Exploring William Shakespeare's Life and Impact

It is essential to commence our journey into the world of William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was here that he was born, spent his childhood, fell in love and raised his children. Stratford was the place to which he returned time and time again. During his career he bought land here and the impressive house New Place after gaining literary and financial success in London. This building, Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the perfect place to start delving into the life of William Shakespeare. He was baptized here on April the 26th, 1564, and he was buried here. We don't know for certain, but it is possible that Shakespeare's birthday was on the very same day as the day he died, April the 23rd, St. George's Day. This Holy Trinity Church goes back to the early 13th century. and is the oldest building in Stratford-upon-Avon. But great changes had happened within these walls in the few years before Shakespeare's name was entered into the baptismal register here. The church had lost its connection with Rome. This was the England of Elizabeth, the England of the Reformation, initiated by Henry VIII. Like many other families, the Shakespeare's were deeply affected by this enforced change. in their religious practice. Nothing was certain. Many shifts and changes in the years after Henry VIII, first to Protestant Edward VI, then back to Catholicism with Mary, and then Elizabeth, who was determined to rule in the Protestant way. Stratford at the time of Shakespeare's birth, it was a town of about 2,000 people. It was a market town, it served the neighbourhood. People would come from neighbouring villages to bring their produce. Stratford is a town that was predominantly agricultural and it's very ideally situated for the Cotswolds. So the war trade was very, very prominent in Stratford. Stratford-on-Avon in the mid 16th century was an unremarkable little town. The small population around 2,000 and it was a struggle for the town to maintain such a number. Outbreaks of the plague were common here as they were across the country. The Black Death had come to England 200 years before and everyone lived in daily fear of a return of this deadly disease. The plague was always, always a concern in Stratford, as it was in other towns as well. Almost every year, the plague would have hit Stratford. The year Shakespeare was born happened to be a particularly bad year. for the plague. There's one very good example in the parish register in front of me here that is from July of 1564, just three months or so after Shakespeare himself is born. The The clerk who's recording the burials for Stratford has taken special care to note, in Latin, hic in capit pestis, so here begins the plague. And you can see from the list of burials that follows, a huge number of people are dying in a very short period of time. They, almost 200 people, are about a seventh of the population of Stratford. So if you think that Shakespeare would have been just a few months old, what infant mortality would have been like at the time, we sort of are very lucky to have survived that whole incident. We know that on houses on either side of the house where they were living, children born in the same year as Shakespeare had died from the plague. So he survived. It was in this house in Henley Street that we believe William Shakespeare was born. He was the son of John... Shakespeare and Mary Arden. Now the Ardens were very well-established family here in Warwickshire. They traced their roots back to before William the Conqueror and when William Shakespeare arrived his parents must have seen that as a very great blessing indeed because they'd already lost two baby girls. John Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's father, started very humbly in Stratford, started as an apprentice glove maker. He became an ale taster. He became somebody who checked that bread was made properly and then worked his way up to eventually becoming the mayor of Stratford. When young William was four, this is when his father's made the mayor. And he would have had on the day, he went to any council meetings, he would have had almost like a procession from the front of the house down Henley Street and along to the town hall. So that must have made a huge impression on a very young William Shakespeare, seeing his father dressed in all his regalia, parading down Henley Street. He was always known as a glove maker stroke witower. Now, a witower is a tanner. A tanner, but who's producing really fine white leather. And that ties in with the sort of gloves that John Shakespeare was making. These are fashionable, high-quality gloves made for the well-to-do. As a young boy, William would have been in contact with all kinds of people through the trade connections of his father. This could have given him inspiration and language for the colorful characters in his plays. Shakespeare had a mysterious side. Which we can only guess at. It is very possible that he was a secret Roman Catholic. Now was this the reason that he didn't attend church? That he received a fine from the Queen? And that he had his name... on a list nailed to the church door? Or was it because he'd been exposed dealing illegally in wool, so that he was nervous of stepping out and being arrested? See, this was the atmosphere of the time. If you stretched the law even a little bit, you were reported. I think there was this sense of turmoil, of not being certain how long Elizabeth's reign was perhaps going to last, and with the changes that happened in previous reigns with Mary and Edward and Henry before them, there was that element of uncertainty and the state wanting to control things much more closely. So John Shakespeare's name appears on a list of... on an accusancy list, which is people who have failed to take the Protestant communion. We now know... Now, of course, Queen Elizabeth has a network of spies throughout England. If you're a wool merchant, you pay taxes to the crown on your transactions. So of course, John Shakespeare isn't doing this. So did the Wool Merchants Guild get tipped off by one of Queen Elizabeth's spies? Here there's this guy in Stratford, John Shakespeare, buying all this wool. He's not in the guild, he's not paying taxes, what are you going to do about it? But of course what they did, John Shakespeare was fined, the wool he'd bought which he hadn't actually sold on, it was all confiscated. And from that moment on, John Shakespeare is heavily in debt. John Shakespeare lost much of his wealth and his property because of the fines imposed upon him. But he didn't lose this house in Henley Street. Later on, things got better. Because John was still held in good opinion by the alderman of Stratford, he was granted his own coat of arms in 1592, and was therefore back in business for the rest of his life. The town in Shakespeare's boyhood had an important school, King Edward's School, a foundation of King Edward VI. It would have been a normal education so perhaps it would be challenging by our standards and it was often said that the Latin and Greek that Shakespeare would have learned or any grammar school pupil would have learned would be the equivalent to a university. Classics course today, school starts at six o'clock in the morning and they go through the whole day. They would have started learning simple alphabet and the catechism, sort of the Lord's Prayer, things like that, and then moved on to more complex things, start with perhaps Aesop's fables, you'd learn your grammar as well, perhaps some Seneca, Virgil, so all of the sort of the classic authors that we think of would have been very much the foundation of that curriculum. He would have read Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, the great Latin classic, it was an education in oratory and rhetoric, and that is reflected in his plays, I think. He would have learnt there to argue. He would have learnt there to argue on both sides of the case, and he's brilliant at doing that in the plays. If you take a play like Measure for Measure, for example, where Claudio, the young Claudio, is condemned to death, there's a wonderful scene where the Duke is disguised as a friar. is trying to persuade Claudio to be absolute for death, as he says, and he's trying to persuade him of the consolations of religion, that it's not all that bad to die after all. But then a few hundred lines later, there's a wonderful speech from Claudio which puts exactly the opposite point of view. Aye, but to die and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. Now there's an example of Shakespeare's dialectic skill, the way that he can present two... totally opposing cases within a single scene of a play. Now, of course, Stratford is synonymous with the name Shakespeare, and you can see memorials to his legacy all over this town. But, of course, William had no chance of establishing himself as an actor or a playwright here, although his father had a very prosperous career in William's early years. Later he had huge financial problems and it was only by a very risky move to London that William was able once again to restore the name of Shakespeare. This... ...is the cottage of the Hathaway family. We know that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, when William was 18, and she was some eight or nine years older. But it is remarkable how little else we know about her, and we can only speculate about their marriage. We do know they had three children. There was Susanna, the firstborn, and then the twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet who was to die when he was 11 years old from an outbreak of the plague. But for a man who wrote wonderful love sonnets and who penned the greatest love story ever, Romeo and Juliet, it is remarkable how little we know about his own love story. It is my lady. Oh, it is my love. How that she knew she were. She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that? Her eye discourses. I will answer it. I am too bold. Tis not to me she speaks. We do know that in August 1582, Stratford enjoyed the benefits of a bounteous harvest. And it must have been at this time that William and Anne had their lovers'trysts. Perhaps on a summer's evening... sitting on a set hay bale during the feasting to celebrate the end of harvest. William, still a teenager, with his quick and easy wit, charms and... Maybe they had a hand fastener. ceremony. It's an ancient tradition still existing in Warwickshire at the time in which the couples shared vows and then shared a bed before the official church wedding. Oh me. She speaks. Oh speak again bright angel. Oh Romeo, Romeo. Wherefore art thou Romeo? The legal age to marry is 21. So if you imagine you're a young man, you've served your apprenticeship, you're in your early 20s, you then have to... To get yourself a job and so the logical thing is you're not marrying and you're not marrying girls from the villages until your mid-20s. So here we have young William Shakespeare who's only 18 and he's underage. I'm sure she would have had young farmers queuing up to marry her. So what's this young William Shakespeare got going for him at this point in time? Romeo, doff thy name! And for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself. I take thee at thy word. Call me but love and I'll be new baptised. Whatever the details were, we know for certain that Anne became pregnant, and an official church ceremony had to be rushed through before a noticeable bump developed. There was a hurried dash to Bishop's Court in Worcester to enable the marriage to proceed. and the huge sum of 40 pounds was paid as surety for a marriage bond to be paid if the marriage were to prove invalid. We know that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 when they had their first child, Susanna, in the year after. But the years 1585 to 1592 are a time of intense frustration for Shakespeare historians. We know practically nothing at all about that elusive seven-year period and consequently we have no idea how and why he first began his career upon the stage. Many theories have been advanced. Some say that he headed off for Lancashire, the Catholic stronghold. An earlier biographer said that he became a school teacher in the country. I think it's perfectly possible that he was kept on at Stratford School as an usher, they were called, the assistant schoolmaster. He was obviously a very talented, clever boy. I think it's quite possible that he did some teaching here. Or perhaps he joined a travelling group of players, many of which came through Stratford to perform, and this is where he found his calling. We know that in 1587, the Queen's men came to Stratford. These were a group of travelling players, backed by Queen Elizabeth the First Government, who performed around the country what was essentially propaganda. to support her reign. The Queen's Men weren't a touring company in the modern sense of the word. No, they were more of a variety act. Acrobatic performances and comic routines alongside the plays. But it is the list of those plays and the fact that they were here in Stratford. Which is the interesting point. We know from old records that they put on the story of Richard III, the story of King Lear, the famous victories of Henry V, and don't they sound familiar? Is it possible that Shakespeare did join that company and was inspired to write his own version of the stories of the plays that they were producing? Omit no happy hour that may give furtherance to our expedition. for we have now no thought in us but France. Save those to God that run before our business. Therefore let every man now task his thought that this fair action may on foot be brought. We know that two of the Queen's men went and performed in Elsinore, famously the setting for Hamlet. I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the very cunning of the sea been struck so to the soul, that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions. For murder, though it have no tongue, shall speak with most miraculous organ. Another of the Queen's men, William Nell, was killed in a brawl outside a tavern near Oxford, just before the company came to Stratford. There was a fight and one of the actors was actually stabbed to death. And there is a belief that possibly William Shakespeare stepped in to that role and then carried on and eventually got to London. It is possible. But unless some late 16th century document turns up in some old drawer that we sadly will have no hard evidence to support this or any other theory. At some point he makes that decision to move to London. We know in Henley Street there was a stable owned by the Greenaways and he would have hired his horse or had his horse stabled there and then made that journey to London. Whether Shakespeare arrived in London as part of a troupe or followed them on his own, this was a momentous undertaking for him. It would mark the dawn of an unparalleled talent, as the author of a body of work that would be unsurpassed and would influence generations to come. London, that Shakespeare found, was a dynamic mix of people involved in various trades, shipping, makers and bakers, lawyers and priests, and a court at Whitehall with Queen Elizabeth at its head. London was about a hundred times bigger than Stratford. It was a town of about 200,000 people, a city of course. It was a walled city with numerous churches, over 300 churches. A cosmopolitan place of course, being on the Thames. It was a place where travellers would come and go, bringing their goods from abroad. It was a bustling, thriving, busy, in some ways or other, sordid place. It was just beginning to have a theatrical community. That begins during Shakespeare's lifetime. Shakespeare had arrived in London at an ideal time. Playhouses dedicated to theatrical performances were a very recent development. Normally, actors and playwrights had to make do with performing in the yards of taverns. or in the homes of aristocrats, but now the opportunities were endless. Just as with the invention of cinema and the birth of television, a whole new medium was opening up to the masses, and Shakespeare capitalised on it. It wouldn't all be plain sailing, though. An outbreak of plague struck the city in 1592, and the theatres were shut, just as Shakespeare had hit his stride. But as always, it seems he adapted quickly and soon had great success publishing the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. It was based on Metamorphoses, another narrative poem by Shakespeare's favourite writer, Ophelia. whom he adored from the time he first would have encountered his work back at school in Stratford. Shakespeare simply couldn't resist a return to the theatre, and he threw himself almost exclusively into the life of a playwright, one who had been a great critic of Shakespeare's work. once the theatres reopened. Perhaps he knew that it was his true calling, or perhaps he simply missed the thrill of acting. It's thought that he took on roles himself throughout his career. Whatever the reason, we can all be very grateful that he turned his back on what seemed to be a more relaxed and lucrative career as a poet. I leaves the noble Mortimer, leading the men of Herevichia to fight against the irregular and wild Glendower. It was by the rude hands of that that Welshman taken. A thousand of his people butchered upon his dead corpses in such misuse, such beastly, shameless transformation by those Welsh women done, as may not be without much shame retold or spoken of. It seems then that the tidings of this boil break off our business for the Holy Land. This match with others does, my gracious lord. Given that Shakespeare had thrown himself back into the world of a playwright, he was going to need to create new material at an alarming rate. Writer's block didn't seem to exist in Elizabethan England, as theatres had such a very quick turnover of the plays that they staged. Just as he took inspiration from Ovid for his poems, Shakespeare dug deep into a very handy book called The Holland Shed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Holland Shed Chronicles is a hugely significant source book for Shakespeare. It's essentially, as the name suggests, a chronicle history of England, Ireland and Scotland. There are two editions of Holland Shed, one published in 1577 and this one published in 1587, which is the one that we believe Shakespeare wrote. Shakespeare used as a source for much of the history plays. With Henry V, for example, Holinshed describes the Battle of Agincourt and the campaigns overseas. So you can see where Shakespeare's getting the story ideas from, that he then turns into the plays on stage themselves. For many of our princes, woe the while, lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood. O give us leave, great king, to view the field in safety, and dispose of their dead bodies. I tell thee truly, herald, I know not if the day be ours or no. The day is yours. As the 16th century came to a close, Shakespeare had managed to bring together everything that he needed to dominate the London theatrical scene. He knew how to leave audiences in stitches with his early hits, the comedy of errors. and the Taming of the Shrew, and his trusty copy of Hollandshed's Chronicles had provided the material for his plays on the English kings, including Henry VI and Richard III. But he needed a star creation of his own, a character that would bring in bigger crowds than ever on the rapidly expanding London stage scene, and he found it in John Falstaff, a buffoonish knight. Give me a cup of sack, rogue! Is there no virtue extant? Go thy ways, old track, die when thou wilt. If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then I'm a shot and herring. There live not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat. Falstaff delighted audiences more than any other character of the era. He stole the show in Henry IV, Part I, II, and was so popular that Shakespeare had to knock out a comedy with Falstaff as the main character. Rather hastily written. merry wives of Windsor. They say that jealous, wittily knave had masses of money, for the which his wife seems to me well favoured. Now, I will use her as the key to the cockledy rogue's coffer, and there's my harvest home. I would you knew, Ford, sir, that you might avoid him if you saw him. Oh, hang him! Having created such a smash hit, you could say that the world was now Shakespeare's oyster, which would be fitting, as he invented that phrase when writing the character of Falstaff. London had given William Shakespeare a stage, but too often it had been a precarious one. His friends, the Burbage family, had to move their playhouse, the theatre, as they did not own the land. William and his colleagues became the shareholders of the Globe, which they erected from the timbers of the previous theatre. Shakespeare's success in London as a playwright had brought him much fame, sometimes perhaps unnerving when it came to royal attention. Life in Shakespeare's England could be a dangerous endeavor. London was a city full of intrigue and espionage. Elizabeth was never easy in her role as queen and was always on the lookout for possible usurpers and employed a contingent of spies. Elizabethan England with all its excitement would have been amazingly a vibrant place to live. We know at one point he's living literally a few hundred yards from the Globe Theatre. It was the red light district of London so I mean it's outside the city walls so people would have been ferried across the Thames and that's the Soho of the day really. It's an amazingly lively place. The building of the Globe Theatre would at last give Shakespeare a proper home for his plays, which inspired him to become more and more creative. This is Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Bankside. It welcomed its first audiences in 1997, almost four centuries after the original Globe Theatre, which this building is intended to replicate, first opened its doors. It was 1599, and Shakespeare was a shareholder in the playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It was a formidable troupe. Shakespeare was the resident genius playwright, but also still an actor, of course. They had a superstar leading man in Richard Burbidge, who had the enormous honour of taking on William's greatest roles for the first time. including Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. They also had a supreme comedian, the other Will in the group, Will Kemp, who would send audiences into raptures with his performances as Sir John Falster. Shakespeare would often be at court entertaining the Queen with his plays. When Elizabeth died and James became King, the royal patronage stayed with him. Shakespeare was now a significant member of the Kingsmen. It was at the Globe that Shakespeare truly cemented his legacy as the greatest writer in the English language. Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, they all had their first ever performances at the Globe. Othello! Othello! Such a tragedy that it burnt down in 1613. Having a performance of the play about Henry VIII, All Is True as it was called at the time, that play has a procession and they were using cannon to have special effects and sadly one of the cannon was aimed in the wrong direction. got in trouble for that and it set the thatch on fire and the theatre was burned down. It must have been a terribly traumatic event for Shakespeare and it's towards the end of his playwriting career and I sometimes think that perhaps it was so devastating that that's why he's ceased writing plays towards the in the last couple of years of his life. Once the globe went down So did Shakespeare's desire to write. He appears to have produced nothing after this date. Most scholars agree that The Tempest is the last play that he wrote on his own, and it appears to be a deliberate swan song. The character of Prospero relinquishes his magical powers at the end of the play and delivers poignant speech where he asks the audience to let your indulgence set me free. in a way that many people have interpreted as Shakespeare's own retirement speech. He did collaborate with other authors on a few works after The Tempest, but he appears to have been happy to bring his solo literary career to a deliberate end. When opportunity arises, he comes back to Stratford. This is where his family, this is where his wife, his children, his siblings are all living his friends. I think he was a Stratford man all his life. His family remained in Stratford. He bought a big house for them quite early in his career. He owned New Place, the large house in the middle of Stratford, from the time that he was 33 years old. We believe for probably 15 to 20 years Shakespeare is earning between two to three hundred pounds a year. He is a playwright who actually hangs on to his wealth and invests it and where is he investing it? It's always in Stratford upon Avon. He bought 102 acres of land, which is about the same size as Stratford itself, land to the north of the town. He purchased an interest in the tithes, which he spent a lot of money on. When he was up in court as a witness in a court case in 1614, he was referred to clearly as William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. He was thought of as a Stratford man. William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and it may be that his death was sudden and unexpected, because just a month earlier he had signed his will in which he said he would in perfect health. In that last will and testament Shakespeare left money behind to his wife and sister, his niece and nephews, his children and his grandchildren, to his friends and to the poor in this his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. But to the world of literature and to the English language. He left behind an unparalleled legacy. As fated as Shakespeare was in his own lifetime, his legacy, along with all of his remarkable plays, could have easily been lost. What became known as the first folio was published in 1623, that's seven years after Shakespeare's death. 36 of Shakespeare's plays were collected together by Shakespeare's colleagues and fellow actors, John Hemmings and Henry Condal. It was a project of great determination and devotion to show that Shakespeare was a great man. Shakespeare. The first folio is particularly special because it records for the first time the collected plays of William Shakespeare and without this book 18 of the plays would be lost to us forever because they don't survive in any other printed form and it's clear that they've been putting together a lot of work to gather up the plays, to edit them, to bring them into what they consider their preferred format to be presented for the first time in their authentic state. It brings together the plays in their division into tragedies, histories and comedies for the first time. It presents them in a standard format. Shakespeare's plays have gone on to have a huge impact on our collective thoughts of so many historical figures. The way that the world views Richard III, Cleopatra, Henry V, Mark Antony and so many, many more has been forever altered. by Shakespeare's works. Be cans for me! How perfectly did he capture the sense of betrayal felt by Julius Caesar as he was assassinated by Brutus Cassius and many others with the simple but devastating line, et tu, Brute? Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar. The funerary monument in the Holy Trinity Church may look a little kitsch. It has gone through centuries of retouching after all. But it remains one of the only two images that we are certain was intended to depict William Shakespeare. The other is the Drushout portrait, which was an engraving placed on the front cover of the first folio and which Ben Johnson declared was a very good likeness. In 2009 a new portrait of Shakespeare came to light. It was held by the Cobb family who had had it in their family for many many years and saw a relationship between it and another portrait. Lots of research went into these portraits and identified them as being one of William Shakespeare, probably painted during his own lifetime. The Birthplace Trust owns a copy of the Cobb portrait, known as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust portrait, and it shows him perhaps as a... as a wealthy, more youthful man than has traditionally been the case for Shakespeare portraits. And it's an interesting addition to the sort of the canon of portraiture of Shakespeare, starting with the first folio and the bust that's in Holy Trinity Church perhaps being the more traditional views of what Shakespeare would have looked like. Shakespeare's greatest legacy of all remains in the language we all use every day. There's the incredible number of words that he coined that are as varied as bedroom, zany, gossip, invulnerable, lustrous, fashionable, monumental, eyeball, savagery, and lonely. They all trace back to the Bard. He was very fond of expanding the horizons of the English language with his own inventiveness. Shakespeare's had colossal influence. A lot of his plays and poems have produced phrases which are in anybody's mouth, even if they don't know Shakespeare. A lot of people know what a Romeo is, for example. And phrases like, a man more sinned against than sinning, for example, which is a line from King Lear, will be used by people who've never heard of King Lear, even possibly. It was Shakespeare's ability to create a turn of phrase that really resonates today. To wait on baited breath. To vanish into thin air. To fight fire with fire. To be made of sterner stuff. To be cruel, to be kind. All phrases conjured in Shakespeare's plays. Any adman today would kill to have Shakespeare's ability to create such memorable soundbites. In fact, as many as one in ten of the common phrases that we use every day are most likely the work of the bard, which is a truly astonishing number. Quite a few of Shakespeare's many phrases have also become the titles of works by later authors. Brave New World. Aldous Huxley's most famous novel is taken from The Tempest. John Steinbeck wrote The Winter of Our Discontent, title coming from the opening speech of Richard III. Even the very recent hit novel The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is taken from Julius Caesar. Shakespeare forever remains the ultimate inspiration. MUSIC The colossal influence that Shakespeare is having increasingly still on the world of the arts, the music that's been inspired by Shakespeare, the films, the theatrical productions which go on, the fact that actors love playing Shakespeare's roles because they give actors such incredible opportunities. He's always a very chameleon type person, I can never quite pin him down. But I'm very fortunate, there are moments quite often in the morning when I open. a house upon my own. And just when you walk through, it's a very humbling experience to be there, having spoken to so many people who it's been a lifetime's ambition to come to the birthplace. The works go on being replicated, inspiring other composers, inspiring operas, inspiring ballets, novels, poems. So that Shakespeare is now in the water supply, you can't get away from it. Television programmes, pop songs, all of them frequently referring to Shakespeare, even subconsciously very often. Yes, Shakespeare is here to stay. To the reader, this figure that thou here seest put, it was for gentle Shakespeare cut. Wherein the graver had a strife with nature to outdo the life. Oh, could he but have drawn his wit as well in brass as he hath hit his face. The print would then surpass all that was ever writ in brass. But since he cannot, reader, look, not on his picture, but his book.

During his career he bought land here and the impressive house New Place after gaining literary and financial success in London. This building, Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the perfect place to start delving into the life of William Shakespeare. He was baptized here on April the 26th, 1564, and he was buried here. We don't know for certain, but it is possible that Shakespeare's birthday was on the very same day as the day he died, April the 23rd, St. George's Day.

This Holy Trinity Church goes back to the early 13th century. and is the oldest building in Stratford-upon-Avon. But great changes had happened within these walls in the few years before Shakespeare's name was entered into the baptismal register here.

The church had lost its connection with Rome. This was the England of Elizabeth, the England of the Reformation, initiated by Henry VIII. Like many other families, the Shakespeare's were deeply affected by this enforced change. in their religious practice. Nothing was certain.

Many shifts and changes in the years after Henry VIII, first to Protestant Edward VI, then back to Catholicism with Mary, and then Elizabeth, who was determined to rule in the Protestant way. Stratford at the time of Shakespeare's birth, it was a town of about 2,000 people. It was a market town, it served the neighbourhood.

People would come from neighbouring villages to bring their produce. Stratford is a town that was predominantly agricultural and it's very ideally situated for the Cotswolds. So the war trade was very, very prominent in Stratford. Stratford-on-Avon in the mid 16th century was an unremarkable little town.

The small population around 2,000 and it was a struggle for the town to maintain such a number. Outbreaks of the plague were common here as they were across the country. The Black Death had come to England 200 years before and everyone lived in daily fear of a return of this deadly disease.

The plague was always, always a concern in Stratford, as it was in other towns as well. Almost every year, the plague would have hit Stratford. The year Shakespeare was born happened to be a particularly bad year.

for the plague. There's one very good example in the parish register in front of me here that is from July of 1564, just three months or so after Shakespeare himself is born. The The clerk who's recording the burials for Stratford has taken special care to note, in Latin, hic in capit pestis, so here begins the plague.

And you can see from the list of burials that follows, a huge number of people are dying in a very short period of time. They, almost 200 people, are about a seventh of the population of Stratford. So if you think that Shakespeare would have been just a few months old, what infant mortality would have been like at the time, we sort of are very lucky to have survived that whole incident. We know that on houses on either side of the house where they were living, children born in the same year as Shakespeare had died from the plague. So he survived.

It was in this house in Henley Street that we believe William Shakespeare was born. He was the son of John... Shakespeare and Mary Arden. Now the Ardens were very well-established family here in Warwickshire.

They traced their roots back to before William the Conqueror and when William Shakespeare arrived his parents must have seen that as a very great blessing indeed because they'd already lost two baby girls. John Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's father, started very humbly in Stratford, started as an apprentice glove maker. He became an ale taster.

He became somebody who checked that bread was made properly and then worked his way up to eventually becoming the mayor of Stratford. When young William was four, this is when his father's made the mayor. And he would have had on the day, he went to any council meetings, he would have had almost like a procession from the front of the house down Henley Street and along to the town hall. So that must have made a huge impression on a very young William Shakespeare, seeing his father dressed in all his regalia, parading down Henley Street.

He was always known as a glove maker stroke witower. Now, a witower is a tanner. A tanner, but who's producing really fine white leather. And that ties in with the sort of gloves that John Shakespeare was making.

These are fashionable, high-quality gloves made for the well-to-do. As a young boy, William would have been in contact with all kinds of people through the trade connections of his father. This could have given him inspiration and language for the colorful characters in his plays.

Shakespeare had a mysterious side. Which we can only guess at. It is very possible that he was a secret Roman Catholic. Now was this the reason that he didn't attend church?

That he received a fine from the Queen? And that he had his name... on a list nailed to the church door? Or was it because he'd been exposed dealing illegally in wool, so that he was nervous of stepping out and being arrested?

See, this was the atmosphere of the time. If you stretched the law even a little bit, you were reported. I think there was this sense of turmoil, of not being certain how long Elizabeth's reign was perhaps going to last, and with the changes that happened in previous reigns with Mary and Edward and Henry before them, there was that element of uncertainty and the state wanting to control things much more closely.

So John Shakespeare's name appears on a list of... on an accusancy list, which is people who have failed to take the Protestant communion. We now know...

Now, of course, Queen Elizabeth has a network of spies throughout England. If you're a wool merchant, you pay taxes to the crown on your transactions. So of course, John Shakespeare isn't doing this.

So did the Wool Merchants Guild get tipped off by one of Queen Elizabeth's spies? Here there's this guy in Stratford, John Shakespeare, buying all this wool. He's not in the guild, he's not paying taxes, what are you going to do about it? But of course what they did, John Shakespeare was fined, the wool he'd bought which he hadn't actually sold on, it was all confiscated. And from that moment on, John Shakespeare is heavily in debt.

John Shakespeare lost much of his wealth and his property because of the fines imposed upon him. But he didn't lose this house in Henley Street. Later on, things got better.

Because John was still held in good opinion by the alderman of Stratford, he was granted his own coat of arms in 1592, and was therefore back in business for the rest of his life. The town in Shakespeare's boyhood had an important school, King Edward's School, a foundation of King Edward VI. It would have been a normal education so perhaps it would be challenging by our standards and it was often said that the Latin and Greek that Shakespeare would have learned or any grammar school pupil would have learned would be the equivalent to a university.

Classics course today, school starts at six o'clock in the morning and they go through the whole day. They would have started learning simple alphabet and the catechism, sort of the Lord's Prayer, things like that, and then moved on to more complex things, start with perhaps Aesop's fables, you'd learn your grammar as well, perhaps some Seneca, Virgil, so all of the sort of the classic authors that we think of would have been very much the foundation of that curriculum. He would have read Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, the great Latin classic, it was an education in oratory and rhetoric, and that is reflected in his plays, I think. He would have learnt there to argue. He would have learnt there to argue on both sides of the case, and he's brilliant at doing that in the plays.

If you take a play like Measure for Measure, for example, where Claudio, the young Claudio, is condemned to death, there's a wonderful scene where the Duke is disguised as a friar. is trying to persuade Claudio to be absolute for death, as he says, and he's trying to persuade him of the consolations of religion, that it's not all that bad to die after all. But then a few hundred lines later, there's a wonderful speech from Claudio which puts exactly the opposite point of view. Aye, but to die and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot. Now there's an example of Shakespeare's dialectic skill, the way that he can present two...

totally opposing cases within a single scene of a play. Now, of course, Stratford is synonymous with the name Shakespeare, and you can see memorials to his legacy all over this town. But, of course, William had no chance of establishing himself as an actor or a playwright here, although his father had a very prosperous career in William's early years. Later he had huge financial problems and it was only by a very risky move to London that William was able once again to restore the name of Shakespeare.

This... ...is the cottage of the Hathaway family. We know that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, when William was 18, and she was some eight or nine years older. But it is remarkable how little else we know about her, and we can only speculate about their marriage. We do know they had three children.

There was Susanna, the firstborn, and then the twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet who was to die when he was 11 years old from an outbreak of the plague. But for a man who wrote wonderful love sonnets and who penned the greatest love story ever, Romeo and Juliet, it is remarkable how little we know about his own love story. It is my lady. Oh, it is my love.

How that she knew she were. She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?

Her eye discourses. I will answer it. I am too bold. Tis not to me she speaks.

We do know that in August 1582, Stratford enjoyed the benefits of a bounteous harvest. And it must have been at this time that William and Anne had their lovers'trysts. Perhaps on a summer's evening... sitting on a set hay bale during the feasting to celebrate the end of harvest. William, still a teenager, with his quick and easy wit, charms and...

Maybe they had a hand fastener. ceremony. It's an ancient tradition still existing in Warwickshire at the time in which the couples shared vows and then shared a bed before the official church wedding.

Oh me. She speaks. Oh speak again bright angel.

Oh Romeo, Romeo. Wherefore art thou Romeo? The legal age to marry is 21. So if you imagine you're a young man, you've served your apprenticeship, you're in your early 20s, you then have to...

To get yourself a job and so the logical thing is you're not marrying and you're not marrying girls from the villages until your mid-20s. So here we have young William Shakespeare who's only 18 and he's underage. I'm sure she would have had young farmers queuing up to marry her.

So what's this young William Shakespeare got going for him at this point in time? Romeo, doff thy name! And for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself.

I take thee at thy word. Call me but love and I'll be new baptised. Whatever the details were, we know for certain that Anne became pregnant, and an official church ceremony had to be rushed through before a noticeable bump developed.

There was a hurried dash to Bishop's Court in Worcester to enable the marriage to proceed. and the huge sum of 40 pounds was paid as surety for a marriage bond to be paid if the marriage were to prove invalid. We know that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582 when they had their first child, Susanna, in the year after. But the years 1585 to 1592 are a time of intense frustration for Shakespeare historians. We know practically nothing at all about that elusive seven-year period and consequently we have no idea how and why he first began his career upon the stage.

Many theories have been advanced. Some say that he headed off for Lancashire, the Catholic stronghold. An earlier biographer said that he became a school teacher in the country.

I think it's perfectly possible that he was kept on at Stratford School as an usher, they were called, the assistant schoolmaster. He was obviously a very talented, clever boy. I think it's quite possible that he did some teaching here.

Or perhaps he joined a travelling group of players, many of which came through Stratford to perform, and this is where he found his calling. We know that in 1587, the Queen's men came to Stratford. These were a group of travelling players, backed by Queen Elizabeth the First Government, who performed around the country what was essentially propaganda. to support her reign. The Queen's Men weren't a touring company in the modern sense of the word.

No, they were more of a variety act. Acrobatic performances and comic routines alongside the plays. But it is the list of those plays and the fact that they were here in Stratford. Which is the interesting point.

We know from old records that they put on the story of Richard III, the story of King Lear, the famous victories of Henry V, and don't they sound familiar? Is it possible that Shakespeare did join that company and was inspired to write his own version of the stories of the plays that they were producing? Omit no happy hour that may give furtherance to our expedition. for we have now no thought in us but France.

Save those to God that run before our business. Therefore let every man now task his thought that this fair action may on foot be brought. We know that two of the Queen's men went and performed in Elsinore, famously the setting for Hamlet.

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the very cunning of the sea been struck so to the soul, that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions. For murder, though it have no tongue, shall speak with most miraculous organ. Another of the Queen's men, William Nell, was killed in a brawl outside a tavern near Oxford, just before the company came to Stratford.

There was a fight and one of the actors was actually stabbed to death. And there is a belief that possibly William Shakespeare stepped in to that role and then carried on and eventually got to London. It is possible.

But unless some late 16th century document turns up in some old drawer that we sadly will have no hard evidence to support this or any other theory. At some point he makes that decision to move to London. We know in Henley Street there was a stable owned by the Greenaways and he would have hired his horse or had his horse stabled there and then made that journey to London.

Whether Shakespeare arrived in London as part of a troupe or followed them on his own, this was a momentous undertaking for him. It would mark the dawn of an unparalleled talent, as the author of a body of work that would be unsurpassed and would influence generations to come. London, that Shakespeare found, was a dynamic mix of people involved in various trades, shipping, makers and bakers, lawyers and priests, and a court at Whitehall with Queen Elizabeth at its head. London was about a hundred times bigger than Stratford.

It was a town of about 200,000 people, a city of course. It was a walled city with numerous churches, over 300 churches. A cosmopolitan place of course, being on the Thames. It was a place where travellers would come and go, bringing their goods from abroad.

It was a bustling, thriving, busy, in some ways or other, sordid place. It was just beginning to have a theatrical community. That begins during Shakespeare's lifetime.

Shakespeare had arrived in London at an ideal time. Playhouses dedicated to theatrical performances were a very recent development. Normally, actors and playwrights had to make do with performing in the yards of taverns. or in the homes of aristocrats, but now the opportunities were endless. Just as with the invention of cinema and the birth of television, a whole new medium was opening up to the masses, and Shakespeare capitalised on it.

It wouldn't all be plain sailing, though. An outbreak of plague struck the city in 1592, and the theatres were shut, just as Shakespeare had hit his stride. But as always, it seems he adapted quickly and soon had great success publishing the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. It was based on Metamorphoses, another narrative poem by Shakespeare's favourite writer, Ophelia. whom he adored from the time he first would have encountered his work back at school in Stratford.

Shakespeare simply couldn't resist a return to the theatre, and he threw himself almost exclusively into the life of a playwright, one who had been a great critic of Shakespeare's work. once the theatres reopened. Perhaps he knew that it was his true calling, or perhaps he simply missed the thrill of acting. It's thought that he took on roles himself throughout his career.

Whatever the reason, we can all be very grateful that he turned his back on what seemed to be a more relaxed and lucrative career as a poet. I leaves the noble Mortimer, leading the men of Herevichia to fight against the irregular and wild Glendower. It was by the rude hands of that that Welshman taken. A thousand of his people butchered upon his dead corpses in such misuse, such beastly, shameless transformation by those Welsh women done, as may not be without much shame retold or spoken of. It seems then that the tidings of this boil break off our business for the Holy Land.

This match with others does, my gracious lord. Given that Shakespeare had thrown himself back into the world of a playwright, he was going to need to create new material at an alarming rate. Writer's block didn't seem to exist in Elizabethan England, as theatres had such a very quick turnover of the plays that they staged. Just as he took inspiration from Ovid for his poems, Shakespeare dug deep into a very handy book called The Holland Shed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Holland Shed Chronicles is a hugely significant source book for Shakespeare. It's essentially, as the name suggests, a chronicle history of England, Ireland and Scotland. There are two editions of Holland Shed, one published in 1577 and this one published in 1587, which is the one that we believe Shakespeare wrote.

Shakespeare used as a source for much of the history plays. With Henry V, for example, Holinshed describes the Battle of Agincourt and the campaigns overseas. So you can see where Shakespeare's getting the story ideas from, that he then turns into the plays on stage themselves. For many of our princes, woe the while, lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood. O give us leave, great king, to view the field in safety, and dispose of their dead bodies.

I tell thee truly, herald, I know not if the day be ours or no. The day is yours. As the 16th century came to a close, Shakespeare had managed to bring together everything that he needed to dominate the London theatrical scene. He knew how to leave audiences in stitches with his early hits, the comedy of errors. and the Taming of the Shrew, and his trusty copy of Hollandshed's Chronicles had provided the material for his plays on the English kings, including Henry VI and Richard III.

But he needed a star creation of his own, a character that would bring in bigger crowds than ever on the rapidly expanding London stage scene, and he found it in John Falstaff, a buffoonish knight. Give me a cup of sack, rogue! Is there no virtue extant?

Go thy ways, old track, die when thou wilt. If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then I'm a shot and herring. There live not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat.

Falstaff delighted audiences more than any other character of the era. He stole the show in Henry IV, Part I, II, and was so popular that Shakespeare had to knock out a comedy with Falstaff as the main character. Rather hastily written. merry wives of Windsor. They say that jealous, wittily knave had masses of money, for the which his wife seems to me well favoured.

Now, I will use her as the key to the cockledy rogue's coffer, and there's my harvest home. I would you knew, Ford, sir, that you might avoid him if you saw him. Oh, hang him!

Having created such a smash hit, you could say that the world was now Shakespeare's oyster, which would be fitting, as he invented that phrase when writing the character of Falstaff. London had given William Shakespeare a stage, but too often it had been a precarious one. His friends, the Burbage family, had to move their playhouse, the theatre, as they did not own the land.

William and his colleagues became the shareholders of the Globe, which they erected from the timbers of the previous theatre. Shakespeare's success in London as a playwright had brought him much fame, sometimes perhaps unnerving when it came to royal attention. Life in Shakespeare's England could be a dangerous endeavor.

London was a city full of intrigue and espionage. Elizabeth was never easy in her role as queen and was always on the lookout for possible usurpers and employed a contingent of spies. Elizabethan England with all its excitement would have been amazingly a vibrant place to live. We know at one point he's living literally a few hundred yards from the Globe Theatre. It was the red light district of London so I mean it's outside the city walls so people would have been ferried across the Thames and that's the Soho of the day really.

It's an amazingly lively place. The building of the Globe Theatre would at last give Shakespeare a proper home for his plays, which inspired him to become more and more creative. This is Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Bankside. It welcomed its first audiences in 1997, almost four centuries after the original Globe Theatre, which this building is intended to replicate, first opened its doors.

It was 1599, and Shakespeare was a shareholder in the playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It was a formidable troupe. Shakespeare was the resident genius playwright, but also still an actor, of course.

They had a superstar leading man in Richard Burbidge, who had the enormous honour of taking on William's greatest roles for the first time. including Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. They also had a supreme comedian, the other Will in the group, Will Kemp, who would send audiences into raptures with his performances as Sir John Falster. Shakespeare would often be at court entertaining the Queen with his plays. When Elizabeth died and James became King, the royal patronage stayed with him.

Shakespeare was now a significant member of the Kingsmen. It was at the Globe that Shakespeare truly cemented his legacy as the greatest writer in the English language. Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, they all had their first ever performances at the Globe.

Othello! Othello! Such a tragedy that it burnt down in 1613. Having a performance of the play about Henry VIII, All Is True as it was called at the time, that play has a procession and they were using cannon to have special effects and sadly one of the cannon was aimed in the wrong direction.

got in trouble for that and it set the thatch on fire and the theatre was burned down. It must have been a terribly traumatic event for Shakespeare and it's towards the end of his playwriting career and I sometimes think that perhaps it was so devastating that that's why he's ceased writing plays towards the in the last couple of years of his life. Once the globe went down So did Shakespeare's desire to write.

He appears to have produced nothing after this date. Most scholars agree that The Tempest is the last play that he wrote on his own, and it appears to be a deliberate swan song. The character of Prospero relinquishes his magical powers at the end of the play and delivers poignant speech where he asks the audience to let your indulgence set me free.

in a way that many people have interpreted as Shakespeare's own retirement speech. He did collaborate with other authors on a few works after The Tempest, but he appears to have been happy to bring his solo literary career to a deliberate end. When opportunity arises, he comes back to Stratford. This is where his family, this is where his wife, his children, his siblings are all living his friends.

I think he was a Stratford man all his life. His family remained in Stratford. He bought a big house for them quite early in his career.

He owned New Place, the large house in the middle of Stratford, from the time that he was 33 years old. We believe for probably 15 to 20 years Shakespeare is earning between two to three hundred pounds a year. He is a playwright who actually hangs on to his wealth and invests it and where is he investing it? It's always in Stratford upon Avon. He bought 102 acres of land, which is about the same size as Stratford itself, land to the north of the town.

He purchased an interest in the tithes, which he spent a lot of money on. When he was up in court as a witness in a court case in 1614, he was referred to clearly as William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. He was thought of as a Stratford man. William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and it may be that his death was sudden and unexpected, because just a month earlier he had signed his will in which he said he would in perfect health. In that last will and testament Shakespeare left money behind to his wife and sister, his niece and nephews, his children and his grandchildren, to his friends and to the poor in this his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon.

But to the world of literature and to the English language. He left behind an unparalleled legacy. As fated as Shakespeare was in his own lifetime, his legacy, along with all of his remarkable plays, could have easily been lost.

What became known as the first folio was published in 1623, that's seven years after Shakespeare's death. 36 of Shakespeare's plays were collected together by Shakespeare's colleagues and fellow actors, John Hemmings and Henry Condal. It was a project of great determination and devotion to show that Shakespeare was a great man. Shakespeare.

The first folio is particularly special because it records for the first time the collected plays of William Shakespeare and without this book 18 of the plays would be lost to us forever because they don't survive in any other printed form and it's clear that they've been putting together a lot of work to gather up the plays, to edit them, to bring them into what they consider their preferred format to be presented for the first time in their authentic state. It brings together the plays in their division into tragedies, histories and comedies for the first time. It presents them in a standard format.

Shakespeare's plays have gone on to have a huge impact on our collective thoughts of so many historical figures. The way that the world views Richard III, Cleopatra, Henry V, Mark Antony and so many, many more has been forever altered. by Shakespeare's works.

Be cans for me! How perfectly did he capture the sense of betrayal felt by Julius Caesar as he was assassinated by Brutus Cassius and many others with the simple but devastating line, et tu, Brute? Et tu, Brute?

Then fall, Caesar. The funerary monument in the Holy Trinity Church may look a little kitsch. It has gone through centuries of retouching after all. But it remains one of the only two images that we are certain was intended to depict William Shakespeare. The other is the Drushout portrait, which was an engraving placed on the front cover of the first folio and which Ben Johnson declared was a very good likeness.

In 2009 a new portrait of Shakespeare came to light. It was held by the Cobb family who had had it in their family for many many years and saw a relationship between it and another portrait. Lots of research went into these portraits and identified them as being one of William Shakespeare, probably painted during his own lifetime. The Birthplace Trust owns a copy of the Cobb portrait, known as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust portrait, and it shows him perhaps as a...

as a wealthy, more youthful man than has traditionally been the case for Shakespeare portraits. And it's an interesting addition to the sort of the canon of portraiture of Shakespeare, starting with the first folio and the bust that's in Holy Trinity Church perhaps being the more traditional views of what Shakespeare would have looked like. Shakespeare's greatest legacy of all remains in the language we all use every day. There's the incredible number of words that he coined that are as varied as bedroom, zany, gossip, invulnerable, lustrous, fashionable, monumental, eyeball, savagery, and lonely. They all trace back to the Bard.

He was very fond of expanding the horizons of the English language with his own inventiveness. Shakespeare's had colossal influence. A lot of his plays and poems have produced phrases which are in anybody's mouth, even if they don't know Shakespeare. A lot of people know what a Romeo is, for example.

And phrases like, a man more sinned against than sinning, for example, which is a line from King Lear, will be used by people who've never heard of King Lear, even possibly. It was Shakespeare's ability to create a turn of phrase that really resonates today. To wait on baited breath.

To vanish into thin air. To fight fire with fire. To be made of sterner stuff. To be cruel, to be kind. All phrases conjured in Shakespeare's plays.

Any adman today would kill to have Shakespeare's ability to create such memorable soundbites. In fact, as many as one in ten of the common phrases that we use every day are most likely the work of the bard, which is a truly astonishing number. Quite a few of Shakespeare's many phrases have also become the titles of works by later authors.

Brave New World. Aldous Huxley's most famous novel is taken from The Tempest. John Steinbeck wrote The Winter of Our Discontent, title coming from the opening speech of Richard III. Even the very recent hit novel The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is taken from Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare forever remains the ultimate inspiration. MUSIC The colossal influence that Shakespeare is having increasingly still on the world of the arts, the music that's been inspired by Shakespeare, the films, the theatrical productions which go on, the fact that actors love playing Shakespeare's roles because they give actors such incredible opportunities. He's always a very chameleon type person, I can never quite pin him down. But I'm very fortunate, there are moments quite often in the morning when I open.

a house upon my own. And just when you walk through, it's a very humbling experience to be there, having spoken to so many people who it's been a lifetime's ambition to come to the birthplace. The works go on being replicated, inspiring other composers, inspiring operas, inspiring ballets, novels, poems. So that Shakespeare is now in the water supply, you can't get away from it.

Television programmes, pop songs, all of them frequently referring to Shakespeare, even subconsciously very often. Yes, Shakespeare is here to stay. To the reader, this figure that thou here seest put, it was for gentle Shakespeare cut. Wherein the graver had a strife with nature to outdo the life.

Oh, could he but have drawn his wit as well in brass as he hath hit his face. The print would then surpass all that was ever writ in brass. But since he cannot, reader, look, not on his picture, but his book.

Transcript for:Exploring William Shakespeare's Life and Impact

Transcript for:
Exploring William Shakespeare's Life and Impact