Shakespeare Unlimited: Hearing the voices of discovery

In our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, now celebrating its 100th episode, you can hear so many surprising and often first-person stories by scholars, musicians, authors, actors, and others on all manner of Shakespearean topics. Amid it all, I enjoy listening for stories of discovery, whether at the Folger or elsewhere—especially that moment of eureka that never goes out of style.

Shakespeare’s First Folio. STC 22273, Folger Shakespeare Library. Photo by Ben Lauer.

In an episode on Shakespeare and London’s Tabard Inn, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Professor Martha Carlin told us how she found a little-known manuscript that described carved names in the panels of the inn’s “large room” (the manuscript was exhibited at the Folger in 2016). The names, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Richard Burbage, seem to offer us a glimpse of Shakespeare’s social life in London. “It was a very lucky discovery of an unpublished manuscript,” she said. “And the discovery that is the most fun, is the discovery of a reference to Shakespeare and his circle that had never been really known about or published.”

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For Case Western Reserve Professor Ross W. Duffin, who was a Folger fellow, close reading of The Winter’s Tale revealed references within the play’s spoken text to a popular ballad. That moment, which ultimately led to his book The Shakespeare Songbook, was almost electric: “It was like light bulbs were going on all over the place in my head,” he said. A 2016 interview with George Washington University Professor Ayanna Thompson and Lafayette College Professor Ian Smith shed light on another text-based find: how Smith’s research led to his realization that a line in Othello (“dyed in mummy”) suggests that the crucial handkerchief was dyed black instead of being white, transforming multiple meanings of the play. “It’s as if we realize we’ve been misreading this play for 400 years,” said Thompson. “This is exactly how scholars are coming to Ian’s argument, like, “Oh my gosh, how have we missed this all this time?”

Not every discovery mentioned in the podcast was made in a library. The archaeological project manager who’s worked on Shakespeare’s final home, New Place, in Stratford, told us, “It’s certainly one that I’ll be telling the grandkids about.” And the podcast’s exploration of the moons of Uranus, nearly all named for Shakespeare’s characters, also revealed what it was like to find a moon. One astronomer recalled the last step of comparing two observations, made one hour apart with the same telescope, to verify the discovery. It felt like Christmas. “The presents are there under the tree, and your parents are saying, “Well, you can take the bow off, but you have to wait an hour before you’re allowed to peel back the paper.”