On My Wavelength

The real lives of famous characters, and the artistic influences that made them, are strong themes running through this week’s radio. You’re Dead to Me: Shakespeare (today, Radio 4, 10am) celebrates the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, in front of a live audience at Prescot’s Shakespeare North Playhouse. Greg Jenner and guests explore, with levity and insight, the life of the man behind the literature. Meanwhile, on Sunday from 5.30pm, Radio 3 will be airing: a Shakespearean edition of Words and Music;a Sunday Feature about his rival Robert Greene; and Drama on 3: Hamlette – a reimagining of the Bard’s play.

Hiftu Quasem and Ian Dunnett Jr star in Love Stories: The Betrothed (Sunday, Radio 4, 3pm), a radio dramatisation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic 1827 Italian novel. Renzo (Dunnett Jr) and Lucia (Quasem) are living in Lombardy in 1628, and planning to marry, when a series of dramatic events, including riots, criminal action and a jealous baron, conspire to prevent the union.

Any regular listener to The Archers knows that the countryside is a far cry from the peaceful Eden that many city-dwellers imagine. The documentary series Battle Grounds: Culture Wars in the Countryside (Monday to Friday, Radio 4, 1.45pm), from Anna Jones, farmer’s daughter and rural affairs journalist, explores some of the conflicts that erupt over this country’s idyllic-seeming fields and hedgerows, including Right to Roam campaigns, vegan activism, rewilding and farming practices.

I always make a beeline for new episodes of Cathy FitzGerald’s Moving Pictures (Tuesday, Radio 4, 11am), which each introduce and illuminate a different work of art and its often-overlooked details. The best thing about the series is that each episode is accompanied by a high-resolution image of the artwork, available on the programme website, so that you can zoom in on each detail as FitzGerald discusses it. This week we’re in Arles with Van Gogh, looking at his self-portrait, its vivid colours and brush swirls evoking the enigmatic artist.

Any of us fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have learned Latin at school via a series of relatively stilted textbooks might have, at some point, imagined ourselves living the life of a wealthy Roman head of the household, wafting around an atrium, eating olives. That tantalising fantasy is probably pretty far removed from the real lives of Romans, as classicist Mary Beard explores in Being Roman with Mary Beard (Wednesday, Radio 4, 11.30am), a six-part series about the real lives of actual Romans. In this first episode, she tracks down the truth behind the storied life of Marcus Aurelius.

Marking 70 years since the death of Dylan Thomas, on this day in 1953, is another chance to hear Great Lives: Dylan Thomas (Thursday, Radio 4 Extra, 10am), a tribute to the great Welsh poet from a fellow Welsh wordsmith, Owen Sheers, recorded in 2012. Hosted by Matthew Parris.

Even Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday, Radio 3, noon) is getting in on the week’s Shakespearean theme, with Donald Macleod exploring the significant influence that the

Bard had on the music composed by Berlioz in 19th-century Paris. We’ll hear Berlioz’s overwhelming reaction to seeing Shakespeare performed on stage for the first time, and how his last creative act as a composer repaid that experience with a final tribute to his literary hero.

j Moving Pictures: Vincent Van Gogh’s selfportrait Tuesday, Radio 4, 11am)

i Being Roman with Mary Beard Wednesday, Radio 4, 11.30am