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To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the author of The Guardian’s ‘Digested Reads’, John Crace, has been condensing the bard’s plays with useful notes from literary critic John Sutherland. The series is published as ‘Incomplete Shakespeare’ (Doubleday). Crace discusses his approach to parody, which he feels should be entertainments that can exist on their own but come to life with knowledge of the text – deftly provided by for us by John Sutherland. John Sutherland is also the author of ‘The Brontesaurus: An A-Z of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte (and Branwell)’ (Icon), and to go alongside this book John Crace has written a special commission just for The Verb, Jane Eyre in just six minutes. 

Zaffar Kunial published his first poetry pamphlet as one of the Faber New Poets. He is the latest poet to take on our ‘Three Score and Ten’ Commission to write new work to celebrate Radio 3’s relationship to poetry in its 70th year. Zaffar’s poems take their starting point from his previous poem ‘Us’ and with the discovery that he was named after a poet. With this commission he felt it was time to write poems titled ‘I’ and ‘You’. 

In the first in our series examining small presses, Head of Publishing at Unbound, Matthew Clayton is in The Verb studio to explain the pleasures of running a publishers on a crowdfunding business model. At Unbound, books are published after readers pledge money towards the production, which means that Unbound has a uniquely direct relationship with their readers.

London’s Finborough Theatre aims to revive lost work, and the latest play to receive their attention is ‘Dr Angelus’ by the Scottish playwright James Bridie. Ian is joined by the play's director Jenny Ogilvie and the actor David Rintoul who plays the titular character, and together they reintroduce us to the remarkable James Bridie – a man who wrote over 40 plays as well as working as a doctor, championing new writing in Scotland and helping to establish the Edinburgh festival.