Podcasts about Macbeth

Today I'm joined by the brilliant Dr Alison Macbeth, one of the most incredible menopause doctors of our generation, who supports our cancer community. Alison has been instrumental in shaping some of the most important chapters in my new book, Navigating Menopause After Cancer — especially those on vaginal oestrogen and the many non-hormonal treatment options available to cancer survivors.But during the process of helping me with the book, Alison herself was diagnosed with breast cancer.We talk about what it's like to cross over — from being the doctor, to becoming the patient. We explore how her diagnosis shifted her perspective and what it's taught her.We also talk about the importance of friendship, support systems, and what really matters when you're on the receiving end of care.It's an honour to share this conversation with you — and I hope it reminds you, like it reminded me, that none of us are alone in this.Thank you for listening — and as always, please share this episode with someone who needs it.Episode Highlights:00:00 Intro04:34 Breast Cancer Screening Anxiety10:53 Women's Support Crucial in Struggles15:13 Emotional Struggles and Recovery Journey26:41 "Informed Consent Lacking for Women"28:47 Choosing Endocrine Treatment Wisely30:37 "Mental Struggles in Treatment"34:28 "Understanding Personal Impact Varieties"Order the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Navigating-Menopause-After-Cancer-comprehensive/dp/1068499907 Dr Alison Macbeth's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_alison_macbeth/?hl=enJoin Alison for the Kilt Walk 14th Sept: https://fundraiseformenopauseandcancer.raiselysite.com/edinburghkiltwalkConnect with us:For more information and resources visit our website: www.menopauseandcancer.org Or follow us on Instagram @menopause_and_cancerJoin our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/menopauseandcancerchathub

Aaron Bartz brings a grounded, thoughtful energy to the role of Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and in this conversation, he shares just how much life and imagination go into keeping the magic alive night after night. From flying and fire to illusions and high-stakes contingencies, Aaron walks us through what it's like to debut on Broadway in one of the most technically demanding plays out there—and why so many actors in the production come from classical Shakespeare backgrounds. We also explore Aaron's journey from Great Falls, Montana to the Lyric Theatre in NYC, including a pivotal classroom moment that set him on the path to acting, and how a love of storytelling (and a little persistence) helped him land gigs that ultimately led to an MFA from Yale. Now a father of two, Aaron reflects on how playing Draco as a parent has shifted his own understanding of growth, vulnerability, and legacy. Aaron Bartz is an actor and writer currently starring as Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. He earned his MFA from the Yale School of Drama and began his career with regional Shakespeare productions across the country. He toured nationally with the Montana Repertory Theatre in To Kill a Mockingbird, and his previous work includes Loves Labour's Lost, Macbeth, and other classical works. This episode is brought to you by WelcomeToTimesSquare.com, the billboard where you can be a star for a day. Connect with Aaron: Instagram: @aaronbartz Connect with The Theatre Podcast: Support the podcast on Patreon and watch video versions of the episodes: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon.com/TheTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter & Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@theatre_podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook.com/OfficialTheatrePodcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TheTheatrePodcast.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alan's personal Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@alanseales⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email me at feedback@thetheatrepodcast.com. I want to know what you think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanguardistas have more fun—so if you don't already subscribe to the podcast, join the Vanguard today via Apple Podcasts or extratakes.com for non-fruit-related devices. In return you'll get a whole extra Take 2 alongside Take 1 every week, with bonus reviews, more viewing recommendations from the Good Doctors and whole bonus episodes just for you. And if you're already a Vanguardista, we salute you.  Could we have found the film of the year already? ‘Bring Her Back' looks like it's got a fighting chance. Mark reviews this brilliantly unsettling new horror from The Philippou brothers, who last freaked us all out with ‘Talk To Me' in 2022. We've got the Good Doctor's verdict on ‘Fantastic Four: First Steps' too—plus the box office top 10 and all your top-quality correspondence.   Our guest this week is the fascinating Justin Kurzel. You know him as director of 2015's ‘Macbeth' with Michael Fassbender, 2021's ‘Nitram', and last year's Nazi-hunting thriller ‘The Order'--and now of his first TV project, ‘The Narrow Road To The Deep North', which hits British screens this week. He chats to Mark and Simon all about the visceral new series, which follows a group of Australian prisoners of war working on the Burma railway in the 1940s, and stars Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds. Plus there's a bit of chat about Nina Simone's chewing gum, and a little teaser for his next project with the guardian of this strange and sticky piece of music ephemera, Warren Ellis.    Timecodes (for Vanguardistas listening ad-free):  Bring Her Back Review: 08:36  BO10: 15:50  Justin Kurzel Interview: 21:55  The Narrow Road to the Deep North Review: 38:20  The Fantastic Four: First Steps Review: 51:16    You can contact the show by emailing correspondence@kermodeandmayo.com or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo  Please take our survey and help shape the future of our show: https://www.kermodeandmayo.com/survey   EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/take Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!  A Sony Music Entertainment production.      Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts    To advertise on this show contact: podcastadsales@sonymusic.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Commento e analisi di Macbeth, tragedia shakespeariana incentrata sui temi dell'ambizione e della sete di potere e le conseguenze. Trama e personaggi.

We're back with the short sketch series from Dream Realm Enterprises. Sketches written by Jonithan Patrick Russell and this week it's "Forgetful Macbeth"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're back with the short sketch series from Dream Realm Enterprises. Sketches written by Jonithan Patrick Russell and this week it's "Forgetful Macbeth"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

La Voz Humana en la Música - Macbeth de Verdi by Radiotelevisión de Veracruz

Dub3K - Under God (feat. Karma) - prod by Kurlee Daddee Productions CD's and Digitial Album - AVAILABLE NOW!!! https://kurleedaddeeproductions.bandcamp.com/album/dub3k-the-foundation O.G. Hip-Hop Group Dub3K featuring G. Macbeth, Shoebox P., Fly and Karma, bless these buttery beats by Kurlee Daddee Productions, to form The Foundation. A Bay Area Christian Hip-Hop EP full of positivity and knowledge.

Hope Hopkinson talks to director Athina Rachel Tsangari and actor Herry Melling about their new film, Harvest. The latest feature from celebrated filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, Attenberg), HARVEST is a spellbinding and thrillingly distinctive period piece like no other. Telling a story steeped in folk horror, and featuring another strikingly memorable performance from Caleb Landry Jones (Nitram), Tsangari presents a study of superstition, the trauma of modernity, and the looming threat of the outsider.  Set over seven hallucinatory days in an undefined era, an idyllic rural Scottish village with no name faces a period of great uncertainty when the community's traditional way of life is suddenly disrupted by seismic economic turmoil. Townsman-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk (Landry Jones) and local landowner Master Kent (Harry Melling, The Tragedy of Macbeth) are childhood friends who lay witness to a series of unexpected invaders from the outside world, whose arrival brings about irrevocable – and potentially damaging – change.   Adapted from Jim Crace's Booker Prize-nominated novel and co-starring Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, and Frank Dillane, HARVEST is an eerie, atmospheric and deeply immersive cinematic experience, blending beautifully textured storytelling with an exploration of what happens when people decide what a society should be.  If you'd like to send us a voice memo for use in a future episode, please email podcast@picturehouses.co.uk. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow us on Spotify. Find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with @picturehouses. Find our latest cinema listings at picturehouses.com.  Produced by Stripped Media. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, rate, review and share with your friends. Vive le Cinema.

This week I welcomed actor, musician, writer and producer Brian O'Sullivan to Up Next Studios to chat about his creative life and the incredible career he's carved out to date! Discovering his innate talent and passion for theatre at a young age, treading the boards of London's West End aged 9 in Oliver!, he has gone on to work on countless productions including most recently Macbeth alongside David Tennant, alongside continuing to write and produce his own work too. Creating his comedy characters Janice the GP receptionist and her husband Frank, in addition to a whole host of others, Brian has gathered an enormous following online from his sketches and this year sees him take his production UH HUH The Janice and Frank Story to the Fringe! When not on stage, travelling the world playing the accordion or writing sell out shows, Brian is hosting and producing his incredible podcast Putting it Together featuring creatives from Scotland's theatre world. Follow Brian on Instagram and TikTok https://www.instagram.com/bridohingwy?igsh=NHVjczBucjBlOWl5 Putting it Together podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/putting-it-together/id1305192983 https://www.tiktok.com/@bridohingwy?_t=ZN-8y2hRYeR5Dq&_r=1 Follow The Braw and The Brave Website: https://www.thebrawandthebrave.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBrawandTheBrave TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebrawandthebrave Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebrawandthebravepodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBrawandTheBrave

ACOFAE Podcast Presents: A Far Better Thing: “2025 - it was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” When was the last time you picked up a one of the "classic" books for fun? Has it been a while? Was it required reading that you were tested on at the end? Keep those answers in mind as you join Laura Marie and Jessica Marie in discussing A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry. A reimagining of A Tale of Two Cities, this story sees the reader encountering now only the classic characters like Sydney and Lucie but also fairies, goblins, and kings. Meeting your Changeling is something that is not done, but when Sydney meets not only his Changeling but his childhood loves as well, plots are revealed and past crimes must be paid for with blood. ACOFAE also touches on accessibility, required reading, retellings, and movies that borrow from the classics. "I don't know this man." TW / CW: none to our awareness For additional TW/CW information for your future reads, head to this site for more: https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/ Spoilers: A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, (loose spoilers) The Infernal Devices by Cassandra "Cassie" Clare Mentions: Shadowhunters, Romeo and Juliet, The Lion King, Hamlet, MacBeth, Cinderella is Dead, Shadowhunters, Loney Tunes, The Lunar Chronicles, The Scandelous Confessions of Lydia Bennett Witch, 10 Things I Hate About You *Thank you for listening to us! Please subscribe and leave a 5-star review and follow us on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/acofaepodcast/) at @ACOFAEpodcast and on our TikToks! TikTok: ACOFAELaura : Laura Marie (https://www.tiktok.com/@acofaelaura?) ( https://www.tiktok.com/@acofaelaura) ACOFAEJessica : Jessica Marie (https://www.tiktok.com/@acofaejessica?) (https://www.tiktok.com/@acofaejessica) Instagram: @ACOFAEpodcast (https://www.instagram.com/acofaepodcast/) https://www.instagram.com/acofaepodcast/ @ACOFAELaura (https://www.instagram.com/acofaelaura/) https://www.instagram.com/acofaelaura/

Le corbeau est présent dans les mythes et contes de toutes les époques, dans de nombreuses cultures. Au fil du temps, l'oiseau acquiert une mauvaise réputation à cause de son plumage noir, de son cri rauque et du fait qu'il soit charognard, en particulier dans l'Europe chrétienne, ce qui en fait un “oiseau de mauvaise augure”. Dans l'Ancien Testament, un corbeau apparaît pour la première fois au livre de la Genèse dans le récit du déluge. Noé, au bout de quarante jours, lâche un corbeau pour savoir si l'eau a baissé ou non. Comme l'oiseau ne fait qu'aller et venir sans pouvoir se poser, Noé lâche ensuite la colombe. Dans la mythologie grecque, Apollon fut un jour si amoureux de Coronis, fille du roi Phlégias, qu'il confia à un corbeau blanc le soin de veiller sur elle. Un jour que le corbeau relâcha son attention, Coronis se laissa séduire par un mortel nommé Ischys. Lorsque Apollon, jaloux, tua la jeune fille d'une flèche. Sur le point de mourir, elle lui révéla être enceinte de lui. Leur fils Asclépios, ou Esculape, fut confié au centaure Chiron, chargé de l'éduquer. Comme punition pour sa négligence, Apollon revêtit le corbeau d'un plumage noir. Le grand corbeau occupe également une place importante dans la culture amérindienne. Le corbeau de ces mythes est souvent à la fois le créateur du monde et le fripon. Selon une légende, l'Angleterre ne succombera pas à une invasion étrangère tant qu'il y aura des corbeaux à la tour de Londres ; le gouvernement en maintient plusieurs en résidence, tant comme assurance que pour faire plaisir aux touristes. C'est pourquoi les plumes des individus de la tour de Londres sont taillées périodiquement pour s'assurer que les oiseaux ne quittent pas les lieux. William Shakespeare mentionne le corbeau plus souvent que n'importe quel autre oiseau, aussi bien dans Othello (1604) que Macbeth (1606). Dans le film d'Alfred Hitchcock Les Oiseaux (1963), les corbeaux sont, parmi les oiseaux belliqueux, les plus redoutables, attaquant d'abord des écoliers, et assiégeant finalement, avec des mouettes, la maison où s'est réfugiée l'héroïne._______

Cappuccilli day - G. Verdi - Macbeth

Tara welcomes Alma Sarai, a Canadian artist, actor, musician, and arts advocate, to promote Tottering Biped Theatre's summer production of "The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged)" at Dundurn Castle Park in Hamilton, ON in August 2025.  Alma graduated from the Theatre and Drama Studies program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a joint program with Sheridan College. She has been deeply involved with Tottering Biped Theatre (TBT) since 2016, serving as Associate Artistic Director and Associate Producer. Alma has performed in every "Shakespeare by Nature" production since its inception, portraying roles such as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, among many other roles in numerous plays. Since 2020, she has also been the producing Director of TBT's Summer Shakespeare Project, an annual festival held at Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, co-led with Trevor Copp. Books mentioned: Ruff by Rod Carley Inkheart by Cornelia Funke How to Make Love in a Canoe: Sex in Canada by Jeff Pearce Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, Brendan O'Hea The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race by Farah Karim-Cooper Whenever You're Ready: Nora Polley on Life as a Stratford Festival Stage Manager by Shawn Desouza-Coelho Event details: The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) August 12-30, 2025 @ 7:00 pm (Tues-Sat)   The Carnival of Animals (live music and mime) August 17, 24, 31, 2025 @ 7:00 pm (Sun)   Dundurn Castle Park , 610 York Blvd, Hamilton, ON https://www.totteringbiped.ca/      

Send us a textOn this episode we hear from Lally Macbeth about her incredible compendium ‘The Lost Folk.' The distillation of a lifetime's passion, it is an inclusive and comprehensive take on the meaning of folk, that asks us to rediscover, to cherish and to share the particular and the weird from which all our communities are made. From pub signs to tea towels, bonfires to storytellers, this is a book that holds the elusive, the unownable and the collective dear. The Lost Folk's epigraph is the motto of the Federation of the Old Cornwall Societies - ‘Gather ye the fragments that are left, that nothing be lost.' And that is unquestionably what Lally Macbeth has done here. Packed from cover to cover with stories and anecdotes, it mixes her own experiences with a treasure trove of customs, curios and finds. ‘An exceptionally thoughtful and beautifully written celebration of the creative power that lives and breathes within our communities.' Maxine Peake‘Erudite, questing and endlessly fascinating.' Katherine May‘A splendid museum full of strange and wonderful things.'Peter Ross@fieldzine www.fieldzine.comwww.patreon.com/fieldzine

The Fates of Classical Antiquity not only survived in the form of related fairy-tale figures but also as the object of superstitions and rituals associated with newborns. In South Slavic and Balkan regions particularly, these customs represent a surprisingly long-lived and genuine case of pagan survival. We begin our episode examining the fairy godmothers of "Sleeping Beauty" as embodiments of the Fates.  Mrs. Karswell reads a few key passages from the definitive version of the story included in Charles Perrault's 1697 collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passé ("stories of times gone by.") We learn how the fairies fulfill the historical role of godparents at the newborn's christening. We also note the peculiar emphasis on the quality of what's set before the fairies at the christening banquet, observing how a failure there leads the wicked fairy to curse the Sleeping Beauty. 1874 illustration by František Doucha for a Czech edition of Sleeping Beauty We then explore antecedents to Perrault's tale, beginning with the 14th-century French chivalric romance, Perceforest.  A peripheral story in this 8-volume work is that of Troylus and Zeelandine, in which the role of Sleeping Beauty's fairy godmothers are played by Greek and Roman deities, with Venus as supporter of Princess Zeelandine (and her suitor Troylus) and Themis cursing Zeelandine to sleep in a manner similar to Perrault's princess.  A failure to correctly lay out Themis' required items at the christening banquet is again again responsible for the curse, though the awakening of Zeelandine by Troylus awakens is surprisingly different and a notorious example of medieval bawdiness. Preceding Perceforest, there was the late 13th-century French historical romance Huon of Bordeaux, in which we hear of the newborn fairy king Oberon being both cursed and blessed by fairies attending his birth.  From around the same time, French poet and composer Adam de la Halle's Play of the Bower describes a banquet at which fairy guests pronounce a curses and blessings on those in attendance prompted again by their pleasure or displeasure at what's set before them at a banquet. We also  hear of the Danish King King Fridlevus (Fridlef II) bringing his newborn son to a temple of "three maidens" to ascertain the  destiny pf the child in Gesta Danorum ("Deeds of the Danes").written around 1200 by Saxo Grammaticus. And lest listeners think such appeals to the Fates were strictly a literary motif, we hear Burchard of Worms, in his early-11th-century Decretum, condemning the not uncommon among the Germans of his region of setting up offering tables for the Fates.  By this point, the connection between how fairy godmother types are served at a banquet and offerings made to the Fates to ensure a cild's fortune should be clear. We then turn back to the Greek Fates, the Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) and the Roman Parcae (Nona, Decuma, and Morta). Particularly in the case of the Parcae, we hear examples of their connection to the newborn's destiny in the celebration nine or ten days after the birth of the dies lustricus, during which offerings were made to the Fates. The Three Fates by Bernardo Strozzi, late 17th c We make a brief side-trip to discuss the Norns (Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld), the Germanic equivalent of the Fates.  These are more distant cousins, not strongly associated with the newborn and his destiny, though we do hear a passage from the Poetic Edda, in which the Norns are  present birth of the hero Helgi. We also hear a gruesome passage from the 13th-century Njáls Saga, in which the Valkyries weave out the fate of those who will die in the Battle of Clontarf. The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Fates, the Wyrds, are also discussed, and we hear how the  witches in Macbeth partook in this identity as the "Weird Sisters," an association Shakespeare inherited from his source material, the 1587 history of Great Britain, known as Holinshed's Chronicles.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)Translated by José López Tomás (1869 - 1939)Macbeth cuenta una historia de crimen y castigo entreverada de brujería y elementos sobrenaturales. Amparado en las engañosas profecías de las Hermanas Fatídicas, brujas o diosas del destino, Macbeth decide asesinar a su rey y tomar la corona. Consciente del horror al que se entrega, forja su terrible destino y se deja poseer por el mal que nace del ansia de poder, creyéndose invencible y eterno. Esta obra tenebrosa e inquietante, de acción vertiginosa, es también profundamente introspectiva. A través de un lenguaje metafórico y sensorial, la obra indaga en lo prohibido, explora la transgresión y ofrece la oportunidad única de compartir la vida interior de un asesino, con su horror y su misterio. 

Up now on Patreon (3hr20h)3 months in the making, we get into a century of Dropping Out, DIY, and the conditions of self-preservation featuring mathematician Alexander Groethendieck, artist Lee Lozano, Cormac McCarthy, Shelly Duvall, and Sarah Records. As public life become further cauterized some will declout, some join the Santa Fe institute, and some refuse to speak to other woman for 27 years. Time to find out why Groethendieck's reasons for leaving the mathematics community, abstract financial systems and their influence on human creativity, ‘healthy disillusionment', the hollowing out of Pax Americana, Applied Quantum Mechanics, Cindy Lee album, reason's obscure other, ‘comparing yourself to old stories', Kazemir Malevich: Suprematism, from Shakespeare's Othello, King Leer, Macbeth, Industry Plant Aktion, refusing the art-world, semiotic superficially, ‘High-Energy Scattering', Dictator to Oneself, Wim Wender's “Perfect Days”, the infamous Shelly Duvall Dr. Phil episode, Alex Bienstock, what people learn from Wittgenstein, Bristol's Sarah Records and the politics of C86 jangle pop, micro-science and more.

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. 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

UNLOCK FULL EPISODE (and HUNDREDS of other BONUS shows): Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcherOn today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast BONUS episode for supporters- we continue our journey into James Shelby Downard's King Kill 33! We'll talk about Set 4: Kennedy, Beale and Bouvier: the Scarlet Woman Miss Chudleigh, Marilyn Monroe's Shriner husband Bob Slatzer, divine and sacred names connecting JFK to Baal, Jackie Onassis' Bouvier bloodline and Radzvil royals. In Set 5 we talk Mystical Toponomy with the 32nd degree of latitude connecting through Tres Hermanas, Macbeth and the Great Whore. Set 6 The Lone Pentagram State looks at symbolism of the color red, Houston's history, Shakespeare's Macbeth, Texas' masonic control system, Kabbalah principles, psycho-sexual rituals and the alchemical detonation of primordial matter!NOW UP AD-FREE ON SUPPORTER FEEDS! Free feed gets a preview!Links:SUPPORTER FEEDS: Go ad-free with HUNDREDS of bonus episodes, early access and books!Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher,VIP Section (*with comparsion of Apple vs Patreon vs VIP): https://wp.me/P2ijVF-aRLApple Podcasts Premium! You can now go ad-free with ALL the bonus episodes on the Apple app- just open up the podcast and subscribe!More from Isaac- links and special offers:*BREAKING SOCIAL NORMS podcast, Index of EVERY episode (back to 2014), Signed paperbacks, shirts, & other merch, Substack, YouTube links, appearances & more: https://allmylinks.com/isaacw*STATEMENT: This show is full of Isaac's useless opinions and presented for entertainment purposes. Audio clips used in Fair Use and taken from YouTube videos.

UNLOCK FULL 3-PART SERIES AND GO AD-FREE! (Video version on Tier 2): Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcherOn today's episode of the Occult Symbolism and Pop Culture with Isaac Weishaupt podcast we have a PREVIEW of a BONUS episode where we'll start a deep dive "Conspiracy Classics" series for the supporter feeds! In Part 1 we'll look at who James Shelby Downard was and what this King Kill 33 is all about! We'll then start exploring the essay: secret governments, the Freemason Grand Architect god and Americans not having the truth! In Set 1 The Hellfire Club we'll start with where it all began- satanic sexy time parties with Ben Franklin! In Set II Sexual Geometry we'll talk about how mathematics and Egyptian history, Set III Macbeth and Scotland connects Carl Jung into the Crossroads of sex magick, cross-dressing rituals, LBJ's bloodlines, Shakespeare's Macbeth at the White House, The Black Watch and the Holy House of Heredom symbolism! Find out the REAL conspiracy behind JFK's assassination!NOW UP AD-FREE ON SUPPORTER FEEDS! Free feed gets a preview!Links:SUPPORTER FEEDS: Go ad-free with HUNDREDS of bonus episodes, early access and books!Patreon.com/IlluminatiWatcher,VIP Section (*with comparsion of Apple vs Patreon vs VIP): https://wp.me/P2ijVF-aRLApple Podcasts Premium! You can now go ad-free with ALL the bonus episodes on the Apple app- just open up the podcast and subscribe!

In her sermon, Shari uses the metaphor of the Camino de Santiago—a long spiritual pilgrimage—to illustrate the Christian journey of moving continually toward peace and away from chaos. She reflects on her own experience walking the Camino, emphasizing that the daily, intentional choices made on the trail mirror the spiritual decisions we make in life. Life, like the Camino, is not static. Everything is always in motion—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Shari ties this constant movement to the second law of thermodynamics, highlighting humanity's natural tendency toward disorder unless we intentionally choose otherwise. Spiritually, we're always moving toward either peace (shalom: wholeness, well-being, safety) or chaos (slavery, disorder, retaliation). Shari contrasts biblical peace with today's culture of “my truth” and ethical relativism, which echo the times of the Judges when "everyone did what was right in their own eyes." She argues that freedom in Christ means intentionally choosing the path that leads to peace, even when it is counterintuitive or difficult. The lie from the Garden of Eden—that we are the exception to the rule—still misleads us today. We often believe we can harbor resentment, avoid forgiveness, or justify sin without consequences. Shari emphasizes that choosing chaos—like revenge, bitterness, and pride—leads us back into spiritual slavery. Through examples from both Scripture (Gideon, the Exodus, Judges) and literature (Nietzsche's philosophy, Crime and Punishment, Macbeth, Hamlet, East of Eden), she shows how refusing to forgive, holding onto bitterness, or believing ourselves exempt from consequences always results in suffering. Forgiveness, though often seen as illogical or undeserved, is the path to freedom. She tells real-life stories—like her friend Bob who justifies meanness because “they started it”—to show how childish and harmful these justifications are. True peace begins with us, not with others. We often claim we want peace but refuse to let go of pride, pain, or perceived justice to get it. Shari closes by urging the congregation to choose the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—as the “good fruit” in contrast to Adam and Eve's wrong choice. Like the biblical figures and literary characters she referenced, we too stand at a crossroads daily: toward peace and freedom in Christ, or chaos and slavery in sin. The Gospel gives us the power through the Holy Spirit to undo our wrong choices and walk “The Way” that leads to true peace. Discussion Questions Shari says we often believe “we are the exception to the rule.” How have you seen that idea play out in your own life or culture? What does the word “shalom” (biblical peace) mean to you? How is it different from simply not fighting or being calm? Are there any areas in your life where you are choosing chaos (bitterness, revenge, pride) instead of peace? What would it look like to choose differently? Who is someone in your life that you feel “started it”? What would it take for you to forgive them anyway? Which of the fruits of the Spirit do you most need to grow in right now to walk in peace? What's one practical way you could pursue it this week?

Send us a textWe have a look through the not-quite-official Coen Brother films, from SUBURBICON and BRIDGE OF SPIES to DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS and THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH.

Called “the finest actor of his generation,” Sir Simon Russell Beale has played just about everyone in Shakespeare's canon—Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff, Malvolio, Iago—and most recently, Titus Andronicus, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this episode, Beale reflects on the Shakespearean roles that have shaped his career and how his approach to them has evolved over time. He shares what drew him to Titus, and how he found surprising tenderness in Shakespeare's brutal tragedy. The actor revisits past performances, exploring grief in Hamlet, aging and dementia in King Lear, and how time has deepened his connection to the plays and the characters. Beale's memoir, A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories, is a moving and often humorous reflection on acting, Shakespeare, and the power of performance to reveal something essential about being human. Sir Simon Russell Beale studied at Cambridge before joining the RSC. Described by the Daily Telegraph as “the finest actor of his generation,” he has been lauded for both his stage and TV work, winning many awards including the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Evening Standard Best Actor Award, and the BAFTA Best Actor Award. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published June 17, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Acclaimed Canadian theatre maker Robert Lepage is back at the Stratford Festival with a new take on Shakespeare's “Macbeth.” This new production tells the same classic story of greed, betrayal and murder, but it's set during the brutal Quebec biker wars of the ‘90s. Robert joins Tom Power to talk about putting a new spin on this Shakespearean tragedy, his unique approach to theatre and his incredible decades-long career. If you're looking for more conversations about Canadian theatre, check out Tom's chat with esteemed stage actor Tom Rooney on what it takes to play a dog.

Dub3K - Al Green (feat. Karma) - Prod. by Kurlee Daddee Producitons CD's and Digitial Album - AVAILABLE NOW!!! https://kurleedaddeeproductions.bandcamp.com/album/dub3k-the-foundation O.G. Hip-Hop Group Dub3K featuring G. Macbeth, Shoebox P., Fly and Karma, bless these buttery beats by Kurlee Daddee Productions, to form The Foundation. A Bay Area Christian Hip-Hop EP full of positivity and knowledge.

In this episode we talk all about All's Well, a novel that is in part a retelling, in part an homage to theater, and a completely wild ride of a book. We discuss the way perception plays into the story, and how repetition functions to serve the narrative - and of course, we explore All's Well That Ends Well and MacBeth, the two plays at the heart of this novel.Shelf Discovery:Bunny by Mona AwadWoo Woo by Ella BaxterHunchback by Saou IchikawaThe Rehearsal by Eleanor CattonMy Death by Lisa TuttleIf you would like to get additional behind-the-scenes content related to this and all of our episodes, subscribe to our free newsletter.We love to hear from listeners about the books we discuss - you can connect with us on Instagram or by emailing us at thenovelteapod@gmail.com.This episode description contains links to Bookshop.org, a website that supports independent bookstores. If you use these links we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Passing of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson; Trump’s alleged plans to deploy troops to more cities; Jeff Stein makes his weekly visit; Macbeth curse strikes again; Luther Seminary campus closure; BWCA mining provision stripped from federal budget bill; government still has no idea on how to execute tariffs; digging into the bills passed at the…

Check out Cam's latest novel / audio drama here! In a twist that might be even more shocking than this terrifying film, this latest Faust Fable discussion is actually built around one of Maggie's theories — not Cam's — as she deep dives into that perennial horror question: why don't they just run away from the scary monsters? The answer is a wild journey of muffled fragments and out-of-focus breadcrumbs through this found footage Faustian masterpiece! Cam sprinkles in some Macbeth for good measure. All hail found footage! LINKS: Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram Feedback & Theories: secondbreakfastpod@gmail.com

On today's episode of Highkey Obsessed: Toil and Trouble, Cassie and Thomas are joined by Dr. Kristin Bezio to talk about the relationship between the Witch Trials of Early Modern Europe and the Reformation! Their conversation covers such illuminating topics as... Why was England so witch hunt light? What exactly was the impact of the Reformation on witch panics? How did people react to MacBeth back in the day? All that and much, much more on another episode of the greatest podcast in the multiverse!If you dig what you're hearing be sure to drop those 5 star ratings and reviews, and to follow the show on:Learn more about Dr. Bezio here: https://jepson.richmond.edu/faculty/bios/kbezio/ Instagram: @HighkeyObsessedPodcast and @sharkbatesbookshelfYouTube: @HighkeyObsessedPodcastWebsite: www.highkeyobsessed.comEmail: highkeyobsessedpodcast@gmail.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Illusionernas Abccedarium heter Scenkonstmuseeéts hyllning i två plan till landets kostymörer, de som kan trolla fram de mesta att bära på en scen. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Jenny Teleman, kritiker på P1:s kulturredaktion, och Maria Edström, teaterkritiker på Expressen, vandrade runt bland svävande rokokoklänningar, små-barn-nattlinnen med kaniner och köttyxor, empatiska varmkorvar i leopardtyg och Ingmar Bergmans gyttja på Ofelias kjol.Teatrar landet runt har donerat kostymerna till utställningen. Och frågorna hopar sig: Är fatsuit okej? När blir blod på tyg svart? Tar vodka bort svetten ur Jarl Kulles kavaj? Och vart har alla magra karlar på scen tagit vägen?Utställningen pågår till och med den 24 maj 2026.

Dub3K - The Foundation - TITLE TRACK AND FIRST SINGLE OFF NEW EP Karma, G. Macbeth, SHOEBOX P, FLY, Kurlee Daddee Productions LIinks to album: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-foundation-feat-karma-single/1815625920 https://open.spotify.com/album/1weMbpQ6eyPLFdLbQ1JkCm?si=TWDiZ0SbTUWnoqJFFxdyqg https://youtu.be/ptRhtfDvFX8

Send us a textLisa & Amy continue to explore The Mystery of the Queen's Necklace. The BWGs travel to Stratford-on-Avon to explore Shakespeare's hometown. Trixie calls an emergency meeting of the BWGs to discuss Miss Trask's involvement with a dashing Scottish man. The group also takes in a performance of Macbeth and makes friends with several of the locals who show them around town.Please rate and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us get the word out about the podcast! You can still listen on your regular platform. Follow this link and click the “listen on Apple podcast” button. Then click on the rate and review tab to reach the correct page. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/books-from-the-basement/id1544343334Please email us at booksfromthebasementpc@gmail.comVisit our FB Page:  https://www.facebook.com/booksfromthebasement Join our FB Group: www.facebook.com/groups/booksfromthebasementpcIf you want to help us keep our podcast ad-free, please go to www.buymeacoffee.com/booksbasement, where you can donate by buying us a "book" instead of a coffee!     

IPS DEPROGRAM 6/1/25 News Bending PsyopsThe episode began with the host announcing the launch of a new AI agent called the IPS stenographer in the Discord server. This bot is designed to automatically summarize the latest comments and create infographics every four hours, posting them in a dedicated summary room. Users can also get a synopsis on demand using a specific command. The host mentioned previously doing this manually and used ChatGPT and Grok to help automate the process. They noted that Grok can elaborate on prompts and assisted in activating the bot on Discord.A core theme of the discussion is the analysis of current events and media through the lens of predictive programming and a concept called the "meta script," which is described as the big story that becomes history. The host views media, including movie trailers and news, as different forms of propaganda – entertainment propaganda parallel to information propaganda – that are interconnected and reveal a larger narrative. By looking at these things holistically, they aim to arrive at subtexts and bigger pictures.The conversation delved into numerous examples and recurring symbols observed in media and events:Movie trailers discussed included Sinners, Mickey 17, Captain America: Brave New World, Fantastic Four, Final Destination: Bloodlines, The Home, and Welcome to Derry.Recurring symbols and themes highlighted were the Space Needle (linked to EMP, the Electronic Music Project, movie plots, and the sinking of the West), EMP events, the eye/iris and needle into the eye (appearing in movie posters and montages), three pillars/masts (seen in the International Hotel, Space Needle, and a Mexican Navy ship), space interpreted as inner space or mind control, the sinking of America or the West (symbolized by the Titanic, the boat hitting the bridge, the Space Needle, and One World Trade Tower), and various numbers and dates (such as 6-11, 11-6, 84, 216, and 33).Specific events analyzed through this lens included the Trump shooting in Butler (linked to the Riddler, Ave Maria, and specific numbers), a Mexican Navy ship hitting the Brooklyn Bridge (noting the three masts and the death of a cadet named America), the East Palestine train derailment (compared to the Netflix movie White Noise and recent lawsuits against BlackRock and Vanguard), the JFK assassination (connected to Trump symbolism, dates, Macbeth, and a home movie allegedly showing his "death"), and the Reagan shooting (noting the 33-year delay in James Brady's death being ruled a homicide).The host discussed the concept of the "auto-hoaxer" and observed media attempts to frame it negatively. They also touched on "Psychic Driving", the "political horseshoe theory" as a deliberately implemented model, and interpreting world events through the lens of WWE kayfabe.The host mentioned the upcoming release of PSYOP trading cards.

The episode began with the host announcing the launch of a new AI agent called the IPS stenographer in the Discord server. This bot is designed to automatically summarize the latest comments and create infographics every four hours, posting them in a dedicated summary room. Users can also get a synopsis on demand using a specific command. The host mentioned previously doing this manually and used ChatGPT and Grok to help automate the process. They noted that Grok can elaborate on prompts and assisted in activating the bot on Discord.A core theme of the discussion is the analysis of current events and media through the lens of predictive programming and a concept called the "meta script," which is described as the big story that becomes history. The host views media, including movie trailers and news, as different forms of propaganda – entertainment propaganda parallel to information propaganda – that are interconnected and reveal a larger narrative. By looking at these things holistically, they aim to arrive at subtexts and bigger pictures.The conversation delved into numerous examples and recurring symbols observed in media and events:Movie trailers discussed included Sinners, Mickey 17, Captain America: Brave New World, Fantastic Four, Final Destination: Bloodlines, The Home, and Welcome to Derry.Recurring symbols and themes highlighted were the Space Needle (linked to EMP, the Electronic Music Project, movie plots, and the sinking of the West), EMP events, the eye/iris and needle into the eye (appearing in movie posters and montages), three pillars/masts (seen in the International Hotel, Space Needle, and a Mexican Navy ship), space interpreted as inner space or mind control, the sinking of America or the West (symbolized by the Titanic, the boat hitting the bridge, the Space Needle, and One World Trade Tower), and various numbers and dates (such as 6-11, 11-6, 84, 216, and 33).Specific events analyzed through this lens included the Trump shooting in Butler (linked to the Riddler, Ave Maria, and specific numbers), a Mexican Navy ship hitting the Brooklyn Bridge (noting the three masts and the death of a cadet named America), the East Palestine train derailment (compared to the Netflix movie White Noise and recent lawsuits against BlackRock and Vanguard), the JFK assassination (connected to Trump symbolism, dates, Macbeth, and a home movie allegedly showing his "death"), and the Reagan shooting (noting the 33-year delay in James Brady's death being ruled a homicide).The host discussed the concept of the "auto-hoaxer" and observed media attempts to frame it negatively. They also touched on "Psychic Driving", the "political horseshoe theory" as a deliberately implemented model, and interpreting world events through the lens of WWE kayfabe.The host mentioned the upcoming release of PSYOP trading cards.

G Macbeth - Large Fries - Prod by Kurlee Daddee Productions Single off the EP The Value Meal Produced by Kurlee Daddee Productions Find it also here: https://open.spotify.com/album/1sjMwN1fgERl8TVFfdkWxL?si=2KzlAaoiSBeviQyBAAsAWw https://www.deezer.com/us/album/710575151 https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/gmacbeth/the-value-meal?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=Email+&utm_source=SendGrid https://www.iheart.com/artist/g-macbeth-45702677/albums/the-value-meal-312966888

Double, double, toil and trouble… the Scottish play… out, damned spot! William Shakespeare's take on Macbeth has well and truly embedded itself in our culture. The play, written in the early 17th century, charts how an ambitious Macbeth turns to violence in order to realise a prophetic vision of becoming King of Scotland. But what of the real Macbeth, who really did sit upon the Scottish throne? What is known of this 11th century monarch? And how much of his life can be compared to the fictitious monarch of Shakespeare's play? To enjoy more episodes of Love Scotland, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on Iona, click here.

Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we start a new series of explorations on the walking simulator, beginning with Gone Home. We set the game in its time, talk about possible real world experiences, and dive into its restraint and storytelling. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary. Sections played: All of Gone Home Issues covered: walking simulator coverage, the wave of indies and another wave, career changes, Fullbright's early history, leaving the big industry, the value of focus, location-based entertainments and shows, focusing on one thing, having constraints vs not, setting your own constraints, the spooky atmosphere but having restraint, imposing expectations from video games, visiting a previously unknown house, the Ouija board, a literal red hair-ing, stripping out all the video game-isms for interactivity, few mechanics, simple systems and using their few mechanics and verbs, experience-forward, Brett quizzes Tim, narrative richness, the ordering of collectible reading, leveraging non-linear storytelling, using period-appropriate communication, games that make Tim cry, the 90s of it all, letters vs email, waste paper baskets, a visual language and the use of consistency.  Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Death Stranding, Dear Esther, Firewatch, BioShock Infinite, Batman: Arkham Origins, GTA V, Tomb Raider (2013), Dead Rising 3, Dead Space 3, LoZ: A Link Between Worlds, The Last of Us, Beyond: Two Souls, AC IV: Black Flag, Rayman Legends, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Battlefield IV, Payday 2, Outlast, Antichamber, The Stanley Parable, Papers Please, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Starbreeze, Josef Fares, Hazelight Studios, It Takes Two, LucasArts, Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Animal Well, Balatro, 343 Studios, BioStats, Calamity Nolan, Tacoma, Indie Game: The Movie, Minerva's Den, Bioshock, Kate Craig, Carl Lumbly, 2K Marin, Hangar 13, Fallout: New Vegas, Morrowind, Sleep No More, Macbeth, Antenna Theater, Meow Wolf, George RR Martin, Control, Imagineering, Disney, Fez, X-Files, Resident Evil, Amnesia, Life Is Strange, Leaves of Grass, Hollow Knight, Pulp Fiction, Final Fantasy IX, Shadow of the Colossus, The Last of Us 2, Alien, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.  Next time: Dear Esther (2012) Links: Why Is Gone Home A Game? Twitch: timlongojr https://twitch.tv/timlongojr Discord https://t.co/h7jnG9J9lz DevGameClub@gmail.com mailto://devgameclub@gmail.com

Charlie is a native Pittsburgher and a proud graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied Acting. As an actor, select stage credits include the NY Public Theatre's “Shakespeare in the Park” (All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure), the Pearl Theatre Company (Richard II), the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (King Lear, The Three Musketeers, Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost), The Shakespeare Theatre of DC (Richard II, Henry V, As You Like It, Mrs. Warren's Profession), Middlebury Actor's Workshop (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), The Arts Center of Coastal Carolina (The Unexpected Guest), and Chautauqua Theatre Company (Much Ado About Nothing, Vaidehi, Ah, Wilderness!).  In 2015, Charlie co-founded Esperance Theater Company — a company that produced classical-based work here in NYC. With Esperance, Charlie produced and performed in 12th Night, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Breitwisch Farm. As a teacher, Charlie has been working with MTCA (Musical Theater College Auditions) for over 20 years, where he is now a Director of the company alongside Leo Ash Evens. Charlie has also taught for Texas State University, PACE University, The Performing Arts Project (TPAP), Broadway Dreams, the City University of New York, Carnegie Mellon's Pre-College program, and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. As a Teacher and Director, he is able to do two of his favorite things in life: help students to find their authentic selves as artists, and help them find their best fit in their collegiate journey. Charlie also hosts the “Mapping The College Audition” podcast, where he continues that work, and helps demystify this daunting audition process for listeners around the world. Charlie is also the proud father to a precocious toddler, partner to an amazing Tony-nominated + Grammy-winning Actress, and a humble Broadway Show League Softball MVP. Want to try our Broadway fitness program for free? ⁠⁠⁠www.builtforthestage.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Send us a textClaudia Mayer discusses designing for Shakespeare plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and The Merchant of Venice.For a complete episode transcript, click http://www.womenandshakespeare.comClaudia Mayer's co-production company: https://jvproductions.co.uk/Interviewer: Varsha PanjwaniGuest: Claudia MayerResearcher: Iris Kobrock Producer: Caroline LehmanTranscript: Benjamin PooreArtwork: Wenqi WanSuggested Citation:  Mayer, Claudia in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2025). Claudia Mayer on Designing for Shakespeare Plays [Podcast], Series 5, Ep.5. http://womenandshakespeare.com/Twitter: @earlymoderndocInsta: earlymoderndocEmail: earlymoderndoc@gmail.comTwitter: @earlymoderndocInsta: earlymoderndocEmail: earlymoderndoc@gmail.comTwitter: @earlymoderndoc Insta: earlymoderndocEmail: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

From 2008- Adam Sexton talks about his graphic novel rendition of Shakespeare's MacBeth. (We're replaying this in honor of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside's production of MacBeth which closed on May 11th.)

G. Macbeth - Big Mac Single off the EP The Value Meal Produced by Kurlee Daddee Productions Find it also here: https://open.spotify.com/album/1sjMwN1fgERl8TVFfdkWxL?si=2KzlAaoiSBeviQyBAAsAWw https://www.deezer.com/us/album/710575151 https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/gmacbeth/the-value-meal?utm_campaign=website&utm_medium=Email+&utm_source=SendGrid https://www.iheart.com/artist/g-macbeth-45702677/albums/the-value-meal-312966888

Dennis Woodyard joins us again as he and Greg Weisman discuss bringing King Arthur into the Gargoyles Universe. Teaming Arthur up with Griff. Macbeth's motivations for pursuing Excalibur. Checking in on Manhattan while the World Tour continues. And we also discuss would could have been (and what may still be) with the “Pendragon” spinoff. And more! We also discuss how the animation industry, as well as the television industry, has changed over the years. Why we still prefer physical media. And Greg Weisman regales us with his vacation and visit to Tintagel: the birthplace of King Arthur. Dennis also talks... Continue reading

Are you ready to hear more Alles is Drama on air?! Well tune in on Wednesday, 14th May for Alles is Drama on G-no-Line, with Student Radio Maastricht!! This time we talk about what it's like to direct, act and be behind the scenes of a production at Alles is Drama. We also get insight on what it is like to act professionally in London.

On this week's episode of the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast, Sean and Jeff celebrate one of the most dynamic actresses working today—Florence Pugh. From indie dramas to superhero blockbusters, she's proven her versatility again and again. We take a deep dive into her incredible career, discussing highlights like Fighting with My Family, Macbeth, The Falling, A Good Person, Little Women, Oppenheimer, and, of course, Midsommar. New Releases: The Surfer Directed by Lorcan Finnegan Starring Nicolas Cage A man returns to his childhood beach to surf with his son, only to be humiliated by territorial locals. What starts as a quiet trip turns into a psychological and physical war of wills. The Shrouds Directed by David Cronenberg Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce In classic Cronenberg fashion, this eerie sci-fi tale follows a grieving tech entrepreneur who invents a machine to communicate with the dead—blurring the line between life, death, and obsession. Another Simple Favor Directed by Paul Feig Starring Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick The stylish thriller returns as Stephanie heads to Italy to support her enigmatic friend Emily—only to find herself wrapped up in another web of secrets, lies, and possibly revenge. Thunderbolts Directed by Jake Schreier Starring Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Lewis Pullman Marvel's team of misfits and antiheroes—including Yelena Belova—are thrown together for a dangerous mission where survival means confronting their most painful pasts. Spotlight: The Career of Florence Pugh We break down the rise of Florence Pugh—how she's become one of our favorite performers and why she continues to command the screen no matter the genre. Follow Us: Website: I Hate Critics Facebook: Everyone is a Critic Podcast Twitter/X: @criticspod Instagram: @criticspod Patreon: Support Us Merch: TeePublic Store YouTube: Watch Us

William Shakespeare, often called the Bard of Avon, is the greatest playwright in the English language. Born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, he married Anne Hathaway at 18 and had three children. He moved to London in the late 1580s to pursue a career in theatre. Over the next two decades, he wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. His works explore timeless themes of love, power, jealousy, betrayal, and ambition. Shakespeare's most famous plays include Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear. He co-owned the Globe Theatre, where many of his plays were performed. His mastery of language enriched English with hundreds of new words and phrases. Shakespeare blended history, tragedy, and comedy in ways that remain unmatched. Despite his fame, much of his personal life remains a mystery. He retired to Stratford around 1613 and died in 1616 at the age of 52. Shakespeare's legacy lives on through endless adaptations on stage and screen. His characters and stories still resonate across cultures and generations. He was as much a keen observer of human nature as a creator of unforgettable drama. This talk show explores the life, love, and literary genius of the immortal William Shakespeare.

Check out Cam's latest novel / audio drama here! Revenge of the Sith is not just the most climactic and sweeping and melodramatic Star Wars film, it's also perhaps the most tragic entry — and that's where we come in. We analyze the film by tracing it's roots through three giants in the field, starting with Lord of the Rings and an avalanche of Gollum / Anakin parallels, moving on to Macbeth and the realization that the Jedi masters are the three witches, and finishing with a Doctor Faustus framing that almost redeems Anakin as a lone Faustus in an endless sea of Mephistopheles. LINKS: Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram Feedback & Theories: secondbreakfastpod@gmail.com

In this episode I talk to my parents about the topic of William Shakespeare. We discuss the enduring appeal and significance of William Shakespeare's work, biographical details of his life, the key themes in Shakespeare's plays, and the impact of his language on modern English. We try to explain the qualities that make Shakespeare great, using examples from plays like Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth. We also consider the challenges of understanding Shakespeare and suggest ways for newcomers to engage with his plays, such as watching film adaptations.Enjoy a conversation about this important figure in English language and culture, with two other important figures - my mum and dad!PDF available with transcript, vocabulary list and vocabulary quiz. Premium listeners - watch out for a language review of this episode coming soon, in P68 "Learn English with Shakespeare" parts 1 & 2.

A new show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music explores what it means to be a powerful woman through the lens of Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Writer and performer Whitney White discusses her show "Macbeth in Stride," running now at BAM through April 27. Plus, White discusses directing the Broadway musical "The Last Five Years."

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most energetic, varied and innovative playwrights of his time. Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) worked across the London stages both alone and with others from Dekker and Rowley to Shakespeare and more. Middleton's range included raucous city comedies such as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and chilling revenge tragedies like The Changeling and The Revenger's Tragedy, some with the main adult companies and some with child actors playing the scheming adults. Middleton seemed to be everywhere on the Jacobean stage, mixing warmth and cruelty amid laughter and horror, and even Macbeth's witches may be substantially his work.WithEmma Smith Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of OxfordLucy Munro Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College LondonAnd Michelle O'Callaghan Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of ReadingProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Clarendon Press, 1996)Suzanne Gossett (ed.), Thomas Middleton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011)R.V. Holdsworth (ed.), Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies: A Selection of Critical Essays (Macmillan, 1990), especially ‘Calvinist Psychology in Middleton's Tragedies' by John StachniewskiMark Hutchings and A. A. Bromham, Middleton and His Collaborators (Northcote House, 2007)Gordon McMullan and Kelly Stage (eds.), The Changeling: The State of Play (The Arden Shakespeare, 2022)Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (The Arden Shakespeare, 2020)David Nicol, Middleton & Rowley: Forms of Collaboration in the Jacobean Playhouse (University of Toronto Press, 2012)Michelle O'Callaghan, Thomas Middleton: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)Gary Taylor and Trish Thomas Henley (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (Oxford University Press, 2012)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production