You're Dead to Me - Shakespeare

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

In this episode, recorded live at the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot, Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Farah Karim-Cooper and comedian Richard Herring to learn all about the life, legend and legacy of William Shakespeare himself. 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, which preserved his work for future generations. But how did a boy from the Midlands become the most famous playwright in the English-speaking world, and how did the publication of the folio contribute to his legacy? This episode explores Shakespeare’s life, career and dramatic works, as well as the reception of his plays in the centuries after his death, and the creation of his legend in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Research by: Jon Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Caitlin Hobbs Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Chris Ledgard

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm delighted that today we're recording live

from the beautiful Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescott, which means I get to say, hello, sorry, no, hey, all fair audience, well met. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Well met. What a lovely sound. Right, today we are donning our ruffs, pulling on our tights and travelling back to early modern England to learn all about the life and legend of Mr William Shakespeare,

the Bard himself. And to help craft this merry narrative, we have two very special guests, co-stars in fact. In History Corner, she's Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London, Director of Education and Research at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and was recently President of the Shakespeare Association of America. She's also the author of a fascinating new book, The Great White Bard, Shakespeare, Race and the Future. It's Professor Farah Karim Cooper. Welcome, Farah.

Hi. And in Comedy Corner, we have a fellow who is wise enough to play the fool. His CV is vast. He's a comedian, author, playwright, blogger, podcast royalty. You'll know him as a Taskmaster Champion from the brilliantly funny Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre podcast, which gives away who he is.

It's also got a spin-off show about books, which I love very much. And of course, he was on our classic episode of You're Dead to Me about Stonehenge. It's none other than Richard Herring. Welcome back, Richard. Thank you. I didn't get the leather jacket memo, so... Sorry. Yeah, they're actually in reception. Yeah, OK.

Richard, hello. Hello, it's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to reception. Yeah, OK. So you... Richard, hello. Hello, it's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to have you back. Thank you. Last time on, you were talking about cats building Stonehenge. That's right, yeah. It was quite weird. They also wrote all the plays where this goes on.

Not infinite monkeys, but infinite cats. Richard, you mask it well with your silliness, but you studied history at Oxford. I mean, I'd say studied was an over... You attended Oxford University. I did a lot of comedy. I did a lot of drama, so I probably did some Shakespeare at university. Do you know your Shakespeare?

A little bit. Luckily, I'm not the expert here. No, we wouldn't have done that. That would be an absolute booking disaster. I know more about Shakespeare than I do about Stonehenge. OK, well, in fairness, you knew nothing about Stonehenge. That's good. And you're a playwright as well.

You have written multiple plays. So have you ever cheekily taken inspiration from the Bard or just lifted stuff entirely, because that's allowed? No, well, I've done some sketches about him. I deconstructed the to-be-or-not-to-be speech, but I can't remember what I did. I can pretty be or not to be speech, but I can't remember what I did. I can pretty much remember most of that speech, but I won't try.

I probably won't do the best ever version of it if I try it in this room. Where do you stand on the debate? I think to be or not to be, first of all, that's the first and only question on the University of Beekeeping entrance exam. And... The answer is to be, if you want to get in. But also, to be, that's where I go on the to be or not to be. That's what I read, to be or not to be.

To be. So, what do you know? All right, well, that brings us to the first segment of the podcast. This is called the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, and indeed, lovely audience, might know about today's subject. Audience, give me a cheer if you've seen a Shakespeare play. Got away with that one, didn't we?

Yes, he's probably the world's most famous playwrights his legacy is absolutely everywhere you can find it in theater ballet opera tv songs hip-hop memes iconic movies you've got your Baz Luhrmann swoon worthy Romeo and Juliet my fave 10 things I hate about you which of course is the taming of the shrew and of course audience give us a shout for which Disney classic is based on Hamlet. Lion King. Very good. Shakespeare wrote Hakuna Matata. It was pronounced slightly differently back then, but yeah.

But what about Shakespeare the man? You may know bits of his life from watching Upstart Crow on the BBC, the sitcom. You may have seen Shakespeare in Love, that great movie. You may have read Maggie O'Farrell's heartbreaking novel Hamnet. But what do we really need to know about this great man? And how did an ordinary boy from the Midlands go global? Let's find out.

In tribute to Shakespearean storytelling, we are structuring this episode in five acts because we're nerds, basically. OK, let's start with that one. Where was little William born, and what was his family situation? Okay, well, we know he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was baptized on the 26th of April in 1564. We celebrate his birthday on the 23rd, because obviously it was tradition back then to baptize somebody within three days of their birth,

but he may not have been born on the 23rd of April. He could have been born on the 24th of April or the 25th of April. But it's also St. George's Day. So it's a great way to celebrate England as well as to celebrate Shakespeare. He was the eldest of six surviving children to John Shakespeare and to Mary Arden. And John Shakespeare was, you know, he was a fortune hunter a little bit himself. And he was quite active in civic duty. He was a bailiff. He was a constable. Most famously, he was a glove maker, which Shakespeare kind of makes much of, I think, throughout his works. But he was also Stratford's ale taster, which is kind of interesting. Now,

it's a much more prestigious role than you think it is. Good job. Yeah, it's a really good job. But he's checking the worth of loaves of bread as well as whether or not the ale is wholesome. So I think it was a pretty prestigious thing to be doing. How do you get that job? What are the qualifications?

That's an ale. Taste buds? You need to have some taste buds. But he was fined for not showing up in the court records a couple of times, so he wasn't always the most toward human. Richard, he wasn't just fined for missing three sittings at the court, he was fined also in 1552, John Shakespeare, for piling up stirquinium next to his front door. What was stirquinium?

On his front door. What was stir quinium? On his front door? Yeah. I mean, you're asking me, so it's probably stone-based, but... That's your default answer for everything, isn't it? That's what I would do. Is it some kind of poop? Oh, it is some kind of poop. Well done.

Yeah, I hope it's his own, but I'm always going and collecting it around the neighbourhood, I hope it's his own, but I'm always going and collecting it around the neighbourhood. You hope it's his own? I don't know. Really? Or the horse poo, is it?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah. It's good for the flat. I live in a village and the Facebook group is full of people complaining about horse poo on the road and other people going,

it's great for the garden, what are you complaining about? Scoop it up. So yeah, horse poo. Scoop it up. So yeah, horse poop. You're bang on. Stoquinium is the Latin name for a manure. It was a pile of animal dung, presumably because he's a glove maker and that's used in the softening of the leather,

I think. But he's piling it by his front door, which was not permitted. But that does tell us a little bit about William Shakespeare. He wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was born with poo in his shoe. He's dad's middle class, but his dad is sort of having to bounce between jobs a bit. And he goes to school, Shakespeare.

He goes to a grammar school, the King's New School in Stratford-upon-Avon. What do you think's on the curriculum, Richard? Probably not playwriting. That would be useful. On the curriculum, I guess, maths. Do they do Latin? Because there's some languages in there. Did they do all the plays of the past

that he then ripped off when he wrote plays? Which it seems is what he mainly did. It's not a bad guess. It's not bad. Professor Farah, what's our... We don't know exactly what's in the curriculum, but what's our informed guess? No, we don't know exactly,

but we do know that there was a lot of classical texts. So he would have read Ovid, he would have read Seneca, and he did rip off both of them. And he probably would have come across Cicero and Virgil, so all the great classical writers. And they had to memorize it, which is good for an acting career, career in the future. You can see from some bits of Shakespeare,

as you like it, that he may not have loved school because it was quite punishing. It was punishing in terms of the schedule because you would have to attend school from dawn to dusk, including on Saturdays. So it's six days a week. But also corporal punishment was a massive part of education in that time period. And there's a really great quote that comes from a preacher in that time period who says, apparently God invented buttocks to ensure that schoolboys learn their Latin. I'm not sure what to do with that. There's a lot of different ways to go. And a couple of them aren't radio for us. Yeah.

from ways to go. Yeah. And a couple of them aren't radio for us. Yeah. Maybe we'll move on from the buttocks. Okay. So,

Shakespeare probably learned some Latin. I think your guess was probably decent enough and I think he's getting a bit of a classical education. He survived school

and in 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. No, not that one. She's 26. How old do you think he is? What year was it? 1582. Are you going to work backwards?

No, I can't remember when he was born. I'm going to say he was 15. Oh, that's quite good. He was 18. Older woman. Older woman. Shotgun wedding. Because six months later, baby appears. So he's clearly gone. Okay.

Okay, let's make this one official. How are you picturing the relationship? Right. Because six months later, baby appears. Yeah. So he's clearly gone, oh, okay. Okay, let's make this one official. How are you picturing the relationship? She's 26 and he's 18. Posh and Bex is what I'm thinking about this. I think he's the one with the natural talent and she swoops in and is acting like a mum towards him a little bit. I've just been watching the David Beckham documentary. You've been watching the documentary.

It's good, though. She claims she's working class, but her dad drove her to school and enrolled her. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's what I'm imagining. I mean, I think Richard's guess

is as good as we know, because we don't really know much about their relationship. We don't. You're right in that Susanna was born six months later after they got married, and then they had twins,

Hamnet and Judith. Unfortunately, Hamnet didn't survive past 11, and we think he may have died of the plague. That's what the novel Hamnet is about. There are no surviving love letters. There may be a sonnet where she's referenced a few times, but it's really unclear how they felt about each other. And of course, he spent most of his time away. But there's a lot of anecdotes about his life and about his relationship, and a lot of people like to fantasize. For example, there was an anecdote that he might have been caught deer poaching. There's a lot of sort of fan fiction about Shakespeare.

And I think the same is true for their relationship. You talked about that seven years gap where we don't have any records of Shakespeare's life. And so you can imagine the amount of speculation about his life in that period. Some people think he may have traveled to Italy, which is why he set so many plays there. But then he surfaces magically in 1592. He does. He's off to seek his fortune in the big smoke in London, which brings us to Act Two, Shakespeare the Actor. Now, in London, he joins a theatre company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men. company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men and how are you imagining his life as a Elizabethan era actor in London compared to I don't know experiences of a gigging comedian? I imagine it was

a lot harder there can't have been many theatres going on it must have been hard to break into although being an actor was it was probably less people from Eton at that time I'm guessing that's people with trust funds so I'm guessing it was sort of people from ethan at that time i'm guessing that's people with trust funds so i'm guessing it was sort of people who had nothing else to do thinking let's give this a crack uh doesn't matter if you're bald mate come on in it's fine uh but yeah and there were no female actors right that's what i know about it based on shakespeare in love you have to dress up as a man and then sort of weirdly get off with shakespeare anyway i don't know if he was happy or not when it turns out to be depends how you feel about goop i think

i'm guessing it was quite a tricky time to be an actor. It's a good point, actually. It hadn't occurred to me about breaking into the industry. He's not a nepo baby, but he's working in Southwark, which is, how would an estate agent describe it? Lively. Yeah, yeah, it was lively. I mean, I've never been there in the 16th century,

but I work there now. It's on the south bank of the River Thames, obviously. And it was at that time a manufacturing district, but also the major entertainment district. So there were other theaters there as well, but there were also bull rings, cockpits, bear baiting arenas and brothels. I'm not going to the theatre in this time. I'm telling you that right now. But also to get there, you'd have to cross the One Bridge across the Thames and London Bridge.

And on the gatehouse were heads of traders that had been tarred and boiled. So that was kind of a gruesome sight as you're coming over to go to the theatre. But also what's really extraordinary about this place is that it was multi-ethnic. There were people from all parts of Europe and all over the world who were living in this part of London. And Shakespeare would have encountered them. Yeah, it's a sort of bustling hotspot. It's where people are hanging out. It's fun.

You can go see Animal Cruelty. You can go see a play. you can go and see other stuff, you know, it's all the things you could possibly want. You know, it says in the script it sounds like a hoot, but I don't think I'm allowed to endorse murdering a bear, so I'm just going to say lively, lively. He finds himself in with the theatre lovies, and we

might describe it as a bit of a feisty crowd, because there's quite a lot of professional rivalry he's not welcomed in by all there's a guy called robert green who calls shakespeare this is the famous quote this is the ben elton sitcom title he calls him an upstart crow beautified with our feathers so that's a slightly subtle way of saying he's an oik yes who doesn't belong we're the kind of university educated boys. And here's this middle class kid from the Midlands. So it is Eton.

It's the Etonians. Slightly. And he's turning up. Yeah. Yeah. So he's got to sort of make his way through that sort of resistance. And it's not just the waspish insults that are being sort of, you know, whipped out. Actual knives are coming out.

The knives came out. Actual knives are coming out. Knives came out, yeah. But street brawling and violence was pretty common in Elizabethan England. And funnily enough, between playwrights and actors. So Christopher Marlowe got into it with the poet Thomas Watson. They had their weapons out and Thomas actually killed somebody. So they both went to prison. And then, of course, we all know that Christopher Marlowe was killed

in Deptford in a tavern over a bill. Ben Johnson got into... Ben Johnson is Shakespeare's frenemy. And he killed a rising star, George Spencer, of the Lord Admiral's Men, which is kind of a rival company. And Gabriel... Was it George Spencer or Gabriel? It was Gabriel. Gabriel Spencer, yeah.

And he himself had stabbed somebody two years before. Is it George Spencer or Gabriel? It was Gabriel Gabriel Spencer Yeah and he himself had stabbed somebody two years before Is it like Conkers this if you I mean I think it's

winner stays on I think Yeah Yeah It's like snooker isn't it? You put a pound down and then you stab somebody

No But Johnson actually killed Gabriel Spencer Yeah Yeah and he went to prison and he was tried for it, but then he managed to get off by quoting some Latin. Yeah, there's a legal loophole at the time.

If you could quote a certain verse called the neck verse, they'd be like, well, he knows Latin, so he can't be that bad. That seems like a mistake to have. That seems like an easy thing for murderers to do. We have to learn this one. Basically for the clergy. It's called Benefit of Clergy.

You could claim to be a churchman. I know this bit of Latin. I must be a churchman. Okay, and so then it's all right if you kill someone. It's all right to kill someone. Isn't it in the Bible that you're not meant to kill people? I can't remember. Details, details.

I can't remember. I mean, Richard, comedians are... I mean, the rivalries... I've seen comedians sort of muttering about who's on Mock the Week or not on Mock the Week that week, so I've seen sort of little jealousies. What's your experience?

Teach me the Latin and I'm going out and killing a whole rat. I mean, it's quite, you know, it's actually... It's not too backstabbing in the comedy industry. We are quite supportive of each other. But, yeah, it'd be interesting to know if it was allowed or if lots of people were doing it. What do you reckon, three murders a year? Yeah, I think so.

I think there's definitely some. I mean, there's definitely some comedians who just should be killed by the state anyway. Just for the protection of society. But I think if it's about just talent and who's getting the work, I think there is a bit of rivalry at the top there. Fair enough. OK, well, apparently our sensible William Shakespeare,

he dodged all of the debauchery and all the violence because whenever he was invited to the pub, he'd say he had a headache and wouldn't go along. So people were saying, how do you make Shakespeare relatable? Well, I'm a teetotaller who's sort of quite an introvert, so that, for me, is the most relatable thing about him. Do you want to go to a party? No.

Please leave me alone. He's basically a hard-working guy who's not doing all the boozing, and he's not doing the hardcore violence, so will he make it as a writer? Well, maybe he will. So, in the 1590s, Shakespeare, he's in London, he's making a name for himself as an actor, but instead of boozing with Marlowe and Johnson, he's safely indoors, scribbling by candlelight. Hashtag self-care. Hashtag writer life. Which means it's time for act

three, the one we've all been waiting for. Shakespeare, the writer. And Richard, you have written some lovely plays. Thank you. Some historical plays, in fact. Yes, I have written some. You've written your own history plays. Yep. How quickly can you knock one out?

Hang on, I'm going to rephrase that. How fast do you work as a playwright, Richard? I do tend to work fairly quickly, I have to say, because I usually work up to the Edinburgh fringe as a deadline. And certainly a couple of those plays I was writing as we were sitting in Edinburgh waiting to go on. So my actors weren't very happy. So I could write a play in two months, I would say.

Oh, that is quick. Yeah. I mean, they weren't very good. I didn't do well, but I wrote them fast. That's pretty good. Okay, all right. Shakespeare was cranking out two plays per year. Right.

Which sounds rubbish in comparison to you. Lightweight. He's almost as prolific as Jacqueline Wilson. Her standards are pretty high and Shakespeare's also pretty high. Yours, obviously high too, but I'm not sure yours is going to stand the test of time 400 years on. We'll see. We'll see.

We'll see. All right. See who's building theatres to there. That was mean of me. Maybe you will. Maybe you'll get discovered. Question for you, actually. How many plays did Shakespeare write in his career?

Oh, I mean, it's a lot because he didn't write for very long. If we're talking about, if you're saying he started in 1492. 1592. 1592, I mean, yes. Well, he would have had 100 extra years if I were him.

It's him and Columbus. It was, yeah. So, well, if it's two a year, columbus it was uh yeah so well if it's two a year uh 32 plus uh 16 48 plays oh that's quite a guess it's not bad i mean it's wrong but like um barrett what's our safe number and then what's the debatable number so safe number is like 37 But a lot of scholars have put forward other plays that have been either called anonymous or written by other people that have now been attributed to Shakespeare.

So some people have it as high as 42. But I'm on the 37 side of things. Oh, are you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think people just want there to be more plays. Yeah, we do. Yeah. Yeah.

That was quite a good guess there. Well done on the maths. And he must have started a few that he didn't. Oh, sure. He must have started a few that didn't come to anything. Hamlet 2. Yeah. The revenge of Hamlet.

This time it's personal. You made the mistake of killing most people. It'd have to be a prequel for that one. Sure, yeah. That's true, yeah. Young Hamlet. Rise of Hamlet. I don't know. Hamlet Bab Rise of Hamlet. I don't know.

Hamlet Babies. Hamlet Babies. Lovely. All right, so we've got 37 safe ones and then five that people like to argue about. I love the way you were like, nope. But we've got four here that I want you to choose between, Richard,

that are maybe lesser known. One of these, probably not a play. So which one is not the play, we think? So you've got Cymbeline, King John, Love's Labour's One, Pericles. Which one, probably not a play? I would say, I mean, it seems like a trick question, but Love's Labour's One is what I'm going for.

You will be correct. Well done, well done. Yeah, Pericles is a legit play. King John, Cymbeline, these are plays., Pericles is a legit play. King John, these are plays. Love, Labour's One sounds like a lazy sequel that he's sort of gone, that was good,

let's do more of those. Is it a play? Is it a title that's in a notebook somewhere? What is it? I mean, we don't know. We don't know. It is a title that shows up.

It shows up in this book called Wit's Treasury, which is listed among some of Shakespeare's other plays. But it could be a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, or it could just be another name for a play that exists. It's not a play.

It would be weird if it was King Lear's alternative name, wouldn't it? It would be weird. It's a tragedy, but with a charming title, it lures them in, and then everyone dies. So Love's Labour's Lost, we have. We have that one, yes. And then Love's Labour's won. And it makes sense that there would be a sequel to that

because it kind of ends unsatisfactorily. Harsh, but okay. Sorry. So might something turn, you know, is it possible that every now and again in a library in some old house they find books that we've all forgotten about. Is it possible that something else would turn up?

Something could turn up somewhere. I just want people to keep looking. Yeah. Keep looking. Yeah. To the benefit of radio listeners, Richard is currently looking under the table. I think they got that.

I think they don't need to be pandered to if people don't make them. I mean, there were fake Spears. There were fake plays written supposedly by Shakespeare in the 18th century. Yeah, there was a lot of what they call apocrypha-type plays. What is he writing then, Farrah? What range of genre is he working in? Richard's already said he's ripping off plots.

Is he a great originator, or is he just working with established stories and just making them better? Well, it's kind of a little bit of both so he writes i mean we have it traditionally um split into comedies tragedies and histories does he do that himself or is that how we no that's how the folio is described yeah and actually since then scholars have described you know some of them as tragic comedies or romances So we kind of play with genre a little bit. I call them comedies. Yeah, you've got to do the air quotes on the radio.

So cool. I think the people on the radio got that. They got it. They're a learned crowd. Yeah, I mean, having seen Succession, which is written by comedy writers but is a drama, I think we're increasingly blurring the lines on drama. Yeah, and he definitely did.

But he was, you know, he was inspired. I mean, in the 1590s, histories were really popular. So he wrote quite a few histories. There were lots of other history plays being performed. He was inspired by all sorts of things. So he obviously found sources for a lot of his work. But there could be contemporary events. You know, there was The Plague, which then shows up in different ways in some of his plays, like Romeo and Juliet. And then there was actually, this I found really interesting, because I hadn't heard this before,

but there was a story about a young woman named Catherine Hamlet, who died in 1575 in Stratford upon Avon, drowning in the river. And some people think that she may have inspired or haunted Shakespeare's imagination. And so he writes about Ophelia's death quite hauntingly and poetically. But she was called Hamlet. She was called Catherine Hamlet with two Ts. There we go.

Yeah. So who knows? And you mentioned Romeo and Juliet. That's not his original story. No, no, no. It's a story by Arthur Brooke, which was written in the 1560s. Romeus and Juliet. But obviously it was based on a kind of...

That's what you do. That's how you stop and spit. No, this is different. No, it's different. The IP lawyers have looked at it, and we're happy. Romeus, Romeus, never heard of him. I was stunned to discover Hamlet.

He didn't create Hamlet. There was a Hamlet already. Well, he did a Hamlet. He just did a Hamlet. He did. Well, kind of, kind of. I mean, some people, he, it's a revenge tragedy that potentially draws on the Spanish tragedy by Thomas Kidd.

But then some people think there's this Ur-Hamlet or original Hamlet or pre-Hamlet that existed and that Shakespeare may have lifted from that. there's this Ur-Hamlet or original Hamlet or pre-Hamlet that existed. And that Shakespeare may have lifted from that. You know, had the typical revenge tragedy things like a ghost and, you know, wanting to kill somebody. Is that the plot? That's the plot. There's a ghost and then you want to kill someone for fun. A play within a play.

A play within a play. A play within a play. Yeah. It's a Hamlet. Shamlet. He's a a play. A play within a play. A play within a play. Yeah. So Hamlet, Shamlet, he's a fraud. He's a hack, Richard. What other sources have we got?

Because you said history plays. What history is he reading to write his history play? He's not on Wikipedia, so what's he reading? Yeah. So he,

I mean, Hamlet comes from a Danish history called Saxo Grammaticus. And he read Holland Sheds, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Classic. Yeah, classic. That's where he gotmaticus. And he read Holland Sheds, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Classic. Yeah, classic. That's where he got his histories. And also a play,

I won't mention, theatre. Yes. And yeah, so that was, I mean, he read classical sources like Plutarch, where he got Antony Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. And you said at school he read Seneca and Ovid. Yes, yes. And Virgil, so he knows a little bit of that. And Titus comes, you know, after Seneca. Titus is your favourite play? It is. Sorry. Are there any other Titus fans out there?

Thank you, thank you. You absolute weirdos. What's wrong with you? There's nice plays about love and stuff. And, you know, Shakespeare, so we think of him then as someone who's building off other stuff, he's borrowing he's reinterpreting, he's adding his own twist, it's all very interesting

but he's not the lone genius Richard, I mean in comedy right, co-writing is very common lots of stand-ups have writers, you were in a sketch group in a TV show, you were co-writing with your comedy partner at the time. Collaborating is normal, right, in comedy? Yeah, I suppose so.

I think even if you do a play, obviously, and especially as it sounds like this, there's a company of actors. If you come with a play, especially a comedy, then people are chipping in ideas all the time and you take the ones you like and you ignore the ones that don't work. So yeah, I don't think any play, especially a comedy, then people are chipping in ideas all the time and you take the ones you like and you ignore the ones that don't work. So yeah, I don't think any play, right,

really would be entirely just, I mean, I guess some of the things that are set texts maybe, but the first time you're doing it, I think if you're not listening to what the actors are saying, the actors are feeling, you want your actors to know the characters

better than you, really. So they've got to dig in and go, well, I don't think my character would say this. And then you have to go, yes, they bloody would. Or just say the lines. What's my motivation? My motivation is say it. Absolutely no bitterness there, I can see it.

But, you know, you listen. And definitely with jokes, you know, you will find that things build in the you know, you listen. And definitely with jokes, you know, you will find that things build in the rehearsal room, for sure. And that's a really lovely point. It's actually a crucial point, actually, because that's

lived experience. And I think scholars, well, maybe not recently, but certainly now, we don't say Shakespeare is the lone genius who single-handedly sat in his room

banging out 37 plays, plus five maybe. But he's collaborating. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a later construction, a really romantic notion about Shakespeare writing in an attic in Stratford that actually he was getting kind of messy

writing in London, in Southwark. And he collaborated with other playwrights. We now know that Thomas Middleton co-wrote bits and pieces of the scottish play um and is everybody okay i didn't say it i didn't say it any lights come down as well as timing of athens and then we know that titus yay um was co-written with george peel, or at least George Peel may have written one, the first act. And then we know that John Fletcher wrote Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII with Shakespeare.

He was kind of training John Fletcher. But as you say, the way in which the rest of the kind of theatre-making apparatus contributes to the making of the play is something that we shouldn't lose sight of. Yeah, and that's obviously so important. We're here because of the anniversary of the play is something that we shouldn't lose sight of. Yeah. And that's obviously so important. We're here because of the anniversary of the first folio where the plays get set in stone. But up to that point, they're being negotiated. Yeah, absolutely. By actors, by censors. And Shakespeare, you know, we're getting a sense of him performing in London,

acting in London, writing in London. But he's got a wife and kids back home. So he's away for weeks and months. He's travelling back to see his family. It's sort of the life of a touring comedian a bit, Richard. This is hard graft. Yeah, I mean, I think he sounds like he's away... I mean, I guess the trains weren't as good in those days, but... They were probably better, actually. Maybe better.

The horse and cart might have been the past, but yeah. But, yeah, that's difficult, but it sounds like maybe he didn't mind that so much once once he's once he's left i mean there's what happens on tour stays on tour that is the uh the mantra so maybe maybe he was happy to be away on tour permanently maybe yeah um but we have to think of him i think as a man from stratford but a man working in london primarily yeah and he's working incredibly hard. So the question, I suppose we can ask is, is he successful? Is he a star? You know, is he selling out? Everyone wants to come see him? Well, he was successful, I would say,

and his theatre company was successful. So he wouldn't necessarily have stood out, but he was certainly an admired writer of his time. And you can see that on the dedication verses to the folio, but he wasn't the Colossus that he is today. You know, we've constructed a much bigger Shakespeare than perhaps was around in his own time. Plays would have sold out, no doubt, but then Christopher Marlowe might have sold out plays at the Rose. In fact, they kept coming back to the Rose, which meant that Marlowe was popular too.

And so was Webster, so was Middleton. Middleton was the one who sold, completely sold out, 3,000 people in the Globe to watch A Game at Chess, which was his most popular play. Never heard of it. Yeah. Well, isn't that funny? Oh, is that it?

No, it's in chess. By Andrew Lloyd Webber. And Shakespeare's also working with stars. I mean, Richard Burbage is sort of the go-to booking. Yeah, I mean, Richard Burbage was his star actor with the Lord Chamberlain's men, and they later became the King's men. He was the first ever King Lear,

first ever Hamlet, first ever Othello. So he was huge and people loved him. And when he died in 1619 there was this amazing poem written in his honour. Shakespeare was working with the best. Was he any good as an actor though? Do we know what parts he, did he play parts in his own plays and was he

any good? Did he get good parts? We don't know. I mean, we think that Shakespeare played some old man parts from time to time. That he may have played the ghost in Hamletlet okay nice yeah yeah potentially yeah because i just write parts for myself that's what i'm doing that's the only way i can get any acting i'm not very good so that's that's what the character of richard yeah so he's sort of he's slightly hitchcocking himself he puts he gives himself cameos and plays in his...

But primarily he's writing. Yeah, Hitchcock's a really good analogy. So if he's selling out playhouses, does that mean Shakespeare's giving the public what they crave? Or is he writing plays that are challenging and pushing against the taste of the time or the prejudices of the time? Is he trying to change people's minds,

or is he actually going, what you all want, sex and violence? All of it. I think all of it. I think what's really clever about Shakespeare is that sometimes he works some of these things in by stealth, and he doesn't give the audience answers. He's always giving them more questions, more ideas and conflicts and dilemmas to be thinking about. So he doesn't always give them what they want,

but he makes them think he's giving them what they want. Yeah, that's how I like to think of it. Yeah, because there are themes in Shakespeare that are laudable. Yeah. And there are those that we go... Yeah, so you'll have these troubling moments. You have bits of, you know, you find racism in his plays, anti-Semitism. But also then you see these incredible pleas for justice and for equality that emerge in different plays.

And then you've got extraordinary female characters who seem to be incredibly powerful. But at the same time, women are oppressed in a lot of his plays. So it's complex. And he's writing about foreigners, strangers? Yeah. This is London, but he's writing about Verona and Greece and various parts of Europe. He doesn't set any of his plays in London. He sets them afar. But he is very conscious of the multicultural and multi-ethnic character of London. It was an incredibly diverse city. We tend not to think of it that way because period dramas don't really

depict that. But it was. There were people living in London from all over. There were black people living in London at the time. And Shakespeare was aware of this. And you can feel that kind of diverse immediacy in his work. Richard, Shakespeare was living through a time of great political turbulence, obviously, and the Tudors, that era, you've got plagues and pandemics, you've got the kind of persecution of the Catholics, you've got a lot of stuff going on, and then you've got dynastic struggles, there's coups against Elizabeth I. So do you think, in your deep knowledge of Shakespeare,

do you think he's a bit of a provocateur, or do you think he's playing it safe when he was writing? Where do you think he lands on the risk-taking line? I feel like only from films I've watched that he's quite a suck-up to royalty and everything. So whoever's in charge, I don't think he's very revolutionary in that sense, but maybe I'm wrong.

That's interesting. Do you want to defend his honor i mean we don't really have any record of him being hauled in front of the privy council but ben johnson did yeah you know in 1603 he wrote um sejanus i'd like to forget because it's such a bad play um but he wrote two tragedies which didn't do very well uh but and one of them getting him into trouble johnson had been imprisoned twice for his political commentary. Shakespeare doesn't get into trouble in the same way. In fact, the opposite happens.

He becomes patroned, his company is patroned by King James. And that's when they become the Kingsmen. Yes, not the Colin Firth movie, sadly. Well, I like the idea of Shakespeare with a gun. James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England, 1603. That's a moment of tension, because at the end of the Tudor dynasty in comes a foreign king.

Scotland's a different country. But he gets to be renamed. The King's Men is the new troop, which is rather glamorous. They get a lovely welcome gift from the king. Do you want to guess what it was? Was it a really big haggis? No, but... Nice, isn't it?

That would be, yeah. The butt of Malm's whatever that stuff's called. Oh, Malm's Be Wine? Yeah. That's a nice Shakespearean allusion, Well done. Thank you. Very good. To drown someone in. No, it's four and a half yards of red cloth. Okay, yeah.

That makes sense now. Because they want Shakespeare's company to line the route during a royal procession in 1604. The king is going to parade through and they want the company to wear the red cloth. But, I mean, basically he's making Shakespeare wear the red carpet. Yes. He's's making shakespeare wear the red carpet yes he's like you are the carpet stand there so i don't know if it's a gift or if it's sort of slightly like just lie down and make me look good but um but this is this a boost

to shakespeare's renown and approval i mean it must be the king saying you're my guy absolutely i mean the king's men are a really prominent company at this point. They were already performing at court for Queen Elizabeth I, but they really do get to monopolize the court at this stage. I think it was something like seven out of 11 plays performed in 1604 were written by Shakespeare. And then they were performing at court up to about 107 times by the time Shakespeare died. So they were pretty prolific at court. Yeah. And of course, James being Scottish King then gives us the Scottish play. Yes.

We know that there is a certain link there, isn't there? Yeah. I mean, you see in his Jacobean plays a bit of political commentary coming through. And certainly in the Scottish play, King James was obsessed with witches and witchcraft, and he was convinced that witches were stalking him, were coming after him. And so Shakespeare writes this play, and it feels pretty provocative, you know,

with the weird sisters as kind of a nod to that. And was James related to Banquo? Yes, yes, yes. So there's a sort of genealogy of saying you're legit. It's complementary, but at the same time. The other thing that Shakespeare gets, a little earlier, in 1596, during Elizabeth's reign, Shakespeare gets a family coat of arms. Something his dad had long craved, you know, ale tasting and making gloves and all that, always on the make. Finally, the family gets its official coat of arms, which, do you want to guess what it is?

I'd say this is a joke, but I think it might be on there. Is there a spear that's shaking on there? Look at you with your knowledge. Ooh, isn't he fancy? Couple of gloves, I'm guessing, on there. Some mittens to string through. It looks to me like a kind of jousting lance rather than a spear. But yeah, it is.

And it's on a mustard yellow backing. It's meant to be gold, but it looks like mustard yellow. I have to ask Richard, what would the herring coat of arms be? Well, there's the obvious. Massive cock and balls yeah um yeah i mean i think it would just be penises and testicles i've sadly only one testicle now yes the mono ball yeah mono ball i mean that's one of that's my autograph has essentially developed i just used to draw cock and balls,

and then I've sadly lost a ball, if you are not aware. So now it's just a cock and ball. So I think maybe both, moving from early life to late life. I had range. Great. Lovely. I'm glad I asked. You knew what you were going to get I did Okay so we have Shakespeare

He was a prolific playwright 37 plays at least We haven't mentioned poetry yet of course And in the movie Shakespeare in Love Which I think is a lot of people's touchstone On the personal story of the man as the author He's writing his sonnets And it's all about he fancies Gwyneth

Boutro. But is that, I mean, are these all love poems? Is there a particular person they're aimed at? You know, what? Yeah, I think that's one of the big things that scholars are searching for is who were the people that are being addressed in the sonnet. So he wrote 154 of them. Some of them are written or addressed to a fair youth, a young man. And a lot of them, there's some that are referred to as the procreation sonnets, where they're trying to urge, he's trying to urge this young man to get married and have kids to preserve or immortalize his beauty. And then there's some sonnets addressed to a dark lady. And I think what he's doing with that is providing a kind of radical intervention

into what sonnet making is. Because the usual sonnet mistress was this kind of fair, highborn woman with golden hair and rosy cheeks and fair skin. And his dark lady is the opposite of that. But some people are still trying to figure out who this dark lady is. She may be nobody. She may be just somebody in his imagination. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors. Like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up.

Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. Today, we are looking for the real Shakespeare. And when we read his poetry, we're still looking for the real... You want to find the biography in the poetry. There's a real tension there. Yeah. And we do the same with Dickens. We were always looking for the autobiographical. But 154 sonnets.

I'm slightly... The idea of a young man trying to procreate to preserve beauty, I can't tell if that's a beautiful idea or creepy as hell. I'm still on the fence. Richard, do you want to vote? I mean, it's creepy. Creepy. Writing poetry is creepy anyway.

So let's go with that. But there's a practical reason for writing poetry. It's shorter, so it's easier to do. Yes. Plays are really long and poems are tiny. I don't even know how many lines in a song. Is it eight? Fourteen.

Fourteen. Oh, that's harder than I thought. The practical reason is plague He has his own pandemic story He's in lockdown In 1592 the theatre's shut There's a bubonic plague Everyone stays at home He's trying to make a buck

And keep working while he can't perform anymore That tells us the real man here He's trying to earn some money He's trying to keep working while he can't perform anymore. I mean, that tells us that the real man here, he's trying to earn some money, he's trying to keep working. Yeah, yeah. I mean, every plague year, the theatres are shut, so the companies either go on tour or they kind of sit at home and watch Netflix. But Shakespeare would have penned some of his poetry.

He also wrote narrative poetry as well. I did ventriloquism during lockdown, so that's actually better, I think, than writing poems is better than ventriloquism. Yeah, I mean, politely, I would say you lost your mind in... You were clearing stones out of fields. I was doing that before lockdown, to be fair. Yeah, so we have the great sonnets, 154 of them.

Can people read them and buy them? Are they published? The sonnets are published in 1609, yeah. And it's very likely Shakespeare oversaw the publication of them, so he wanted them out there. Great. All right, well, that brings us to Act IV, Shakespeare, the businessman.

And I feel like we should probably play the intro music to The Apprentice, because that's obviously inspired by Romeo and Juliet, but I'm not allowed to for copyright reasons. I suppose, far at the beginning, we talked about John Shakespeare being a bit of a hustler, you know, middle class, trying to work his way up, but always sort of slightly Del Boy-esque, there's always a plan.

Shakespeare, William Shakespeare seems like he's better at it than his dad is that fair I think he may have had more opportunity but he he owned quite a bit of property he had some properties in Stratford and he had some acres as well just before he left London he bought a property in the Blackfriars which is where his indoor theater was it was where the Tempest and The Winter's Tale first debuted, for example. It's also, well, it's been said that he would chase after people who owed him money as well. So he cared about money. He was commercially savvy.

Yeah, I think one thing we know is in 1604, his lawyers chased someone for 35 shillings, 10 pence. It's not a lot. No. So he's quite like, you owe me. The less surprising thing would be his investment in the Globe Theatre, where you work now. Yeah. So can you tell us more about how that comes into being?

Yeah, so originally Shakespeare's company were performing across the river in Shoreditch in the first purpose-built playhouse, which was called The Theatre. Just in case you got confused. The lease ran out, they got kicked out, and so they decided to build the Globe, but in order to build the Globe, you had to invest in the actual playhouse itself.

So he was a sharer in the company. He was the house playwright, but then he became a householder as well, which means that he would have made money at the box office. That was very commercially savvy, but it was the only way that really you could build a globe, which finally emerged in 1599. It was a very technologically advanced theater. It was considered one of the sort of most exciting theaters that got built. There are only two, so...

Well, there are a few more at that point the swan yeah yeah eventually they had quite a bit of technology you know they had special effects fireworks and thunderstorms and that kind of thing but they also had a cannon and for i think it's the 29th of june 1613 i remember it well they were doing a production of Henry VIII, and the cannon went off and sparks caught the thatch on fire, and the whole thing came down. But fortunately, nobody was killed, but one guy's pants caught fire. Let's not forget that.

Apparently, someone put it out with some ale. This is told to us in a ballad. Excellent. Ale keeps emerging as a theme. But was it good quality ale? Some ale. This is told to us in a ballad. Excellent. Yeah. That's quick thinking. Ale keeps emerging as a theme. Yeah. But was it good quality ale? Had the dad checked it?

No, probably not. No, that's what you need to know, isn't it? Then they rebuilt the globe. It's the second globe, 1614, and with a tile roof this time. But Shakespeare didn't invest in that one. That's interesting. So the second time around,

either he'd lost money and gone, oh, I've been burned, literally, I've been burned before. Or he... He was just ready to go home, I guess. Yeah, yeah, OK. Nobody really knows why. Interesting. So a cannon set fire to the theatre.

Richard, what's the worst, most dramatic thing that's happened at one of your gigs? I was doing a show, Christ on a Bike, which was about my relationship with Jesus, and I think just at a bit where I was being the most blasphemous, all the lights went out in the theatre. And it wasn't someone messing around. It actually happened.

There's been a few fire alarms. I fell off. We talked about this stage being precarious. I've fallen off a stage in Tring, which was quite high, but I bounced, luckily. I was young. I'm not going to risk it here, because if you fall off here, you'll roll down the stairs. I mean, it'd be funny, but it would definitely kill me.

Yeah, I don't... There's not been... There's been a fire alarm, but there was no fire, so I don't think I've had anything... I like the fact God intervened at one point. Just like, enough. I've said a lot against him, so he probably just got to the point where, well, that's enough.

The most I can do is turn the lights off. That's my only power. If only I could properly get him. He'll buy this time. So, 1614 was the rebuilding of the Globe, but Shakespeare did not invest, which I suggest then he's back home. He's gone back to Stratford-upon-Avon so what's the last stages of his life like well I mean some

people think he came out of retirement slightly to write to co-write the two noble kinsmen and Henry VIII would have would have been his last place his last place yeah yeah not the tempest which is what everybody thinks oh really yeah Yeah, it wasn't his last. I love the way that you were like, must say this, key, crucial information. Did I give that away? Sorry. Wasn't his last good one, though.

Well, maybe. The last, maybe solely authored, maybe. Yeah. He moved into New Place, which is the second largest house, or was the second largest house in Stratford. Pretty expensive. That's proper marketing. Old place, new place.

Yeah. The other theatre, new house. No, you're right. You're right. The other place. Yes. New place, yeah. He didn't really get involved like his dad was in civic duty.

He was more interested in sort of preserving his own legacy as well as his financial interests. And some people think he might have been even a little miserly towards the end. I don't like to think so. I mean, I don't know. Who knows? But there was a story that there was a huge fire in Stratford. I think it was around 1614. And that provoked sort of land enclosures and that somehow Shakespeare would have been an advantage for that. And the poor would have been disadvantaged quite significantly. But I just don't know. He hates the poor.

Ah, that's not what I'm saying. William Shakespeare. Bastard. No, no. All right, maybe not. Not necessarily miserly, but certainly self-interested. Self-interested. Self-interested William Shakespeare

died on the 23rd of April, 1616, which might have been his birthday. Yeah. May not have been, but certainly birthday week. Yeah. He was 52. Richard, how do you think he died? Did his coat of arms fall on him and he got spiked through the head by the spear?

If only. I love that. If only. That would them. If only. That would be a lovely sort of stupid death, wouldn't it, for the horrible histories. No, he sort of, he went against type a little bit. He got hammered. He got drunk with his old drinking buddies.

His old frenemy, Ben Johnson, and another fella called Michael Drayton, they went for a boozy night out and he had to hang over from hell, and it killed him. That's what they say. Some people say that. Yeah, yeah. It could have been anything. Fact. It's true. Let's go with fact.

Yeah, all right, OK. Maybe debatable. But the story goes that he... It's a good story. So what does Will's Will, the last Will and Testament of Will, Shakespeare, what is it? I'm sure he would have been really aware of the punning as he was writing his will. Of course he would, yes.

What does it tell us? Who's he leaving stuff to? What's he leaving? Well, you said he didn't care about the poor, but he left 10 pounds to the poor. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's nice.

Is that good? Is that a lot? I don't know. It's a huge amount, but it's an amount. Okay, so you bastard told you. His lawyer got 13 pounds, six shillings, and eight pounds. His lawyer got £13.06. His lawyer got more than the poor. His lawyer did a lot of work.

The bulk of his property was left to his daughters. Okay. And he weirdly left his clothes to his sister, Joan. She could have sold and, you know, made some money if he had really nice clothes. And then, of course, we know famously he left his second best bed to his wife, Anne. And, of course, a lot of people think that that means he didn't really care about her very much or it was slightly insulting. But a lot of the phrasing of Will's at that time talks about the best this. And it was just a way of designating something.

It didn't necessarily mean it was the second best. We don't. If it's called the second best, that doesn't mean it's the second. Because it does. My first best bed, I wouldn't bury it with me, though. Buried in a bed is brilliant. What a great coffin that would be. I mean, some people think that the best bed is the one you give to your guests.

The second best is the one that you sleep in yourself. So it could have been their bed. I'm going to have both beds. And a house and stuff. And some money. She raised the kids. I agree, I agree. I mean, honestly.

He's not very endearing in the will to his wife, but to his fellow players, you know, Burbage and Hemmings and Condell, he leaves them some money. And he also leaves them money to buy mourning rings. That's a really intimate gesture, which tells you something about the relationship that theatre companies have.

He leaves money for them to buy rings to mourn him. That's the real, yeah, mourning rings. That's quite big-headed. Okay, well, we've come to the end of his life. William Shakespeare's dead. We've killed him off. And we've come to Act 5. This is about the first folio and the legacy. But what is the first folio, Farah? So the first folio is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. So prior to that, Shakespeare's plays were published in single format called quartos. Some of them are kind of considered bad quartos, and he didn't necessarily oversee the publishing of those. But the folio, it refers to

Mr. William Shakespeare's comedies, histories, and tragedies. And it was edited and put together by Hemmings and Condell, who were his best friends in the company. It's pretty trustworthy. There are 18 plays that have never seen the light of day. So without the first folio, we wouldn't have those plays. We wouldn't have The Tempest. We wouldn't have Comedy of Errors. We wouldn't have Twelfth Night. And we wouldn't have the Scottish play. Oh, really?

Yeah, there's only one edition of those plays. It kind of gives you a full picture of Shakespeare's career. If we didn't have it, we would have a very different Shakespeare. And we think it's published in November? November 1623. So this is the 400th anniversary. Yay! Yay!

Can we have a cheer for the first folio? Yay! You absolute nerds You just You just cheered a book What's wrong with you? No, it is good There's one in here There's one in the building

Today There is a gorgeous copy One of There's very few How many in circulation In the world? Gosh, I don't God, I mean

There's 235 We think 83 in the United States, in the Folger. OK. So there's one in this very building. So if it goes missing, we know who to blame, Richard. That's a huge artistic legacy he leaves behind,

but actually it's amazing. If we didn't have that folio, we'd have half of his plays. As you said before, Richard, there might be some missing. Who's going to curate your masterworks? Yeah, I don't know. I think it might be... I might be in trouble. I haven't made any friends.

I'm not sure I've got copies of most of my plays, to be honest. It might be more lost than Shakespeare's ones. Yeah. My wife, maybe. I'm planning on her

outliving me. I'm giving her my second best bed. My blog, which I've written every day for 22 years, is in the British Library. So that might be something. So, you know, you sort of never know, do you? No. Because you're sort of actually better off

being a sort of middling, unknown person, and then you're writing about more interesting things and it might be more interested to you might be the voice of the 21st century it might be so far i mean the the first folio is published in 1623 it's been um edited and put together by his friends we trust it it's got all these wonderful plays in it does it automatically and immediately transform shakespeare into the genius that we know today you know know, Mr. Shakespeare, the greatest playwright in world history. Yeah, no, I don't think it happens immediately. I mean, I think it's something that's kind of a slow burn, happens over time. When Shakespeare retired, the kind of writing he was doing was

kind of being outmoded and other playwrights like John Fletcher were coming on board. And, you know, Shakespeare's career was kind of maybe flailing. Maybe that's why he retired. And I often describe it as sort of what Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta's career. And that's what the folio kind of does. It brings Shakespeare back into the imagination and people get really excited about Shakespeare as you move, particularly into the Restoration period. But then because they're all in print, they've become more scrutinizable.

And so people, even though John Dryden, for example, loved Shakespeare, he also found him sometimes insipid, as he called it, or full of too much bombast. And also his plays were kind of criticized a bit in this time, in the restoration period, for implausible plots, which of course Shakespeare didn't invent many of those plots. That's a great defense. Don't blame me, I stole them. But also the supernatural. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Yeah. The hierophany and the ghosts. Too much spectacle. Yeah, exactly, exactly. If you paid for a ghost costume, you've got to use it. You've got to use it. So Dryden is the poet laureate in the 1660s. By the 1700s, that's when we get the kind of burnished Shakespeare. That is.

Shakespeare gets a whole new lease on life, and he becomes sort of lauded as the nation's poet, and you see a whole different approach approach to shakespeare becomes worship and statues start emerging all over the country have you ever heard of david garrick yeah the garrick theater yeah so yeah i don't know much about him he he had a big uh jubilee celebration right in stratford and um they they wanted to bring you know put stratford on the map as a literary pilgrimage site and erect another statue to Shakespeare. But no Shakespeare play was actually performed during that period.

They did a three-day Shakespeare jubilee and forgot to put any plays on. The Nuance Window! We've covered all sorts of things about William Shakespeare, and I think it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where the spotlight falls on Professor Farrar as she tells us something we need to know about Shakespeare and his legacy. So without much further ado, Professor Farrar, The Nuance Window, please. Thank you. So Ben Johnson said that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time.

I agree. But I guess this means Shakespeare is universal, right? His plays appeal to seemingly everyone, which would make him the greatest writer in the world, in history, in fact. The critic Harold Bloom went so far as to say Shakespeare invented us humans. This would make Shakespeare a god. Or, as David Garrick said in 1769, make Shakespeare a god? Or, as David Garrick said in 1769, the god of our idolatry. Hmm. If this is true, why is it that Shakespeare, whose plays speak to different experiences across time and geography, can still feel inaccessible and exclusive to so many? At what point in the history of his reception did he become the unassailable beacon of English

civility and culture, an identity that is still very much woven into the way we perform, teach, and talk about Shakespeare to this day. In his own time, Shakespeare, as we've heard, was a middle class playwright from Warwickshire who came to London to become part of a thrilling but scrappy and unrefined enterprise of making theater. He made plays not as a lone literary genius in Stratford, but with a company of players in Southwark. Something happened, though, in the 18th century, the period of Enlightenment, when Shakespeare was first christened the Bard, referred to as a native genius, celebrated for his particular English sublimity and wit, called an instrument of nature. His talent viewed as natural and rooted in his English heritage. Statues and busts appear

that seem to whitewash his image, his face chiseled in the neoclassical fashion. whitewash his image, his face chiseled in the neoclassical fashion. The messiness of theater and collaboration redacted from his works, and he's apotheosized as being apart from every other mortal, as one minister argued. This was at a time when English culture was getting a makeover. A heightened appreciation of art, literature, and music emerges, along with theories of aesthetics and taste, all leveraged as the chief symbols of a civilized society. Harmless, right? Not when you consider the simultaneous escalation of maritime commerce and the full realization of England's role in the slave trade and empire. realization of England's role in the slave trade and empire. How do we reconcile the fact that Shakespeare is being lauded as the native genius while Britain was enslaving and colonizing people overseas? So maybe best to topple that icon then and go back to Shakespeare's words and stories.

We might find troubling things there sometimes, but nothing we can't grapple with if we don't mind a bit of discomfort. Thank you very much. Thoughts, Richard? Yeah, well, it was very good. I don't know if I'm going't top that. Yeah, I mean, I always found him as a kid, like impenetrable and, you know, and being forced to learn it and study it before you could even understand any of it. Even in A, you know, I did measure for measure for A level

and I found that a slog, I have to say. You know, I think him being held up as this beacon, it probably wouldn't be what he would want. I mean, he would love it. But, you know, it changes it to make it holy and make it, you know, this unchangeable thing. It's sort of, I think, against the nature. But, yeah, that's an interesting view.

Yeah, I mean, I've just enjoyed learning sort of about... Scrappy is a good word. Yeah, it's really scrappy. He worked hard, he tried stuff, not everything worked. It's exciting and thrilling, and actually the urgency of his moment is in his plays, and it's so resonant with the things that we're grappling with today. And I think if we just see him as this benign genius all the time,

we miss so much that's in those texts. Yeah. Well, pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah, all right. Good. Just saying. Good.

So what do you know now? It's time now for our quiz. Oh, great. This is called the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Richard to see

how much he's learned. Richard, I feel like we've had a good time. Yeah, it's been OK. I was a bit mean to you sometime, sorry. Oh, I didn't notice. It's the adrenaline, sorry. But it's been really interesting. So do you feel like you know Shakespeare

and do you feel confident in this quiz? I do, apart from he didn't exist. I'll answer your questions. This was a booking error. We should have got Sue Perkins. Alright. Not Bacon, no. Not the Earl of Oxford. Let's do a quiz. Alright, here we go.

Ten questions. Question one. On what date is supposedly was both Shakespeare's birth and death date? April the 23rd. Very good. Very good. Question two. What was the name of Shakespeare's wife and death date? April 23rd. Very good. St George's Day. Very good. Question two, what was the name of Shakespeare's wife with whom he had three children?

Anne Hathaway. Not that one. Question three, what was Shakespeare's first job after moving from Stratford-upon-Avon to London? God, it wasn't listening. I really wanted to get 10 out of 10 as well What was he doing? He joined what?

He joined the Merchant Navy No! It went around the world He joined... He was an actor Yeah! Yay! You put me off

That's his only job Sure, but still Question four You put me off. That's his only job. Sure, but still, true. Question four. Before changing its name to the King's Men, what was the name of Shakespeare's theatre troupe? The... The Chamberlain's Men. Yeah, I'll have you have it.

Lord Chamberlain's Men. The Chamber Pop Boys. Men. Yeah, I'll have you have it. Lord Chamberlain's Men. The Chamber Pop Boys. No. Question five. What event might have led Shakespeare to take up sonnet writing? The plague. Yeah, the plague in the 1590s. Question six.

What happened to the original Globe Theatre in 1613? It was burnt down by a cannon during the performance of Henry VIII. Oh, good knowledge. Really good knowledge. A round of applause there. That was organic. Question seven. What insulting nickname did writer Robert Greene

give to a young, starting-out William Shakespeare? Upstart Crow. It was Upstart Crow. Question eight. According to a local priest, how did Shakespeare die? Well, he was drinking with his mates in the pub. And unfortunately, I should have made this joke at the time He wasn't barred

Richard Herring, everyone Question nine What was unusual about the Shakespeare Festival Organised by David Garrick in 1769? There was no Shakespeare plays in it The best kind of Shakespeare play, I reckon No, I'm joking, I like Shakespeare David Garrick in 1769. There was no Shakespeare plays in this. It's the best kind of Shakespeare play, I reckon. No, I'm joking. I like Shakespeare.

And question ten. This is for a perfect ten out of ten. In what year was Mr William Shakespeare's comedies, histories and tragedies, also known as the first folio, first published? Well, just have to take 400 years off of this year. 1623, November 1623. Richard Harrington. Ten out of ten.

Well done, Richard. Very good. Thank you. I mean, I really enjoyed that. Do you enjoy Shakespeare more now you know this stuff? I mean, I loved Very good. Thank you. I mean, I really enjoyed that. And, you know, actually, do you enjoy Shakespeare more now you know this stuff? I mean, I loved him already. Thank you. I loved him so much, anyway.

Yeah, no, it is very interesting. And also, I think that fact that he's like a working-class man made good, I think is what's really... Middle class, probably. Yeah, but, you know, not posh. Not posh. Not the Earl of Oxford. Not that, you know. It's a sort of inspiring story of what Britain should be

and is unfortunately becoming less like again. Yeah. But, you know, it's good, yeah. Listener, if you want more Richard in your life, of course you do. Check out our episode on Stonehenge. It's one of our bestest. For more theatre history,

we have episodes on superstar actresses Nell Gwynn, Josephine Baker and Sarah Bernhardt. All really good fun. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode, because we do these sneaky specials sometimes that just come out of nowhere, like this one. But all that's left for me to say is a huge thank you. First, to our wonderful hosts, the Shakespeare North Playhouse up here in Prescott. Thank you so much.

Secondly, to our gorgeous audience. Thank you so much, audience. Give yourself a round of applause. And then, of course, in History Corner, we had the Queen of the Dramatic Arts, Professor Farah Karim Cooper. Thank you so much, Farah. APPLAUSE And in Comedy Corner, we had the King of Comedy himself, Richard Herring. Thank you, Richard. CHEERING

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we perform a new history play with another troupe of players. But for now, I'm off to go and design the Jenner coat of arms. I'm thinking a weasel in a tuxedo being loaded into a circus cannon. Perfect. Bye! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Thank you. Thank you.

This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by John Mason. He's in here somewhere, hopefully. Hi, John! It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow. Over there! Emma Neguse. And me! Sorry.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey. Production coordinator was Caitlin Hobbs. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow and me. Our senior producer was Emma Neguse. You're not getting a second one. And our executive editor was Chris Ledgerd. Over there. I've run

out of words. So I think that's the end of the thing now. Bye. It was about 2.30 in the morning and every time in that moment of waking I would see the man standing in the corner.

It's here. Uncanny. Season 3. She was just walking, non-responsive, without talking, without blinking. It seemed like something had just taken over. Terrifying real-life encounters with the supernatural. What I saw in that house frightens me and I wish I'd never seen it. Listen on BBC Sounds, if you dare. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at Participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. you