From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,

the Folgers director. This podcast is called I That Am Routly Stamped. One thing literature does for us

is open up a window onto times we've never experienced. The best riders not only transport us to other times and places, they also allow us to

reconsider from a new angle the social conventions, habits, attitudes, and gender politics

of the time in which they were writing.

It's why we're able to talk about conditions being Dickensian, a situation being pinteresque,

or a character being Shakespearean.

When it comes to Shakespearean, though, there's a caveat.

Shakespeare not only talked about his own times, he also wrote literary plays that showed us the past,

though it was a past filtered through the politics and prejudices of

Shakespeare's present. Questions about this came up recently when a body was found in a Leicester

England parking lot that is now widely believed to be that of Richard III. Among the many issues

raised, along with that body, were the ones we bring up in this podcast. It features an expert on

the real Richard III, David Baldwin, author of a new biography of the Plantagenet King, and an

expert on Shakespeare's Richard III, Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at

the University of Birmingham. They are interviewed by Rebecca Shear.

We're here, of course, to talk about Richard III. And stick with me here, but it sort of seemed to me

a good place to start is to talk about Whitey Bulger, the Boston Irish mobster who spent

16 years on the lamb from the FBI. Those guys you tuned up, they're connected down Providence.

What they're going to do is come back with some guys and kill you.

Which sure as you're born, they will do, unless I stop them.

Do you want me to stop them?

...