The Literary Life Podcast · Angelina Stanford Thomas Banks

How to Read Shakespeare

March 3, 2026·1 hr 24 min·5 clips

Harold Goddard writes that a man who finds no over-meanings in Shakespeare 'is a man without metaphors and such a man is no man at all.'

The stage is not dismissed. The hosts are more interested in the gap between seeing Shakespeare performed and meeting him as a poet on the page. Harold Goddard helps them frame it: performance and reading are different pleasures, and a production can miss the verbal genius if it cuts too much, rushes the language, or lets spectacle do all the work. Then Churchill arrives, and the episode perks up. Angelina and Thomas clearly enjoy the story of Winston and Clementine Churchill sitting close enough for Richard Burton to hear Winston reciting along. When lines are cut, Churchill does not politely suffer in silence. He says them louder from the front row, which is about as dry and stubborn as the anecdote deserves. Angelina enjoys the nerve of it. Thomas lets the story keep its comic dignity while pointing to Churchill's huge memory for Shakespeare. The joke has a serious edge: memorized language changes what a person hears, and a missing passage can feel less like tidy editing than real loss. The hosts still are not anti-performance. They praise the Archangel recordings as a way to hear full plays acted well without giving up the whole text. Audio becomes the compromise: dramatic, alive, and still close to the words. Their advice is patient. Read, listen, and watch, but do not let the visible show replace Shakespeare's sentences. The ending turns darker, with a poetic passage on money, memory, childhood, piety, and death.

As heard by us

A warm, text-first case for reading Shakespeare closely while still making room for performance.

How to Read Shakespeare makes a patient case for meeting the plays on the page before surrendering them entirely to the stage. Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks circle around a simple but useful distinction: performance matters, but Shakespeare's genius is also in the words…

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Want a better way into Shakespeare than only watching a cut-down performance?

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