William Shakespeare is widely considered to be the most important writer in the history of the English language, but relatively little is known about his personal life. The desire to know more about the ‘Bard of Avon’ has led to much speculation and conjecture over the centuries. In this episode, we try to separate fact from fiction as we look at the surviving documentation to determine what we actually know about the poet from Stratford-upon-Avon.
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The elephant in the room with this podcast are the depictions of Shakespeare (and the Elizabethan world) in popular media.
While there is a lot to criticise in films like ‘Shakespeare in Love’, I’m more curious as to what the directors & screenwriters got right. What is there in these films that we should bear in mind as useful & worthwhile in our appreciation of the Elizabethan world?
I’m also curious about how educated the person on the street was and what knowledge they had of the outside world. Many sailors had been abroad and seen foreign lands. When Shakespeare wrote of, say, Verona, was that as distant as the Elizabethans as Coruscant is to us?
I thoroughly enjoyed that last episode. On the “Authorship Question” I would just like to throw in my opinion that whoever wrote the plays must have been an actor; the plays are too well crafted towards performance to have been written by somebody who was not familiar with an actor’s craft. I should state my position that I believe that the plays were written by the actor William Shakespeare although, as you pointed out, some of them (possibly Henry VIII) were co-written with someone else.
There is some (albeit circumstantial) evidence that during the “missing years” Shakespeare worked as a tutor in some of the great Catholic manor houses in Lancashire although as with all matters relating to the Bard it is frustratingly imprecise.
I found the episode very well put together and dealt with the evidence on a very balanced basis. Thank you again for all your hard work.
Two points that are rarely mentioned in the authorship debates:
1. If anyone had wanted to hide their authorship of the plays, the simplest way would have been to have let them be produced anonymously. That was quite common at the time and, as mentioned in this episode, it was Shakespeare’s popularity that really started plays’ authorships being a big thing.
2. While there may well have been reasons for Bacon, Oxford or whoever to have not wanted to acknowledge the plays, writing poetry, especially sonnets, was very much an occupation for a gentleman. In particular, any courtier in Elizabeth’s court would have sold their soul to be able to claim Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Re: the authorship controversy. In autumn of 1967, I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University. The University’s amateur theater group, Scotch ‘n’ Soda, performed two one-act musicals. The first was an opera by Steven Schwartz of subsequent Broadway fame (Godspell, Wicked, …). The second was “All’s Well That Ends”, a farce about Shakespeare’s early years in London by David Sheridan Spangler. The McGuffin was that Queen Elizabeth was Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” and that she wrote his plays.
It was Amelia Bassano
The Bodleian Library has a Latin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that some people believe has Shakespeare’s (abbreviated) genuine signature on it. Here’s the Bodleian link: https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/9490 . Here’s a link to a PDF of the book’s opening pages: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IEvw0qeg9cTbKvcHKJQ4SMAQTX3pLp1X/view?usp=sharing
Woohoo! I’ve been waiting very eagerly to hear you discuss Shakespeare! Thank you so much for a glorious podcast.
I thought you might like to read this:
Stage that once hosted William Shakespeare found, claims Norfolk theatre
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67007980
Minor quibble. When a play mentions a specific event or occurrence, that gives you a cut-off date after (not prior to) which the play would have been written.
It’s been speculated that the mystery play Love’s Labours Won is actually an alternative name for Much Ado About Nothing, which bears a certain amount of similarity to Love’s Labours Lost.