Episodes

  • #123 Pissing on bagpipes - Ep 5 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #123 Pissing on bagpipes - Ep 5 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    May 6 2026
    Was Shakespeare a Catholic? We examine the evidence and then ask whether his audience would have compartmentalised the world into Protestant, Catholic or alchemical. Wasn’t their world full of magic? In his last solo play, The Tempest, a white magus, Prospero, tells the audience that it’s up to them to make good things happen, to create a ‘brave new world’ in which everyone can be reconciled. Is this Shakespeare’s leave-taking?

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    46 mins
  • #122 Queen Elizabeth's Toyboy - Ep 4 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #122 Queen Elizabeth's Toyboy - Ep 4 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 29 2026
    The Earl of Essex, it always used to be said, was an airhead. Elizabeth’s swaggering toyboy who posed as a military genius. And yet Shakespeare took the young Earl of Essex seriously, portraying him as Henry V in early performances in 1595. It riled Essex’s rival at court, the Queen’s Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, so much that he ensured English history plays were banned.

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    41 mins
  • #121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #121 The naked King Lear - Ep 3 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 22 2026
    Shakespeare confronts homelessness with his aging king, reduced to beggary. He makes the audience ask what it would be like if it was you who found yourself out of house and home, shivering and hoping someone would give you their cloak. Is it not, Shakespeare asks, an outrage to blame the poor for their condition?

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    38 mins
  • #120 'Hang, beg, starve' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #120 'Hang, beg, starve' - Ep 2 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 15 2026
    We reveal the real-life factional feud that inspired the Montagues v Capulets and which makes the groundling audience so angry. It’s London. 1595. Life is tough. It’s wet and cold and only three years ago 20% of the population died of the plague. And it’s not fair. The rich can commit murder, duelling in the streets, and get away with it. While young apprentices are hanged for arguing over the price of a fish because the Queen’s Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, is in a feud with the Lord Mayor. As the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet ‘some shall be pardoned and some punished.’ It’s an outrage.

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    39 mins
  • #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings

    #119 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' - Ep 1 Shakespeare and the Groundlings
    Apr 8 2026

    Nothing is what it seems? We, poor Londoners, paying our penny to stand at the Globe in 1606 would agree with that. With Robert Cecil’s government relentlessly pumping out fake news around the Gunpowder Plot, it’s not at all clear who the real criminals are. As Macbeth, murderer of a Scottish king, is overtaken by the evil of ambition we begin to see that our Scottish king James is also in danger. Doesn’t the ambitious scheming of his Principal Secretary threaten to reduce him to an irrelevance? Didn’t Cecil’s father, Elizabeth’s chief adviser, kill our own king’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots?


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    36 mins
  • #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?

    #96 Extortioners and hatchet men - Ep 5 What Wars? What Roses?
    Apr 1 2026
    Henry VII invented the idea of the Wars of the Roses and the notion that he alone could end them. With a comparatively weak claim to the throne he found a novel way to deal with the nobility - through extortioners and hatchet men. He could only get away with this because the Black Death had fatally damaged the status of the nobility and caused the rise of the small independent farmer. Feudalism in England and Wales was over… or at least we thought it was, until now. (R)

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    29 mins
  • #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

    #95 Murder in the Tower - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 25 2026
    One common-girl-denies-king-until-he-marries-her, two kings, three royal murders in the Tower, and the Queen's mother accused of witchcraft. Just about standard for late 15th Century England and Wales. (R)

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    30 mins
  • #94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?

    #94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 4 What Wars? What Roses?
    Mar 18 2026
    By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the historian Michael Postan long ago (in 1939) famously called ‘political gangsterdom.’ (R)

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    35 mins