Rare early drama, argued and performed.
Beyond Shakespeare treats pre-modern drama as living material, not museum glass. It moves between interviews, full-cast adaptations, archive recordings, fragments, and production previews, with patient attention to texts, staging, sound, and historical context.
PRESS PLAY
Beyond Shakespeare is a large, patient project devoted to drama before and around Shakespeare, especially the plays and fragments that rarely sit at the center of the syllabus. Its range is unusually practical. Episodes include interviews, full-cast audio adaptations, live archive recordings, fragment readings, and previews of current productions. The show cares about texts, but it also cares about bodies in rooms, voices on microphones, and what happens when a script has to become an event. A conversation on Caroline stage music can move from witches, printed songs, and audience belief to the emotional force of rhythm and performance. A production preview for Edward II can turn casting, cutting, doubling, and the absence of an interval into serious dramatic questions. The show also keeps returning to archives. John Cotgrave's English Treasury of Wit and Language becomes a route into unattached fragments and the odd afterlives of dramatic quotation. Audio drama receives the same kind of attention, with discussion of adaptation, early modern plays on radio, BBC production history, and the difference between simply recording a play and making it work for the ear. There is a generous amount of performance here. Gown, Hood and Cap appears as a full-cast adaptation, complete with academic clothing turned into quarrelsome comic characters. The Interlude of Youth arrives as a live archive recording, with the roominess and rough edges openly acknowledged rather than hidden. That balance matters. Beyond Shakespeare can be scholarly, but it is not aloof. It explains why a textual problem, staging choice, or historical context changes the experience of a play. The result is a show for listeners who like old drama treated as active material: argued over, performed, adapted, preserved, and tested in practice.
Made for: For listeners drawn to early modern and Tudor drama, theatre history, adaptation, textual scholarship, and performance practice. It also suits theatre makers who like hearing how staging choices change the meaning of old plays.
What sets it apart: Beyond Shakespeare does not stop at commentary; it pairs scholarship with performed scenes, full-cast adaptations, fragments, and live archive recordings. Its strength is the constant movement between page, stage, microphone, and historical evidence.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Beyond Shakespeare connects textual scholarship with the practical decisions that return early English plays to the stage and microphone.
Beyond Shakespeare treats early English drama as something to be staged, heard and argued over. The host brings scholars and theatre-makers into detailed conversations about how surviving texts become performances.
A Tudor interlude gets both close discussion and a live stage recording, so you can judge the choices.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Caroline-stage review where music becomes evidence for theatrical atmosphere, belief, fear, and arousal.
Music supplies the Caroline stage with a charged emotional vocabulary in this PlayNext review of a conversation with Dr. Shirley Bell, an early career researcher specialising in early modern drama and music and author of Music and Emotion on the Caroline Stage.
A clear case for hearing early modern drama through audio, with BBC history and practical production detail.
Beyond Shakespeare offers a focused look at radio drama and audio drama, following Dr. Andrea Smith of the University of Suffolk as she shows how early modern plays change when they are heard rather than staged.
A focused look at how one Edward II production turns casting and pacing choices into an argument.
The piece frames a forthcoming Edward II staging as a practical study in how Marlowe can be made to work on stage today. Alex Pearson, directing and co-producing, and Natalie Harper, co-producing while playing Edward, come across as active shapers of the production rather than…
A clear live Tudor interlude recording, with a little room in the sound and a cast that keeps the play easy to follow.
Beyond Shakespeare's archive recording of The Interlude of Youth keeps the moral argument easy to track, setting Youth against Charity, Riot, Pride, and Humility with plain clarity.
An early Tudor play is read as a staging problem, with a brief bridge to King Lear.
This episode treats The Interlude of Youth as a live staging problem, not a fixed text, and that choice gives the discussion its edge. Returning to Charity, Humility, Pride, Riot, and Youth through the off-Broadway production, it pays closest attention to what the stage can do…
Friendly criticism for screen and stage obsessives.
Odd lives, sharp tangents, no straight path.
Shakespeare, traced through the wider world.
After a live White Bear Theatre reading of Seneca's Thyestes on 23 October, Robert Crichton, Helen Good and Simon Nader Merzer discuss Jasper Haywood's 1560 translation.
Seneca’s Thyestes, translated by Jasper Haywood, opens with Megera urging Tantalus to stir conflict in the house of Pelops.
The central puzzle is how Jasper Hayward’s early-1560s Thyestes preserves Seneca’s Latin syntax while adding selective emotional emphasis.
Lizzie Conrad Hughes says early modern actors were not simply “unrehearsed”: learning parts and talking with writers counted as rehearsal.
Dr.
This episode introduces a mini-series exploring unattached fragments from John Cotgrave's 1655 book 'English Treasury of Wit and Language', which collects quotes from English dramatic poems during the interregnum period.
The episode turns to early modern drama on the radio and the awkward business of calling it radio when audio drama is doing so much of the work.
Alex Pearson and Natalie Harper preview a production of Christopher Marlowe's *Edward II*.
Dr.
A live performance of a scene from Robert Greene's 1590s play 'James IV' featuring a lawyer, merchant, and divine debating the political and moral decay of their society.
The episode presents a live archive recording of The Interlude of Youth by The Unknown.
The host opens by placing The Interlude of Youth in the early years of Henry VIII and by noting that both speakers have been working on the play recently, in different places and under different circumstances.
This episode explores the history of printed plays in the 16th century, focusing on John Danter, a controversial figure who published plays like 'Fair M, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester', with insights from PhD student Michelle Michel.
This episode explores whether modern genre labels like horror can be meaningfully applied to early modern texts, featuring a discussion with Dr.
This episode features a relaxed interview with author Laurie Johnson discussing Leicester's Men, early playing companies, and their significance in Elizabethan theater history.
This episode features a live discussion with Professor Liz Oakley-Brown about fighting snails in Tudor-era mythology and drama, connected to an upcoming play called Thucytes.