Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps

it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,

music, radio, podcasts. Welcome to the Arts and Ideas Podcast.

I'm Rana Mitter, and ahead of the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth,

here's a chance to catch up with the discussion I recorded about Shakespeare's bookshelf.

Hello, one of the lead characters of a Midsummer Night's Dream is Peter Quince,

a village carpenter with

the skills of a real craftsman and a huge love of books, which he reads with immense enthusiasm.

It's no surprise that people over the centuries have interpreted Peter Quince as a version of

Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare helped reinvent the English language by drawing on the huge

range of sources that he read over his life.

British histories, Italian comedies, terrible medieval joke books now mercifully forgotten.

So what exactly did young Will flick through when he filled his own bookshelves?

Well, with me are three specialists who know exactly what Shakespeare read as a schoolboy

and then as an up-and-coming

actor with the Lord Chamberlain's men in London. Nandini Das of Liverpool University is a specialist

in romance and travel writing of the Renaissance. Edith Hall of King's College London is an expert

on ancient Greek literature and links between classics and drama. And Beatrice Groves is

research lecturer at

Trinity College Oxford, whose research is on biblical motifs in early modern literature. So let's go

around here. Let's all try and name one book that you know that Shakespeare would have read,

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