Hello and welcome to Sheldrake on Shakespeare, the home of a series of podcasts relating to the plays of William Shakespeare, dramatist, actor and celebrity.

My name is James Sheldrake and, to my mind, the body of literature written by William Shakespeare is one of the best things about being alive. I have waved goodbye to spending my time studying Shakespeare in a university. I have done two degrees in English, one at Warwick University and another in Renaissance English Literature at Oxford, so those are my credentials, such as they are, for addressing you on the subject of Shakespeare and related topics. I have also done much research in the field, having acted in his plays for some time now. For whatever reason I have bade academia farewell.

However, literary criticism should not stop simply because I don’t spend time in a classroom any more. And, dear reader, I’m afraid that goes for you too. A podcast will be released every other week. The episodes will alternate between long and short. The fifteen minute episodes will consider one Shakespeare play at a time and one idea in relation to it. The Short Sheldrake on Shakespeares will consider an area of context. Hopefully this will be entertaining to the general listener, and may even, I suppose, be of use to the particular student. When I’ve said something about each of them, I shall stop.