From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

Every theater-goer who sees a Shakespeare play, and every scholar whose research touches on some aspect of Shakespeare's work,

comes away with his or her own interpretation of Shakespeare. But in addition, there are people

who have shaped the world's understanding of Shakespeare. They are performers, scholars, writers,

critics, theater directors, and others whose work has left an enduring imprint on how Shakespeare

is understood and performed. About ten years ago, Peter Holland,

the McNeil family chair in Shakespeare Studies at Notre Dame, and Adrian Poole, the former chair

in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, set out to create a compendium that

summed up the work of these people. The final set of books in their opus, an 18-volume reference called the Great Shakespeareans,

was released in 2013.

In this podcast, Peter Holland explains the rationale he and Adrian Poole used to decide just who

got to be listed as the world's great Shakespeareans. We, of course, call this

podcast, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Peter Holland is interviewed by Rebecca Shear. So the collection has reached 18 volumes now. Did you ever

think it would get this big?

We knew it would get this big, and this is as big as it gets. The whole idea was to plan something from the beginning.

It was originally going to be, oh, a mere 16 volumes, and then somehow we grew so hugely to 18.

And Adrian Poole, who's at the University of Cambridge

and I, were charged with the idea of trying to put this thing together. And looking back at when

the series was born, who did you see it serving? We imagined a pretty wide range of students

and scholars. We want people when they are beginning to get

...