Resource reviews: BBC Shakespeare Archive

The BBC Shakespeare Archive recently relocated to the website of ERA – the Educational Recording Agency. Educational establishments can register to access more than 900 TV and radio clips and full programmes, from throughout the broadcasting company's history, relating to the plays and life of Shakespeare.

Most educational establishments in the UK are covered by the ERA licence, which allows you to make recordings or copies of programmes on the site for educational use. Once registered and logged in, you can visit the Shakespeare Archive and perform a search. I looked, for example, for the word ‘Lear’ and found 37 results ranging from TV and radio adaptations of the full play to an episode of BBC Radio 3's programme The Essay entitled ‘Freedom of Speech or Nothing: King Lear and Contemporary India’.

Other ways to search involve filtering results by content type (TV or radio), programme type (entertainment, factual, plays, or sonnets and poems), and play. This is also a useful way to browse the entire library. Choosing to filter by content type ‘TV’ and programme type ‘Plays' produced 365 results such as:

• An Age of Kings – a 15-part series comprising all the History plays from Richard II to III
• The Animated Tales of Shakespeare in Welsh
• A full RSC As You Like It from 1963
• Episodes from the 1994 series Bard on the Box, in which various celebrities including Germaine Greer, Prince Charles and Eartha Kitt joined members of the public to recite Shakespeare's speeches and sonnets
• A BBC Proms performance from 2016 of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet
• Shakespeare related episodes of the BBC's lockdown home-schooling offering ‘Bitesize Daily’ from 2020
• One episode of Blackadder the Third, in which actors Keanrick and Mossop rehearse their Shakespearean-style play ‘The Bloody Murder of the Foul Prince Romero and His Enormously Bosomed Wife’
• CBeebies versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest
• A half-hour documentary about Cleopatra, examining propaganda in how the last great Egyptian queen is portrayed by Shakespeare and since
• Coriolanus as directed by Ralph Fiennes in 2013, transposed to the Balkan conflict, as well as in a theatre production from Chichester Festival Theatre in 1965 and set in 1914.

Clearly, therefore, the variety of content is immense. It helps, I think, to know what you are looking for, and even if you do, it may take time to find something of immediate use to your students – but certainly the full productions of the plays, all of which are represented, on radio if not on film, are an excellent resource to have on demand. An immense archive of content which takes some navigating but includes many gems.

era.org.uk/shakespeare-archive/