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>> michael whimore, when did you notice politicians using shakespeare's quotes? >> i noticed it in 1989. politicians are often saying shakespeare's words. i think it's important something for america, the ability to

quote shakespeare gives them weight. >> you tell me if i'm wrong, robert byrd greatest in the senate? >> i agree, he was called the cisero of the senate. very fond to using ornate. >> he's deceased but we have many statements using shakespeare.

>> drawn from thy gore. of these covering heavens, all on their heads like for they are worthy to inlay in heaven. as we leave for the evening, give me my robe and give me my crown. >> what did you hear? >> i heard a very thatrical senator. he moves around. he sounds almost like an english professor.

>> what is it for somebody like me that's not a shakespeare and don't know what he's saying? >> sometimes you have to go with the sounds and rhymes, you're able to pause and linger over a long phrase and stop and keep going. i think he's using the rhythms of the language which shakespeare did so brilliantly so he can take english and put it in raw -- high gear. >> i have an article from new york times, in july 2010, i'm not sure how he pronounces. most politicians quote shakespeare badly if at all with special emphasis on if at all. [laughter] >> is that fair? >> the longer quotations are

harder to reproduce. there are -- there are words that shakespeare invented that we use and we don't know that they were his. first use of that word seems to be with shakespeare. do they quote him accurately. i think that shakespeare is kind of in the bloodstream of our culture but we get him wrong but close enough that people can hear the connection. >> we found the fun video on youtube. he's doing exactly what you're talking about, putting a bunch of quotes together. >> if you cannot understand my argument and declare its greek

to me, you're quoting shakespeare. if you claim to be more sinning, you're quoting shakespeare. if you recall your days, you're quoting shakespeare. if you act more in thorough than in anger and if your wish is farther to the thought, if your lost prophecy has lost into thin air, you are quoting shakespeare. >> i think that's a great example and it's funny that you get it from the internet because shakespeare is on stage and people on the internet are performing the plays. so shakespeare is public property. >> do you recognize some of the quotes? >> oh, sure. i'm a man more sin against than

sinning. that's one of the greatest lines from shakespeare's plays and it's one that politicians could use to say, i may be wrong, but you're more wrong. and what you're doing to me is worst than what i ever did to you. i'm a man more sinned against than sinning. great line. >> we have perhaps to show everyone how close the shakespeare library is to the united states capital, put a couple of pictures on the screen so you can tell us, here is one, for instance, you can see all around it. how far is that from the your place to the left? >> from there you're positioned from the u.s. supreme court and right next to the library of congress. how did this building get there

in the building and how was it built? >> 1932 by henry and wife emily, he was president of standard oil in new york, he made a fortune and fortunately for us he chose to spend it on books and the person he loved was shakespeare. the largest collection in the world of shakespeare materials and when he died, before he died, he said i'm going to build a library and i'm going to put it in washington, d.c. as the gift to the american people. that's really important because he understood that americans, politicians really have a connection to the writer and i love having the soldier be part of that neighborhood because if you look at the u.s. capital and look to the east, the congress, the supreme court, the library of congress, the soldier, those represents the language arts in our country, you've got the law which is about language, i will just say we are part and you

look and that's word central for the united states and we are really pleased to be a part of that. >> how were you chosen to be the director? >> i was interviewed and i had to make application, i wrote a letter and you need to be a shakespeare scholar, you need to be able to connect with the hundreds of people who come from all over the world to read our collection and to write but you also need to be able to run and an institution that has theater program, we do shakespeare plays, we do exhibitions, right now we have a beautiful exhibition on the history, east or west we are bringing in thousands of students who are performing on our stage. they're getting into the act and they're performing, so i think

it would have been hard to be qualified to do all of it, but i knew i was qualified to do a lot of it. >> you came from where? >> i came from the university of wisconsin madison. >> what did you do there? >> taught. >> you got your education there? >> i went to vasler college and went and got ph.d at university of california at berkeley. >> we will continue our questions about the shakespeare library. here is harry ried on the florida senate. pardon is sorrow. goodnight, goodnight. parting with such sweet sorrow

and it really is. >> he's quoting romeo and juliette. i think he has a big challenge there as a politician. he needs to make an emotional connection and there are many things that are wrong and wouldn't work, some of the reasons people turn to shakespeare is tried and true. that quotation actually comes from a courtship scene, it's about r romantic love, he can take a phrase and adopt it to his own situation. he's saying good-bye. we are very lucky that we are close to the capitol. it's very important that shakespeare never took sides. shakespeare saw the whole world and complexity of our lives so we have people, members of congress, members of the

judiciary who come, they enjoy our exhibitions, we were fortunate to have meeting of the female senators who got together and saw parts of our collection and got steak dinner and got to talk about the renaissance. looking at some of the great materials including manuscripts from queen elizabeth, a very successful female leader, someone who had great challenges and so i felt very honored that the female senators chose to come and that they could see those connections between the challenges of a truly great -- she was a monarch, she wasn't a politician, but her predicament as a women in politics, it was difficult, and so it was very exciting to be be able to share that with the leaders of our country. >> is there any way to know what william shakespeare's politics would have been?

>> oh, my god. we speculate all of the time. i tell you what i think, i think that shakespeare understood that family politics are the country's politics. they often turn on family relationships. and so i'm not sure that's a left or right issue, but it's definitely something about politics that he was aware of. i would also say that there's moments in his place that he seems skeptical of crowds. there's a scene of a peasant rebellion, there's a play where the masses rise up and make demands of general, in those scenes shakespeare shows the masses being excitable, educated, ignorant, dangerous. it's kind of interesting. i think he knew that there was a danger to having, let's say, the

rule and i think he would have been friendly to our kind of constitutional democracy. i don't know. he wrote plays that flattered kings and queens, so he believed in the monarchy on some level. the question for shakespeare and it would maybe this is the way to think about this issue, for shakespeare the culture war was really between protestants and catholics. every individual had a direct connection with god and then on the right there was the catholic church with rituals that had been the religion of england for so long. this was the tension. catholocism may have been illegal. ting most relevant kind of battle that he was probably

aware of was between protestants and catholics. >> for he today that sheds his blood with me should be my brother. this day shall gentle his condition. and gentlemen in england now abed shall think themselves that they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks that fought with us upon st. crispen's day. those sentiments centuries ago are precisely applicable to the stand here tonight because it is the stand against and indeed a stand against the administration

that refuses to acknowledge limits on its power. >> that's a really fascinating clip, ryan. he's quoting from henry the fifth, it's the speech that henry gives before leading into a major battle. often teem that talk about that leadership, talk about that speech. the power of the king to motivate people to go into a battle against all odds. it's so tough to quote a play because the senator is objecting to the tendency of a president who is acting by own authority but it's a monarch. we can use shakespeare against the purposes that we originally intended. i think that's a tricky one. he's trying to say one thing with shakespeare and i think shakespeare was on a different

side. he said, no american politician today wants to seem too educated quoting shakespeare is risky as a rhetorical strategy. >> that may be right. so in the 19th century, people who are educated who learn to speak, those trainings that you get well before you go to university, those happened by learning to quote shakespeare. you would deliver speeches and that tradition is really gone now. they need to be able to broadcast to people that i may know more than you, but i'm also like you. and so i think our political discourse has been turned in

different directions. we still quote shakespeare in moments that we have seen are important. i think politicians really food to have some more down-to-earth way that doesn't sound like it's coming from on high and that's where you get into the press release and the talking points. political speech right now tends to be more about focus, goals, precision and that's where it's tough, i think for shakespeare to work back in. >> thank you, friends. i'm so glad to be here truly. it makes her think about a famous speech from henry the fifth, where young king henry, bust up the troops. because that's what i do. i'm more likely to say, buck up for stay in the truck when we

talk about defending our rights but it works and we are a happy brothers and sister who is are fighting the good fight, a fight for the constitution, this is a fight for the future of freedom. >> that's from an nra event. >> i think that's sophisticated. i think she's able to use shakespeare and takes some great parts of that famous speech and delivers them. but i would say this, shakespeare himself was really, really good at hitting both sides of our language. and just to put that in context, some of the most powerful

moments in shakespeare's plays have the heros using the grounded words, come from the life world and buck up or stay in the truck is exactly that kind of language, but then they can lift it to other place which is the language that came in with the conquest when french and latin came to britain and those are the words that are connected to bureaucracy, more ornate forms of expression. he wasn't always necessarily quoting but realized to play all the oc, -- octives.

>> talking about hamlet. >> i spoke to our chaplain before we started the session about a line in shakespeare that i have always struggled to understand, it is from hamlet. >> what does it mean? >> that's a good, you decide you want to do something and then you think about it whether it's right, whether it's right for you and you pause. so your correspondence is sitting on your shoulders saying, don't do it. don't do it. and instead of being a hero, you feel like a coward. >> shakespeare lived when? >> shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616. he lived -- he started and son

of a glover, someone who made things. he ends up in london and become it is most successful in history. >> she lived in stanford. >> what was his relationship to her, in his will he left her his second best bed which sounds insulting but there may be other reasons why that was actually a more intimate gift to give her. one of the things that scholar at the shakespeare library has started to think in her research that she may have been managing a business in stratford. i think if we do learn more about shakespeare will be because we find more documents connect today his life.

>> why did he die of? >> that's a great question. we don't know exactly what he died of. >> so where do you -- how do you trust the information, where does it come from in. >> right, well, a really good answer to this will come in -- in 2016, that's the 400th anniversary of shakespeare's death and the library will be connected with shakespeare and we will bring together almost every document that's directly connect today william shakespeare, the man from stratford who lived in london. all in one place. probably the first time that they have ever been in one place. among those will be documented about his birth and death, there will be legal documents, we know

that he brought lawsuits. par of what we have to do is put things together from legal documents, which have a certain amount of trust worthiness because they're bureaucratic documents. the other part a famous man. people wrote about him during that time. so you get people complaining who is this, he's from -- he's not from london. he didn't go to university. and so those complaints help us understand how people thought about him and also helped connect the body of work from what we know in court records. >> here is michelle bachman. >> it was press secretary carnie

, there are numerous republicans who voted because we knew all were in the future. and so it reminds me of the shakespeare line. didn't you know, that's why i voted against this bill. >> she wasn't reading that so it was obviously off of the top of her head. >> right. >> where did that come from? >> it's very common for people to just reach out from memory and try to grab a piece of shakespeare. another common one is i knew him well. in the play it says i knew him. once someone misquotes shakespeare, other people keep hearing it and they do it.

we've got the first, but shakespeare is a living encyclopeia. it helps her make her point. and i think her point there -- it's kind of tricky. people who are against -- who actually are for this, by protecting actually there's. >> i saw in your financial report on your website that you get $773,000 from the federal government in 2013 and your total expenditures were $20,700,000. why is the money going to be used for? >> the money that we get from the government is from two

sources. there's the library and information signses grant which is part of the federal government and it funds research projects in libraries to make libraries great, we get funds from them. these called the imlf's and we get funds for the endowment, they funded some really important initiatives for us. we did a terrific show called the king james bible and we show it had history of how we came to the king james bible and what it's meant to americans and that show came to washington and went around the country. another exciting thing that the neh has made possible for us is a tour of our big book, the to all 50 states and to two territories in 2016. so the neh is helping us take that book all over the country, we will open it to be or not to be speech and help interpret it for visitors, it'll in public

libraries, museums, but millions of people, i hope will see that book and will get a sense of not only just the source of it, the fact that we still have these books, but be able to recognize that this book still speaks to us, and so the federal grants that we get are advanceing often -- >> by the way, on the king james bible, a surge-state problem? >> we are neither church nor state so we can host members of congress or members of clergy. there was one book that was popular called the sinner's bible. there were a lot of people that wanted to oppose. we won't name names. it's interest to go me to see --

it's tough. ways in which you can talk about him that are very political and that, you know, very academic but shakespeare is part of a world that is big and it's the same world that produced the king james bible. you look at shakespeare and the king james bible those are probably the two most influence texts to americans, those the books that people read in the 19th century. >> let's look at more quotes from the friends of the youtube. it shows how many words and phrases came from shakespeare. >> if you ever refused to bunk an inch or suffered from green-eye jealous jealousy, if u lifted your brows made of virtue

of necessity, danced attendance, laughed yourself into stitches, too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days why be that as it may the more, the conclusion that you are good luck. >> could you do a lot more of this? >> we could go on and on and -- >> in a pickle, making a virtue of necessity, it's good for politics if you want to say your opponent is misreading the law. if you want to make a case for taking an action that's uncomfortable then it's making a virtue of necessity. there are a lot of phrases in there that can get you out of a

tight corner. >> how much of the language of shakespeare was actually the way they spoke back in the 1500's? >> that's a great question, bryan. english in england in britain is pretty fluid when shakespeare was around. so there's different dialects. the west doesn't sound like the east. what happens when it's introduced in england becomes a dominant media form is that english starts to stabilize into the form that is spoken in london, and so shakespeare reflects the english of london at the end of the 16th century and that's interesting because that's the english that ends up becoming the official dialect as time goes on. >> the library is available to the average person in what way? >> so we are open and we are free, free and open to the

public, we have an exhibition hall where you can come and see great exhibitions for free, right now we have the history and some of the most important time pieces ever created. we do three times a year. people don't expect thousands of school children come into and perform and it's a real drill for a high school student, a junior high school student to be able to perform on that stage stage as he or she is get to go know shakespeare, it's something they will remember all of their lives but i would invite viewers to come and explore where america's home for shakespeare was free and open to the public. do you have a large endowment. >> we have endowment that covers the core costs that covers rare materials in volts.

>> how much is that? >> over $300 million right now. >> where did that money came from? >> when he died he created a trust in the care of emers college, we are one corporate entities with emers college, manages our endowment. so we have been very fortunate to have growth over the course of almost 80 years and for a place that needs to take care some of the most important documents in the world, i think it guaranties that we will always be able to do that. importantly, it gives us an anchor, i do fundraising for my job, when i ask for support, i can say to donors or people who are excited about our mission, we will always be here. we've got that ability, of course, we've been around for a long time and our mission points us at william shakespeare, the renaissance, a huge important

body of work and thought and ideas for this country and for for all the students in america. >> emers college is in massachusetts a long way from washington. how did they get involve in it? >> there was a story, i believe, it was in "the new york times" and the trusties learned that the greatest shakespeare collection in the world and endowment to support it had been left to the trusties. the will is written in such a way that if the trusties refused to take the collection it would go to another university and if that university chose not to do it, it would go to another university. they saw the value of the collection and they took it over. >> let's go back to politics. here is senator ted kennedy, the late senator ted kenny and former senator simpson from

wyoming. >> under the senate rules, we will have an opportunity to make these -- to have these and of amendments on the minimum wages. >> senator from wyoming. >> mr. president, i think we could go on and we may, but i think as we go to the substance of minimum wage and apparently the senator does that, and i think i misspoke earlier about shakespeare, i think that senator kennedy is leader and i am puck because certainly he launched one there and here i am. >> what did that mean? >> i'm not sure i know what that means. that was senator simpson; is that right? senator was leader and i'm told

he spent time at the library. he's a huge fan of shakespeare and he read a lot of shakespeare. >> does it make any sense to you that senator kennedy is king leader? >> king leader launching into the tempus. he's talking about king leader on the east and suffering kind of breakdown to hand and insults to the gods and senator simpson is puck, the playful spirit from a mid-summer night stream. it's almost better to be tough. >> here is representative trent franks quoting shakespeare and supporting the balanced budget amendment. >> but in history, america may

give a second chance, madame speaker. we may not get it again. long ago he wrote in a play this quote that i think applies to us today, he said there's a tide in the affairs of men, which taken if the floods lead on the fortune but omitted voyage of their lives is bound in shall lows and in miseries. upon such a full sea we find ourselves afloat and we must take the current or lose our venture. in the time of crisis, a place where the tide is high and the opportunity is real. >> by the way there's no teleprompter. >> it's about taking opportunity. grabbing it. i love what he did when he said, i don't often quote shakespeare and then he lunches into several

lines that he has in memory, it's an old trick to say, i'm not about to do this thing and then go ahead and do it. but one way to get into shakespeare is by saying, i don't usually quote shakespeare but, and i think we heard sarah palin do the same thing. it's a way of talking without talking about it. >> if you are saying shakespeare, what was that from and all that? what's your recommendation? how can people research where a language like this comes from? >> a great way to do it is search the place. we put online for free. you can search it all. pick a phrase and we will come up right with it and you can see it there on your screen and you

can cut it and paste it. >> people with get on line and get the close caption transcription so if they his what they're say if they want to connect it to. >> that's right. >> you started the whole business of digital analyzeing that when? >> i was in for ten years and i was trained as a scholar and i read a lot of books, i still read a lot of books and you try to absorb as much as you can and you sit down and write, because we now have fully searchable versions about 60,000 of the books between 1470 and 1700, we have an unprecedented opportunity to take a full view of all the words in as much as we can use those 60,000 books that represent this very important period in print where print is taking off. you've got shakespeare, you've got public theater and you have politics, you have civil war in

england and i realize that you could use some techniques from statistics from looking at sequences of words and then asking yourself are there some kinds of texts where more of these happened and it tushes out that you can create a profile of shakespeare's plays almost with your eyes shut because there's certain things that you have to do when he's writing history play. >> how many plays did he write? >> we believe that he wrote 38 plays but this was the professional theater. so up to 30% of those include the words of other people and, in fact, computers have been able to identify what paths were created by the writers. >> which sense has been the most quoted of all of shakespeare? >> that's a great question. i would bet that it's either

julia cesar or hamlet. >> and why? >> julio cesar is about beautiful speeches and there are a bunch of wonderful set pieces and politicians, countrymen, those tend to be very popular and americans read them and loved them. i think that's one. i think hamlet is a play that just took off in the 19 century and has a lonely hero who wants to revenge his father but reluctant to the it. it's a great story about a fully-formed person with real problems. >> in 2011 queen elizabeth came to the house. here is president obama using shakespeare. >> your majesty the queen, the vitality of the special relationship between our people

and to the blessed realm, to the queen. >> well, bryan, that has to be a high-pressure moment even for someone as polished as the president meeting monarchy to talk about her country with john of god and richard the second, a marvelous long speech and so i think he chose -- >> how did shakespeare name plays? >> that's an interesting question. and they are long titles. it's the way they did it.

they say it's about leader, and it's also about edgar who has to go and become a man on the run. and so i think that i myself i'm curious as to how the plays were named and one -- one thought that i have is that they were often named with proverbs. some of the research that i've been doing in my own work is to try to understand why play writes show proverbs. i have probably read the whole cycle. that's all 38. i tend to read them in the order in with they think they were written, so that i am -- i'm trying to piece together the career of this person, when i was teaching classes i would

read hamlet, so i probably read those plays 20 times. >> and what was the first play and what was the last? >> written? >> yeah. >> well, there's debate about that. it could be one of the henry sixth plays, maybe errors about two sets of identical plays. the ones he wrote at the end of the year were collaborative. it may have been two nobl ex-kingmen. >> well, i will give you an example. when for george w. bush was president, after 9/11, the media started to talk about the transportation of this leader from one who -- and the other

person was less serious and after tragedy became a serious, there was a change in how he saw his role and that comes back to king henry, spending time with drinking and best friend, changes when he decides to reform himself and when he meets his old drinking buddy, at the end of one of the plays, fall to the prayers, old man, i know thee not. i can't guess what was going through president bush's mind after 9/11, but i do think that the media understood that there was a similar story there. shakespeare's stories are good because they are dramatic and have vivid characters and

they're available for us to slot our politicians into and that's why allen was fond of saying, you know, i see my mcbeth, my leaders in washington. it just gives you a short-hand way of trying to figure out what will happen next. >> former congressman from california david dryer on the floor of the house. >> i would like to quote william shakespeare, william shakespeare said in such business action is eloquence. we have one thing and one thing only and focus on getting our economy growing and generating job opportunities for the american people. >> it's so interesting how beautiful short quotations from shakespeare action is eloquent.

beautiful phrase, i can't remember what play it comes from, but the best way to make an impression is not to talk a lot, is to take action. that's what he is saying. >> shakespeare library contains what? >> it's the greatest collection of original materials connected to shakespeare and his world, we cover not only shakespeare play writing, poetry, but the collection also represents the entire european renaissance, the beginning of the exploration of atlantic and particular focus is on the world of london between 1580's and 1630's which is the world when we are getting science, theology, we are getting poetry and theatre from

shakespeare. it's such a live moment, the city is undergoing so many changes. there are people coming from all over the country to this one spot, trade is alive. the entire atlantic is being explored, good and bad things are happening, very frightening things are happening politically. they don't know what elizabeth, who the heir would be. beginning of colonization. but it's an amazing period in history and i would say that the period that's represented by our collection is a world that we could recognize, it may be the first moment in english and western history where we can look at that and say, that's our world too. >> how many books at your library? >> so there are millions of books, but in terms of rare material, there's probably over -- and i want to get this right, almost 300,000 books, rare books

that are printed in the first centuries, in print. there are 130,000 pages of manuscripts h. >> his manuscript? >> from all over. so we have a fully browsable secondary collection that's a full city block long. first collected edition of shakespeare's work. >> all 38 years? >> 37. there's a couple of things that are important about the book. the first is that without that book, we would not have 18 of shakespeare's plays. it's the only record we have for some of the most famous plays. >> the second thing that's important about it is that it's

a large book. it's about like this and large format books were reserved for theology, philosophy, history. and to say that plays and plays only belong in a book like this was a very important statement, the first folio is the first book in english in the large luxurious format that is only filled with stage plays. there's 233 copies in the world. >> if you sold one of those copies, what would it be worth today? >> we will never sell them. they have all research value. the last -- i believe that the last auction sale for a complete was over $6 million. >> here is robert kennedy in 1964 at the democratic national

convention, his brother jack kennedy was killed in '63. >> take him and kit him out in the stars and he should make the heaven and all the world would be in love with knights. >> a passionate to describe the loss of a -- sudden loss of a president. it takes that death, which is a political event and a historical event and makes it a cosmic event. >> how often do you get a call from someone in politics to get

a quote? >> we get calls like that all of the time. we have a head of reference which knows a lot and fills those requests. at election times we get requests for things like a quote from 12th night, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. that's a really good political quotation, we get interest in that a lot. >> back in 2004, steven was on the program, wrote a book about mr. shakespeare and we had a composite on there of writers on book notes program that talked about shakespeare. let's watch. >> what i try to do with humor and serious columns is let the readers see politics almost like shakespeare drama. >> if you want to understand life, there's no better way than reading shakespeare and then

discussing it with a lot of people. >> some of the characterrics of certain people in particular mozart, individuals would have negative capability. what negative capability is rather than having strong personality themselves they had an incredible ability to pick up the personalities of individuals around them and be able to capture that in their works. >> these children have to learn english, how are they going to read english? let's read shakespeare. >> i dream in english. >> the only figures who had more things written about them than lincoln are jesús, shakespeare and napoleón.

>> what an incredible quotation quotations. and the fact that when he dreams he dreams in the language of shakespeare is amazing. i think -- i think he captures that sense that you and i may not quote shakespeare day and night and we may know it more or less, but the way that shakespeare wrote was so powerful and suggestive that it's more like he lives in our dreams. it's when you shut your eyes and your brain is trying to figure out what this world is and put people into the right stories. the words that tell those stories were put there by great writers and shakespeare is one of them. >> do you have a family? >> do i. >> kids? >> i have an 11-year-old son. >> is he interested in shakespeare? >> my son cannot quote all 40

lines from the beginning of richard the fourth but the first four. >> it's hard to get kids interested in shakespeare? >> it is not. because shakespeare wrote plays he wrote in the form that's almost natural for kids to take up. kids are -- are theatrical. when we teach and we have been doing for 40 years is performance-base teaching, you may not understand all of these words, but the situation will speak for itself, start speaking and you'll begin to find your way into the language, what we find is that if you've had a positive experience reading shakespeare or more accurately performing shakespeare or seeing a play, the odds of your

remaining connected to this writer go way up. >> let's go back to the way we begin with robert c. byrd, senator from west virginia in the senate. >> valentine speaking to proteus. and the two gentlemen of verona were speaking of does he recall beloved sylvia when they said as i rich and heaven of having such a jewel has 20 seeds, if all were peril, water nectar, valentine could just as well have been speaking of a

good-solid, well-rounded education. if all they're saying the water nectar and the rocks pure gold. >> how does someone do that? >> well, some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. i think that he was a natural, i think that he probably had a great memory for shakespeare, but what he does there, he doesn't just quote shakespeare, he performs it. and then he says why it matters, he says, it's kind of a tough ball to play. most people don't read it or see it, but he's read it. i don't want to talk about the situation that's in the play, i want to talk about a great

education. >> how many people work at library? >> over 100-full-time staff and 40-50 people working on contracts what are actors or directors. >> how big physically, i know you have two buildings? >> i have facilities on both sides of third street, 201 east capital is a full city block in length and takes up half of the long city blocks. >> i want to go back and show the picture so people can see how close it is. the senators and congressmen often walk over to the library and use the reading room, for instance. >> well, senator simpson is a great example and we have members of congress in the library both day and night, they come for receptions, they came for our gala, celebrating chic spear's birthday. >> here is the supreme court. >> here is the supreme court. i'm told that the justices were debating among themselves

whether shakespeare was the man from statford and oxford. within ten minutes they walked across the street. >> how much did it cost in 1932 to build the building? >> you know, i do not know the answer to that question. it's interesting, when it opened in 1932 it was the middle of the depression and probably the most luxurious building to be open in washington for a debate. >> can the average citizen belong? >> absolutely. the library is there for the entire country. you can become a member and receive our magazine, where we are talking about shakespeare, discoveries in our collection, we have performed shakespeare's plays in audio books and you can hear our auditions. >> can you use the library?

>> we ask that you are letters of reference for you to reference that material. if you have an important reason to use it, we want you to. it's not everybody and the whole world in that space, but the reading rooms are filled with people, some of them are very famous professors or editors, but some of them are high school students who are fellows at the -- >> michael, we are out of time. we thank you as director of the shakespeare library, thank you for joining us and we will continue this discussion. >> it's a pleasure. thank you for having me. ♪ ♪ >> for free transcripts or give us your comments about the program, visit us at q&a.org.

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