Lend Me Your Ears

Lend Me Your Ears: Measure for Measure

Why it’s still difficult to reckon with the ethics of Shakespeare’s darkest comedy.

Lend Me Your Ears is a podcast miniseries exploring how Shakespeare’s works have shaped our modern views on politics. Each month, host Isaac Butler will dig into a different Shakespeare play to explore how Shakespeare was responding to his current events, and how they map onto our own. Read Isaac’s introduction to the series and listen to previous episodes now.

Five hundred years before #MeToo, Shakespeare wrote his darkest comedy, a story of religion, sexual coercion, and the nature of justice.

In this fourth episode of Lend Me Your Ears, host Isaac Butler talks to theater critic Helen Shaw, Villanova University professor John-Paul Spiro, and UCLA professor Claire McEachern about Measure for Measure, its troubling situations and conflicts, and why it’s still difficult to reckon with today.

The actors in this episode are Geordie Broadwater as Duke Vincentio, Emily Gardner Xu Hall as Isabella, Daryl Lathon as Claudio, and Sid Solomon as Angelo.

Slate Plus members get a bonus episode of Lend Me Your Years every month. This episode, Isaac is joined by Slate’s editor-in-chief, Julia Turner, and Trumpcast co-host Virginia Heffernan. Together, they discuss Isabella’s conundrum, morality, feminism, and reading the play after the #MeToo movement.

If you are logged into your Slate Plus account, you can find this week’s bonus episode in the player below this paragraph, or find it in your members-only podcast feed. Not yet a member? Click here to join.

Podcast produced by Chau Tu.