PREVIEW： Epochs #251 ｜ The Life of Shakespeare
Episode Stats
Summary
The life and career of William Shakespeare, or as some refer to him as The Great Englishman of the 16th Century is a bit different from the usual biography of a famous writer. He was not as obscure as some people try to make him out to be, and we actually know a fair bit about his life.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello and welcome to Epochs. As you noticed I'm recording in the first studio again today just
00:00:24.600
for technical reasons but let's just jump straight into it. Today I thought I'd do sort of a one-off
00:00:28.480
it might be a two-parter we'll see all about the life of William Shakespeare. Something a little
00:00:33.860
bit different because as a lot of people might know that the history isn't exactly full about
00:00:40.760
Shakespeare who he was. There's various ideas about who he might have been or if it was an
00:00:46.740
amalgam of different people like Homer. The ancient Greek poet Homer not Homer Simpson. Anyway talking
00:00:54.980
about Shakespeare. So I've got a lovely quaint little book here which I've read from before
00:00:58.540
Great Englishman of the 16th century by Sidney Lee. It's a it's a very very early very early 20th
00:01:04.840
century book and it's very quaint you know super super pre-woke or anything like that. So I thought
00:01:10.400
we could just talk about it I'll read it and we'll I'll interrupt myself as usual and talk all about
00:01:15.300
everything about the life and career of Shakespeare. Okay let's just jump straight in. We're told the
00:01:21.920
obscurity with which Shakespeare's biography has been long credited is greatly exaggerated. The mere
00:01:28.300
biographical information accessible is far more definite and more abundant than that concerning
00:01:34.620
any other dramatist of the day. In the case of no contemporary dramatist are the precise biographical
00:01:41.560
dates and details dates of baptism, burial, circumstances of marriages, circumstances of children,
00:01:47.120
the private pecuniary transactions of his career, the means of determining the years in which his
00:01:53.120
various literary works were planned and produced. Equally numerous are based on equally firm documentary
00:01:59.100
foundation. Okay so right away you see there that they're saying it's not he's not as opaque as some
00:02:05.440
people try and make out. He definitely was a real person for a start not many people and that we know we
00:02:11.120
actually know a fair bit about his life. I mean you know it's not a very very very well documented life
00:02:16.960
but we can say a fair few things with certainty. Okay he carries on. Shakespeare's father John
00:02:23.280
Shakespeare was a dealer in agricultural produce at Stratford-upon-Avon, a prosperous country town in
00:02:29.360
the heart of England. John Shakespeare was himself the son of a small farmer residing in the neighbouring
00:02:34.560
Warwickshire village of Snitterfield. The family was of yeoman stock. Shakespeare's mother Mary Arden was
00:02:40.800
also daughter of a local farmer who enjoyed somewhat greater wealth and social standing than the poet's
00:02:46.160
father and his kindred. William Shakespeare the eldest child that survived infancy was baptized
00:02:51.440
in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon on the 26th of April 1564 and the entry may still be read
00:02:59.280
there in the parish registers. Again this was being written at the very beginning of the 20th century
00:03:04.940
just to remind you. The more closely one studied Shakespeare's career the plainer it becomes that
00:03:09.960
his experiences and fortunes were very similar to those of many who came in adult years to follow
00:03:15.520
in his day his own profession. Sprung from yeoman stock of a family moderately supplied with the
00:03:21.500
world's needs he had the normal opportunities of education which the grammar school of the town
00:03:26.540
of his birth could supply. Elizabethan grammar schools gave boys of humble birth a sound literary
00:03:32.100
education. Latin was the chief subject of their study. The boys talked Latin with their master in
00:03:38.400
simple dialogue. They translated it into English. They wrote compositions in it. A boy with a native bent for
00:03:44.300
literature was certain to have his interest stimulated if he went to an Elizabethan grammar school and
00:03:49.720
mastered the Latin curriculum. Few of Shakespeare's school fellows at Stratford, whatever their adult
00:03:55.280
fortunes, lost in later life familiarity with the Latin which they had acquired at school. Friends and
00:04:01.220
neighbours of Shakespeare at Stratford who were educated with him at the grammar school and passed their
00:04:06.080
days as grocers or butchers in the town were in the habit of corresponding with one another in copious and
00:04:12.380
fluent Latin. Of Shakespeare's great literary contemporaries few began life in a higher social
00:04:17.240
position or with better opportunities of education than he. Marlow who was the first writer of literary
00:04:22.880
blank verse in England and was Shakespeare's tutor in artistic tragedy was son of a shoemaker and was
00:04:28.400
educated at the King's Grammar School in Canterbury. Spencer the poet of Fairy Queen was son of an
00:04:34.860
impecunious London tailor and began writing poetry after passing through the Merchant Tailors School.
00:04:40.640
These schools were of the same type as the school of Stratford-upon-Avon. They provided an identical
00:04:45.860
course of study. While Shakespeare was a schoolboy his father was a prosperous tradesman holding the
00:04:51.380
highest civic office in the little town of Stratford. Unfortunately when the eldest son William was little
00:04:57.040
more than 14 the father fell into pecuniary embarrassment and the boy was withdrawn from school
00:05:03.040
before his course of study was complete i.e. he went broke. The father went broke. He was deprived of the
00:05:08.540
opportunity of continuing his education at a university. His further studies he had to pursue
00:05:14.200
unaided. Nothing peculiar to this experience is to be detected in the fact that his pursuit of knowledge
00:05:20.040
went steadily forward after he left school. I must admit just to interrupt this is me talking now I must
00:05:25.320
admit that I've done much much much more reading and learning since I finished my formal education my
00:05:33.260
undergrad at least. I've read way way more about the ancient world since I finished my undergrad
00:05:39.080
dissertation my undergrad studies in in ancient history. If you're someone that's sort of inquisitive
00:05:44.700
or just enjoy reading and learning for the sake of it it will probably be the way. Okay the narrative
00:05:49.740
goes on saying many men of the day whose education suffered similar abbreviations became not merely men of
00:05:56.380
wide reading but men of immense learning. Ben Johnson whose erudition in the Latin and Greek classics
00:06:02.680
has for range and insight very rarely been equalled in England was according to his own account taken
00:06:08.520
from school and put as a lad to the trade of bricklaying the least literary of all trades. Sir Walter
00:06:15.340
Riley had a very irregular training in youth. He left Oxford soon after joining the university without
00:06:20.940
submitting to regular discipline there yet after a career of great activity in all departments of
00:06:26.200
human effort he wrote his History of the World a formidable compendium of learning and recondite
00:06:32.880
research. Other great writers of the day owed little or nothing to academic teaching. Their wide
00:06:37.820
reading was the fruit of a natural taste. It was under no teacher's control. It was carried forward at the
00:06:43.320
same time as they engaged in other employment. Shakespeare owing to his interrupted education was never a
00:06:49.660
trained scholar. He had defects of knowledge which were impossible in a trained scholar but he was clearly an
00:06:55.340
omnivorous reader from youth to the end of his days. He was a wider reader than almost all of those who
00:07:02.020
owed deeper debts to schools or colleges. Shakespeare's father intended that he should assist him in his
00:07:07.180
own multifarious business of Glover, Butcher and the rest. But this occupation was uncongenial to the young
00:07:14.020
man and he successfully escaped from it. He developed early. At 18 he married hastily to the most unnatural
00:07:20.340
annoyance of his parents. Very soon afterwards his genius taught him that he required a larger scope
00:07:26.160
for his development than the narrow associations of a domestic hearth in a little country town. At 22
00:07:32.540
like hundreds of other young Englishmen of ability of ambition and of high spirits he set his face
00:07:38.760
towards the capital city of the country towards London where he found his goal. The drama was in his
00:07:44.260
infancy. The first theatre built in England was not a dozen years old when Shakespeare arrived in the
00:07:49.840
metropolis. The theatre was a new institution. Of course there had been Roman theatres but I suppose
00:07:55.180
he's talking talking here about them. Medieval times or a true theatre in the modern sense I suppose.
00:08:00.680
The theatre was a new institution in the social life of Shakespeare's youth. English drama was an
00:08:05.940
innovation. It was one of the latest fruits of the renaissance in England of the new study of classical
00:08:11.660
drama with the new expansion of intellectual power and outlook. A love of mimicry is inherent in men
00:08:17.580
and the middle ages gratified it by their miracle plays which developed into moralities and interludes.
00:08:24.540
In the middle of the 16th century Latin and Greek plays were crudely imitated in English but of poetic
00:08:30.000
literary romantic and intellectual drama England knew practically nothing until Shakespeare was of age.
00:08:36.380
The land was just discovered and its exploration was awaiting a leader of men, a mastermind.
00:08:42.040
There is nothing difficult or inexplicable in Shakespeare's association with the theatre.
00:08:46.640
It should always be borne in mind that his conscious aims and ambitions were those of other men of
00:08:52.660
literary aspirations in this stirring epoch. The difference between the results of his endeavours
00:08:57.960
and those of his fellows was due to the magic and voluntary working of genius which since the birth of
00:09:04.460
time has exercised as large a charter as the wind to blow on whom it pleases. Speculation or debate
00:09:11.660
as to why genius bestowed its fullest inspiration on Shakespeare, this youth of Stratford-upon-Avon,
00:09:17.320
is as futile a speculation as debate about why he was born into the world with a head on his shoulders
00:09:22.980
at all instead of say a block of stone. It is enough for prudent men and women to acknowledge the obvious
00:09:28.480
fact that genius in an era of infinite intellectual energy endowed Shakespeare, the Stratford-upon-Avon boy
00:09:35.160
with its richest gifts. A very small acquaintance with the literary history of the world and the
00:09:40.560
manner in which genius habitually plays its part there will show the folly of cherishing astonishment
00:09:46.060
that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, rather than one more nobly born or more academically trained,
00:09:52.560
should, in an age so rich in intellectual and poetic impulse, have been chosen for the glorious dignity.
00:09:58.000
In London, Shakespeare's work was mainly done. There his reputation and fortune were achieved,
00:10:04.040
but his London career opened under many disadvantages. A young man of 22, burdened with a wife and three
00:10:10.720
children, he had left his home in his little native town about 1586 to seek his fortune in the great city.
00:10:18.680
Without friends and without money, he had, like many other stage-struck youths, set his heart on a
00:10:24.920
two-fold quest. He would become an actor in the metropolis and he would write the plays in which
00:10:30.320
he should act. Fortune did not at first conspicuously favour him. He sought and won the menial office of
00:10:36.840
cool boy in a London playhouse and was only after some time delay promoted to humble duties on the
00:10:43.600
stage itself. But no sooner had his foot touched the lowest rung of the theatrical ladder than he felt
00:10:49.820
intuitively that the topmost rung was within his reach. He tried his hand on the revision of an old
00:10:55.900
play, a play which was about to be revived. The manager was not slow to recognise the gift for
00:11:01.740
dramatic writing. Shakespeare's period of probation was not short. He did not leap at a bound to fame and
00:11:08.300
fortune. Neither came in sight until he had worked for seven or eight years in obscurity and hardship.
00:11:13.920
During these years, he accumulated knowledge in very varied fields of study and experience.
00:11:19.960
Rapid power of intuition characterised many other great writers of the day, but none possessed it in
00:11:25.760
the same degree as himself. Shakespeare's biographies have sometimes failed to make adequate allowance for
00:11:32.180
his power of acquiring information with almost the rapidity of a lightning flash, and they have ignored
00:11:38.540
altogether the circumstances that to some extent his literary contemporaries shared his power with
00:11:44.720
him. The habit of viewing Shakespeare in isolation has given birth to many misconceptions. The assumption
00:11:50.100
of Shakespeare's personal association in early days with the profession of the law is a good
00:11:55.860
illustration of the sort of misunderstanding which has corrupted accounts of Shakespeare's career.
00:12:00.900
None can question the fact of Shakespeare's frequent use of law terms, but the theory that during his early
00:12:06.420
life in London he practised law in one or other professional capacity became perfectly superfluous
00:12:12.320
as soon as his knowledge of law is compared with that of other Elizabethan poets, and it's intuitive
00:12:17.620
rather than professional character appreciated. So he doesn't know as much about the law as some
00:12:22.680
people claim he did, if you actually study it properly. It is true that Shakespeare employs a long
00:12:28.120
series of law terms with accuracy, and is in the habit of using legal metaphors, but the careful
00:12:34.240
enquirer will also perceive that instances of bad law or unsound interpretation of legal principles are
00:12:41.860
almost as numerous in Shakespeare's work as instances of good law or right interpretations of legal principles.
00:12:48.600
On that aspect of the problem, writers are, as a rule, tantalisingly silent. If we are content to keep
00:12:55.200
Shakespeare apart from his contemporaries, or to judge them exclusively by the practice of imaginative
00:13:00.700
writers of recent times, the circumstances that he often borrows metaphors or terminology from the law
00:13:06.500
may well appear to justify the notion that personal experience of the profession is the best explanation
00:13:12.620
of his practice. But the problem assumes a very different aspect when it is perceived that Shakespeare's
00:13:18.760
fellow writers, Ben Johnson and Spencer, Massinger and Webster, employed law terms with no less frequency
00:13:25.560
and facility than he. It can be stated with the utmost confidence that none of these men engaged in the
00:13:31.360
legal profession. Spencer's fairy queen seems the least likely place wherein to study Elizabethan law,
00:13:38.140
but Spencer in his romantic epic is even more generous than Shakespeare in his play and technical references
00:13:43.960
to legal procedure. It was not probably until 1591, when he, Shakespeare, was 27, that the earliest
00:13:52.000
original play, Love's Labour's Lost, was performed. It showed the hand of a beginner. It abounded in trivial
00:13:58.200
witticisms. But above all, there shone out clearly and unmistakingly the dramatic and poetic fire, the humorous outlook on
00:14:06.280
life, the insight into human feelings, which were to inspire titanic achievements in the future. Soon after, he scaled the
00:14:14.000
tragic heights of Romeo and Juliet, and he was rightly hailed as the prophet of a new world of art. Henceforth, he marched on the
00:14:21.980
onwards in triumph. Fashionable London society befriended the new birth of the theatre. Cultivated noblemen
00:14:28.240
offered their patronage to promising actors or writers for the stage, and Shakespeare soon gained
00:14:34.820
the ear of the young Earl of Southampton, one of the most accomplished and handsome of the Queen's noble
00:14:40.440
courtiers. The Earl was said to spend nearly all his leisure at the playhouse every day. It is not always
00:14:46.620
born in mind that Shakespeare gained, soon after the earliest of his theatrical successes, notable
00:14:52.280
recognition from the highest in the land, from Queen Elizabeth and her court. It was probably at the
00:14:57.940
suggestion of his enthusiastic patron, Lord Southampton, that in the week preceding the Christmas of 1594,
00:15:05.840
when Shakespeare was 30, and he had just turned the corner of his career, the Lord Chamberlain,
00:15:11.100
who controlled the entertainment of the court, sent a stirring message to the theatre in Shoreditch.
00:15:15.860
That is the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare was at work as playwright and actor. The young dramatist
00:15:21.500
was ordered to present himself at court for two days following Christmas, and to give the sovereign
00:15:26.900
on each of the two evenings a taste of his quality. The invitation was of singular interest. It cannot
00:15:33.340
have been Shakespeare's promise as an actor that led to the royal summons. His histrionic fame did not
00:15:39.560
progress at the same rate as his literary repute. He was never to win the laurels of a great actor.
00:15:44.820
His most conspicuous triumph on the stage was achieved in middle life as the ghost in his own
00:15:50.640
hamlet, and he ordinarily confined his efforts to old men of secondary rank. Ample compensation
00:15:56.520
for his personal deficiencies as an actor was provided by the merits of his companions on the
00:16:03.180
first visit to court. He was to come supported by actors of the highest eminence in their generation.
00:16:08.420
It's funny, isn't it, that way, that sometimes a songwriter who also wants to be a singer and
00:16:13.760
performer, they're just, they're not up to it, they're not any good, they're brilliant at writing
00:16:17.920
songs, but they can't really sing and they're not cut out for performing on stage. There you go,
00:16:23.480
many writers have wanted, started out wanting to be an actor and realised they're just not good
00:16:28.080
enough, but turns out they can write. So I mean, that's, that's what happened with Shakespeare.
00:16:32.360
Directions were given that the greatest of the tragic actors of the day, Richard Burbage,
00:16:37.260
and the greatest of the comic actors, William Kemp, were to bear the young actor-dramatist's
00:16:42.380
company. With neither of these was Shakespeare's acting position then, at any time, comparable.
00:16:49.040
For years, they were the leaders of the acting profession. Shakespeare's relations with Burbage
00:16:54.240
and Kemp were close, both privately and professionally. Almost all Shakespeare's great tragic characters
00:16:59.540
were created on stage by Burbage, who had lately roused London to enthusiasm by his stirring
00:17:05.360
representation of Shakespeare's Richard III for the first time. As long as Kemp lived,
00:17:10.940
he conferred a like service on many of Shakespeare's comic characters, and he had recently proved his
00:17:16.620
worth as a Shakespearean comedian by his original rendering of the part of Peter, the nurse's
00:17:22.620
graceless serving man in Romeo and Juliet. Thus powerfully supported, Shakespeare appeared for the
00:17:28.040
first time in the Royal Presence Chamber in Greenwich Palace on the evening of St. Stephen's Day,
00:17:33.660
which is Boxing Day, in the year 1594. Extant documentary evidence of this visit of Shakespeare
00:17:40.000
to court may be seen in the manuscript account of the Treasurer of the Royal Chamber, now in the
00:17:46.180
Public Record Office in London. The document attests that Shakespeare and his two associates performed
00:17:51.440
one comedy or interlude on that night of Boxing Day in 1594, and one gave another comedy or interlude
00:17:59.560
on the next night, that the Lord Chamberlain paid the three men for their services the sum of £13,
00:18:05.520
six shillings and eight pence, and that the Queen added to the honour, as personal proof of her
00:18:11.560
satisfaction, the further sum of £6, thirteen shillings and four pence. The remuneration was thus
00:18:18.760
£20 in all. These were substantial sums in those days, when the purchasing power of money was eight
00:18:25.480
times as much as it is today, and the three actors' reward would now be the equivalent of £160.
00:18:31.840
And again, this is in the very early 20th century, so it'd be thousands and thousands of pounds now.
00:18:36.880
Unhappily, the record does not go beyond the payment of the money. What words of recommendation
00:18:41.640
or encouragement Shakespeare received from his royal auditor are not handed down to us, nor do we know
00:18:47.200
for certain what plays were performed on the great occasion. It is reasonable to infer that all the
00:18:52.820
scenes came from Shakespeare's repertory. Probably they were drawn from Love's Labour's Lost, which was
00:18:58.320
always popular in later years at Elizabethan Court, and from The Comedy of Errors, in which the farcical
00:19:05.060
confusion and horseplay were calculated to gratify the Queen's robust taste. But nothing can be stated with
00:19:11.300
absolute certainty, except that on December 29th, 1594, Shakespeare travelled up the River Thames
00:19:17.420
from Greenwich to London with a heavier purse and a lighter heart than on his setting out.
00:19:23.020
We hope you enjoyed that video, and if you did, please head over to lotusseeters.com for the full unabridged video.