Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, creator; Paul Edmondson and Anjna Chouhan, hosts. Shakespeare Alive

Though now nearing the age of maturity, podcasts retain something of their adolescent charm.A demotic form, podcasting is within reach for anyone with internet access and a recording device.Though "anyone" is not "everyone"internet access is still a luxury, like running water-the relatively low barrier to entry positions podcasts as a DIY techno-craft.Freely available to anyone with internet access and a rudimentary listening device, podcasts also require little investment on the listener's part.They are meant to be enjoyed while doing something else-walking to work, tending your garden, stirring the risotto.They are, above all else, an incidental form.If they are unpolished, they are so by design.If they are unrewarding, they ask little in the first place.Low risk, sometimes high rewards.That is part of a podcast's promise and pleasure.In these terms, tuning in-to use an archaic phrase-to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Shakespeare Alive podcast is like showing up at your community theatre and finding the English National Opera presenting Die Fledermaus.Lavishly produced and elegantly edited, Shakespeare Alive drips with prestige.Bumped by a chipper welcome and spritely music (think of the intro to PBS's All Creatures Great and Small, but somehow, impossibly, even more cheerful), the episodes are alternatively hosted by the beautifully spoken and elegantly erudite Paul Edmondson and Anjna Chouhan, who engage performance practitioners and active academics in roughly half an hour of companionable chat about Shakespearean

Art · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism