I’ll no doubt be back in gear with more insights into early modern suffering sometime during 2021, but for now I’m working on a series of videos on “Shakespeare the man”. Here’s the first one, just giving a general overview.

This next one is the first of several I’ll be doing on Shakespeare’s Stratford friends. Following Kate Pogue, I’m starting with Richard Quiney:

And here’s the third one, on Thomas Greene, which is as far as I’ve got so far:

I’m working on placing Shakespeare in his social context, showing the kinds of people he mixed with and the circles he moved in. The unspoken subtext of the videos is that, despite the claims of those who, for some reason, desperately need for Shakespeare to have been a country bumpkin who could never have written the plays published in his name, he was closely connected to people like Quiney and Greene, who were highly literate and well-educated.

In addition to my own series on Shakespeare, I’ve been editing and producing a series of interviews for a series of interviews by Thomas Dabbs, of Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, called “Speaking of Shakespeare”. These are a kaken-funded project, originally intended to finance a number of “live” appearances of visiting lecturers, but adapted because … well, because!

Here they are:

Both series are growing, so if you want to follow them check them out on YouTube and subscribe to the respective channels!