Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.8 • 878 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life. Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than presenting clear answers, Shakespeare lets these ideas collide on stage. In this episode, Womersley explains how Shakespeare’s plays become what he calls “crucibles” for thinking. As characters struggle with competing values and impossible choices, audiences go on that journey with them—testing ideas, reconsidering assumptions, and confronting the same enduring dilemmas that have shaped human thought for centuries.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:07.0	I'm Farah Karim Cooper, the Folger Director.
0:11.0	What is Shakespeare for?
0:15.0	At the Folger, we've been thinking a lot about that question,
0:19.0	not in terms of relevance, but use.
0:23.0	What do these plays actually help us do?
0:26.4	How do they sharpen our judgment or deepen our understanding of power or moral conflict?
0:32.6	David Womersley of Oxford University has written a new book entitled Thinking Through Shakespeare, which takes up that same challenge.
0:43.1	Wilmersley argues that Shakespeare's work presents strategies for thinking through larger philosophical questions,
0:50.1	but only if we open ourselves up to them.
0:54.0	Wilmersley turns to Shakespeare's great tragedies,
0:57.1	Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear,
1:00.7	not simply as stories,
1:02.9	but as spaces that invite us to wrestle with enduring questions
1:06.6	about ambition, loyalty, justice,
1:10.2	and the tensions between means versus ends.
1:14.2	His message, Shakespeare is here to help.
1:18.3	Here's David Womersley in conversation with Barbara Bogave.
1:24.2	Well, I want to start with the beginning, with the big idea that you write straight out in your
1:30.8	introduction, which is that at least as far as academia is concerned, and this is a quote from
1:38.8	you, the universal Shakespeare has, of late, gone missing. So it's a short sentence, but a lot to unpack there.
1:47.0	Maybe first, why don't you explain for us what you mean by universal Shakespeare?
	...

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