Dan Snow's History Hit - Death by Shakespeare

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

Poison, swordplay and bloodshed. Shakespeare’s characters met their ends in a plethora of gruesome ways. But how realistic were they? And did they even shock audiences who lived in a time of plague, pestilence and public executions, a time when seeing a dead or dying body on the way home from the theatre were high. I was joined by the wonderful Dr Kathryn Harkup, a chemist and author, on a tumultuous journey through the most dramatic and memorable parts of Shakespeare’s work. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I hope you enjoyed the podcast we had out recently. We had Saul David talking about Okinawa, the last great battle of the Second World War. He's always a great communicator, a great historian, and that is one heck of a story. Also, I found Douglas Gill's recent podcast on the emergence of Spanish influenza in the crowded camp of Etapla during the First World War. Fairly chilling. That was a fascinating episode, so it was great to have him on. So please go back and check those out. Also, of course, we had Johanna Katrin Friedrich's daughter talking about Viking Age women. We've got

lots going on, and this is no exception. I love this conversation. This is with Dr. Catherine Harker, but she has gone and studied all the ways in which people in Shakespeare plays die. And what that tells us about drama, what it tells us about Shakespeare, what it tells us about being alive and getting dead in the late 16th, early 17th century. And if you think about, you know, Hollywood films today, most people die by getting shot. But that's not the case with Shakespeare. And I think the way people die in drama can tell you something interesting about society. So great fun. Have a listen.

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just one pound, euro or dollar. So please go and check that out. Lots people joining up to get them through this lockdown and i hope it's i hope it's proving diverting people i hope it's proving useful for young people who are not heading into schools and colleges at the moment so thank you for all the feedback everyone and enjoy dr katherine hark up katherine thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me. This is the best idea ever. I'm not sure about that. Can you just explain for everyone what you wanted to do and how you wanted to show it? Well, originally it was a teacher who showed me a pie chart of all the ways to diet in Shakespeare. And he sort of nudged me on the elbow and said, you should write

a book about that. And thought you know what maybe I should because it sounds like great fun when you look at all the different ways that he killed off his characters it sounds morbid but actually it's an awful lot of fun. But also it's presumably quite instructive because not many of them died from fridges falling on their heads right? No. So what's it tell us? Are they all meant to be like fantastical deaths or were the audience supposed to like engage go, oh yeah, I know what that's like, you know, you got stabbed? I think it's a mixture because some of his plays, obviously he was depicting historical events, so he had some token gesture to historical accuracy. I'm not sure how accurate he was, not very.

I think his only criteria was really to entertain people. his only criteria was really to entertain people. So there are some spectacular deaths that occur or some ones that seem silly to us now but were probably more credible 400 years ago because he was writing for an audience 400 years ago. And seeing a bear appear on stage would have been more plausible back then than it would be today. So what might seem ridiculous now possibly wasn't back then. Okay, so let's run through some of the ones that we feel could give us an insight into what life was like in late 15th to 16th century England. Like shipwreck, there must have been a lot of shipwrecks, were there?

There must have been a lot of shipwrecks, yep, I think that's credible. Mercutio being stabbed in a sword fight. I think there was probably an awful lot of sword fights in the day. Everyone was quite angry, probably quite stressed 400 years ago, and all men were armed. So a posh way of saying knife crime? Yeah, basically. Sword fighting. The knife crime of the day, yes. So yeah, I think that's believed. So young men in particular stabbed each other a lot, presumably from lots of different social

groups? Yeah, absolutely. I don't think it was one particular class or group within the capital. I think it was everyone carried a knife, pretty much, or some sort of object that could be used as a weapon. So when you are upset, it's quite obvious to take it outside. And the consequence was, unfortunately, quite a few people died that way. And in Shakespeare, have you divided, I mean, what is the way most people die in Shakespeare? It's at the end of a sharp weapon, basically. It is mostly stabbing or slain in battle.

Most of the history plays quite a few of the tragedies. Or Cassius stabs himself at the end of Caesar. Or Caesar falls on his sword. So does Mark Antony. Caesar was stabbed 33 times by the conspirators. But yeah, there's lots of people falling on swords. And lots of people having swords deliberately thrust into them. I suppose it makes for good entertainment on the stage.

And it's kind of realistic for the period. Definitely. I think sword fights were very popular, not just kind of street fights, but actually there were displays of fencing and sword fights in the theatre when plays weren't on. So actually your audience was looking at this almost professionally to see the quality of the fights between the actors. It wouldn't have been I think quite so hammy as some productions could be where you wave a wooden sword at each other and hope for the best. These were very skilled at what they did. What about the gunpowder age? Gunpowder is creeping into Europe in the 15th century.

Are we seeing people shot? There were a few but mostly the sort of handguns were very very early stages and they were possibly as dangerous to the person firing them as to the recipient of the bullet so it was mostly cannons and the destruction that cannon could cause. So a few cannonballs? Yeah a few cannonballs knocking off bits of masonry that fall on people and things like that. Okay, well of course famously the cannon was what set off the fire that burnt down Shakespeare's Globe, wasn't it?

Yes, absolutely so, very relevant to him. So drowning in shipwrecks though? Yes. That must have been very common. It must have been very common and unfortunately drowning, intentional drowning was quite a common method of suicide at the time. Apparently the most common method for women at the time. So you'd hurl yourself into a...

Yeah, you'd throw yourself into a river and hope that people would see it as an accident so that you would get appropriate burial rights because suicide was a crime. So that's what's remarkable about Shakespeare is how he treats people who commit self-murder. Because at the time it was a crime, your family would lose all of the money that would normally be inherited by them, you would be disgraced, you wouldn't get a proper burial. But actually I think Shakespeare is more sympathetic to people like Ophelia and Arthur in King John. So I think his most modern attitude to that than perhaps his contemporaries. And there's a lot of falling on your sword when

the alternative is just... Yeah there is no alternative for some people. And drinking poison which I can't recommend at all. You can't recommend it because it kills you? No, it will kill you which is a bad thing, and it will hurt, and it will take time. So both, okay, on both. Yeah, well there's so much poison in Shakespeare, how much of that is, because poison's a funny one, isn't it, because there's so much poison in the tales of the first century AD Roman Empire, like it's almost a narrative device, or do you think poison was a big part of people's lives in the sort of pre-modern world? I think it possibly was, because in terms of like murder and intrigue,

poison has always been, there's always been something about it because it's quite devious and surreptitious. And back in Shakespeare's day, there was absolutely no way of testing for these poisons, certainly not effectively. So you could essentially get away with it unless you were seen adding the poison to dinner or whatever it was. So I think it was probably quite a common method for some people to commit murder. The kind of Roman emperors and their wives who were

bumping each other off with atropine and God knows what else. So I think it was possibly more common than we might suspect. The trouble is also it's unprovable isn't it? It's like witchcraft, like they died of poison, someone like Germanicus, you know who's the imperial favourite who died, like this you can imagine or like Henry Fitzroy, Henry VIII's son, like people presumably the poisoner gets the credit sometimes when in fact it's just good old microbes. Yeah absolutely so it works both ways in that a deliberate poisoner might be able to get away with it,

but also someone who died of something completely accidental, someone could get the blame for it. Yeah, I'm sure there were a lot of... Because in your other life, you're a chemist, you overachiever. So is the poison the stuff that you're particularly drawn to? Yeah, that's the more... Well, it's all interesting, but it's what initially got me interested in this kind of work.

What kind of common poisons were being used? And if you used them, is there not a symptom like, oh my gosh, your tongue's gone black, or like, you must have been poisoned? Yes, there are symptoms. So quite commonly cyanide would have been used because it was quite easily extracted from plants that were growing readily. So cherry water is always a clue to a good poisoning. What's cherry water?

Oh, there was a murder case around the 16th century, and someone used cherry water. And they'd extracted cyanide from cherry pits and given it to someone. So cyanide, it kills you very quickly. There's twitching convulsions, not very nice. Arsenic, lots of vomiting. It looks an awful lot like cholera or gastroenteritis, so people

could blame it on natural causes. So every poison has some characteristic. And modern scientists can extract poisons from bodies, they can test them, they can identify them. But 400 years ago, not a chance. World Finance So how many poisons, we've got lots of poisoning in Shakespeare, do we? Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek There's quite a few. There's less than I thought there would be. There's some very suspicious ones as well.

Old Hamlet with the poison in the ear. And if you're going to poison someone, the ear seems a really odd place. Does it work? I would think it was unlikely. I think Old Hamlet was very, very unlucky that it killed him because it's just not a very practical place to try and poison someone. It seems a very odd choice. But some other poisons do work. Remind me, how are they portrayed in Shakespeare's Poison?

Is it seen as underhand and sort of feminine, like the way Livia allegedly would kill people in the Roman Empire, or is it seen as wise and clever? No, I think it's definitely in the devious and underhand category. People like Claudius is poisoning everyone and he's not the good guy in that story. So it's definitely a devious and underhand category. People like Claudius is poisoning everyone and he's not the good guy in that story. So it's definitely a devious thing to be doing. And then pulling eyes out seems to be quite a thing, but that's recoverable. Yes, absolutely. That's in King Lear, isn't it? King Lear, yeah. His son-in-law.

He survives having his eyes gouged out, he's tortured, he's tricked into believing he fell off a cliff and what finally kills him is his reunion with his long-lost son. Oh there you go, so yeah, what about deaths of broken heart and being forlorn and all that sort of stuff? Is that... That's credible. It is credible? Yeah, I wasn't too sure when I went into it but there are certain symptoms that obviously in the Lear story he's been through it a bit so he's probably quite stressed and if he had a pre-existing heart condition maybe that was the final thing for him but there's a thing called broken heart syndrome and it's a genuine

medical condition and it is moments of extreme stress the heart can deform so that or it deforms when it starts to pump blood, so it can't pump blood very effectively. Most people recover from that, certainly today. I don't know what your chances would be in Shakespeare's era because basic medical care was pretty bad. So Lady Montague just falling over because she's bereaved is credible. Yes, and people dying of sadness and turning their heads to the wall and all that.

Yeah, Anabarbus just dying allegedly of shame because he went over to the other side and abandoned Antony. On stage you have Anabarbus give this very passionate speech and he just drops dead. But actually Shakespeare wasn't kind of making stuff up, making a dramatic end for this guy. This is apparently what happened. He just dropped dead and at the time people said it was from shame. And maybe it was the stress of realising he'd done something terribly, terribly wrong and betraying Antony. So we're saying that there's obviously there's obviously a physiological it's probably what pressure on the heart or? I don't think they actually know the detailed physical cause of things like broken heart syndrome but certainly emotional stress we all know that stressful

situations can cause a physical effect you know fans seeing their idol on stage or on the street and they faint from just excitement. So if you take that to an absolute extreme, you can see how it could have a serious effect. So do you think this is, again, coming back to that first point, but is this all just sort of tragic, people dropping down all over the place? Or do you think people in late 16th century urban environments would just be used of people fitting and dropping dead all over the

place you know is there is there is the what sort of level of public health and and people's exposure to it different to our world i think it would be very different i think it would be unusual for anyone in late 16th century to have not seen a dead body up close and personal because most end-of-life care was done at home friends and families visited and reassured the person who was dying they were there to care for them in their last moments today most people die in a hospital and it's professionalized and a lot of the detail is screened off from us because i don't know we're being protected from something maybe. But I think actually at the time when you knew that was how your end was likely to be,

surrounded by friends and family, that would have been reassuring because you saw the level of care that others received. So actually death was a pretty ordinary part of life, I think. Much more, well, I say that, I think it's just very different today. We talk about death all the time think it's just very different today. We talk about death all the time but in a very different way. We see car accidents, we talk about viruses spreading across the globe but we don't see the bodies. It's

all sanitised, we see numbers. I was deep into my 20s before I actually knew anyone intimate who had died and saw a dead body, deep into my 20s. I think it's quite a strange thing that we have today in especially in the west that we're not exposed to that because in the vast majority of cases it's not it's distressing because you're losing someone you love but actually the process of dying it's just a slowing down and a slow shutting down of the body and it's something that you could you could reassure the person who is dying and you also gain that reassurance for yourself. There would be as well as domestic, presumably there would be public, I mean I'm

just thinking suddenly about Queen Elizabeth long, bless her memory, let her whole crews that had fought against the Anishinaabemowin basically starve to death the following winter by laying them all off and not paying them and there were accounts of like around the dockyard there'd just be sailors starving and begging and dying on the streets. Absolutely. Huge shortages of food, especially in the capital. There was executions. Death was everywhere. And you can imagine why these people, going back to an earlier conversation, why people were stressed and why they might be suddenly roused to anger when they're short of food, they feel sick, they see people being strung up from the gallows. It must have been

quite a stressful time to live. What's the most unusual death in Shakespeare? Torn apart by the mob. Oh yeah. That's quite weird. Who is that? The Sinner the Poet and Julius Caesar. They get the wrong sinner. You don't actually see it on stage.

You don't see it, do you? Yeah, you're told about it. Because I think actually if you start, you could fake all of that. You could make fake limbs and stuff and strewn a lot of blood around. But actually it just becomes farcical and you don't want your audience to laugh at that point. True, I would be laughing at that point. Okay, so other totally bizarre death. Let's have, like, anything to think.

There's a struck by lightning. Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's, it's have, like, anything to think? There's a struck by lightning. Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's, it's in Pericles, which isn't often staged. Does anybody die from cancer? No. Isn't it funny? If you think about modern drama, I guess it's heart attacks, cancer, and then gunshot wounds. Yes.

If we're trying to be all dramatic. Virtually none of that. Very strange. And there's a few natural causes, not many. Catherine of Aragon. I've never watched Henry the Eighth. Yeah, she gets a very sad ending as her life is slowly ebbing away and her eyesight's failing and she's struggling to get out her last wishes. It's all very sad. But yeah, that's quite

rare. And as far as I can work out, there's only one character in the entire canon that dies in a hospital. Ooh. Who's that? It's Nell. So it's one of the gang from Falstaff's pub where he hangs out. Wow. Good old Nell.

Yeah, good old Nell. Well, not really. I say good old Nell. No, it's probably not a great place to go. Probably died of, well, she did die of syphilis in a hospital. Right. Not poor old Nell. Yes. Okay, well, she did die of syphilis in a hospital. Right, poor old Mel. Yes.

Okay, well, that is amazing. The book is called? Death by Shakespeare. Everyone go and buy it, everyone. It's brilliant. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand

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