Shakespeare's Tribe

I like to think of myself as a cool, objective reviewer (especially of electronic resources) but occasionally I can’t help myself and just go all-in fanboy. Such is the case with my new obsession, an inspirational and exceptional resource, Clear Shakespeare: The Read-Along Shakespeare Podcast.

Created by Akiva Fox, a former Literary Manager for D.C.’s famed Shakespeare Theatre Company, this is the most genuinely demystifying tool for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays of which I know. This is, in part, because he in unafraid to use the multi-episode format that podcasts do so well for discussing the plays line-by-line in exceptional detail. As a result, his explication of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is spread across six podcasts totaling nine hours of audio. (Hamlet is even longer, with nine individual podcasts!)

So why is this so useful? Fox has one simple insight that powers everything. Most students (and even experts) don’t really understand the language. Most editions don’t help much. They try, of course, but glosses of all the difficult words do not fix the problem, because even when you know roughly what each word means the issue is more often grasping the entire phrase or putting those words in context.

Fox takes you through the plays, discussing one unit of meaning – usually a sentence but sometimes longer connected thoughts – at-a-time. He avoids too much interpretation, in favor of just explaining what is being said while you follow along with your favorite printed edition.

If listening to an expert talk about the language of a play for nine hours sounds more like a circle of hell than fun to you, as I admit it generally does to me, then all I can say is you haven’t heard Akiva Fox do it. He is witty, entertaining, and enormously empowering. He really believes that listeners can hear and understand this language with just a little help, and studiously avoids telling you what you are supposed to think and feel about it all. This ain’t “schoolmarm Shakespeare”! His site name is well chosen, because he really does make things clear.

Best of all, these podcasts are available for free. (Pitch in a few bucks if you can, but for starving artists and struggling students this guy is a godsend!) Want to see, or rather hear, why I am so gaga for him? You can listen to a sample here.

So far only Hamlet and Midsummer are available, with Julius Caesar coming next, but the plan sounds extensive.

My advice? Download old episodes as soon as possible, and subscribe so you don’t miss anything in the future.