To Pod or Not to Pod

Guest: A couples therapist (modern)

Shakespeare re-examines his most famous love story and admits, candidly, that the whole thing could have been avoided with better communication and a working postal service. He breaks down every decision the two teenagers made and grades each one. Romeo gets a D-minus for faking his death without texting first. Juliet gets a C for the poison plan. The Friar gets an F for being the worst advisor in literary history. Shakespeare insists he wrote it as a cautionary tale and is baffled that people use it at weddings.

A deep dive into the psychology of Hamlet, the prince who spent five acts deciding whether to do one thing. Shakespeare admits he based Hamlet on a friend who took three hours to order at a restaurant. He discusses the "to be or not to be" soliloquy and reveals he wrote it in one draft, which he considers the most efficient thing Hamlet ever did. The irony is not lost on him.

Guest: Richard III (guest villain)

A villain writing workshop. Shakespeare explains that the key to a great villain is making them smart enough that the audience almost roots for them. Iago, he argues, is the greatest villain he ever wrote because he never tells anyone his motive — and people have been arguing about it for 400 years. "If your villain needs to explain themselves, you've failed," he says, while pointedly not explaining why he wrote Iago that way.

Shakespeare teaches listeners the art of the Elizabethan insult. He covers classics like "Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood," and newer coinages he's been working on. Listeners call in to describe people who annoy them and Shakespeare crafts personalized insults in real time. A baker from Stratford describes his neighbor and Shakespeare responds with a three-line devastation that the baker has been using daily since.

Shakespeare addresses, with increasing irritation, the conspiracy theories that he did not write his own plays. He goes through every proposed alternate author — Bacon, Marlowe, de Vere, the Queen — and dismantles each theory. He is particularly annoyed by the Marlowe theory because Marlowe was "good, but not that good, and also technically dead at the time." He concludes by reading his tax returns from 1597, which list his occupation as "playwright," and asks what more evidence anyone could possibly need.

A frank discussion about the economics of theater. Comedies filled seats. Tragedies won prestige. Shakespeare reveals that Much Ado About Nothing was his biggest commercial hit and King Lear was the one he was proudest of, and there is a lesson in that about art and commerce. He also reveals his ticket pricing strategy: comedies on weekdays, tragedies on weekends, and the Scottish play whenever the Globe needed repairs because "nothing fills a theater like a good murder."

Guest: Ben Jonson (reluctant)

Shakespeare takes full credit for inventing over 1,700 words in the English language, including "lonely," "generous," "gloomy," "assassination," and "eyeball." He walks through his favorites and explains the creative process behind each. "Eyeball" came to him in the bath. "Assassination" came during a boring meeting with his acting company. "Lonely" came to him while waiting for Marlowe to stop talking about himself.

Shakespeare reveals that his most famous stage direction — "Exit, pursued by a bear" from The Winter's Tale — was not a metaphor. He hired an actual bear. It went poorly. The actor survived but quit the same afternoon. Shakespeare discusses other chaotic stage moments including a sword fight that drew real blood, a ghost that fell off the stage, and the time the cannon set fire to the Globe Theatre. He is strangely nostalgic about all of it.

Shakespeare recorded 154 sonnets about a "Fair Youth" and a "Dark Lady" whose identities have been debated for centuries. In this episode, he finally agrees to discuss them and then proceeds to reveal absolutely nothing. He reads several sonnets in their entirety, pauses dramatically after each one, and says "I will let the poem speak for itself." His producer asks direct questions. He answers in verse. By the end, we know less than when we started.

Guest: The Actor Who Played Bottom

Shakespeare discusses the writing process behind his most beloved comedy. He reveals he wrote the entire fairy subplot after staying up for three days straight and was not entirely sure it was good until the audience laughed. Bottom getting turned into a donkey was, he admits, the kind of joke he would normally consider beneath him, but "the groundlings loved it, and groundlings buy tickets." He defends physical comedy as an art form for exactly 12 minutes before pivoting back to talking about sonnets.

Shakespeare addresses the theatrical superstition that saying "Macbeth" in a theater brings bad luck. He says it seventeen times during the episode, each time pausing to see if anything bad happens. Nothing does, except his microphone cuts out once, which his producer attributes to a loose cable and Shakespeare attributes to "the curse working on a delay." He then discusses the play itself and why ambition without conscience is the scariest thing he ever wrote about.

Shakespeare performs a live episode at the reconstructed Globe Theatre. He performs soliloquies from six plays, invents three new insults based on audience suggestions, and delivers a 15-minute improvised monologue in iambic pentameter about modern life. He comments on smartphones ("a glass that shows all knowledge yet makes men know nothing"), social media ("a stage where every fool believes himself the lead"), and podcasts ("a player who speaks unto the void and calls it audience"). Standing ovation. He takes a bow in complete silence.