Shakespeare’s plays are rich with references to fashion and feathers. In All’s Well That Ends Well, he writes: “Faith, there’s a dozen of ’em, with delicate fine hats and most courteous feathers, which bow the head and nod at every man.”

These plumed hats weren’t just theatrical flourishes—they were part of a broader story of global trade, Indigenous artistic labor, and the ways in which early modern England encountered and represented the wider world.

This week, we’re exploring the fascinating intersection of featherwork, costume design, and Indigenous contributions to the English stage during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Our guest is John Kuhn, whose work on Inimitable Rarities investigates how feathers traveled across oceans to arrive on early modern stages—and what their presence can tell us about colonialism, artistic labor, and performance in Shakespeare’s England.

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So complains one of Shakespeare’s characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor, voicing what was surely a common frustration in the 16th and 17th centuries. Fleas were an ever-present part of daily life—so much so that they appeared in poems, jokes, love songs, and even seven different times across Shakespeare’s plays. This week, we’re scratching the surface of these itchy invaders to explore what their presence reveals about hygiene, health, and humor in the early modern world. Our guest is 17th-century historian Andrea Zuvich, here to help us explore how people really managed fleas in Shakespeare’s lifetime.

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In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne declares, “Let us dance and sport,” while in Twelfth Night, Sir Toby Belch exclaims, “Shall we set about some revels?” Shakespeare’s plays are filled with movement—more than 100 stage directions across his works call for a dance, making dance not merely entertainment, but a powerful form of expression in the early modern world.

This week on That Shakespeare Life, we’re taking a closer look at what those dances might have looked like in real life. What was the significance of dancing in the 16th and early 17th centuries? What kinds of dances were popular? And how did they reflect the politics, courtship, and social hierarchies of the day?

To help us explore the rhythm and meaning behind Shakespeare’s choreography is our guest, historian and dance scholar Emily Winerock.

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