In Our Time - Shakespeare's Life

Episode Date: March 15, 2001

Melvyn Bragg examines what we know about the life of William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens said of the deeply enigmatic Shakespeare, “It is a great comfort…that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up”. The mystery may have been a pleasure to Dickens but for forgers, conspiracy theorists and Shakespeare scholars it is a tantalising conundrum that has exercised minds since the day the playwright died. How was the low born son of an illiterate craftsman, with a meagre education, able to write with such skill and erudition? How did a provincial man manage to become so attuned to the politics of kings? And how do we know that the plays that we have are the right plays, written by the right man and published in the form they were written?With Katherine Duncan-Jones, Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford; John Sutherland; Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College, London and textual scholar Grace Ioppolo, lecturer in English at the University of Reading.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Henry James, said of Shakespeare, The facts of Stratford do not square with the plays of genius. Charles Dickens said,

It's a great comfort that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine myth. and I tremble every day, lest something should turn up. The mystery may have been a pleasure to Dickens, but for forges, conspiracy theorists and Shakespeare and scholars, it is tantalizing, and has exercised some fine and some frankly cranky minds for centuries. Those who dismiss him, as merely the low-born son of an illiterate craftsman with a meagre education, say, how was it that he was able to write with such skill in erudition?

And others say, how did a provincial man manage to become so attuned to the politics of kings, the ways of aristocrats, and how do we know that the plays that we have are the right plays written by the right man and published in the form they were written? With me to negotiate the maze that's grown up around William Shakespeare is Catherine Duncan Jones, Professor of English at Somerville College Oxford, an author of a forthcoming biography of Shakespeare called Ungentle Shakespeare. Also with us is John Sutherland, Lord Northcroft Professor of Modern English at University College London, and the textual scholar Gracieopolo, lecturer in English at the University of Reading.

Lincoln Jones, in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, the first folio is published. Condal and Hemming print 36 of Shakespeare's plays. How reliable are they, do you think, as a guide? I think they're one of the best guides we've got, and I think we shouldn't dismiss Heming and Condle too lightly. There were Shakespeare's colleagues. John Hemming, in particular, like Shakespeare, came from the Midlands, like Shakespeare didn't go to university, was another of these West Midlanders of enormous talent, enormous tenacity, and I think he, there's every reason to think he took great trouble over assembling Shakespeare's texts. Had any other plays been printed before? This is called the first folio, implies they hadn't been imprinted all before. And this is, as we said, seven years after his death.

It's the first folio, because it's the first folio edition. And in fact, 18 of them in the folio had never been printed before, and I think we should be extraordinarily grateful to Hemming and Condal that we have such plays as Macbeth. And as you like it, many of the ones that had not been printed before are major plays. and it's astonishing to think that but for the labours of Shakespeare's devoted colleagues and fellow actors in collecting and editing these plays and doing a very, very complicated deal with the printers and publishers, possibly at some expense to themselves,

that we do have, say, Macbeth, which we might have lost altogether. There are three more folios or quarters published before 1685. Do they get better or worse as time goes on? Roughly speaking worse. some detritus gets added to them and the so-called Shakespeare apocrypha various plays are added which most scholars don't think are authentic though this is a very very large grey area

where we may debate about one or two of the plays that are added to later folios I have myself a debate about the little playlet called a Yorkshire tragedy which I may be the only person in the Western world I believe it is by Shakespeare but most people don't and I don't so as anybody around this table thinks it's by Shakespeare

mostly they get worse John Sutherland, one of the problems for anybody making a textual study of Shakespeare, as I understand it, is that no original manuscript, nothing that could be called original manuscript survived. You'll correct me if I'm wrong, and people have come up with various different ideas to explain this absence. Do you think it's unusual that we have nothing as we were written in Shakespeare's hand? No, in fact, I think Grace and Catherine will correct me, I think there is one sort of surviving fragment of what is supposed to be Shakespeare's own hand,

the Sir Thomas More fragment. But you're quite right. I mean, talking about Shakespeare's text is really a bit like the kind of search for extraterrestrial life. I mean, it's fascinating, but I'm not sure at the end of the day whether it's worth the huge investments which are being made in academic time and energy.

That's to say, you know, the big discussion at the moment, or the big quarrel at the moment, and it's between what might be called the disintegrationists and the interagionists and the integrationists, those in fact who think we should revere what fragmentary evidence we have. So we have three or four king liars, for instance, any of which has kind of authority, or whether or not we should use rules of thumb and sort of simplify the whole thing. And in a sense, perhaps even go the whole way, as they did in the 18th century, and improve Shakespeare.

That's to say, you know, put sort of little improving sort of links in where, in fact, there are now lacunae or gaps. This, in fact, goes on all the time in Shakespeare studies, and there's this kind of expanding, sort of, contracting universe thing about whether we put Shakespeare back together or whether, to some extent, you know, we actually sort of look at the separate relics and parts of textual material that dissent to it. I mean, it's quite fascinating in the long term, but if you're in the middle of this quarrel, of course, it's sort of, it's something else. My two colleagues are today. Gracia Apollo, let's go back to these manuscripts. The earlier copies, I understand, were known as foul copies, F-O-W-L, is that right? Foul copies. What were these? Can you explain what

these were first? Well, we have two uses of the word of foul. Spelled F-O-W-L-E at the time, but meaning foul, F-O-U-L. That is, the first draft an author wrote of a manuscript of a new text, were considered not finished, therefore foul, not in dirty, but unfinished. Usually a dramatist would then rewrite himself or pay a scribe to write what we call a fair copy. But I want to take issue a bit with what John said, because we do have numerous surviving manuscripts of this period from other authors. In fact, these are the kinds of things I work on regularly.

However, most of the manuscripts we have that survive from other dramatists date from about 1620 and forward. And my supposition is there were various things happening in the period which demanded extra copies of manuscripts after about 1622, largely to do with a censor. So therefore, we don't have a lot of extant manuscripts before this period. Whether Shakespeare himself seemed as manuscripts we don't know, we do know that John Fletcher's manuscript of Bonduca, this is an obscure play now, but well known at the time, had been saved for some reason because the scribe who copied out a fair copy

from the prompt book wrote a note in this copy saying, oh, we've lost Act 5 from the prompt book, so I had to go find the foul papers of the author. Just let's try to get to the bottom of this then. The man wrote the plays, he wrote them down, so that people could learn their parts. They learned their parts, they did the play.

The prompter made a copies, I understand it, the prompter or the scribe. these copies were kept tight because there was no copyright and anybody could pinch them in other theatres so they kept them tight. These were the foul copies. No, these were not the foul. It depended on individual cases. We have one, I think, example of foul papers.

This is in the British Library. It's called The Captives by Thomas Haywood. But can we stick to Shakespeare because it's difficult to know. We have no foul papers of Shakespeare except, I think, the three pages in the Thomas More manuscript. So I want to know, sorry, I'm not quite clear about this. Clearly, I'm not asking the right questions. How did we get to the first folio? What happened before the first folio, if anything significant?

What was it at this place? He would write a draft. If the draft was then legible, it was sent straight to the censor. If it was not legible, and Shakespeare's handwriting seemed to have been rather sloppy. It was then recopied into what we call fair copy. It was then read by the censor. He would make changes. After he made the changes, it went to the company Bookkeeper, what we now call a prompter.

He would make further changes. that text or some version of it would get printed. So behind the first folio text we could have, in some cases, file papers, in some cases a transcription, in some cases a company prompt book. Right. So you've got all this stuff, but none of it remains, except in your opinion, or in some of these people's opinion, a little bit from a play on Thomas Marr. The rest, none of the rest is extant, right? Not in manuscript form, correct. That's right. So why do you think that this

bit of, what's your case for the, the, the, the, small part of the play Thomas Moore surviving. Well, there are a couple of ways to examine the Thomas Moore. One is to look at the handwriting. The other handwriting that survives and Catherine can correct me may strictly be signatures on wills and various other

documents like that. We don't have a sort of prose tract or a poetic tract written in his hand. The handwriting seems to be similar, but I also think what's in the Thomas Moore edition, this is an addition to a play that couldn't get past the censor, is very much stylistically like Shakespeare's. It also has

number of what I call interlinear revisions or corrections, showing that as Shakespeare was writing or recopping, he was making corrections. To me, this suits the kind of way Shakespeare was working. Catherine Duncan Jones, if this piece of Thomas Moore is in Shakespeare's handwriting, what does that diluminate for us? Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree with grace because I'm a complete skeptic about that Thomas More fragment being in Shakespeare's hand. In my view, seven very late signatures with the only words other than William Shakespeare that we have in Shakespeare's hand

being the two words by me, which only have four letters in them. In my view, we don't have a long enough specimen of Shakespeare's hand to verify any other hand as being his. So I'm afraid in my belief we do not have any manuscript in Shakespeare's own hand. And what Grace was saying in favour of the Thomas Moore manuscript

being corrected, apparently authorially, it seems to me actually not to square with what Heming and Condal say about Shakespeare's writing practice, with which, I mean, John Heming's case, Shakespeare's colleague possibly for 25 years, at least if they were in the Queen's men together

in the late 1580s, he says, we do not remember to have received from him a blot in his papers. His mind and his hand went together with such readiness. Sorry, that's paraphrasing, not perfect quotation. The external evidence we have from people who were very familiar with Shakespeare's texts, that is Hemingman Condal,

is that he was a very fluent writer, didn't do much, crossing out, deleting, correcting, interlineating. So that actually circumstantially seems to me a point against the Thomas More fragment rather than a point in favour of its being by Shakespeare. Do you want to comment on that, John Sutherland? I'd like to think it was Shakespeare

because, in fact, it's very nice to have this kind of apostolic link. But I do think that Shakespeare, one of the nice things about Shakespeare is this kind of, you know, what Catherine referred to, this kind of extraordinary fluency and really, you know, to some extent, sort of transcendent indifference. If you compare him to someone like Ben Johnson, for instance,

who really did think about his kind of reputation in posterity and did prepare his works for print, Shakespeare seems not to have cared too much about that. I mean, he seems not to, as it were, sort of really worried too much about his progeny after it had left his pen. Johnson did prompt him, as we were told that because Johnson published in 1616 and people thought what a vain chap he was, but nevertheless it worked, as it were,

because of that Shakespeare's first failure was undertaken. It's quite interesting. I mean, a biography which may be stink in Catherine's nostrils, which I like quite a lot, Anthony Holden's life of Shakespeare, I mean, Holden's a journalist, and decided he's got the kind of journalist's ability to create a story. And he does, in fact, flesh out, I think, very interestingly, the, you know, this kind of putative relationship between Johnson and Shakespeare, the two very different men, you know, both of them, geniuses,

of, you know, very quite extraordinary different kind. Yeah, but coming together and to some extent sort of, you know, coming together at two mighty streets into great confluence. And I suspect that I wish, in fact, for scholarship's sake, that there'd been a bit more of Ben Johnson in Shakespeare. I suppose Johnsonians may wish that there'd been a bit more of kind of Shakespearean 11 in Johnson. Well, let's talk about collaboration and adulteration.

And I'll start, Graciopolo, with one of Shakespeare's contemporary's Robert green, he took us what seems to be a swipe at Shakespeare in his book, A Grotsworth of Witt, where he wrote, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you. This seems to be saying that Shakespeare took other people's work and touched it up. Is that what it seems to be saying to you? It does, and in fact Shakespeare made fun of that line. I think in Hamlet, when he has Polonius say beautified, that's a viable, phrase. Shakespeare, like any other dramatist, we have to start putting Shakespeare into the context

of his dramatic enterprise. He's not unusual. Like any other dramatist, he is writing on occasion with other people. We think he probably started his career writing with other authors, particularly two and three, Henry the Six, were collaboratively written. This would not be unusual. It also doesn't mean there's something wrong with Shakespeare to think that he collaborated. It's a normal part of the working process. So early in his career, and I think late in his career, most people argue that, for example, two noble kinsman or Henry the 8th was co-written with Fletcher. So at the beginning of his career, in the end of his career, he was collaborating. For the bulk of his career, I think he was working alone. You can get this evidence from internal evidence of the text.

We do stylistic studies, what we call orthographic studies. There are various kinds of things. We look not just at the folio text, but the quarto text. Some of the quarto text were printed from Shakespeare's, what we think were foul. papers. So we can look at the way Shakespeare wrote how he spelled, for example, what kind of words he preferred to use, and then we can look for this kind of evidence in other texts. I'm intrigued by the use of the word crow, if there's an upstart crow. What does that mean for you? I don't, can you decode that? It means he's a base bird. All right. He's a, I mean, one, I'm afraid, very pedantic academic thing. Whoever wrote

that attack, it was not, I think, Robert Green, who was deeply dead by the state, the authors of that attack were using a very ill trick. If you libel, the dead cannot be libeled, the dead cannot utter libel. If a very prolific author dies, it's extremely convenient then to write something as if in his voice found in his study. He can't be brought to account because he's well dead and buried. I think it was Thomas Nash who wrote that attack, who was a graduate playwright and possibly had a hand in one Henry 6 with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's posthumously drawn some perhaps rather unwanted collaborators. Why did people like Dryden in the 18th century feel that Shakespeare needed re-referreder? writing John Sutherland? Well, I think for the same reason that Tom Stoppard writes Shakespeare in love, you know, that in fact, you know, great, great genius that attracted to great genius. Actually, I've got a great sympathy for improved Shakespeare, so-called, and I think, you know, I think all for love. But in Shakespeare in Stoppard isn't rewriting Shakespeare,

is writing a film about the life of Shakespeare, and he's writing a life of our times. I mean, his Shakespeare is very different. His take on the idea, Shakespeare as well is very different from that of, say, Olivier's, but he isn't writing, he isn't rewriting a play, John. Well, it depends. I mean, one of the experiences, which in fact, I suppose, you know,

sort of determined my later career was seeing Olivier's Hamlet. Now, if you look at the text of Olivia's Hamlet, it is brutally cut about. Not only that, is this superimposing of this is the story of a man who could not make up his mind. I mean, it's a terrific sort of, as it were, sort of improvement

may be the wrong word, but there's, you know, there is, in fact, a kind of almost vandalistic sort of interference with, you know, what one might think of was the sanctity of the Shakespearean text. I don't resent that at all. I think, you know, I think Olivier did, in fact, our culture a huge favour by taking the great risk of, you know, putting Hamlet into a cinema, which was a popular, at that time, a kind of popular place of entertainment. But Shakespeare's text wasn't even sanctified in his own time. We know that the plays took about two hours to perform if we can trust Shakespeare, for example,

in Romeo and Julia. So Shakespeare's own text, which run three or four hours now, were obviously cut during his period. But you must have sat through the whole, I mean, the Brana Hamlet, which in fact is a bladder-straining experience. I mean, to some extent, one really does reach, it seems to me, from the, you know, the sheer. But that's a modern sanctification. In Shakespeare's time, they wouldn't have sanctified the text. And part of the problem in the 18th century was they didn't care for the moral or the personal messages that they got from Shakespeare's text. They were particularly upset about the body language. So one of the reasons they improved Shakespeare was to remove anything that can be considered body

or what makes Shakespeare look less than exalted. But they're also worried at different periods about Shakespeare being too grim. Neon Tate's version of King Lear has Cordelia marrying Edgar and King Lear back in the throat and all ending happily ever after. This was endorsed by Samuel Johnson later on in that century. What's your view on that, Catherine? Went on being played for about on for 50 years in that. form people knew no other in the theatre. I think it's extremely understandable. Shatesbury himself

was giving the play a shock ending, the old play of King Lear on which it's based, ends with a saccharine happy ending with Leo and Cordelia alive and Lear making a nice little thank you speech like the Vicarate a village fate, thanking all the people who've been so kind to him during his troubles and saying what a good thing it is. His nasty daughters' husbands have been defeated and going off for a nice convalescent holiday in France with Cordelia and his son-in-law, the King of France, and everything is as merry as can be. Shakespeare, I think, was rewriting the play

for all sorts of reasons, but I think one of the things he wanted to achieve was extreme shock for the audience who thought they knew this story extremely well from many sources, including the old play, and in all of the sources, Cordelia outlives her father. When

Leo comes in bearing the body of his youngest daughter, and longs to believe that she's alive. The first audiences, including perhaps the court audience in Christmas, 1605 to 6, were also, they shared that long. She must be alive. She must be alive. She reigns for another five years.

She ends committing suicide, but that's another story. It's Lear who should die, but Cordelia should be alive at the end of the play. It must have been a terrible shock. And I think the Tate version answers to an audience need to find some comfort, which Shakespeare refuses to provide. The confusion or the difficulty about these texts has made it a forger's delight. And there was a huge, I mean, many forging scandals. Can you tell us about the big scandal in the romantic era, Grace, Gophler?

Well, there was a very well-known and distinguished Shakespearean critic named John Payne Collier, also a journalist, as a matter of fact, and a lawyer who badmouthed his own profession, found no welcome there. He worked for many years as a Shakespearean scholar. He had access to numerous fantastic libraries like Dulwich College, Bridgewaterhouse Library and became very familiar with texts that no one else had seen.

He did an addition of Shakespeare in about 1842 to 1844, which got, I would imagine, some attention. But he decided in 1852 that he had purchased a second folio, 1632, with an inscription that said Thomas Perkins' book, which meant that this particular folio had been owned by a member of Shepard.

Shakespeare's acting company. So he announced in 1852 in a letter, in fact, to the newspaper that he had found this great new edition, that it had been annotated by someone in Shakespeare's acting company, and he then proceeded to do his own new edition of Shakespeare. Of course, he caused a great controversy because most of the people who examined it finally got to examine the folio, realized it had been, in fact, forged. It was finally subjected to inquiry by the British Museum. And I think Collier was so desperate to get some attention in the age, especially in the romantic age, everyone was talking about Shakespeare, particularly Coleridge.

And I think Collier felt he had to make a name for himself. But after his death, his library was investigated and many things were found to be forgeries. And because he had so much to do with so many books, as I understand it, he was rather like a virus through Shakespeare studies that very, a lot of texts became suspect. Is that right, Catherine? We're still living with the damage that Collier did,

and I don't know whether it will ever be. completely untangled. I mean the problem, bad forgerers are not a problem, bad, clumsy, obvious ones like some of the 18th century ones like Ireland, for instance, who had no idea about Elizabethan spelling or handwriting and imagined that the sender of a letter might still have the letter he sent rather than the recipient having it. Collier was a very, very good scholar, a man of enormous learning and reading, unfortunately, and had friends among scholars who entirely trusted him, some of them entirely trusted him at his dying day, who gave him help. He was extremely good, brilliant in fact, at identifying the gap, as it were, the gap

in the data, the gap in the record, the things we would most like to have as evidence about Shakespeare and his texts, and he would supply those gaps. And I do actually think we are probably still living with some collier material that has not been, but it is suspect, but has never been absolutely clearly identified as false. Can we move on to the conspiracy and the attribution? John Son, I kicked off the program by Henry James Remark, and he also said, I'm haunted by the conviction that the Divine William is the biggest, most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.

And we have the Oxfordian Society claiming Edward DeVira at the plays, and the theories that claim it was Marlowe, the theories that claim it was bacon, and a lot of these are taken very, very seriously indeed. Can you give us your overview as to why people want other people to have written the plays? Well, I think, I mean, obviously, you know, the kind of the perennial sort of issue of British class comes into it,

that to some extent, you know, Shakespeare doesn't have the right to be Shakespeare. Again, the quotation from Henry James is rather interesting. Even James says, you know, this man is such a genius, that we can't even understand his genius. He slinks past, he says. He won't, in fact, stay for an answer. But the, what interests me, I mean, I think probably there is a kind of sort of centrifugal, which actually really literally makes people mad.

I think there is a lot of mania about Shakespeare. And the Oxfordians, for one, do play very, very dirty. I mean, I had a colleague in America, very kind of intelligent Shakespearean, who wrote a rather kind of funny, jokey piece about the Oxford theory. Because Oxford died before, in fact, Shakespeare was finished with his playwright and Chris. I mean, the whole thing is, I think, preposterous. But in fact, this colleague of mine wrote this piece,

and the Oxfordians actually wrote to the president of the college demanding that she'd be fired and threatening the endowment of the college. They would actually do their best to make sure that this institution got less funds. And it was a real kind of hardball. I mean, did you get fined? Well, no.

I mean, there would have been a counter suit, I think, which would, I mean, the lawyers, all of whom Shakespeare wanted to kill them, of course, the lawyers would have made themselves very rich. But it was just how serious this has become. I mean, I don't know what my two colleagues here think, but I think it is almost a kind of comedy in its own right now. I mean, the Stratfordians versus the anti-Stratfordians.

And the Bacons, I don't know whether they're a society or what sort of organization. They've all of one in Brighton. They persevered, don't they? What's your view of this, Catherine? I think it's complete madness. It's all the trouble, it's all the fault of those romantic. If anyone had them and never had the cult of genius

and the free-standing artist who has to be. a great man who writes about himself, this problem wouldn't have arisen of people wanting to know things about an Elizabethan Jacobian dramatist that just aren't the kind of things that we do know about Elizabethan Jacobian dramatists. And, of course, the best documented people

in the English Renaissance are aristocrats. And wanting Shakespeare's, the plays by the man from the Midlands to have been written by an aristocrat or a well-educated Toff like Francis Bacon is wanting to move. It's rather going back to where you're beginning, Melvin, the documentary record, wanting to move, connect these works with a good collection of records

rather than have them in this rather place where the wind is blowing rather coldly, where we really don't have lots of data that we would like to have because Shakespeare didn't belong to the social class or the kind of institution, like a college, for instance, had he been at university, that leaves a good body of records behind. There is a great absence of records and attributing the plays by the man from the Midlands to, an aristocrat moves them into an area which is much better documented, and somehow people feel happier with that. One of the many reasons that presuppets me entirely that the man called William Shakespeare from Stratford-Avon-Avon did write the plays attributed to him by his colleagues,

who knew him very well, and that is the figure of Ben Johnson, whom we mentioned already, who was what an aunt of mine would have called a Haiti friend of Shakespeare, that is, they were sort of friends, enemies, rivals, went in for a lot of mutual biffing and yet actually rather admired each other, if Johnson had at any moment suspected that Shakespeare was palming off, claiming to have written plays that were really written by the people, he would have been quick as a flash to say so. Johnson had a longer life than Shakespeare and became a kind of cult figure

and well documented in his cups. He would certainly have said, and by the way, he didn't write, he never wrote Hamlet. One of these aristocrats that I know wrote it, Johnson would have been very quick to allege that. if it was even a rumor around in the world that Johnson and Shakespeare inhabited, he never said no contemporary of Shakespeare's ever alleged that the man from the Midlands did not write the works that he's alleged to have written,

and I really think that, for me, that resolves all doubt. Does this come out, and does this stem somehow from another point that you make, John Sutherland, which is that Shakespeare was very much a professional man of the theatre? You say the first person to make his living from his pen, the first literary figure to make his living from his pen, and that very professionalism, about going about it, running the theatre, acting, and, you know, is wanting the money, keeping on acting, because that's where the money was, and so on and so forth.

That this was rather distasteful. I think so, and I think probably that's part, I mean, I mean, it seems to me extraordinary that a figure like Coleridge probably never saw a production of King Lear. I'm right now, when you think this is our major sort of, you know, this is the man who said, I have a smack of Hamlet in me, the man that gave us the phrase motiveless malignity. You know, probably, you know, with Johnson,

one of the greatest Shakespeare critics and he never saw the great works on stage. And it seems to me that that's where the energy should go. That's what the Shakespeare industry should be working on to some extent. But this business of the two Shakespeare, is the Shakespeare on the page and Shakespeare on the screen and stage, is that the Shakespeare on the screen and the stage seems to be thriving. Now, there are real anxieties among certain people I've talked to,

that Shakespeare on the page is becoming more difficult to reach for people at school and they're less willing to reach out to that. Is that true? I think that's true at all. We now have Shakespeare on CD-ROM. I just purchased an addition from the U.S. Shakespeare is more accessible than ever. You have Shakespeare on the internet and number of Shakespeare sites. In fact, my students are constantly asking me

for good Shakespeare sites. I think the problem is with the academic view of Shakespeare, we force it on our students and we make Shakespeare something that intimidates them and something that frightens them. I think the best way to start with Shakespeare is to go to the theater and watch, whether it's the Globe or the RSC,

because if you watch Shakespeare without an instructor saying to you, this is really difficult language, and you don't understand what this means here, so I have to tell you, if you watch Shakespeare, you understand Shakespeare. I'm sorry, and we didn't get round to the plays. He might have written that we don't have. Scores, according to you.

That's a tantaliser. Thank you very much. Catherine Duncan Jones, Sir John Sutherland, and Gracieopolo, and thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.com.