Scurvy Companions is the brand new podcast from NoSweatShakespeare.
Hosted by our most NSS contributor Emily Jackoway, the podcast takes a fortnightly deep dive into all things Shakespeare.
We’ll be speaking with diverse experts in fields of Shakespearean performance, literary study, education, social media, and more — all while keeping the Bard’s works entertaining and accessible.
Scurvy Companions is available wherever you usually listen to your podcasts – subscribe today!
Scurvy Companions on Google Podcasts
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Listen to Scurvy Companions now:
Episode 1: “Brevity is the soul of wit”: Shakespeare for the TikTok teens
Here are links they mentioned to their Shakespeare-themed playlists: Beatrice, Hal and Poins, Helena and Hermia, Lady Macbeth, and Ophelia
When you think of teenagers on TikTok, you probably think of complicated dance trends, new makeup looks, and “Okay, Boomer,” but… what about Shakespeare? In episode 1 Emily is joined by Shakespearean TikTok creator Annalyse Lapajenko, known as Al on TikTok.
Al is an actor and Shakespeare enthusiast with 6 years of teaching experience. Their TikTok account, @nofearshakesqueer, brings Shakespeare content to thousands of people daily by inviting audiences to engage with the text in a modern setting. Al creates humorous, trendy, and engaging videos about Shakespeare characters and themes, ranging from outfits to wear on a first date based on your favorite Shakespeare play, to video trailers for Spotify playlists for your favorite characters — and they’ve built a community of nearly 35,000 followers doing so.
Episode 2: “Note this before my (e)Notes”
Wesley is the Project Manager for eNotes.com and an avid reader of whatever he can get his hands on. Before life in editing and publishing, he spent many years teaching English Language Arts from Moscow, Russia, to Seattle, Washington. Wesley works with a team of literature enthusiasts who seek to make reading and teaching literature as enjoyable and rewarding as possible. In addition to his work with eNotes, Wesley enjoys gardening, coffee, and talking about speculative fiction with Chris and Oren on the Mythcreants podcast.
Today we’ll be talking with Wesley about the mechanics of an online literature Q&A site (one slightly different from our own!), how Shakespeare is taught in schools, and how the Bard can be used as a point of critique for modern literary genres like science fiction. You can see Wesley’s work on eNotes.com, oweleyes.org, and mythcreants.com.
https://anchor.fm/nosweatshakespeare/embed/episodes/Note-this-before-my-eNotes-etk6oe
Episode 3: “Let old wrinkles come”: Celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday
To celebrate the life of the Bard, we’ll be discussing his life in Stratford-upon-Avon with NoSweatShakespeare’s founder and scholar, Ralph Goldswain.
Ralph taught English Literature in England for four decades. During the 1980s he was seconded to the National Shakespeare and Schools Project, where he helped develop methods of teaching Shakespeare to bring plays to life in the classroom. He went on to work at the London Education Authority, where his focus was working with teachers to make Shakespeare lively, comprehensible, and enjoyable for their students. He has created and delivered Shakespeare workshops for both teachers and students, and stEmily dives into Shakespeare’s early and later years with NoSweatShakespeare founder, Ralph Goldswain. Together they discuss such questions as: What kind of family was Shakespeare born into? What shocking event happened to make his father retire from public life? And what does Shakespeare’s will say about his marriage?
Episode 4: “The play’s the thing”: Actor and Director Jacqueline Thompson
Jacqueline Thompson, an actor, director, producer, and professor based in St. Louis, Missouri, is one of the first actors taking to the stage as we enter our (hopefully) post-pandemic theatrical space. She will be playing Regan in St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s production of King Lear, premiering this June, starring André De Shields in the title role.
Jacqueline has a rich history of community-engaged classical theater stemming from her involvement with St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Shakespeare in the Streets program and furthered by the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Program. Her work has earned her accolades like a Visionary Award, which recognizes St. Louis women in the arts, the award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama from the St. Louis Theater Circle, and participation in the Theater Communications Group’s Rising Leaders of Color program.
Today, Jacqueline will be talking to us about how to effectively engage with communities through theater, how the pandemic has shaped recent performance, and how to make classical theater accessible to everyone.
You can learn more about seeing Jacqueline in King Lear in St. Louis this summer here. Jacqueline is interviewed by host Emily Jackoway.
Episode 5: “All the world’s a stage”: Zoom Shakespeare with The Show Must Go Online
Rather than closing up shop, actor Rob Myles formed a Shakespeare reading group over Zoom — a group which quickly transformed into an online theater company, The Show Must Go Online.
Since then, TSMGO has performed the entire Shakespeare canon, premiering a new production every week throughout the pandemic. They’ve involved actors and theater makers from across the world, and every performance included guest speakers, with luminaries like Ben Crystal and Simon Russell Beale joining in on the fun. All of the performances are still up on YouTube, and have garnered tens of thousands of views across the globe.
Rob Myles joins us from his home in Glasgow. He is an actor, author, director, stage fighter, and creator of the Shakespeare Deck, which aims to make Shakespeare simple on the go.
Today he’ll be joining us to talk about how The Show Must Go Online developed, the process and challenges of creating Zoom theater so quickly and at such a high level, and his views on how we can make Shakespeare and theater, in general, more inclusive and accessible going forward.
Episode 6: “Speak the speech as I pronounced it to you”: Director of New York University’s Classical Studio, Daniel Spector
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts houses multiple drama studios, each of which teach their own technique for acting. One of them, the Classical Studio, was developed more than 20 years ago to use Shakespeare as the basis for acting education. The studio is a training ground for both classical and contemporary work, and has produced alums who have used their Shakespeare training to work in both classical productions, in musicals on Broadway, and more.
We are joined today by the studio’s director, Daniel Spector, who was once a student in the program himself. He is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and an alumnus of the Broadway Theatre Project. He has served as a consultant to PBS on matters Shakespearean, moderated Artist Talks at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, led workshops for numerous arts organizations, produced many readings of new plays, and spoken at conferences around the world (British Shakespeare Association, Offensive Shakespeare, BritGrad, Shakespeare Theatre Conference).
Today he will talk with us about how Shakespeare’s verse can be used to train actors, what kind of classes are taught in a small Shakespeare conservatory ensemble, how Shakespeare acting education transferred online during the pandemic, and more.
Episode 7: “These violent delights”: Stage Fight Choreographer David Brimmer
Shakespeare wrote some of the most beautiful poetry and sweetest love scenes in history. But, as we all know, he also thought up some of the grisliest fight scenes and murders. How do you stage Macbeth and Macduff’s duel, or Lavinia’s maiming, or Mercutio’s death? Fight choreographer and master David Brimmer is here to shed some light on what those fights do for the story, and how actors get them onstage.
David has been working in fight choreography for 40 years, and has staged fights for both Shakespearean and contemporary work for Broadway, film sets, and regional theaters across the United States. He is a renowned Fight Master with the Society of American Fight Directors, and founded the stage combat program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has choreographed for scads of famous directors, actors, and playwrights; one of his recent credits was choreographing for Spring Awakening on Broadway.
Today David will talk with us about how he got started in stage combat, how the certification process for stage combat works, how to stage the reality of pain in stage fights, and why combat is meaningful in Shakespeare’s works.
Episode 8: “What’s past is prologue”: Shakespeare’s Lost Years with Ralph Goldswain
Imagine if, for a total of 11 years of your life, you completely disappeared from record. No leases on any apartments, no phone records, no credit card transactions. Just totally as if you didn’t exist.
It seems impossible to imagine now, but hundreds of years ago, records were pretty thin — even if you were a famous poet, playwright, and actor like one William Shakespeare, who totally disappears from public record from the years of 1578-1582 and 1585-1592. Theories abound about what Shakespeare was up to during that time. Was he on the run from the law? Secretly visiting the Vatican? Or perhaps traveling with a band of actors? The only thing we know for sure is that he suddenly emerges around 1585 as one of the most famous playwrights in London — but we have no idea how he got there.
Here to speculate on what happened is NoSweatShakespeare’s founder and resident scholar, Ralph Goldswain. Ralph joined us a couple months ago to talk about Shakespeare’s life in Stratford, but he has plenty of knowledge about Shakespeare’s life in London and beyond, as well — even when the facts are a little scarce. A
n English teacher for four decades, a member of the National Shakespeare and Schools Project, and a frequent lecturer on Shakespeare’s life and works, Ralph has a pretty solid idea of what may have happened during Shakespeare’s famed “Lost Years.”
Episode 9: “Something wicked”: Macbeth, King James, and Demonology with Korey Leigh Smith and Elyse Sharp
When actors Korey Leigh Smith and Elyse Sharp started their own Shakespeare podcast, “Shakespeare Anyone?”, they wanted to do deep dives into the history, themes, and scholarly analysis of all the plays — without, as Korey says, going into the crippling debt of grad school.
And they did just that — their series on Macbeth alone has ten episodes, with a total of seven hours of Macbeth content. They’re now moving onto Twelfth Night and, from the looks of things, they’ll be devoting the same amount of time there.
Today, Korey and Elyse join us to discuss one of the major aspects of Macbeth they discuss – the history behind King James’s obsession with witchcraft and how it feeds into the play. We’ll be discussing Shakespeare’s historical sources for the play, what the political climate was like in England at the time, how England’s king became so obsessed with witches and the supernatural, and what Shakespeare’s goal might have been in writing a play steeped in treason and sorcery.
