There's not an American writer, not Hemingway, not Emily Dickinson, not Faulkner, who is named as required reading by American high school and junior high school students. Shakespeare is.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. This week we consider William Shakespeare, an American icon, enlisted forever in our

political fights. It is explosive. It is potentially toxic, but that's why it speaks to us.

Plus, how love flavors lost resonated in Kabul, Afghanistan. These four princes take an oath that they are going to study for the next four years,

and they will not interact with any woman.

And that sounded very much like Taliban, and all the actors laughed and said,

What? Shakespeare actually came up with this 400 years ago.

It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Ladstone.

This summer, as the numbers of the vaccinated rise, we get to spend time outside,

go to all those favorite places shuttered by COVID-19. Many of us will flock to outdoor festivals, including Shakespeare

festivals, where actors once again will be treading the boards. Shakespeare would find

all this familiar. According to historian Jay Leeds Barrell III.

In the four-year period between 1606 and 1610, it's likely the London playhouses were open for all of nine months, if that, due to plague.

Shakespeare, a shareholder in some of those spaces,

would have been financially devastated, but he did use the occasions of quarantine to write Anthony and Cleopatra and The Tempest, and according to legend, King Lear. Emma Smith argued

in the New York Times that likely he wrote most of his plays amid the threat of infectious disease.

Thank goodness it didn't derail him.

He is America's national poet, our national dramatist.

You know that, right?

His words are quoted as routinely as the Bible to mean whatever

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