S6: E2: Hanh Bui on Ageing in Shakespeare

Hanh Bui discusses how Shakespeare's plays can make us rethink ageing.

For a complete episode transcript, http://www.womenandshakespeare.com

Interviewer: Varsha Panjwani
Guest: Hanh Bui 

Researcher: Julia Patterson
Producers: Caitlin Cusack & Grace Kunik
Transcript: Benjamin Poore
Artwork: Wenqi Wan

Suggested Citation:  Bui, Hanh in conversation with Panjwani, Varsha (2025). Hanh Bui on Ageing in Shakespeare. Women & Shakespeare [podcast], Series 6, Ep.2. http://womenandshakespeare.com/

Insta: earlymoderndoc
Email: earlymoderndoc@gmail.com

Transcript

Varsha: Hello, dear listeners, welcome to Women and Shakespeare. I'm your host, Dr. Varsha Panjwani, and today happens to be my cousin Prayna’s birthday. So join me in wishing her a happy birthday. She and I are the same age, and so every year our birthdays spark reflections on – yep, ageing.

Sometimes we slip into the stereotypes, comparing aches and ailments of growing older, but actually more often than not, we have found that the myths about women growing older simply aren't true. We were warned that turning 30 would feel like the end of something. We should do everything before we are 30.

But in truth, our thirties have been the most joyful and expansive years of our lives, and forties are promising to be [00:01:00] even better. Of course, being a good cousin, I dutifully remind her of Shakespeare's words about Cleopatra: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’. But what did Shakespeare really think about aging? Was he also wrestling with fears and stereotypes of later life?

To explore these questions, I'm joined by the perfect guest, Dr. Hanh Bui, Head of Research at Shakespeare's Globe. Her scholarship sits at the crossroads of age, race, disability, and medicine, and her publications have appeared in leading journals and edited collections.

In our conversation, we touch on many of these threads. Hanh's work is as wide ranging as it is vital . She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students, leads workshops on anti-racist Shakespeare, runs a [00:02:00] disability studies reading group and chairs the steering committee for the

Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network. Even as I release this episode, she's busy writing her book Birthing Race in Shakespeare's Worlds. No pressure, Hanh. But appropriately, she's starting right at the beginning and birthing of life.

Hanh, you're so welcome to Women and Shakespeare because every time we've met previously, you have been in the role of supporting other people's research and amplifying other people's talks and so on. So I'm so pleased to be sitting here with you and talking about your research today. 

Hanh: Well Varsha, it’s a real honour and privilege to be here, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that I'm much more comfortable being on the other side of the virtual microphone than this one. But again, I'm very excited to be here. 

Varsha: Well allow me that pleasure today. So I'm going to begin [00:03:00] with a very standard question: when did you first encounter Shakespeare, and what was the nature of that encounter? 

Hanh: I first encountered Shakespeare as a second year student in American High School. I went to an all-girls Catholic school and Mrs. Tufts in English assigned Julius Caesar. Back in the nineties, Julius Caesar was the play that many American high schools assigned because – and this was what the nuns got really excited about – there was no body language and no conspicuous alcohol consumption, and revelry of that type. And so I think it was considered a nice scrubbed clean, safe play to teach. And I have to be honest, at the time I didn't get it. I didn't get what was so special about Shakespeare. 

Varsha: So, Julius Caesar, about assassination, was considered a nice, clean, scrubbed play?

Hanh: Exactly, exactly. The conflicting morals that I think is often on demonstration [00:04:00] in American culture where we don't want to teach about sex and drugs, but violence and murder is okay. So there's no, you know, there's no rhyme or reason.

Varsha: Okay, but you are now at Shakespeare's Globe, and what does that role actually entail? 

Hanh: I love my job at the Globe, and it's a really unique one for someone who researches and writes about Shakespeare to be working in a theatre.

And so, one of the reasons why I love my job, because the functions are so varied. On one hand I do a lot of teaching. I teach undergraduate students, Americans, UK students, and other international students, especially acting companies, acting schools that come to the globe for a short course.

I also co-convene our Master's courses, , that we teach with King's College London. In addition to teaching, I provide research for our acting companies and for our tour guides. For example, when Ola Ince was directing Romeo and Juliet,  she was really interested in the topic, early modern [00:05:00] suicide, in particular young people killing themselves. Do we have any statistics or any research on that?

So I went to the library, British Library, did my research, compiled a document and sent it to her. So there's lots of that type of research that I do. And then the third other major part is events programming. A big event, which was Shakespeare and Race. And I also curate and host our series on Anti-Racist Shakespeare, a series of webinars where we invite a theatre practitioner and a scholar to come in and unpack issues around race and social justice in a play of Shakespeare's. And so I have to wear a lot of hats, but it's really rewarding work.

Varsha: So you must learn all sorts of things when you are going and researching for these productions. Anything that threw you?

Hanh: Anything that threw me? Well, I guess because I just mentioned it, I didn't even realise that we had statistics on young people who [00:06:00] had killed themselves in the 16th and 17th century.

When you're looking at the early modern period, things like statistics and record keeping is notoriously dodgy because our level of bureaucratic-mindedness hadn't quite kicked in yet. But I learned that children over the age of seven would have been legally kind of classified in the same group as adults who had killed themselves and it was considered a crime, a felony against oneself. 

And it wasn't called suicide during the period, but it was called self-slaughter, self-murder, self-killing. And I was surprised to learn that if a child or an adolescent was judged to have ended their life, then the Crown could take their goods, take their property like an adult.

But the really sad part was that if you're talking about a child, the only goods that they likely had was the clothes on their back. And [00:07:00] so another interesting titbit around that is that there's very little contemporary response to the phenomenon of children taking their own lives, which is really curious.

And, you know, in another life, if I had two lives, I'd have the time to explore that vein of research as well. But you're right, there are so many random things that I get asked as a researcher at the Globe. 

Varsha: Great. And I think that will explain a lot about, we have been considering Ophelia and we've been considering Juliet, so maybe it's worth revising those with this in mind.

But your research and publications are concerned with the effect of Early Modern science innovations, and the effect that those had upon cultural attitudes towards old age. What made you interested in studying ageing in Shakespeare? 

Hanh: My research interests are evolving, to broaden beyond or to become more intersectional, to lean [00:08:00] in a little bit more to issues of gender and race and disability in addition to ageing.

But it was during my second or third year in the PhD program at Brandeis University in Boston, Massachusetts. And I was lucky enough to take a course, a little bit down the way at Boston University, with a professor named Christopher Martin, who had just written a book called Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature.

And he's the one who introduced me to the field of age studies because before then I hadn't realised that this was a thing. So that's the kind of formal introduction to age studies. But in terms of my interest in ageing in general – and more specifically this question of how do we see science intervening in the so-called, natural process of ageing – that, I just looked around myself.

You turn on the news and you hear stories about, you know, because there aren't enough workers in the healthcare system, maybe the way forward is AI [00:09:00] robots, assisted caregivers in nursing homes or in private homes, to alleviate that sense of isolation that a lot of old people have if they're living on their own or all the wellness apps and heart tracking devices, all these things have become part of the landscape of what it means, or can mean, to age in Anglo-American societies.

And so it occurred to me that the questions that we're grappling with now in terms of what is our relationship as aging people to the technology that we use, number one, it's still a field that's really under-theorised across the disciplines, not just in Literature or Shakespeare studies, but at the same time, and it shouldn't surprise us that these issues were also prevalent and relevant well before the invention of the internet and fitness apps. 

And so I think when we [00:10:00] can look backwards and forwards and put the past, you know, in conversation with the present to, at the end make sense of our own lives now, that to me is the sweet spot of Shakespeare scholarship.

Varsha: Yeah, you are absolutely right, because Shakespeare is, on the one hand, writing in the 16th century, but on the other hand, there's so much that we do to make Shakespeare relevant, that Shakespeare almost becomes a way to talk about the past and the present and future together, right?  So, it's a great enabler in having that kind of across-the time-zones conversation. In your article, ‘King Lear and the Duty to Die’, you say that – and I'm gonna quote you – you say that King Lear ‘suggests that any easy correlation between old age and mental or physical impairment is highly problematic, even as the play draws on those fears about later life’

Hanh: Mm-hmm. 

Varsha: So my [00:11:00] student, Kayla McCullum, wanted to know whether you think that Shakespeare was ahead of his time in condemning ageism? 

Hanh: That's a really good question.

I am not sure I'd go so far as to say that across the cannon we find Shakespeare condemning ageism. We can think of a play like Hamlet, the way Polonius is spoken of,  Rosencrantz refers to him, ‘an old man is twice a child’, and that's an image that recurs throughout Early Modern writings.

But the thing to keep in mind is that statement goes unchallenged in Hamlet, right? And so Shakespeare definitely exploits a lot of negative stereotypes about old men, old women, especially for comic effect. 

What I would say is that in King Lear, what we find is a real ambivalence towards old age. And what Shakespeare shows us is that our assumptions about what old age should be, the idea [00:12:00] that old age is a time of peaceful retirement, old age is a time when, you know, your children will care for you, old age is a time when you should be beyond your passions and live a moderate life, or the idea that you're wise, or even the idea that you're too old. You know, the old proverb, you're an old dog, can't learn new tricks. The idea that you're too old to learn anything new. 

I think what we're seeing in the play is Shakespeare, putting pressure on those assumptions and really inviting us to ask, well, how true is it? How true is it that we can expect these things, at the end of our lives if we're lucky to reach that age? And Kent's line, ‘is this the promised end?’, that word ‘promised’ is so rich with meaning because in that one word is bundled up so many expectations and hopes and fears of what old age might be.

So I think we should probably be careful about assigning any [00:13:00] kind of sweeping condemnation of ageism on behalf of Shakespeare. 

Varsha: And again, in this same article – and this connects to what you were saying earlier about suicide – so my student, Julia Patterson, who is also the research, lead on this podcast, she was thinking about the ways in which young characters’ suicides are actually treated differently to maybe old characters’ suicides, both in Shakespeare's plays and in critical discussions of his work. What are your thoughts on it? 

Hanh: That's another really excellent question. I think the word that comes to , mind right now is timeliness.

 That's a word that comes up again and again across Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare uses it to describe when someone's life ends violently. An untimely death or when someone dies because of illness unexpectedly. I'm thinking about Mamillius in The Winter's Tale who dies. We could have a [00:14:00] very interesting conversation of what causes Mamillius’s death in Winter's Tale, but the idea that something was interrupted leads to the characterisation of his death as untimely as well. But then if you examine it a little deeper in Shakespeare's drama as well as other writings of the period, when a young person dies, the image is of a young bud, a little budding flower, that is untimely plucked, right? Picked too soon. 

Whereas when an older person dies, the image is of like, decayed, rotting fruit that falls on the ground. And you can imagine the daws, the birds pecking at it. And this really bleak, bleak images of that stage of life. And so, I think what lies behind this tension between a young person dying and an old person dying in King Lear is this issue of fairness, is this issue of what it means to live a full life and are we denying that [00:15:00] fullness to a young person? 

But again, I think what Shakespeare kind of invites us to think about is our assumptions of what it means to live a full life. For example, we have Gloucester who, when he expresses his desire to die, you know, do we feel the same sense of loss, right, as we would if Hamlet were to commit suicide? 

But then imagine the scenario where in the 16th century you’re a woman and as a child you spent most of your childhood taking care of younger siblings. As an adolescent, you were sent out into service to work seven days a week in someone else's house, cooking and cleaning and, doing the laundry.

Certain age, uh, you got married and for the next little bit you were taking care of your husband's house and maybe pushing, standing behind the cow as, you know, it was ploughing the field. And then you had children, and then for the next 20 years you were taking care of, 3, 4, 5, [00:16:00] 5 kids to boot.

And it wasn't until, let's say, in your sixties. Your husband has died. He left you the farm. Your children have grown up. You're on your own now. And for the first time in your life, you have that chance to think about yourself and what it is you want to do. And we'll have to bracket for a moment, what options were would have been open to you as a woman in the period.

But I'm using this as an example of, this woman who reached, let's say the same age as Gloucester, does she have that sense of a same full life, that perhaps an elite white male of the aristocracy, like Gloucester, are those kind of comparable full lives? And in which case, do we mourn her loss any more than we mourn Hamlet’s because we say, oh, well she's in her sixties. She's had her chance, her fair run at life. So it's [00:17:00] time for someone else to have a chance, for example. So I think there are lots of extra dimensions of gender, of class that becomes part of that picture of how we value something like a long life old age, what we consider someone's fair share of the oxygen on the planet, that Shakespeare explores in King Lear. 

Varsha: So maybe not thinking in terms of age, but in terms of opportunity when we are thinking about lives. I think that's really interesting. You mentioned older women. So I want to ask you about Shakespeare's portrayal of older women and whether you think that the way in which they are portrayed is in any way nuanced or subversive. 

Hanh: Well, I think Shakespeare's aged women are completely fascinating.

I actually have an article where I examine Sycorax, Caliban’s mother in The Tempest, and Prospero's [00:18:00] description of her body, as an aged hoop. I put that in conversation with the anatomical discourses of the time and kind of thinking of her hoop as this body that's bent over and hunched over to the extreme.

And I also look at a lot of the racialised images of African women in the period and draw out the iconography of the deformed crone and understand how that becomes racialised. And we can see that in descriptions of non-European women from Africa and Asia and the Americas.

But I think what's really interesting when you look at characters like Volumnia, Margaret in Richard III, Paulina in The Winter's Tale, one thing they have in common is this idea of their manliness. Coriolanus referred to Volumnia as mankind. And Margaret has similar epithets hurled against her. And Paulina, too, is this masculinized figure. 

And it [00:19:00] really begs the question, why are these old women troped as manly figures? And I think what's really interesting is that, according to Galenic humoural theory which is the ancient, well, Greek medical writer of the Roman world, described aging as this process, you know, as you grow older, your body becomes colder and drier as it ages and so okay, colder and drier as you age. But the implication for women is that as your body matures, you lose that much needed ability to purge excess blood from month to month, right?

So that's his way of explaining menopause. Why do women have their menses stop? But because blood was considered the source of passions in a lot of accounts, what that meant was if women had less blood in them, it made them healthier, stronger, emotional, more reasonable, in short, more [00:20:00] like a man.

Um, and so there's this interesting kind of play or instability of gender once you get to an older woman's life. And it begs the question for the period beyond Shakespeare, which is, were women allowed to experience old age as women in the 16th and 17th century, or were they subsumed into these male paradigms of ageing?

And what's further interesting is that that gender instability you see with male characters too, right? Because in so many of the texts old men have watery eyes, bleary eyes, their noses leak, their noses run. And that type of loss of control of their bodies echoes what, Gail Kern Paster famously formulates as the leakiness of the woman's body in the period.

And so you see with a character like King Lear, his references to hysterica passio, the wandering womb, and [00:21:00] so there's that kind of slide for him into the feminisation of his body. And so there are all sorts of ways that gender becomes really interesting towards the end of the life course that I think could warrant further, study.

Varsha: And that's really interesting that we always have to look at the intersection of gender and age. And also it's fascinating isn't it, that even if a woman is behaving in that way, it is still coined as manly. 

Hanh: Yes. Yeah. It can't be on her terms of strength or subversiveness or power. It needs to fit into a masculine framework.

Varsha: Yeah. Power is always masculine. So if you are behaving powerfully, you must be doing it like a man. Oh dear. Um, my student Anna Rubio Rodriguez, she wondered if you had any thoughts on the differences or similarities between the way in which aged bodies are [00:22:00] portrayed in popular media today and the way in which they were portrayed in Shakespeare's time.

Hanh: The first thing that comes to mind is an age critic by the name of Margaret Morganroth Gullette, who has written about representations of aged people in North American popular culture as a master narrative of decline. That idea that it's all downhill over 40: you lose your hair, you lose your eyesight, you lose your teeth, you lose all sorts of things. And that certainly echoed in the 16th and 17th century, when you think of something like the ‘seven ages of man’ paradigm, which is something that Jaques talks about in As You Like It. In that speech, he goes through all the earlier phases, like, you know, first the baby, then the lover, then the soldier, da, da, da, and then he gets to the sixth age of life.

Which is the kind of the younger end of old age, then all of a sudden the [00:23:00] speech kind of opens up and Shakespeare devotes a lot more lines to describe old age than he did to describe any of the ages preceding it. So signalling old age as this exceptional phase of the life course.

And certainly there is some very unkind and vicious representations of old people in Shakespeare's era. But one thing I would kind of qualify though is what we also see in the early modern period is not just a narrative of decline, but really a dialectic between loss and gain, right?

Like you lose your physical robustness, but then you gain like spiritual insight. The idea that aged men, they're too old now to serve in the wars, carry a sword, fight in battle. But they can offer political counsel or they can offer military advice. And for women, you're too old to bear children, but you're understood [00:24:00] to be one step closer to profound spiritual understanding because you're – and I say this in huge scare quotes, like – almost dead.

So being on that threshold of spirituality makes you more spiritual. So you can give advice, religious advice, or you can give advice to a young woman how to maintain a household. So the idea that physical losses are compensated with spiritual or educational gains.

But again, it's always a tricky thing because then there's. Henry Cuffe, a writer of the period, has this awful line in one of his texts where he says, an old man, his entire body has basically fallen apart, but he talks a lot because the tongue is the one part of the body that hasn’t decayed, right?

And so, leaning into the stereotype that old people talk a lot and they don't, you know, they just babble on senselessly. So you find one writer who you know says something [00:25:00] positive and there are many more who say something negative. 

Varsha: Mm. I'm very much looking forward to giving all sorts of advice in my forties, all spiritually entitled and enlightened.

Great. So talking about ageing Shakespeare, you have seen movies – All Is True? Yeah?. 

Hanh: I think I saw like the first 10 minutes of it, to be honest. 

Varsha: Oh my God, was it too bad? 

Hanh: And I just, it didn't quite hook me. So, I won't have a ton of things to say about how Shakespeare is portrayed in All Is True. Um, but you know, I, I, I will say that, um, it's a, it's another opportunity for artistic license that doesn't necessarily reflect Shakespeare's, uh, many thoughts on, on aging that we find in his plays. [Laughter] Was that good enough or [00:26:00]..? I'll take that. 

Varsha: Perfect. So in your article, ‘The Mirror and Age in Shakespeare Sonnets’, you write about the active and subversive role of non-human objects.

And we really connected with this statement because in this class we have been obsessed with ways in which actors use objects in their performance of plays. And again my student, Julia, wondered if you could elaborate on both the power of mirrors in Shakespeare's work and any other examples of these material objects that you think work powerfully on the stage in Shakespeare's plays.

Hanh: I think what's really fascinating about an object like the mirror, and I think it's something that Shakespeare is responding to in his sonnets, is the ambiguity about where does your body end and an object begin? And that, we could call it something fancy, like overlapping ontologies or something like that, but the [00:27:00] phenomenon of ‘the image is you, but is not to you’. And can we understand then subjectivity as something that is materially transgressive, that it can extend beyond your own corporal framework? 

And this idea of subjectivity being multiple ontologies, we often associate with modern or postmodern thinking, but I'm thinking of a scholar, Miranda Anderson, who's written about this idea of how human subjectivity during the Renaissance period was something that was distributed across the spiritual world, across the physical, humoural world as well as the environment, the climate world. 

When we think about all the theories about how climate or air or location had an impact on your body and your humoural balances and all that kind of stuff. And so this idea of troubling the boundary between the human and the [00:28:00] non-human or self and other, I think it's not a stretch at all to see this very kind of modern idea present in a much earlier time period.

And there's so many objects in Shakespeare that have that special charge, right? There's Othello’s handkerchief, there are severed body parts, thinking about Titus's hand in Titus Andronicus. And that's another great example of – Titus's hand – is it still Titus's body? Is it still Titus, does it lose its agency the moment it’s severed from his body? Because then, Titus turns around and asks in one of the grosser moments, asks his daughter to take it in her mouth, right? In that moment, is that body part supposed to be understood as a stand in for Titus?

And so there's all this really weird overlapping self and not-self, human and [00:29:00] non-human, that we can see throughout Shakespeare's works. 

Varsha: Tell us a little bit more about mirrors. 

Hanh: I guess what interests me about mirrors is the confrontation with one's aging self and this idea that a mirror can present an image of yourself that either contrasts or affirms your own sense of who you are.

And then in the article that you guys all read, I talk about the mirror in Richard II. But what interested me in the topic in the first place was just thinking about leading up to the 16th century, for, you know, going back to ancient times, if you wanted to see yourself, you looked in a polished stone, or going back to Narcissus, you look in a pool or, in terms of man-made objects, human-made objects, it was looking into polished metal, either silver or brass or tin or if you're really fancy, polished gold, right? [00:30:00] 

And preceding the 16th century, glass was convex, so it was curved, which gave you a distorted vision of yourself. We've all probably seen ourselves in fun mirrors, or paintings, that had that distorted rounded glass. And glass wasn't white. It was tinted, it was green, it was brown, it was bluish. And so prior to the Italian invention of the crystal clear mirror – which wasn't just crystal clear but was also flat – all other images that you had of yourself was one that was distorted in some way. 

And so, because we all study, well, many of us study who we are. I asked myself the question, oh my goodness, what if one day, literally, it fell into your lap, this newfangled invention, the flat crystal mirror. And for the first time you saw the fine lines and wrinkles and grey hairs on your face in a way that was never available before.

And [00:31:00] the crystal mirror preceded the 16th century in Italy. But in Shakespeare's time, that's when the technology was really – what is the word I'm looking for? Manufactured. Like the dissemination of those flat mirrors became more affordable, more accessible, to more people in England.

And so it's the availability of that reflection that kind of overlaps Shakespeare's time. And so that confrontation with the aged itself, how is that informed by something like a technical object, which is the mirror? And several of his poems, as you guys read in that chapter, it's that tense confrontation of one’s aged self. Do I acknowledge that image? Do I reject that image? Do I want to claim that image? Or is that image just not me at all? Which I think is a wonderful anxiety in the sonnets. 

Varsha: It's also related to so much of what we are dealing with today, right? Like [00:32:00] with selfies and filters. 

Hanh: Mm-hmm.

Varsha: And also very recently during the pandemic women claiming their grey hair and putting it on social media. So, so much of what you were saying about technology being a way to confront the self and understand the self and understand one's self-image, it's so resonant with all of that. 

Hanh: And I think what it affirms too is this idea that when it comes to aged identity, how much of it is a result of how old you look? As opposed to how old you feel or how old you look in other people's eyes, which is a different type of identification than something like gender or race or able-bodiedness.

It's, this kind of a different, a nuance to this problem of how we understand our own identities and how do other people understand us. 

Varsha: Mmm. [00:33:00] Well, a lot of my students have been listening to the Anti-Racist Shakespeare seminars that you organise and moderate.

Mary Jahn and Julia again wanted to know what you have learned from the conversations on this seminar series. We wanted to know whether any like ‘aha’ moments about specific plays, or perhaps this has changed your approach to teaching and research. 

Hanh: Um, my first thought was hands down, the most fun I had and in terms of just really feeling like the chemistry between all the speakers was the one that I shared with you when we talked about, Romeo and Juliet. And we talked with Kathy, who's a Chinese American actor – 

Varsha: Kathy –  

Hanh: Hsieh. That's her name. 

Varsha: Yes.

Hanh: –  in the US about her ethnicised production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Varsha: Yeah, I had fun on that seminar. 

Hanh: It was good chemistry, but I guess to try to answer the question more fully, even though [00:34:00] we're desirous of the epiphanies and the ‘aha’ moments, I think for me, my takeaway has just been the cumulative effect of being put in the path of all these scholars, because of the virtue of my work, who have showed me how exciting Shakespeare becomes when you relocate Shakespeare outside of these Eurocentric, Anglocentric contexts and approach the plays from different perspectives. 

And it just affirms again and again that for the people who are concerned that Shakespeare is being left off of the curriculum, Shakespeare is not speaking to contemporary issues, that we need to scrap the cannon and start over again – all these conversations have shown me that the way to keep Shakespeare relevant and alive today is exactly what these scholars are doing that I have the privilege to talk to on the webinars is putting Shakespeare in conversation [00:35:00] with issues such as race and culture and ethnicity right now. That even though it's a topic that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, because there are concerns about destroying English heritage or questioning his greatness, or casting aspersions that Shakespeare's racist. All those things that which are patently not a focus of any of our, work at the Globe – 

Varsha: We don't care about that. 

Hanh: We don't care [laughter]. That ironically, it's these conversations that's going to keep Shakespeare, I hope, on the syllabi.

Varsha: I think so. I think that we as people now use Shakespeare because it's so part of the popular culture, but I don't think we need Shakespeare; I think Shakespeare needs us. Yeah, absolutely. 

Hanh: A hundred percent.

Varsha: Well, thank you so much, Han, for talking to us today.

Hanh: Thank you for having me. It was a lot of [00:36:00] fun.

That was Dr. Hanh Bui speaking about what means to age in Shakespeare's time and hours. If you enjoyed this episode, you might be interested to straight away enrol in a wonderful new course, Shakespeare and the Stages of Life, that Hanh will be running at Shakespeare's Globe next year.

I'll leave you to it and I bid you adieu, adieu, adieu. But remember to tune in to Women and Shakespeare, streaming at Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you want to listen to the podcast with a full transcript, head over to our website, www.womenandshakespeare.com.

Until then, keep smashing the patriarchy.