Kathryn Harkup on "Death by Shakespeare"

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s quite a list: Hanged. Prison fever. Stabbed. Stabbed. Poisoned. Beheaded. Beheaded. “Malady of France.” Cannonball. Burnt. Bitten. Eaten. Mauled. Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things, but he really wrote a lot about death. Chemist and science communicator Dr. Kathryn Harkup’s new book is Death By Shakespeare. In it, she takes her readers through a fulsome exploration of death in the plays and provides plenty of grizzly explanations of just what causes it all. We talk to her about a some of those deaths, dying in Shakespeare’s world, and why gruesome deaths feature so prominently in stories from Shakespeare to CSI. Harkup is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Kathryn Harkup is a chemist, author, and science communicator. Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts (published in the US by Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) is the third in her series of books joining popular fiction and science, which also includes A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie and Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. From our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 12, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Death is Certain,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, let's see. There's a hanging. There's prison fever. There's a stabbing. There's another stabbing. There's a poisoning.
0:10.9	Beheaded. Beheaded. Malady of France. Cannonball.
0:20.8	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:25.6	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Fulcher's director.
0:28.6	Shakespeare wrote about a lot of things.
0:31.6	Love, ambition, doubt, magic, and inevitably and vividly he wrote about death. Death by natural causes, death by royal
0:42.4	decree, near death, faked deaths. There's a lot of death in Shakespeare. Dr. Catherine Harkup,
0:51.0	a chemist and science communicator, has a new book out, part of a series
0:55.4	of books she's written Joining Popular Fiction and Science.
0:59.6	She has a book on the deaths in Agatha Christie Mysteries, one on the science in Frankenstein,
1:05.3	and now she's written Death by Shakespeare.
1:09.2	In it, she takes the novice Shakespeare reader through a fulsome exploration of death in the plays,
1:14.6	and she takes the novice science reader through plenty of grisly explanations of just what causes all that death.
1:22.6	I think you'll agree it's the kind of material that rom-com fans will find fascinating and horror movie
1:29.0	fans will think is just so cool. I should mention, when we talked with Dr. Harkup recently,
1:35.8	she was locked down in her apartment in Spain. Our host, Barbara Bogave, was recording from
1:41.5	her garage in Los Angeles. If their audio quality, or mine for that matter, is something less than what you've come to expect from us,
1:50.2	we hope you'll understand under the circumstances.
1:53.4	We call this podcast, Death is Certain.
1:57.5	I've been thinking just this week that coronavirus is going to be one of the defining
2:02.6	moments in my children's lives and that Shakespeare was also marked by a pandemic. He was born in a
2:10.5	plague year. And it sounds like from what you write that he was lucky to survive. Oh, absolutely.
	...

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