Ep. 44: James Shapiro

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

“The reason great works of art sustain themselves for over 400 years whether it’s a Mozart horn concerto or the Tempest is because when that work was created it spoke with great immediacy to its audiences.”

James Shapiro, specialist of the works and life of William Shakespeare, joins Talking Beats for a look into the origins of Shakespeare’s popularity in the United States and the role his works play today. Why is Shakespeare taught and read everywhere? Why are his plays so immediately relevant 400 years after the fact? What can we always be learning from the great master dramatist and poet, who is both current and ahead of us at once?

Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University is author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1995), which was awarded the Bainton Prize; Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), winner of the Theatre Book Prize as well as the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize; Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), winner of the Lionel Trilling Award in 2011; and 1606: The Year of Lear, which won the James Tait Black Prize. He has co-edited the Columbia Anthology of British Poetry, served as the associate editor of the Columbia History of British Poetry, and edited a volume on Shakespeare in America for the Library of America. He has also co-authored and presented a 3-hour BBC documentary, The King and the Playwright (2012). He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Huntington Library. He is currently at work on a book on Shakespeare in a Divided America. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2011 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is Shakespeare in a Divided America: What his Plays tell us About our Past and Future.

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