Jonathan Bate
Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford
15 episodes
Appears in multiple episodes with: Katherine Duncan-Jones
Covers topics in categories such as:
Is Shakespeare History? The Romans
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's treatment of Roman history, where he had scope to explore ideas too threatening for English histories.
18 October 2018
Also featuring: Catherine Steel, Patrick Gray
Hamlet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play's context and meaning, and why it has fascinated audiences from its first performance.
28 December 2017
Also featuring: Carol Rutter, Sonia Massai
John Clare
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Clare, the 'Northamptonshire peasant poet', whose writing was as celebrated as his life was humble.
9 February 2017
Also featuring: Mina Gorji, Simon Kövesi
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss William Blake's illustrated collection of poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
23 June 2016
Also featuring: Sarah Haggarty, Jon Mee
The Tempest
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss The Tempest, one of Shakespeare's last and richest plays.
14 November 2013
Also featuring: Erin Sullivan, Katherine Duncan-Jones
Lyrical Ballads
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 volume of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
8 March 2012
Also featuring: Judith Hawley, Peter Swaab
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the poem that made Byron famous.
6 January 2011
Also featuring: Jane Stabler, Emily Bernhard Jackson
William Hazlitt
Melvyn Bragg and guests Jonathan Bate, Uttara Natarajan and AC Grayling discuss the life and works of William Hazlitt.
8 April 2010
Also featuring: A. C. Grayling, Uttara Natarajan
Elizabethan Revenge
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why revenge tragedy was so popular with Elizabethan theatre goers, from Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
18 June 2009
Also featuring: Julie Sanders, Janet Clare
Lear
Melvyn Bragg discusses Shakespeare’s King Lear, a shocking and violent vision of a broken family in a godless world.
28 February 2008
Also featuring: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Catherine Belsey
Marlowe
Melvyn Bragg discusses Christopher Marlowe; a forger, a brawler, a spy, but above all a playwright, a poet and the most celebrated writer of his generation.
7 July 2005
Also featuring: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Emma J. Smith
CultureEnglish male poetsEnglish male dramatists and playwrightsPeople of the Elizabethan era16th-century English poetsLatin–English translators16th-century English male writersEnglish spies16th-century English translatorsEnglish Renaissance dramatists, 16th-century English dramatists and playwrightsDeaths by stabbing in England, People murdered in England, English murder victimsThe Later Romantics
Melvyn Bragg discusses the poetry and idealism of Byron, Shelley and Keats, who all had unconventional lifestyles, strong affinities with southern Europe and classical Greece, and who all died young.
15 April 2004
Also featuring: Robert Woof, Jennifer Wallace
Nature
Melvyn Bragg discusses the history of man’s attempt to define nature, including the Ancient Greek’s quest to demonstrate the wrath of the gods and the Romantics who set out to philosophise it.
10 July 2003
Also featuring: Roger Scruton, Karen Edwards
The Sonnet
Melvyn Bragg discusses the Sonnet, the most enduring form in the poet’s armoury, from Petrarch and Shakespeare, to Milton, Wordsworth and Heaney.
21 June 2001
Also featuring: Frank Kermode, Phillis Levin
The Romantics
Melvyn Bragg discusses the ideals and legacy of Romanticism, a literary and artistic movement at the turn of the 19th century which gave rise to the great poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.
12 October 2000
Also featuring: Rosemary Ashton, Nicholas Roe