🎧 John Lyly: The Queer Shakespeare
🎧 Not Just the Tudors • 41m
John Lyly's name may not be so familiar. He was a playwright and poet writing at the same time as Shakespeare and, in his day, was more famous than the Bard himself. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr Andy Kesson about Lyly's radical and, frankly, queer works: his plays in which Queen Elizabeth was compared - at court! - to the lesbian poet Sappho, and in which the marriage of two girls dressed as boys is approved by Venus, goddess of love. Why has Lyly been forgotten? And why might he just be the alternative Shakespeare for our times?
Up Next in 🎧 Not Just the Tudors
-
🎧 Bridewell: The Palace that became a...
In the heart of Shakespeare's London, there was a palace that had become a prison: Bridewell. Professor Duncan Salkeld has explored the records of this notorious place of imprisonment for the poor, the indigent, vagrants, prostitutes and the idle, and shares his extraordinary findings of the wayw...
-
🎧 Henry VIII's Billionaire Wardrobe
Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian described Henry VIII as the 'best dressed sovereign in the world'. The King spent the equivalent of £2 million a year on clothes. In this episode with Professor Maria Hayward, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb gets to grips with the sumptuous garments, the fabri...
-
🎧 An Early Modern Teenage Werewolf
The witch-hunts of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe are well-known. But did you know that some 300 people were convicted of being werewolves? In this revelatory podcast with Dr. Jan Machielsen, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb travels back to 1603 to find out more about the moving case of Jean...
