Show Notes
One small step into the wrong classroom becomes a giant leap into a new life as a Shakespearean actor. That’s how Jacob Ming-Trent tells it in his remarkable one-man tour-de-force, How Shakespeare Saved My Life. As the Folger prepares to welcome How Shakespeare Saved My Life to the stage this June, Ming-Trent joins us to delve deeper into his story.
Ming-Trent is no stranger to the Folger stage, having previously presented How Shakespeare Saved My Life at the 2024 Reading Room Festival and portrayed Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2022. A multitalented stage and screen actor, he has appeared in Broadway musicals from Gypsy to Shrek, television series like Watchmen and Ray Donovan, and films including The Forty-Year-Old Version and Friendship.
In this episode, Ming-Trent presents Shakespeare as an urban poet in the vein of Tupac and Biggie. He breaks down the inspiration behind How Shakespeare Saved My Life and how he brings his own experience to his interpretation of Shakespeare’s words, rearranging and reframing them to create something uniquely personal.
More from Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Who can explain the alchemical transformation that is rehearsal? Actors begin with words on a page and emerge with a fully formed theater production. In her documentary, Acting, director Sophie Fiennes captures the magic of actors connecting with their text and characters during a workshop with the world-renowned Cheek by Jowl theater company.
Long before his iconic portrayal of Logan Roy in Succession, Brian Cox trod the boards as a Shakespearean actor.
How do you write a “complete” life of Shakespeare when very little complete information about his life exists? Four centuries after Shakespeare’s death, the legends that have grown up around him have taken on a cultural significance of their own. As Inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies Paul Menzer puts it, “the verifiable facts of his life would fit on the back of a postcard. But the stories that we have told about them would fill a dozen phone books.”
In 1597, the first published edition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rolled off the printing press. Only a year later, the Spanish colony of Santa Fe was established. While you might not immediately think Shakespeare had much to do with the Latinx experience, Shakespeare’s career and the Spanish conquest of the Americas fit into a similar timeline.
If you were Hamlet’s lawyer, would you advise he plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Would you consider his accidental slaying of Polonius to be murder or manslaughter? These are the kinds of questions that University of Michigan Law professor Len Niehoff asks his students to consider.