Podcast appearances and mentions of greg doran

I was delighted to talk to the historian Helen Castor (who writes The H Files by Helen Castor) about her new book The Eagle and the Hart. I found that book compulsive, and this is one of my favourite interviews so far. We covered so much: Dickens, Melville, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, whether Edward III is to blame for the Wars of the Roses, why Bolingbroke did the right thing, the Paston Letters, whether we should dig up old tombs for research, leaving academia, Elizabeth I, and, of course, lots of Shakespeare. There is a full transcript below.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Helen told me what is hardest to imagine about life in the fourteenth century.I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Good news to any publishers reading this. Helen is ready and willing to produce a complete edition of the Paston Letters. They were a bestseller when they were published a hundred years ago, but we are crying out for a complete edition in modern English.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that.Full TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to the historian, Helen Castor. Helen is a former fellow of Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge. She has written several books of history. She is now a public historian, and of course, she has a Substack. The H Files by Helen CastorWe are going to talk mostly about her book, The Eagle and the Hart, which is all about Richard II and Henry IV. I found this book compulsive, so I hope you will read it too. Helen, welcome.Helen: Thank you very much for having me, Henry.Henry: You recently read Bleak House.Helen: I did.Henry: What did you think?Helen: I absolutely loved it. It was a long time since I'd read any Dickens. I read quite a lot when I was young. I read quite a lot of everything when I was young and have fallen off that reader's perch, much to my shame. The first page, that description of the London fog, the London courts, and I thought, "Why have I not been doing it for all these years?"Then I remembered, as so often with Dickens, the bits I love and the bits I'm less fond of, the sentimentality, the grotesquerie I'm less fond of, but the humour and the writing. There was one bit that I have not been able to read then or any of the times I've tried since without physically sobbing. It's a long time since a book has done that to me. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but--Henry: I'm sure I know what you mean. That's quite a sentimental passage.Helen: It is, but not sentimental in the way that I find myself objecting to. I think I really respond viscerally to this sentimentalising of some of his young women characters. I find that really off-putting, but I think now I'm a parent, and particularly I'm a parent of a boy [laughter]. I think it's that sense of a child being completely alone with no one to look after them, and then finding some people, but too late for a happy ending.Henry: Too late.Helen: Yes.Henry: You've been reading other classic novels, I think, Moby Dick?Helen: I'm in the middle of Moby Dick as we speak. I'm going very slowly, partly because I'm trying to savour every sentence. I love the sentence so much as a form. Melville is just astonishing, and also very, very funny in a way I hadn't expected to keep laughing out loud, sometimes because there is such humour in a sentence.Sometimes I'm just laughing because the sentence itself seems to have such audacity and that willingness to go places with sentences that sometimes I feel we've lost in the sort of sense of rules-based sentences instead of just sticking a semicolon and keep going. Why not, because it's so gorgeous and full of the joy of language at that point? Anyway, I'm ranting now, but--Henry: No, I think a lot of rules were instituted in the early 20th century that said you can and cannot do all these things, and writers before that point had not often followed those rules. I think what it has led to is that writers now, they can't really control a long sentence, in the sense that Melville and Dickens will do a long sentence, and it is a syntactically coherent thing, even though it's 60, 70 longer words. It's not just lots of stuff, and then, and then. The whole thing has got a beautiful structure that makes sense as a unit. That's just not obvious in a lot of writing now.Helen: I think that's exactly right. Partly, I've been reading some of the Melville out loud, and having just got onto the classification of whales, you can see I'm going very slowly. Those sentences, which are so long, but it's exactly that. If you read them out loud, and you follow the sense, and the punctuation, however irregular it might be in modern terms, gives you the breathing, you just flow on it, and the excitement of that, even or perhaps especially when one is talking about the classification of whales. Just joyful.Henry: Will we be seeing more very long sentences in your next book?Helen: I think I have to get a bit better at it. The habit that I was conscious of anyway, but became acutely so when I had to read my own audiobook for the first time is that I think I write in a very visual way. That is how I read because mostly it's silent.I discovered or rediscovered that often what I do when I want to write a very long sentence is I start the sentence and then I put a diversion or extra information within em dashes in the middle of the sentence. That works on the page because you can see spatially. I love that way of reading, I love seeing words in space.A lot of different kinds of text, both prose and poetry, I read in space like that. If you're reading to be heard, then the difficulty of breaking into a sentence with, whether it's brackets or em dashes or whatever, and then rejoining the sentence further down has its own challenges. Perhaps I ought to try and do less of that and experiment more with a Melvillian Dickensian onward flow. I don't know what my editor will think.Henry: What has brought you back to reading novels like this?Helen: I was wondering that this morning, actually, because I'm very aware having joined Substack, and of course, your Substack is one of the ones that is leading me further in this direction, very inspiringly, is discovering that lots of other people are reading and reading long novels now too. It reminded me of that thing that anyone with children will know that you have a baby and you call it something that you think only you have thought of, and then four years later, you call and you discover half the class is called that name. You wonder what was in the water that led everybody in that direction.I've just seen someone tweet this morning about how inspired they are by the builder next door who, on the scaffolding, is blasting the audiobook Middlemarch to the whole neighborhood.Henry: Oh my god. Amazing.Helen: It's really happening. Insofar as I can work out what led me as opposed to following a group, which clearly I am in some sense, I think the world at the moment is so disquieting, and depressing, and unnerving, that I think for me, there was a wish to escape into another world and another world that would be very immersive, not removed from this world completely. One that is very recognizably human.I think when I was younger, when I was in my teens and 20s, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy before it was such a genre as it is now. I'm a huge fan of Diana Wynne Jones and people like that.Henry: Oh, my god, same. Which one is your favorite?Helen: Oh, that is an impossible question to answer, partly because I want to go back and read a lot of them. Actually, I've got something next to me, just to get some obscurity points. I want to go back to Everard's Ride because there is a story in here that is based on the King's square. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but early 15th century, the story of the imprisoned King of Scotland when he was in prison in England. That one's in my head.The Dalemark Quartet I love because of the sort of medieval, but then I love the ones that are pure, more science fantasy. Which is your favorite? Which should I go back to first?Henry: I haven't read them all because I only started a couple of years ago. I just read Deep Secret, and I thought that was really excellent. I was in Bristol when I read it quite unwittingly. That was wonderful.Helen: Surrounded by Diana Wynne Jones' land. I only discovered many years into an obsession that just meant that I would read every new one while there were still new ones coming out. I sat next to Colin Burrow at a dinner in--Henry: Oh my god.Helen: I did sort of know that he was her son, but monstered him for the whole time, the whole course of sitting together, because I couldn't quite imagine her in a domestic setting, if you like, because she came up with all these extraordinary worlds. I think in days gone by, I went into more obviously imaginary worlds. I think coming back to it now, I wanted something big and something that I really could disappear into. I've been told to read Bleak House for so many decades and felt so ashamed I hadn't. Having done that, I thought, "Well, the whale."Henry: Have you read Diana Wynne Jones' husband's books, John Burrow? Because that's more in your field.Helen: It is, although I'm ashamed to say how badly read I am in medieval literary scholarship. It's weird how these academic silos can operate, shouldn't, probably don't for many, many people. I always feel I'm on horribly thin ground, thin ice when I start talking about medieval literature because I know how much scholarship is out there, and I know how much I haven't read. I must put John Burrow on my list as well.Henry: He's very readable. He's excellent.Helen: I think I can imagine, but I must go into it.Henry: Also, his books are refreshingly short. Your husband is a poet, so there's a lot of literature in your life at the moment.Helen: There is. When we met, which was 10 years ago-- Again, I don't think of myself as knowledgeable about poetry in general, but what was wonderful was discovering how much we had in common in the writing process and how much I could learn from him. To me, one of the things that has always been extremely important in my writing is the sentence, the sound of a sentence, the rhythm of a sentence folded into a paragraph.I find it extremely hard to move on from a paragraph if it's not sitting right yet. The sitting right is as much to do with sound and rhythm as it is to do with content. The content has to be right. It means I'm a nightmare to edit because once I do move on from a paragraph, I think it's finished. Obviously, my editor might beg to differ.I'm very grateful to Thomas Penn, who's also a wonderful historian, who's my editor on this last book, for being so patient with my recalcitrance as an editee. Talking to my husband about words in space on the page, about the rhythm, about the sound, about how he goes about writing has been so valuable and illuminating.I hope that the reading I've been doing, the other thing I should say about going back to big 19th-century novels is that, of course, I had the enormous privilege and learning curve of being part of a Booker jury panel three years ago. That too was an enormous kick in terms of reading and thinking about reading because my co-judges were such phenomenal reading company, and I learned such a lot that year.I feel not only I hope growing as a historian, but I am really, really focusing on writing, reading, being forced out of my bunker where writing is all on the page, starting to think about sound more, think about hearing more, because I think more and more, we are reading that way as a culture, it seems to me, the growth of audiobooks. My mother is adjusting to audiobooks now, and it's so interesting to listen to her as a lifelong, voracious reader, adjusting to what it is to experience a book through sound rather than on the page. I just think it's all fascinating, and I'm trying to learn as I write.Henry: I've been experimenting with audiobooks, because I felt like I had to, and I sort of typically hate audio anything. Jonathan Swift is very good, and so is Diana Wynne Jones.Helen: Interesting. Those two specifically. Is there something that connects the two of them, or are they separately good?Henry: I think they both wrote in a plain, colloquial style. It was very capable of being quite intellectual and had capacity for ideas. Diana Wynne Jones certainly took care about the way it sounded because she read so much to her own children, and that was really when she first read all the children's classics. She had developed for many years an understanding of what would sound good when it was read to a child, I think.Helen: And so that's the voice in her head.Henry: Indeed. As you read her essays, she talks about living with her Welsh grandfather for a year. He was intoning in the chapel, and she sort of comes out of this culture as well.Helen: Then Swift, a much more oral culture.Henry: Swift, of course, is in a very print-heavy culture because he's in London in 1710. We've got coffee houses and all the examiner, and the spectator, and all these people scribbling about each other. I think he was very insistent on what he called proper words in proper places. He became famous for that plain style. It's very carefully done, and you can't go wrong reading that out loud. He's very considerate of the reader that you won't suddenly go, "Oh, I'm in the middle of this huge parenthesis. I don't know how--" As you were saying, Swift-- he would be very deliberate about the placement of everything.Helen: A lot of that has to do with rhythm.Henry: Yes.Helen: Doesn't it? I suppose what I'm wondering, being very ignorant about the 18th century is, in a print-saturated culture, but still one where literacy was less universal than now, are we to assume that that print-saturated culture also incorporated reading out loud —Henry: Yes, exactly so. Exactly so. If you are at home, letters are read out loud. This obviously gives the novelists great opportunities to write letters that have to sort of work both ways. Novels are read out loud. This goes on into the 19th century. Dickens had many illiterate fans who knew his work through it being read to them. Charles Darwin's wife read him novels. When he says, "I love novels," what he means is, "I love it when my wife reads me a novel." [laughs]You're absolutely right. A good part of your audience would come from those listening as well as those reading it.Helen: Maybe we're getting back towards a new version of that with audiobooks expanding in their reach.Henry: I don't know. I saw some interesting stuff. I can't remember who was saying this. Someone was saying, "It's not an oral culture if you're watching short videos. That's a different sort of culture." I think, for us, we can say, "Oh yes, we're like Jonathan Swift," but for the culture at large, I don't know. It is an interesting mixed picture at the moment.Helen: Yes, history never repeats, but we should be wary of writing off any part of culture to do with words.Henry: I think so. If people are reporting builders irritating the neighbourhood with George Eliot, then it's a very mixed picture, right?Helen: It is.Henry: Last literary question. Hilary Mantel has been a big influence on you. What have you taken from her?Helen: That's quite a hard question to answer because I feel I just sit at her feet in awe. If I could point to anything in my writing that could live up to her, I would be very happy. The word that's coming into my head when you phrase the question in that way, I suppose, might be an absolute commitment to precision. Precision in language matters to me so much. Her thought and her writing of whatever kind seems to me to be so precise.Listening to interviews with her is such an outrageous experience because these beautifully, entirely formed sentences come out of her mouth as though that's how thought and language work. They don't for me. [chuckles] I'm talking about her in the present tense because I didn't know her, but I find it hard to imagine that she's not out there somewhere.Henry: She liked ghosts. She might be with us.Helen: She might. I would like to think that. Her writing of whatever genre always seems to me to have that precision, and it's precision of language that mirrors precision of thought, including the ability to imagine herself into somebody else's mind. That's, I suppose, my project as a historian. I'm always trying to experience a lost world through the eyes of a lost person or people, which, of course, when you put it like that, is an impossible task, but she makes it seem possible for her anyway and that's the road I'm attempting to travel one way or another.Henry: What is it about the 14th and 15th centuries that is hardest for us to imagine?Helen: I think this speaks to something else that Hilary Mantel does so extraordinarily well, which is to show us entire human beings who live and breathe and think and feel just as we do in as complex and contradictory and three-dimensional a way as we do, and yet who live in a world that is stripped of so many of the things that we take so much for granted that we find it, I think, hard to imagine how one could function without them.What I've always loved about the late Middle Ages, as a political historian, which is what I think of myself as, is that it has in England such a complex and sophisticated system of government, but one that operates so overwhelmingly through human beings, rather than impersonal, institutionalized, technological structures.You have a king who is the fount of all authority, exercising an extraordinary degree of control over a whole country, but without telephones, without motorized transport, without a professional police service, without a standing army. If we strip away from our understanding of government, all those things, then how on earth does society happen, does rule happen, does government happen?I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Henry: Good. You went to the RSC to watch The Henriad in 2013.Helen: I did.Henry: Is Shakespeare a big influence on this book? How did that affect you?Helen: I suppose this is a long story because Richard II and The Henriad have been-- there is Richard II. Richard II is part of The Henriad, isn't it?Henry: Yes.Helen: Richard II. Henry, see, this is-Henry: The two Henry IVs.Helen: -I'm not Shakespearean. I am. [laughs]Henry: No, it's Richard II, the two Henry IVs, and Henry V. Because, of course, Henry Bolingbroke is in Richard II, and it--Helen: Yes, although I never think of him as really the same person as Henry IV in the Henry IV plays, because he changes so dramatically between the two.Henry: Very often, they have a young actor and an old actor, and of course, in real life, that's insane, right?Helen: It's absolutely insane. I always separate Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V off from Richard II because it feels to me as though they operate in rather different worlds, which they do in lots of ways. My story with the Henry ad, now that we've established that I actually know what we're talking about, goes back to when I was in my teens and Kenneth Branagh was playing Henry V in Stratford. I grew up very near Stratford.At 15, 16, watching the young Branagh play Henry V was mind-blowing. I went a whole number of times because, in those days, I don't know how it is now, but you could go and get standing tickets for a fiver on the day. More often than not, if there were spare seats, you would get moved into some extraordinary stall seats at-- I was about to say halftime, I'm a football fan, at the interval.Henry V was the play I knew best for a long time, but at the same time, I'd studied Richard II at school. The Henry IV plays are the ones I know least well. I'm interested now to reflect on the fact that they are the ones that depart most from history. I wonder whether that's why I find them hardest to love, because I'm always coming to the plays from the history. Richard II and Henry V actually have a lot to show us about those kings. They bear very close relationships with a lot of the contemporary chronicles, whereas the Henry IV ones is Shakespeare doing his own thing much more.Particularly, as you've just said, making Henry IV way too old, and/or depending which angle we're looking at it from, making Hotspur way too young, the real Hotspur was three years older than Henry IV. If you want to make Hotspur and how-- your young Turks, you have to make Henry IV old and grey and weary with Northumberland.Back in 2013, the really intense experience I had was being asked to go for a day to join the RSC company on a school trip to Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey at the beginning of their rehearsal process, so when David Tennant was playing Richard II and Greg Doran was directing. That was absolutely fascinating. I'd been thinking about Richard and Henry for a very long time. Obviously, I was a long way away from writing the book I've just written.Talking to actors is an extraordinary thing for a historian because, of course, to them, these are living characters. They want to know what's in their character's mind. They want to know, quite rightly, the chronological progression of their character's thought. That is something that's become more and more and more and more important to me.The longer I go on writing history, the more intensely attached I am to the need for chronology because if it hasn't happened to your protagonist yet, what are you doing with it? Your protagonist doesn't yet know. We don't know. It's very dramatically clear to us at the moment that we don't know what's happening tomorrow. Any number of outrageous and unpredictable things might happen tomorrow.The same certainly was true in Richard II's reign, goes on being true in Henry IV's reign. That experience, in the wake of which I then went to see Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 in Stratford, was really thought-provoking. The extent to which, even though I'd been working on this period for a long time, and had taught this period, I still was struggling to answer some of those questions.Then I'd just had the similarly amazing experience of having a meeting with the Richard II cast and director at the Bridge Theatre before the Nicholas Heitner production with Jonathan Bailey as Richard went on stage. That was actually towards the end of their rehearsal process. I was so struck that the actor playing Bolingbroke in this production and the actor playing Bolingbroke in the production back in 2013 both asked the same excellent first question, which is so hard for a historian to answer, which is at what point does Bolingbroke decide that he's coming back to claim the crown, not just the Duchy of Lancaster?That is a key question for Bolingbroke in Richard II. Does he already know when he decides he's going to break his exile and come back? Is he challenging for the crown straight away, or is he just coming back for his rightful inheritance with the Duchy of Lancaster? That is the million-dollar question when you're writing about Bolingbroke in 1399.It's not possible to answer with a smoking gun. We don't have a letter or a diary entry from Henry Bolingbroke as he's about to step on board ship in Boulogne saying, "I'm saying I'm coming back for the Duchy of Lancaster." The unfolding logic of his situation is that if he's going to come back at all, he's going to have to claim the crown. When he admits that to himself, and when he admits that to anybody else, are questions we can argue about.It was so interesting to me that that's the question that Shakespeare's Richard II throws up for his Bolingbroke just as much as it does for the historical one.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Henry: When I left your book, the one thing I thought was that in Shakespeare, the nobles turn against Richard because of his excesses. Obviously, he really dramatizes that around the death of Gaunt. From your book, you may disagree with this, I came away thinking, well, the nobles wanted more power all the time. They may not have wanted the king's power, but there was this constant thing of the nobles feeling like they were owed more authority.Helen: I think the nobles always want more power because they are ambitious, competitive men within a political structure that rewards ambition and competition. The crucial thing for them is that they can only safely pursue ambition and competition if they know that the structure they're competing within will hold.The thing that keeps that structure rooted and solidly in place is the crown and the things that the crown is there to uphold, namely, particularly, the rule of law because if the rule of law starts to crumble, then the risk is that the whole structure collapses into anarchy. Within anarchy, then a powerful man cannot safely compete for more power because an even more powerful man might be about to roll into his estates and take them over. There have to be rules. There has to be fair competition. The referee is there on a football pitch for a reason.The king, in some senses, whether you want to see him as the keystone in an arch that supports a building or whether he's a referee on a football pitch, there are reasons why powerful men need rules because rules uphold their power. What goes wrong with Richard is that instead of seeing that he and the nobles have a common interest in keeping this structure standing, and that actually he can become more powerful if he works with and through the nobles, he sees them as a threat to him.He's attempting to establish a power structure that will not be beholden to them. In so doing, he becomes a threat to them. This structure that is supposed to stand as one mutually supportive thing is beginning to tear itself apart. That is why Richard's treatment of Bolingbroke becomes such a crucial catalyst, because what Richard does to Bolingbroke is unlawful in a very real and very technical sense. Bolingbroke has not been convicted of any crime. He's not been properly tried. There's been this trial by combat, the duel with Mowbray, but it hasn't stopped arbitrarily, and an arbitrary punishment visited upon both of them. They're both being exiled without having been found guilty, without the judgment of God speaking through this duel.Richard then promises that Bolingbroke can have his inheritance, even though he's in exile. As soon as Gaunt dies, Richard says, "No, I'm having it." Now, all of that is unlawful treatment of Bolingbroke, but because Bolingbroke is the most powerful nobleman in the country, it is also a warning and a threat to every other member of the political classes that if the king takes against you, then his arbitrary will can override the law.That diagnosis is there in Shakespeare. It's the Duke of York, who in reality was just a completely hopeless, wet figure, but he says, and I've got it written down, keep it beside me.Henry: Very nice.Helen: Kind of ridiculous, but here it is. York says to Richard, "Take Herford's rights away and take from time his charters and his customary rights. Let not tomorrow then ensue today. Be not thyself, for how art thou a king, but by fair sequence and succession?" In other words, if you interfere with, and I know you've written about time in these plays, it's absolutely crucial.Part of the process of time in these plays is that the rules play out over time. Any one individual king must not break those rules so that the expected process of succession over time can take place. York's warning comes true, that Richard is unseating himself by seeking to unseat Bolingbroke from his inheritance.Henry: We give Shakespeare good marks as a historian.Helen: In this play, yes, absolutely. The things he tinkers with in Richard II are minor plot points. He compresses time in order to get it all on stage in a plausible sequence of events. He compresses two queens into one, given that Richard was married to, by the time he fell, a nine-year-old who he'd married when he was six. It's harder to have a six-year-old making speeches on stage, so he puts the two queens into one.Henry: You don't want to pay another actor.Helen: Exactly.Henry: It's expensive.Helen: You don't want children and animals on stage. Although there is a wonderful account of a production of Richard II on stage in the West End in 1901, with the Australian actor Oscar Asche in it, playing Bolingbroke. The duel scene, he had full armour and a horse, opening night. It was a different horse from the one he rehearsed with. He gives an account in his autobiography of this horse rearing and him somersaulting heroically off the horse.Henry: Oh my god.Helen: The curtain having to come down and then it going back up again to tumultuous applause. You think, "Oscar, I'm wondering whether you're over-egging this pudding." Anyway, I give Shakespeare very good marks in Richard II, not really in the Henry IV plays, but gets back on track.Henry: The Henry IV plays are so good, we're forgiven. Was Richard II a prototype Henry VIII?Helen: Yes. Although, of course, history doesn't work forwards like that. I always worry about being a historian, talking about prototypes, if you see what I mean, but--Henry: No, this is just some podcast, so we don't have to be too strict. He's over-mighty, his sense of his relationship to God. There are issues in parliament about, "How much can the Pope tell us what to do?" There are certain things that seem to be inherent in the way the British state conceives of itself at this point that become problematic in another way.Helen: Is this pushing it too far to say Richard is a second son who ends up being the lone precious heir to the throne who must be wrapped in cotton wool to ensure that his unique God-given authority is protected? Also describes Henry VIII.Henry: They both like fancy clothes.Helen: Both like fancy clothes. Charles I is also a second son who has to step up.Henry: With wonderful cuffs and collars. He's another big dresser.Helen: And great patrons of art. I think we're developing new historical--Henry: No, I think there's a whole thing here.Helen: I think there is. What Henry does, of course, in rather different, because a lot has changed thanks to the Wars of the Roses, the power of the nobility to stand up independently of the crown is significantly lessened by the political effects of the Wars of the Roses, not at least that a lot of them have had their heads cut off, or died in battle, and the Tudors are busy making sure that they remain in the newly subjected place that they find themselves in.Henry then finds to go back to Hilary Mantel, a very, very able political servant who works out how to use parliament for him in rejecting those extra English powers that might restrain him. I do always wonder what Richard thought he was going to do if he'd succeeded in becoming Holy Roman Emperor, which I take very seriously as a proposition from Richard.Most other historians, because it's so patently ridiculous, if you look at it from a European perspective, have just said, "Oh, he got this idea that he wanted to become Holy Roman Emperor," but, of course, it was never going to happen. In Richard's mind, I think it was extremely real. Whether he really would have tried to give the English crown to Rutland, his favorite by the end of the reign, while he went off in glory to be crowned by the Pope, I don't know what was in his head. The difference with Henry is that the ambitions he eventually conceives are very England-focused, and so he can make them happen.Henry: Is there some sort of argument that, if the king hadn't won the Wars of the Roses, and the nobility had flourished, and their sons hadn't been killed, the reformation would have just been much harder to pull off here?[silence]Helen: I wonder what that would have looked like, because in a sense, the king was always going to win the Wars of the Roses, in the sense that you have to have a king. The minute you had someone left standing after that mess, that protracted mess, if he knew what he was doing, and there are arguments about the extent to which Henry VII knew what he was doing, or was doing something very different, whether or not he knew it was different, but there was always going to be an opportunity for a king to assert himself after that.Particularly, the extent to which the lesser landowners, the gentry had realized they couldn't just rely on the nobility to protect them anymore. They couldn't just follow their lord into battle and abdicate responsibility.Henry: Okay.Helen: That's an interesting--Henry: How much should we blame Edward III for all of this?Helen: For living too long and having too many sons?Henry: My argument against Edward is the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't actually go that well by the end of his reign, and it's cost too much money. Too many dukes with too much power. It's not that he had too many sons, he elevates them all and creates this insane situation. The war itself starts to tip the balance between the king and parliament, and so now you've got it from the dukes, and from the other side, and he just didn't manage the succession at all.Even though his son has died, and it really needs some kind of-- He allowed. He should have known that he was allowing a vacuum to open up where there's competition from the nobles, and from parliament, and the finances are a mess, and this war isn't there. It's just… he just leaves a disaster, doesn't he?Helen: I think I'd want to reframe that a little bit. Perhaps, I'm too much the king's friend. I think the political, and in some senses, existential dilemma for a medieval king is that the best of all possible worlds is what Edward achieves in the 1340s and the 1350s, which is, fight a war for reasons that your subjects recognize as in the common interest, in the national interest. Fight it over there so that the lands that are being devastated and the villages and towns that are being burned are not yours. Bring back lots of plunder. Everybody's getting richer and feeling very victorious.You can harness parliament. When things are going well, a medieval king and a parliament are not rivals for power. An English king working with parliament is more powerful than an English king trying to work without parliament. If things are going well, he gets more money, he can pass laws, he can enforce his will more effectively. It's win-win-win if you're ticking all those boxes.As you're pointing out, the worst of all possible worlds is to be fighting a war that's going badly. To fight a war is a big risk because either you're going to end up winning and everything's great, or if it's going badly, then you'd rather be at peace. Of course, you're not necessarily in a position to negotiate peace, depending on the terms of the war you've established.Similarly, with sons, you want heirs. You want to know the succession is safe. I think Edward's younger sons would argue with you about setting up very powerful dukes because the younger ones really-- York and Gloucester, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, really didn't have much in the way of an estate given to them at all, and always felt very hard done by about that. John of Gaunt is set up very well because he's married off to the heir of the Duke of Lancaster who's handily died, leaving only daughters.Henry: That's the problem, isn't it, creating that sort of impact? John of Gaunt is far too rich and powerful.Helen: You say that, except he's unfeasibly loyal. Without Gaunt, disaster happens much, much, much earlier. Gaunt is putting all those resources into the project of propping up the English state and the English crown for way longer than Richard deserves, given that Richard's trying to murder him half the time in the 1380s.Henry: [laughs] For sure. No, I agree with you there, but from Edward III's point of view, it's a mistake to make one very powerful son another quite powerful son next to-- We still see this playing out in royal family dynamics.Helen: This is the problem. What is the perfect scenario in a hereditary system where you need an heir and a spare, but even there, the spare, if he doesn't get to be the heir, is often very disgruntled. [laughs] If he does get to be the heir, as we've just said, turns out to be overconvinced of his own-Henry: Oh, indeed, yes.Helen: -specialness. Then, if you have too many spares, you run into a different kind of problem. Equally, if you don't have a hereditary system, then you have an almighty battle, as the Anglo-Saxons often did, about who's actually going to get the crown in the next generation. It's a very tricky--Henry: Is England just inherently unstable? We've got the Black Death, France is going to be a problem, whatever happens. Who is really going to come to a good fiscal position in this situation? It's no one's fault. It's just there wasn't another way out.Helen: You could say that England's remarkably-- See, I'm just playing devil's advocate the whole time.Henry: No, good.Helen: You could say England is remarkably stable in the sense that England is very unusually centralized for a medieval state at this point. It's centralized in a way that works because it's small enough to govern. It's, broadly speaking, an island. You've got to deal with the Scotts border, but it's a relatively short border. Yes, you have powerful nobles, but they are powerful nobles who, by this stage, are locked into the state. They're locked into a unified system of law. The common law rules everyone. Everyone looks to Westminster.It's very different from what the King of France has been having to face, which has been having to push his authority outward from the Île-de-France, reconquer bits of France that the English have had for a long time, impose his authority over other princes of the realm in a context where there are different laws, there are different customs, there are different languages. You could say that France is in a much more difficult and unstable situation.Of course, what we see as the tide of the war turns again in the early 15th century is precisely that France collapses into civil war, and the English can make hay again in that situation. If Henry V had not died too young with not enough sons in 1423, and particularly, if he'd left a son who grew up to be any use at all, as opposed to absolutely none-- what am I saying? I'm saying that the structure of government in England could work astonishingly well given the luck of the right man at the helm. The right man at the helm had to understand his responsibilities at home, and he had to be capable of prosecuting a successful war abroad because that is how this state works best.As you've just pointed out, prosecuting a successful war abroad is an inherently unstable scenario because no war is ever going to go in your direction the entire time. That's what Richard, who has no interest in war at all is discovering, because once the tide of war is lapping at your own shores, instead of all happening over there, it's a very, very different prospect in terms of persuading parliament to pay for it, quite understandably.You talk about the Black Death. One of the extraordinary things is looking at England in 1348, 1349, when the Black Death hits. Probably, something approaching half the population dies in 18 months. If you're looking at the progress of the war, you barely notice it happened at all. What does the government do? It snaps into action and implements a maximum wage immediately, in case [chuckles] these uppity laborers start noticing there are fewer of them, and they can ask for more money.The amount of control, at that stage at least, that the government has over a country going through an extraordinary set of challenges is quite remarkable, really.Henry: Did Bolingbroke do the right thing?Helen: I think Bolingbroke did the only possible thing, which, in some senses, equates to the right thing. If he had not come back, he would not only have been abandoning his own family, his dynasty, his inheritance, everything he'd been brought up to believe was his responsibility, but also abandoning England to what was pretty much by that stage, clearly, a situation of tyranny.The big argument is always, well, we can identify a tyrant, we have a definition of tyranny. That is, if a legitimate king rules in the common interest and according to the law, then a tyrant rules not in the common interest, and not according to the law. But then the thing that the political theorists argue about is whether or not you can actively resist a tyrant, or whether you have to wait for God to act.Then, the question is, "Might God be acting through me if I'm Bolingbroke?" That's what Bolingbroke has to hope, because if he doesn't do what he does in 1399, he is abandoning everything his whole life has been devoted to maintaining and taking responsibility for. It's quite hard to see where England would then end up, other than with somebody else trying to challenge Richard in the way that Henry does.Henry: Why was he anointed with Thomas Becket's oil?Helen: Because Richard had found it in the tower, [chuckles] and was making great play of the claims that were made for Thomas. This is one of the interesting things about Richard. He is simultaneously very interested in history, and interested in his place in history, his place in the lineage of English kings, going all the way back, particularly to the confessor to whom he looks as not only a patron saint, but as in some sense, a point of identification.He's also seeking to stop time at himself. He doesn't like to think about the future beyond himself. He doesn't show any interest in fathering an heir. His will is all about how to make permanent the judgments that he's made on his nobles. It's not about realistically what's going to happen after his death.In the course of his interest in history, he has found this vial of oil in the tower somewhere in a locked drawer with a note that says, "The Virgin gave this to Thomas Becket, and whoever is anointed with this oil shall win all his battles and shall lead England to greatness," et cetera. Richard has tried to have himself re-anointed, and even his patsy Archbishop of Canterbury that he's put in place after exiling the original one who'd stood up to him a bit.Even the new Archbishop of Canterbury says, "Sire, anointing doesn't really work like that. I'm afraid we can't do it twice." Richard has been wearing this vial round his neck in an attempt to claim that he is not only the successor to the confessor, but he is now the inheritor of this holy oil. The French king has had a holy oil for a very long time in the Cathedral of Reims, which was supposedly given to Clovis, the first king of France, by an angel, et cetera.Richard, who is always very keen on emulating, or paralleling the crown of France, is very, very keen on this. If you were Henry coming in 1399 saying, "No, God has spoken through me. The country has rallied to me. I am now the rightful king of England. We won't look too closely at my justifications for that," and you are appropriating the ceremonial of the crown, you are having yourself crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 13th of October, which is the feast day of the confessor, you are handed that opportunity to use the symbolism of this oil that Richard has just unearthed, and was trying to claim for himself. You can then say, "No, I am the first king crowned with this oil," and you're showing it to the French ambassadors and so on.If we are to believe the chroniclers, it starts making his hair fall out, which might be a contrary sign from God. It's a situation where you are usurping the throne, and what is questionable is your right to be there. Then, any symbolic prop you can get, you're going to lean on as hard as you can.Henry: A few general questions to close. Should we be more willing to open up old tombs?Helen: Yes. [laughs]Henry: Good. [laughs]Helen: I'm afraid, for me, historical curiosity is-- Our forebears in the 18th and 19th century had very few qualms at all. One of the things I love about the endless series of scholarly antiquarian articles that are-- or not so scholarly, in some cases, that are written about all the various tomb openings that went on in the 18th and 19th century, I do love the moments, where just occasionally, they end up saying, "Do you know what, lads? Maybe we shouldn't do this bit." [chuckles]They get right to the brink with a couple of tombs and say, "Oh, do you know what? This one hasn't been disturbed since 1260, whatever. Maybe we won't. We'll put it back." Mostly, they just crowbar the lid off and see what they can find, which one might regret in terms of what we might now find with greater scientific know-how, and et cetera. Equally, we don't do that kind of thing anymore unless we're digging up a car park. We're not finding things out anyway. I just love the information that comes out, so yes, for me.Henry: Dig up more tombs.Helen: Yes.Henry: What is it that you love about the Paston Letters?Helen: More or less everything. I love the language. I love the way that, even though most of them are dictated to scribes, but you can hear the dictation. You can hear individual voices. Everything we were saying about sentences. You can hear the rhythm. You can hear the speech patterns. I'm no linguistic expert, but I love seeing the different forms of spelling and how that plays out on the page.I love how recognizable they are as a family. I love the fact that we hear women's voices in a way that we very rarely do in the public records. The government which is mainly what we have to work with. I love Margaret Paston, who arrives at 18 as a new bride, and becomes the matriarch of the family. I love her relationship with her two eldest boys, John and John, and their father, John.I do wish they hadn't done that because it doesn't help those of us who are trying to write about them. I love the view you get of late medieval of 15th-century politics from the point of view of a family trying to survive it. The fact that you get tiny drops in letters that are also about shopping, or also about your sisters fall in love with someone unsuitable. Unsuitable only, I hasten to add, because he's the family bailiff, not because he isn't a wonderful and extremely able man. They all know those two things. It's just that he's a family bailiff, and therefore, not socially acceptable.I love that experience of being immersed in the world of a 15th-century gentry family, so politically involved, but not powerful enough to protect themselves, who can protect themselves in the Wars of the Roses in any case.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. [chuckles]Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that. There are some very good selections. Richard Barber did one many years ago, and, of course, self-advertising. There is also my book, now more than 20 years old, about the Paston family, where I was trying to put in as much of the letters as I could. I wanted to weave the voices through. Yes, please go and read the Paston Letters in selections, in whatever form you can get them, and let's start lobbying for a complete modernized Paston.Henry: That's right. Why did you leave academia? Because you did it before it was cool.Helen: [laughs] That's very kind of you to say. My academic life was, and is very important to me, and I hate saying this now, because the academic world is so difficult now. I ended up in it almost by accident, which is a terrible thing to say now, people having to-- I never intended to be an academic. My parents were academics, and I felt I'd seen enough and wasn't sure I wanted to do that.I couldn't bear to give up history, and put in a PhD application to work with Christine Carpenter, who'd been the most inspiring supervisor when I was an undergraduate, got the place, thought, "Right, I'm just going to do a PhD." Of course, once you're doing a PhD, and everyone you know is starting to apply for early career jobs, which weren't even called early career jobs in those days, because it was a million years ago.I applied for a research fellowship, was lucky enough to get it, and then applied for a teaching job, utterly convinced, and being told by the people around me that I stood no chance of getting it, because I was way too junior, and breezed through the whole process, because I knew I wasn't going to get it, and then turned up looking for someone very junior.I got this wonderful teaching job at Sidney Sussex in Cambridge and spent eight years there, learned so much, loved working with the students. I was working very closely with the students in various ways, but I wasn't-- I'm such a slow writer, and a writer that needs to be immersed in what I was doing, and I just wasn't managing to write, and also not managing to write in the way I wanted to write, because I was becoming clearer and clearer about the fact that I wanted to write narrative history.Certainly, at that point, it felt as though writing narrative history for a general audience and being an early career academic didn't go so easily together. I think lots of people are now showing how possible it is, but I wasn't convinced I could do it. Then, sorry, this is a very long answer to what's [crosstalk] your question.Henry: That's good.Helen: I also had my son, and my then partner was teaching at a very different university, I mean, geographically different, and we were living in a third place, and trying to put a baby into that geographical [chuckles] setup was not going to work. I thought, "Well, now or never, I'll write a proposal for a book, a narrative, a book for a general readership, a narrative book about the Paxton family, because that's what I really want to write, and I'll see if I can find an agent, and I'll see if I," and I did.I found the most wonderful agent, with whose help I wrote a huge proposal, and got a deal for it two weeks before my son was due. At that point, I thought, "Okay, if I don't jump now, now or never, the stars are aligned." I've been a freelance medieval historian ever since then, touching every wood I can find as it continues to be possible. I am very grateful for those years in Cambridge. They were the making of me in terms of training and in terms of teaching.I certainly think without teaching for those years, I wouldn't be anywhere near as good a writer, because you learn such a lot from talking to, and reading what students produce.Henry: How do you choose your subjects now? How do you choose what to write about?Helen: I follow my nose, really. It's not very scientific.Henry: Why should it be?Helen: Thank you. The book, bizarrely, the book that felt most contingent, was the one I wrote after the Paston book, because I knew I'd written about the Pastons in my PhD, and then again more of it in the monograph that was based on my PhD. I knew having written about the Pastons in a very academic, analytical way, contributing to my analysis of 15th-century politics. I knew I wanted to put them at the center and write about them. That was my beginning point.The big question was what to do next, and I was a bit bamboozled for a while. The next book I ended up writing was She-Wolves, which is probably, until now, my best-known book. It was the one that felt most uncertain to me, while I was putting it together, and that really started from having one scene in my head, and it's the scene with which the book opens. It's the scene of the young Edward VI in 1553, Henry VIII's only son, dying at the age of 15.Suddenly, me suddenly realizing that wherever you looked on the Tudor family tree at that point, there were only women left. The whole question of whether a woman could rule was going to have to be answered in some way at that point, and because I'm a medievalist, that made me start thinking backwards, and so I ended up choosing some medieval queens to write about, because they've got their hands on power one way or another.Until very close to finishing it, I was worried that it wouldn't hang together as a book, and the irony is that it's the one that people seem to have taken to most. The next book after that grew out of that one, because I found myself going around talking about She-Wolves, and saying repeatedly, "The problem these queens faced was that they couldn't lead an army on the battlefield."Women couldn't do that. The only medieval woman who did that was Joan of Arc, and look what happened to her. Gradually, I realized that I didn't really know what had happened to her. I mean, I did know what--Henry: Yes, indeed.Helen: I decided that I really wanted to write about her, so I did that. Then, having done that, and having then written a very short book about Elizabeth I, that I was asked to write for Penguin Monarchs, I realized I'd been haunted all this time by Richard and Henry, who I'd been thinking about and working on since the very beginning of my PhD, but I finally felt, perhaps, ready to have a go at them properly.It's all been pretty organic apart from She-Wolves, which was the big, "What am I writing about next?" That took shape slowly and gradually. Now, I'm going to write about Elizabeth I properly in a-Henry: Oh, exciting.Helen: -full-scale book, and I decided that, anyway, before I wrote this last one, but I-- It feels even righter now, because I Am Richard II, Know Ye Not That, feels even more intensely relevant having now written about Richard and Henry, and I'm quite intimidated because Elizabeth is quite intimidating, but I think it's good, related by your subjects.[laughter]Henry: Have you read the Elizabeth Jenkins biography?Helen: Many, many years ago. It's on my shelf here.Henry: Oh, good.Helen: In fact, so it's one of the things I will be going back to. Why do you ask particularly? I need--Henry: I'm a big Elizabeth Jenkins fan, and I like that book particularly.Helen: Wonderful. Well, I will be redoubled in my enthusiasm.Henry: I look forward to seeing what you say about it. What did you learn from Christine Carpenter?Helen: Ooh. Just as precision was the word that came into my head when you asked me about Hilary Mantel, the word that comes into my head when you ask about Christine is rigor. I think she is the most rigorous historical thinker that I have ever had the privilege of working with and talking to. I am never not on my toes when I am writing for, talking to, reading Christine. That was an experience that started from the first day I walked into her room for my first supervision in 1987.It was really that rigor that started opening up the medieval world to me, asking questions that at that stage I couldn't answer at all, but suddenly, made everything go into technicolor. Really, from the perspective that I had been failing to ask the most basic questions. I would sometimes have students say to me, "Oh, I didn't say that, because I thought it was too basic."I have always said, "No, there is no question that is too basic." Because what Christine started opening up for me was how does medieval government work? What are you talking about? There is the king at Westminster. There is that family there in Northumberland. What relates the two of them? How does this work? Think about it structurally. Think about it in human terms, but also in political structural terms, and then convince me that you understand how this all goes together. I try never to lose that.Henry: Helen Castor, thank you very much.Helen: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

The story of the Folger library and more of the people who have owned First Folios, including His Majesty King Charles III, who makes a guest appearance.  The extraordinary stories of Shakespeare's First Folio uncovered by RSC Artistic Director Emeritus, Greg Doran. The second part of Greg's journey tells the story of Hemminges and Condell, turns up some of the printing errors that crept into the first folio, and explores traces of long-gone owners across some of the copies.  Four hundred years after it was first published, Greg ‘One of the great Shakespearians of his generation' (Sunday Times), explores the remarkable history of the Folio, arguably the most famous secular text in the world. Travelling to libraries, museums and private collections in 10 countries, he visits as many as possible of the surviving copies of the First Folio in existence today. This episode contains some strong language.  Music composed by Paul Englishby

"What on earth am I doing? Travelling around the world, trying to see 200 copies of the same book." Greg begins his journey around the world looking for every first folio in existence, including the RSC's own copy in Stratford-upon-Avon. Find out how the Pope got involved and follow the first stage of Greg's journey to Birmingham, Skipton and Cologne. The extraordinary stories of Shakespeare's First Folio uncovered by RSC Artistic Director Emeritus, Greg Doran. Four hundred years after it was first published, Greg ‘One of the great Shakespearians of his generation' (Sunday Times), explores the remarkable history of the Folio, arguably the most famous secular text in the world. Travelling to libraries, museums and private collections in 10 countries, he visits as many as possible of the surviving copies of the First Folio in existence today. Music composed by Paul Englishby

What to do when a cat walks across your priceless copy of the First Folio. The extraordinary stories of Shakespeare's First Folio uncovered by RSC Artistic Director Emeritus, Greg Doran. The second part of Greg's journey tells the story of Hemminges and Condell, turns up some of the printing errors that crept into the first folio, and explores traces of long-gone owners across some of the copies.  Four hundred years after it was first published, Greg ‘One of the great Shakespearians of his generation' (Sunday Times), explores the remarkable history of the Folio, arguably the most famous secular text in the world. Travelling to libraries, museums and private collections in 10 countries, he visits as many as possible of the surviving copies of the First Folio in existence today. This episode contains some strong language.  Music composed by Paul Englishby

Nau mai haere mai - Welcome to a session from the Reading Room of Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero, Central City Library, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. In this podcast, we are delighted to share the recording of Greg Doran's visit to the Auckland First Folio in June 2023. Greg Doran, artistic director emeritus of the Royal Shakespeare Company is on a tour of surviving first folios sponsored by the British Council. https://www.britishcouncil.org.nz He comes to us after visiting First Folios in Japan and most recently Sydney, at the State Library of New South Wales. Next stop Cape Town. Our First Folio has travelled the furthest from the Print House in London, some 11,386 miles in fact. The Folio has had an active life, most recently getting some attention from David Ashman, our Preservation Manager. The Folio can be handled more easily post-treatment. The tangible evidence of the preservation treatment (including leather shavings and “gutter sweeping”) is now stored in a bespoke archival box with the Folio itself. In this recording, Greg meets our unique annotated Folio and talks with an interested party – including retired rare books librarian Georgia Prince who curated the exhibition Shakespeare in his time which featured 17th century rare books from the Heritage Collections. We also had a moment with the Shakespeare bronze, affectionately referred to as the ‘Beadle bust' – named for the sculptor Paul Beadle. The bust entered stage left during our discussion – returning to its plinth after a stint on the Ground Floor of our busy public library. Let's give Greg the floor to share his close reading! Listen to David Ashman's preservation treatment: https://soundcloud.com/auckland-libraries/sets/celebrating-shakespeare Shakespeare in his time – 2016 curator talks: https://heritageetal.blogspot.com/2016/06/shakespeare-in-his-time-curator-talks.html The Beadle bust: https://heritageetal.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-shakespeare-beadle-bust-origin-and.html

On today's episode, the Royal Shakespeare Company's former Artistic Director takes a look back at four decades of staging Shakespeare. Greg Doran's career as a Shakespearean director began in the late 1970s, when he was a teenager. By the time he stepped down as the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company earlier this year, Doran had directed every play in the First Folio, capping off the feat with an acclaimed production of Cymbeline. In between, Doran helmed era-defining productions of Shakespeare's plays and worked with actors such as Judi Dench, David Tennant, Patrick Stewart, and the late Antony Sher, to whom Doran was married. Doran's new memoir, My Shakespeare, tells the story of his life through the plays he has directed. It's a portrait of an artist at work, shot through with commentary about the plays themselves and insights about working with actors. It's also an intimate account of Doran's deep artistic partnership with Tony Sher. Greg Doran is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. My Shakespeare: A Director's Journey Through the First Folio, is available from Methuen Drama. From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 20, 2023. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Melvin Rickarby in Stratford and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

A special edition following the Royal Shakespeare's Company's new production of Cymbeline, the final play in Shakespeare's First Folio - a collection that reaches its 400th anniversary this year. Acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearean, Greg Doran, has directed every play in the First Folio except Cymbeline. For him it's one of Shakespeare's most complex creations and he will be directing it for the first time as his swansong as the RSC's Artistic Director Emeritus. From the start of the production's rehearsal period until its first performance, Front Row follows Greg and his team as they get to grips with a play criticised and celebrated for its genre-busting, location-hopping, multiple plotlines, topped by the appearance of the god Jupiter descending from the heavens on an eagle. Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene Akalawu

DR. CAROL LACHAPELLE: holds a PhD from UTT and Master of Arts from the University of the West Indies. She is a graduate of The London College of Dance and Drama, Dartford College of Education, University of London. Artistic Director of the La Chapelle Dance Company of Trinidad and Tobago. The first Trinidadian to gain Honours in the Royal Academy Ballet Examinations and an exhibition winner. and received her early dance training from Helen Mary Kay. Awarded an Island Scholarship she studied dance in the UK, graduating with the Progress Cup and distinctions in Dance, Drama and Education. She has collaborated with Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott and artists like Galt Mc Dermot, composer of Hair, Roscoe Lee Brown, US, Andre Tanker, Le Roi Clarke, Greg Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Elizabeth Bergmann, dance director at Harvard University and top local artists Choo Kong, Spencer, Manwarren, Machel Montano and Noble Douglas. In the UK she has worked with Greta Mendez in The Man Who Lit up the World at the Hacknet Empire and the film A Hard Rain. Choreographed the Trinidad High Commission Awards, the UK Arts production -Vodou Nation for Haiti's 200 year Independence in Haiti and at the Hackney Empire, London. Associate director and choreographer for Carnival Messiah (theatre production and film), she performed at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Harewood, Queens Hall, Royal Albert Hall, the HRH Prince Charles Charity, at the Theatre Royal, London and West Yorkshire Playhouse Galas. Artistic Director of the La Chapelle-Douglas Dance Company she presented Seasons of dance for stage and television with dancers like Natalie Rogers, (Bucket USA), Andre Largen (Alvin Ailey), Nadine Mose (Ballet Hispaniola) and Allison Brown (Carnival Queen) Diane Harvey (Forces of Nature) Mary Barnett (Alvin Ailey) Nina De Shane Gill (Grand Ballet, Canada) Bob Marley, Karen Kain, Melba Moore and Jose Feliciano. As La Chapelle Dance Company, she opened the Derek Walcott Theatre St. Lucia, performed at Florida International and she taught at Harvard as artist in Residence. Her company has toured many ineternational countries. She has worked with Peter Minshall's -Paradise Lost, River and the Atlanta Olympics and for the Opening ceremony of the Summit of the Americas with Brian McFarlane, POS.  Carol is a producer, dance educator, and presenter of seminars and workshops on dance in the Caribbean, USA and Europe and has served as an executive and term President of the National Dance Association, and as Dance Examiner (TT/Martinique), on The Foundation for the Arts (Cabinet Appointed Committee), VAPA Curriculum Design Team and is on the Board of Management of Queen's Hall. Awards include Outstanding Choreography in Theatre, 2003 for Carnival Messiah and Best Actress for Testimony, 1991. She is the Winner of five Cassique awards for Choreography in theatre, the President's Award for Excellence in the Arts, The National Dance Association Emeritus Award and International Women Award for Pioneering Women. In 2012 she received the NWAC award for Outstanding Contribution to development in the Arts. In 2019 she was honoured by The Rotary club & as a Cultural Legend by The Ministry of Culture. 2020 saw her honoured by Queens Hall on International Teachers Day. Dr. La Chapelle served as Arts coordinator and Assistant Professor in dance at UTT until 2018. She served on the VAPA team for the Diploma in Ed at UWI in 2019 and is currently MA supervisor at APA, UTT. La Chapelle has presented Zoom sessions on ‘Dancing the Mas' in London, Canada & the Caribbean…More details can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/carol.lachapelle2/ Check out full chat at: ozziestewart.com/onthecallpodcastEpisode sponsored by: Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad & Tobago @tt_esc https://www.emancipationtt.com Art on flyer by: @voodofe  Music by: JLC Media @jacylamarcampbell --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ozzie-stewart/support

Richard III is one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays, often cited as the basis for the King's reputation as a scheming murderer. But what do the Bard's history plays tell us about the period they are set in and how that era was viewed in Shakespeare's time? Are there allusions to Elizabethan figures in Richard III that Shakespeare knew his viewers would understand?In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis heads to Stratford-upon-Avon to catch up with director Greg Doran and Arthur Hughes - the first actor with a disability to play Richard III in a major production - to talk about the Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of the iconic play.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. The Producer was Rob Weinberg. It was edited by Seyi Adaobi.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, we talk to some of Britain's leading stage actresses - Dame Harriet Walter, Mariah Gale, Sian Brooke, Katie West, Kellie Shirley and Stephanie McGregor - about Ophelia, one of the most iconic roles of the classical stage. We see Ophelia defy corrupt authority and express her own truths, assert her existential freedoms, in the famous so-called madness scene. The beautiful readings of Ophelia are by Emma Pallant, and the TBNTB speech is by Emma Fielding and Simon Paisley Day.  The extract of Mariah Gale is from the Royal Shakespeare Company's filmed version of Hamlet, 2009, directed by Greg Doran and broadcast on the BBC For more information on the podcast and how you can help theatres and actors during the COVID crisis: http://www.fleetingyearfilms.com/podcast.html#, or email Andrew@fleetingyearfilms.com  

Sarah's guest this week is the award-winning director Greg Doran

This is the second half of our discussion about Greg Doran's film adaptation of his RSC Hamlet production starring David Tennant. For detailed show notes, visit: http://www.seventh-row.com/2016/05/06/ep-7-hamlet-david-tennant/ Follow us on Twitter @21stFolio. Find us online at http://seventh-row.com Host: Alex Heeney (@bwestcineaste) Guests: Noemi Berkowitz (@noemiola), Caitlin Merriman (@CaitlinSnark), Mary Angela Rowe (@lapsedvictorian), Craig Ruttan (@crut) Sound recordist and editor: Cam White (@JediDusk) 00:00–0:50 Intro 0:50–7:50 Ophelia’s madness - why does she always have to be naked when she’s crazy 7:51–14:24 Keeping up appearances, how everyone is performing for everyone else in this world, and the surveillance state 14:24–30:59 A controlled, diplomatic Polonius, the great Patrick Stewart, and David Tennant's performance 31:00–39:35 The problems with Horatio, the need for a dispassionate observer, and the role of the camera 39:35–55:50 How does this "hybrid" film/play production work as a means of capturing theatre? 55:50–1:05:02 The humour in the production and the Hamlet/Polonius relationship 1:05:02–1:07:52 Sign-offs, the Yorick skull story, and outro

In this episode, we discuss Greg Doran's film version of his RSC production of Hamlet starring David Tennant. The production is currently available to stream on PBS.org in the US. For detailed show notes, visit http://www.seventh-row.com/2016/05/06/ep-7-hamlet-david-tennant/ 00:00–1:58 Intro 1:58–7:00 Initial thoughts on the production 7:00–11:23 Claudius in Act IV & Act V and the worldbuilding in the production 11:23–21:04 Translating the play into a hybrid film of the play (the sets, the cameras within the production, breaking the fourth wall) 21:04–31:05 Incest-y things: Laertes-Opehla and Hamlet-Gertrude 31:06–36:33 The Laertes-Ophelia-Polonius family unit 36:35–42:40 Denmark is a Prison? + Rearranging Act 2 & 3 (and the “To be or not to be” speech) 42:40–49:40 Excising (almost all of) Fortinbras and cuts to Horatio’s scenes 49:40:–1:00:06 Women in the production 1:00:06–1:00:50 Outro Host: Alex Heeney (@bwestcineaste) Guests: Noemi Berkowitz (@noemiola), Caitlin Merriman (@CaitlinSnark), Mary Angela Rowe (@lapsedvictorian), Craig Ruttan (@crut) Sound recordist and editor: Cam White (@JediDusk) Follow us on Twitter @21stFolio. Find us online at http://seventh-row.com/21st-folio

For the seventh episode of Let’s Talk Shakespeare, I asked “Was Shakespeare Gay?”. This is a really big question that people have written a great deal about, so this episode acts as a sort of summary of some of the arguments for and against Shakespeare being gay. To answer this question we have to think about the nature of friendships and sexuality and self identification of those thing in Shakespeare time, as well as looking at evidence from this text, in particular the sonnets. This weeks guests are: * Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute * Dr Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and Primary Learning Manager a the SBT * Professor Stanley Wells, Honorary President of the SBT * Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre You can find the show notes for this episode over on our blog: https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcast/was-shakespeare-gay/

Tom Sutcliffe discusses hedonism, from the ultra-hedonists in ancient Greece to the seasonal impulse to indulge. Tom's joined by RSC artistic director Greg Doran who's looking at hedonism in Shakespeare, from Toby Belch to Falstaff; by Prof Julia Twigg who assesses hedonism and asceticism in the contemporary world; by writer Zoe Cormier who's explored the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science; and by Kurt Lampe from Bristol University on the philosophical hedonists of Cyrene, an ancient city in modern day Libya. Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Greg Doran is one of those lucky people who seem to have found his perfect place in life. From the age of 13, when his mother first took him to the theatre in Stratford, Shakespeare's been his passion; as a boy he dedicated himself to seeing every single Shakespeare play - sometimes managing to watch three Macbeths in a day. So - what better job than Artistic Director of our great national Shakespeare company, a role he took on 18 months ago. His production of Richard II with David Tennant in the lead opens on 10 October, and he's directing Henry IV next year with his partner Anthony Sher playing Falstaff. Doran doesn't come from a theatrical background - his father ran a nuclear power station. But his passion for music began early, thanks to a concert in the local village hall in Lancashire. A friend of his mother's, Mrs Sidebottom, got up on stage and sang 'Blow the Wind Southerly'. And young Greg was hooked. That haunting folk song begins his choice of music - sung in this case by Kathleen Ferrier. Other choices include Duke Ellington, a song by Cervantes, and a Vivaldi Concerto which changed Doran's life when he heard it in Paris. It was a low point - a love affair had ended, his ambition to be an actor was foundering. And the music spoke to him, and gave him a new direction. In Private Passions, he talks to Michael Berkeley about his passion for Shakespeare, and about his relationship with Antony Sher. Its foundations are a shared life in theatre, but also a love of food: when Anthony's depressed, Greg cooks for him the comfort food he ate as a child in South Africa. He's even learned how to make a special lamb stew - and he gives us the recipe: "I believe there is a Jewish saying that food is love. For me, tomato bredie is an expression of love." First broadcast in October 2013.

A practical Masterclass with Greg Doran from the Royal Shakespeare Company on how Shakespeare spins rhetoric for the actor, with Sam Leith, journalist and writer, and author of 'You Talkin' to Me'. Students from Oxford University Drama Society take part.

A practical Masterclass with Greg Doran from the Royal Shakespeare Company looking at what clues Shakespeare puts into the verse for the actor. Students from Oxford University Drama Society rehearse Romeo and Juliet in front of an audience.

A practical Masterclass with Greg Doran from the Royal Shakespeare Company on how Shakespeare spins rhetoric for the actor, with Sam Leith, journalist and writer, and author of 'You Talkin' to Me'. Students from Oxford University Drama Society take part.

Libby Purves meets Dick Robinson, the Royal Shakespeare Company's new artistic director Greg Doran; broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald and Lord and Lady Fitzalan Howard. Dick Robinson is the great nephew of Sister Edith Appleton who was a nurse in France during the First World War. Sister Edith recorded her experiences in her diaries - contrasting the horrors of her job with her love of the natural world. The diaries provide a record of the terrible effects of gas attacks and shell shock as well as a personal insight into nursing care during that period. War Diaries - a Nurse at the Front, The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton is published by the Imperial War Museum with Simon and Schuster. Greg Doran has recently been appointed artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking up his new role in September. He joined the company as an actor in 1987 before switching to directing. He is currently rehearsing Julius Caesar, set in modern day Africa, as part of the World Shakespeare Festival. His production of David Edgar's new play Written on the Heart is about to open at the Duchess Theatre in London. Sir Trevor McDonald OBE broadcaster, presenter and former ITV newsreader is presenting a new three part series for ITV, 'The Mighty Mississippi' which discovers how the river has played a central role in American history. He travels 2500 miles up the Mississippi to explore its place as the backdrop to some of the most painful chapters of life in America's Deep South. Lord and Lady Fitzalan Howard live at Carlton Towers, near Selby in Yorkshire. They feature in a new Sky Atlantic TV series The Guest Wing in which four stately home owners show how they have kept their properties running by opening their doors to weddings, corporate events and even dog shows. Producer: Paula McGinley.

With Mark Lawson. Greg Doran discusses his appointment as the next Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was announced today, and reflects on his priorities in his new role. Award-winning documentary maker Molly Dineen reviews Werner Herzog's new television series based on interviews with inmates on Death Row in the United States. The renowned Complicite theatre company's new production is a staging of The Master And Margarita, based on Bulgakov's novel. Sarah Churchwell gives her first-night verdict. Singer and bass player Esperanza Spalding reflects on her unexpected success at last year's Grammy Awards, and discusses her approach to song-writing. Producer Stephen Hughes.

Andrew Marr talks to the theatre director Greg Doran about the literary detective work involved in his production of Cardenio - a play he's described as Shakespeare's Lost Play re-imagined. Nicola Shulman turns to the court of Henry VIII to explore the influence of Thomas Wyatt's poetry. While Neil Astley brings together contemporary poets from around the world in an anthology dedicated to 'Being Human'. And as the Guardian launches a new website for book reviews by readers, its literary Editor, Claire Armitstead says there will always be a place in newspapers for the professional critics. Producer: Victoria Brignell.