Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb.

If you'd like not just the Tudors ad-free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.

With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries,

including my own recent two-part series, A World Torn Apart, The Dissolution of the Monastries, and enjoy a new release every week.

Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise.

Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

This is a story of defiance of a young widow standing against the expectations of her family.

A woman striving for love and agency in a society which demands she claim neither.

This is a woman who knows her own mind, a woman who stands firm in the face of torture and even death.

This is the Duchess of Malfi.

One of the seminal texts of Jacobian theatre, and still one of its most performed,

John Webster's remarkable 17th century tragedy about the price of female desire

still has much to show us today.

But what makes one play endure and another

fade into obscurity? Can we find an answer in its writing, its emotional resonance, in the

spectacle of its staging? Perhaps, like most art, it is in the perfect balance of all three.

I'm here today with Dr. Will Tosh, theatre historian, co-director of the Shakespeare Centre London,

and Director of Education at Shakespeare's Globe.

Dr. Tosh is the author of Male Friendship and Testamies of Love in Shakespeare's England,

and his riveting new work, straight acting,

the many queer lives of William Shakespeare is an absolute must-read. Together, we're going

...