Podcast Tag: 16th Century

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Podcast Tag: 16th Century

Paradoxes of Defence and Ben Crystal

Episode 190

Crystal and Silver in a Shakespearean accent, with Ben Crystal

In today’s episode we have another audiobook/interview mashup! The Paradoxes of Defence Audiobook Project involved me hiring two narrators to record George Silver’s 1599 book, Paradoxes of Defence. Ben Crystal is a Shakespearean actor, specialising in original pronunciation, and Jonathan Hartman is a modern dramatic actor who narrates in modern English. Renowned historical harpist Andrew Lawrence-King provides the musical punctuation. George Silver, an English gentleman, was appalled at the influx of Italian rapier fencing […]

Episode 58

Shakespeare and Silver with Ben Crystal

Ben Crystal is an actor, author, producer, and explorer of original practices in Shakespeare rehearsal and production. In this episode we talk about Ben’s work in exploring how actors would have rehearsed, staged, and performed Shakespeare’s plays in the 16th century, and how the original rhymes and pronunciation would have sounded. It makes for a completely different experience to what we think of as “Shakespearean” in modern times. Even if you aren’t into Shakespeare […]

Episode 52

Paradoxes of Defence- in audio!

In 1599 George Silver, gentleman, published his Paradoxes of Defence, which lambastes the outlandish (i.e. foreign) Italian rapier fencing that was becoming popular in England, and offers an extraordinary window into the medieval martial arts that the rapier was superceding. Whatever you think about Silver, or rapier fencing, his book is simply essential reading for all historical martial artists. It is one of the few historical fencing sources that doesn’t rely on images, so it […]

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