Short History Of... - Shakespeare

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

No single writer has shaped the way we speak and think more than William Shakespeare. Whether we’re being cruel to be kind, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, or spotting the green eye’d monster ��� it’s almost impossible to use the English language without quoting him. But who was Shakespeare? What vaulting ambition drove a young writer from a sleepy town to stardom in London? Was he born great or did he have greatness thrust upon him? This is a Short History of William Shakespeare. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Dr Anjna Chouhan, Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's early summer in 1593. A man hurries along a cobbled alleyway beside the River Thames in London. He passes shops and market stalls, preachers on pedestals, scurvy children and stylish gentlefolk. There are cats underfoot and a bear tied up by a chain. The alleyways that wind their way to St. Paul's Cathedral form the social grapevine of London. This district, known as St. Paul's Churchyard, is a cultural melting pot, where people come to see and be seen, hear the latest news, and buy books. That's why this man is here today. He's seeking one very special publication. He reads the posters pasted up on every wall

advertisements for poetry bibles drama not advertised but available under the counter there is also atheist literature works of satire and gossip pamphlets of an erotic nature that cost the same as a beef supper in a tavern. But the man is seeking a respectable bookseller. Turning down a lane lined with shops, he scans the bowed glass windows for a hanging sign showing a picture of a white greyhound. This symbol is used by a printer called Richard Field from Stratford-upon-Avon. When the man finds the sign,

there is a knot of people gathered beneath it outside the shop. It looks like the new publication is proving popular. He enters and lifts a copy of the new pamphlet from a wooden box placed prominently on a table inside the door. It is a quarto, one sheet folded cleverly into four to make a simple book. one sheet folded cleverly into four to make a simple book. He brushes his fingertips across an ornate title page that says Venus and Adonis. His name is not on the cover, but like any writer before or since, he's excited to see his work in print. A gentleman pushes past to reach the counter,

quickly hands over a couple of coins and hides a copy of the work in the inside pocket of his doublet before striding out of the shop. The writer smiles to himself. Because he's also an actor and a playwright, he knows how to entertain a crowd. A drama needs violence, humor, or lust. Tell a bone-dry story on a London stage and you'll get pelted with apples. But sex sells. And it looks like this sexy new version of this Greek tale is the talk of the town. Just then, the bookseller recognizes the writer. He ostentatiously drags him to stand beside the table of pamphlets, and he informs the

next buyer, a young lady, that she is in the company of the author, Mr. William Shakespeare. The lady frowns as though the name is familiar. She asks if he has written anything else she might have read. William explains this is his first publication, but perhaps she frequents the theatre. He has written a number of plays. Impressed, she pulls out a coin and pays for a copy. Dropping the bookseller a wink, Shakespeare accompanies her onto the street. As they stroll back towards St. Paul's Cathedral, the lady complains that whenever she comes to town the theatres seem to be shut for the plague,

and her husband prefers the bear baiting and cockfighting. But who knows, if he enjoys this quarto, then perhaps she can persuade her husband to see one of his shows. Shakespeare lifts his hat in gratitude and bids her farewell. One more reader, one more theatre-goer. One by one, Mr. William Shakespeare intends to make a name for himself. The epic poem Venus and Adonis proves to be Shakespeare's best-selling publication in his own lifetime. It is his lockdown project, written while the theatres are closed by the plague. But in time, its fame will be eclipsed by his plays and sonnets. No single writer has shaped the way we speak and think more than William Shakespeare.

From bad dreams to good books, from a pound of flesh to a noble heart, from star-crossed lovers to the green-eyed monster. Four hundred years after the man we know as the Bard shuffled off this mortal coil, every English speaker carries his DNA in their words. But who was Shakespeare? What vaulting ambition drove a young writer from sleepy Stratford to stardom in London? Was he born great, or did he have greatness thrust upon him? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of William Shakespeare. In The Tempest, one of the plays written later in his life, Shakespeare muses that what is past is now prologue. But the prologue of his own fame is largely unwritten. We know very little about Shakespeare's childhood

beyond where and when his story starts. On April the 26th, 1564, a curate at the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon is updating the register of births, deaths, and marriages. He writes in Latin in a leather-bound book, meticulously tracing ornate calligraphy with a quill. Stratford is a substantial market town about 100 miles northwest of London.

Its large church is the center of the community for miles around, and the vicar is kept busy. On this day, he notes the baptism of a newborn baby boy called Guglielmus Filius Johannes Shakespeare. Guglielmus is the Latinized version of a common English name, William. Filius Johannes Shakespeare means son of John Shakespeare. As the registrar blots the ink, little as you know that in decades to come another hand will draw three small stars in the margin of this ledger to highlight the

significance of this simple entry. Baby William is not born on April the 26th. There is no record of his actual birth date, but baptisms tend to be carried out quickly because of the high mortality rate, no more than three days after the delivery. So the birthday of William Shakespeare is generally celebrated on the 23rd of April, which also happens to be the national day of St. George, the patron saint of England. William lives with his father and his mother, Mary Arden, in a large property on Henley Street in the heart of Stratford, close to the River Avon. That house will stay in the family for generations until it is turned into a museum, run now by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Dr. Anjana Chuan is Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the Trust. So what we know about Shakespeare's early years is gleaned from documents we have primarily about his father, John. I like to sort of refer to him as the Del Boy of Stratford.

And he was really up and coming throughout the 1550s all the way to the late 1560s, which doesn't sound very long, but that had a material effect on young William, who was born in 1564. So John is found in records owning property on Henley Street in Stratford and on Greenhill Street. So that's two properties. That's pretty impressive for someone who descends from essentially farming stock. And then he turns up in civic records because he takes on lots of civic duty within the town itself. So he takes on the role of constable, which I think is wonderful because it reminds me of the roles of constable in some of Shakespeare's plays. Much Do About Nothing, for instance, and Measure for Measure. And the constables are always sort of bumbling fools and maybe or maybe that doesn't tell us something about John Shakespeare.

And eventually, he gets voted the High Bailiff of Stratford for a short while at the end of the 1560s. So this means that he's a very, very respectable gentleman at the time with a degree of power. And that entitles his children, his sons in particular, to a place at the King's High School, which was in town itself next to the Guildhall. So the school itself was incredibly respectable. And it was taught at by masters from Oxford, for example. So young William would have attended the King's High School for six days a week. We know that he will have studied Latin and rhetoric and Greek, and in particular, great Roman writers and poets like Ovid. And all of those writers had an enormous impact on William Shakespeare's own writing later in his life.

When William is still a youth, his father falls from grace. John Shakespeare has fingers in many pies, but his primary trade is as a glover and witower, or leather worker. Henley Street is home to William and his four siblings, but its large backyard is a place of work, where apprentices learn their skills. There's a tannery, too, where the leather is treated, plus space for chickens, pigs, and a market garden where produce is grown. But it's in Stratford's bustling market that John Shakespeare is caught and prosecuted for usury or money lending. He's also fined for hoarding stocks of wool, essentially creating a shortage to inflate its price at market. John Shakespeare was a bit of a wheeler-dealer. So you have young William

picking up all the shrewdness of his father as well. And I think what becomes clear in this period is that John has a particular sort of ambitious side, so he very much wants to be seen as a gentleman. And so young William is picking up on all of this and it's having a huge impact on the way in which he is positioning himself, obviously as a young man, but much later in life when he acquires this wealth in order to be able to invest that very wisely, as his father would have liked to do had he not fallen upon hard times in around about the 1570s. The Shakespeare family survive the father's disgrace, but then fortune slings her arrows again. In November 1582, William marries a woman called Anne Hathaway. She is 26, around the average age for a bride at this time, but Shakespeare is only 18.

In the eyes of the law, a man under the age of 21 must get the permission of his father to wed. Once that is secured, William hastily arranges a ceremony under special license from the Bishop of Worcester. The reason for the hurry is revealed in parish records. Six months after their wedding, a child is born to William and Anne Shakespeare. The baby is baptized at the Holy Trinity Church, where the entry in the register notes that she is called Susanna. But as a family man

with responsibilities, the opportunities open to William are now limited. He is unable to go to university or take up an apprenticeship, as these are only open to single men. an apprenticeship as these are only open to single men. The Shakespeare's went on to have more children and William had a good life with Anne Hathaway and he bought her a beautiful house. They raised a good family. It wasn't entirely unusual for couples to wed once they had conceived. It wasn't enormously unusual at the time. What would often happen is couples would exchange a sort of informal vow and they may have even performed a ceremony such as a hand-firsting, this really beautiful ritual that a couple goes through to declare their love. However, in church

law that isn't official or indeed in the eyes of the law of the land. And so you have to go through a more formal process of signing contracts and licenses, etc. But this was a very common way of people exchanging vows, and it's something Shakespeare writes about in some of his plays as well. For example, in Measure for Measure, you have the characters of Juliet and Claudio, who are first married, he tells us, that basically they're betrothed and they consummate their betrothal because they believe they're going to get married any day. And so you have this play that's all about the fallout

between the law and actual civic practice and the ways in which the law might seem a little harsh by extension. On the 2nd of February, 1585, the curate at the Holy Trinity Church once again picks up the leather-bound parish register and dips his quill in a pot of black ink. Another baptism, this time of twins. He writes the names Hamonet and Judith, son and daughter of… but then he runs out of room and the long name of Shakespeare gets squashed into the margin.

Another eleven years pass before the name features in the register again, but this time it is in the column under burials. One of the twins, Shakespeare's only son, dies young. It is not known what kills Hamonet at the age of eleven, or whether his father is able to attend his funeral. Because by then, Shakespeare is parted from his family by his work in London. How and why William moves from Stratford to London is a mystery. One story says he flees after illegally poaching a deer from the grounds of a nearby country house. Some say that during these lost years he works as a schoolmaster or helps his father in the family business.

Others suggest he works for the publisher Richard Field at his White Greyhound bookshop at St. Paul's Churchyard in London. Or perhaps Shakespeare joins one of the companies of travelling players who perform in Stratford. But as London is the only town with permanent theatres, like many a performer dreaming of fame and fortune, it's there that William is magnetically drawn. it's there that William is magnetically drawn. Exactly when Shakespeare first puts pen to paper is lost to history. But by the age of 28, he has done enough to inspire envy among less successful authors. At this time, satirical pamphlets are popular with the elite set in London,

where public figures are lampooned in thinly veiled vignettes. In 1592, a pamphlet is published called A Groatsworth of Wit, written by the dramatist Robert Greene on his deathbed. It ridicules a fellow writer who is given the nickname Shake Scene and scathingly called an upstart crow. It is clear from the bitter tirade that the man from Stratford has burst onto the literary scene of London. I think he's starting writing as he's learning how to act.

He turns up in records in London, early 1590s, where he's referred to as an upstart crow. He was described this way by Robert Greene in 1592, as this tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide. It's incredibly sort of snooty, really, that this player can just turn up and think that he can write. However, it's possible that William Shakespeare started writing when he was performing with other companies, learning the tricks of the trade, watching how the actors perform, how they learn their lines, what works with audiences, what sorts of things audiences want to see those kinds of stories. The fact that audiences throughout the 1590s absolutely loved all the kind of violence that came with all the stabbing and the tragedies, but they also loved history plays. So you have a young writer who's learning the tastes of his audience and adapting them for himself. So the first play that turns up in print, or the first plays rather, are Henry VI Part II and Titus Andronicus which really speak to those appetites

for histories and for incredibly violent revenge drama. I think it does also tell us a lot about audience tastes and the way they change in the very fact that he never wrote a play like Titus ever again you know that nobody eats human beings in any of his other plays and I think this is probably quite an extreme coming out statement. You know, my first tragedy is going to be this enormously vomit-inducing, visceral, violent play. But I think it made a name. It definitely made a name for him.

And let him get a foot in the door. It's a bright September day in 1596, and William Shakespeare is making his way along Curtin Road in Shoreditch. This part of the East End is known as the Suburb of Sin. Its streets lined with brothels, gaming houses and taverns. Touts call out as he passes, offering tickets for bear baiting and cockfighting. But Shakespeare isn't in the mood. Recently he received dreadful news from home about the death of his beloved Hamnet. Though he's used to being far from his family,

needing to work in London to support them, it's hard not to be consumed by heart sickness. Shakespeare forces thoughts of home away as he arrives at the theatre. He enters by the stage door and stops a moment in the central yard where the roof is open to the sky. They'll get a good crowd on a fine day. Over a thousand people can cram inside if they're lucky. The audience starts to arrive. Some pay a penny to stand on ground level in front of the stage. Others hand over tuppence to watch from covered stalls that encircle the theatre. For three pence, the more well-to-do

theatregoers climb to an upper level where there is less shouting and throwing of fruit. As the theatre fills, food sellers do the rounds, offering nuts, hunks of bread, even platters of oysters and periwinkles. In this thriving entertainment district, theatres are more lucrative than a marketplace, and Shakespeare and his fellow writers can hardly produce plays quickly enough to keep up with demand. This is their sixth show of the week. A performance of Romeo and Juliet, a new play that has proved popular. The actors stride onto the stage, and at first the audience seem more interested in their snacks and conversations.

But as the first scene begins, they fall under its spell and a hush descends. Soon, the balcony scene takes place, with Juliet standing high amid the audience overlooking the stalls. Later, she comes down onto a stage that thrusts out into the yard, complete with a trapdoor to act as the tomb where the star-crossed lovers meet their fate. The crowd is silent now, mesmerized as Juliet falls on her knife. The young boy who plays the part of the doomed girl is one of the company's best. Watching from the wings, Shakespeare realizes he has tears running down his face. His play is about the intensity of young love, how it balances on a fulcrum that may swing to comedy or tragedy. He thinks of his wife, Anne,

and how their intense passion saw them married young, risking everything to be together, how it brought them the joy of children, and now the woe of a lost son. On stage, Juliet's father turns to the audience to deliver the play's most heartfelt speech, though when he first scratched it onto parchment, Shakespeare could hardly know how it would prove to be a prophecy of his own loss. Death lies on her like an untimely frost, upon the sweetest flower of all the field. Despite his grief, the 1590s proved prolific for Shakespeare. He writes great histories, like his trilogy on Henry VI, Richard III, and Julius Caesar. There are romantic comedies too, like Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. A Midsummer Night's Dream becomes a favorite of

Queen Elizabeth I, who calls for a performance at court. But towards the end of the 16th century, the theatre playhouse in Shoreditch is forced to close. It is owned by the family of William's friend and fellow actor Richard Burbage, but they are unable to renew the lease on the land where the building stands. So they take down the building, timber by timber, and put it into storage. Then they come up with an innovative solution.

If the building can't stay, they'll just move it. Shakespeare is among several entrepreneurs who invest 10 pounds for a stake in a lease on a new plot by the South Bank of the Thames, on the opposite side of the river from St. Paul's Cathedral. The timber frame of the theater is shipped up the river and resurrected as the Globe.

The new playhouse is round, encircling a central yard that is once again open to the daylight and the elements. It is made of timber with a thatched roof. In 1599, the Globe opens to great fanfare with a performance of Shakespeare's latest hit, Julius Caesar. By now it's here, in the Bankside area, where Londoners and tourists go to see the sights and to be seen.

You've got a lot of plays to choose from if you're an audience member, particularly in the first instance in Shoreditch, where the theatre is and eventually the curtain is. So the two playhouses are very, very close to each other with rival repertoires in rival companies, the Lord Chamberlain's men and the Admiral's men competing for those audiences. So if you want to see a play, you could go there. Usually, rather than the evening, it's going to be afternoon, probably about two o'clock in the afternoon. You really need daylight. And you don't want to be risking the lighting of candles or people carrying fire around your beautiful thatched building. So daylight is really when you're hearing a play. So if you go off and hear one, you might also go to see some bear baiting.

This is an incredibly popular sport, the bear house. You're very likely to find yourself in a tavern. The tabardin is something that was referenced by Chaucer. It's where all the pilgrims meet at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales. And we actually know that Shakespeare and some of the company frequented that tavern because there's an anecdote about him having etched his name into some furniture there, along with Richard Burbage and some of the other actors. There were pleasure gardens, the Paris Gardens in particular. And that leads us very neatly into the fact that essentially, down on the South Bank, the Globe in particular was situated in what was essentially the red

light district. There was a lot of prostitution around. So there were all kinds of things and forms of entertainment on offer if you had a free afternoon slash early evening in and around London. The Globe is a huge success for Shakespeare, both as a playwright and a businessman. His initial £10 investment pays dividends, and soon he is wealthy enough to buy a good family house in Stratford called New Place. Perhaps the house offers a new start for his wife Anne and his two surviving daughters after the loss of Hamnet. New Place is one of the most notable properties in town, a medieval hall built in the 1480s,

the biggest home in the borough and the only one with a courtyard. William fills it with artwork and uses its great hall for entertaining when he is home in Stratford. But his work demands that most of his time is spent in London. Known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, his theatre company has the exclusive right to perform his plays, as well as works by contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson. Demand is voracious, as London expands rapidly, with a population of 200,000 permanent residents and many more visitors. But its density is what makes it vulnerable to the plague. Throughout Shakespeare's career,

he is subject to regular periods of lockdown, known then as shut-ins. Theatres are closed to prevent the spread of disease. Unable to make money from ticket sales, he has to adapt. If you can pack up and go on the road and travel around, that's fantastic, especially if plague is only in the city at the time. You could travel around and make money that way. And we know that the company did travel. But we know that certainly early in his career,

1592 to 1593, for example, rather than writing plays, Shakespeare took to writing poetry. So he wrote The Rape of Lucrece, Venus and Adonis, which he published and they became incredibly popular and served him very well, in fact, because I think they helped to heighten his reputation as a serious, as a legitimate writer. And Venus and Adonis, I think in particular, because it's so cheeky. It's so naughty. It's hyper-sexualized and also has so many nods to classical literature. I mean, it is classical literature, but it's sort of salacious. And I think this just made him incredibly memorable as a writer. And so when it was time to come back to the playhouses and start writing theatre again, he almost certainly would have attracted new audiences. But also the plague was so bad at the time that they had this extended

period of closure. And I think it's really interesting that around this time, what Shakespeare is working on and what he ends up performing and what the company take to be performed at court is Measure for Measure, which is a play about a city really in decline. At the very start of it, you have a character who talks about the war, the sweat, the disease, and the gallows, and all the horrible things that are going on. And this sense that the people are desperate to just be free, to run around. And the way that's manifested in Measure for Measure is that everyone starts having sex all over the place. And it's about the legitimization, if you like, of the sex trade. It's a fascinating play, but it does have this really curious

connection back to the idea of being shut away and restrained. But King Lear, round about 1606, strained. But King Lear, round about 1606, another time of plague, is a play about the abandonment of hope. It really is a play that deals with the depths of despair. And I think that's the kind of subject matter that can only come from a period of lengthy contemplation and solitude. Now in the 21st century, lockdown was hard for us throughout the 1500s, early 1600s. It would have been devastating. Your proximity to death, I think, was so profound. And it's something that's incredibly manifest in the tragedy of King Lear. of King Lear. One particularly horrendous epidemic occurs in 1603 and lasts for over a year, killing a quarter of all Londoners.

Elizabeth's successor, James I, issues a directive known as a Book of Orders to combat the pandemic. Households must isolate for six weeks if one resident is sick. Anyone leaving has to mark their clothing with a symbol. Suggested treatments range from herbal remedies to bloodletting to breathing through rudimentary face masks made from handkerchiefs dipped in vinegar. In 1604, with London still in the grip of this plague, Shakespeare's company is elevated from the Lord Chamberlain's men to the King's men, under the patronage of the monarch. But theatres are closed for almost a year. Though the King's men perform at court at least eight

times, Shakespeare never stops writing, pouring his despair into King Lear and Macbeth. Alas, poor country, Shakespeare laments in the latter, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother, but our grave. In the summer of 1606, the players once more lower the flag at the Globe and lock its doors. If plague victims rise above a set number in a week, 30 to 40, then public venues must be shut. It is thought that Shakespeare's own landlady, the owner of his home on Silver Street, succumbs in October 1606. But his play, Macbeth, shows that Shakespeare has other matters on his mind. The story is flattering to his patron, King James,

the Scottish king, who ascends the English throne, but it is also full of ill omens. Something wicked this way comes, as he says. He writes Macbeth just a year after Catholic conspirators tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the King. In real life, the gunpowder plot involving Guy Fawkes is thwarted and the plotters are hung, drawn and quartered. In the fiction of Macbeth, a treasonous attempt to overthrow a Scottish king also ends in downfall. It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare makes public his support for King James. Not only is the monarch his patron, but more importantly, William's family connections risk dragging him into the spotlight of suspicion in the aftermath of the gunpowder plot. Its mastermind, Robert Catesby, was a family friend of John Shakespeare, and relatives on his maternal side had been executed for their part in an earlier conspiracy.

Plus, William himself frequented a tavern known as the Mermaid, where Fawkes, Catesby and the other plotters often met. Scholars argue that his masterpiece Macbeth reveals Shakespeare's position on political events through the prism of fiction, that the king is the legitimate monarch and usurpers must be punished. And when he writes, double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble, he is echoing his patron King James's dark obsession with witchcraft. Shakespeare is believed to have researched his weird sisters in detail, making sure their incantations are accurate. Eye of newt ande of Frog come from real 16th century spellbooks. Perhaps Shakespeare did his job too well. Legend has it that a coven of witches takes issue with

the negative depiction of their craft and curses the play. At its first performance, the actor playing Lady Macbeth dies suddenly, and Shakespeare has to step into the role for opening night. Then a real dagger is swapped for a stage prop that leads to the accidental death of the actor playing King Duncan. Productions throughout history are plagued by disasters and near misses. Many actors are suspicious about saying Macbeth to this day, referring to it instead as the Scottish play. Little is known about how Shakespeare writes, but his breadth of subject matter suggests he is a wide reader of source materials and books,

from histories to courtly life to sorcery. He may have had access to them via his friend, the publisher and white greyhound bookseller Richard Field, and his works would almost certainly have been written and rewritten on the fly. I think it's when the plays get performed and put on their feet that they start to take shape. And the process is interesting in as much as it's a lot more organic than we might assume or imagine. He knew exactly who he was writing these plays for, and therefore what the skill sets are of the individuals within it. So for example, Shakespeare worked all the time with his good friend and colleague, Richard Burbidge. And if you look at some of the lead roles across Shakespeare's canon,

think about Macbeth and Hamlet and Julius Caesar and Antony and Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus, all of these types of central figures. They have lots of things in common. For example, they don't really dance around and make fart jokes. They definitely don't sing. And this tells us a lot about Richard Burbage. He wasn't very good at doing those things. He was very good at standing in front of the audience, delivering monologues and drawing them into those moments. Think about Hamlet asking all those questions. Am I a coward? Who dares call me villain? And so think about those moments. Those were crafted for the actor. This is very much partner Shakespeare's process. On the same token, he knows exactly how many people in the company

are playing women, for instance, and maybe what they look like too. So for example, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we know we've got two women, Helena and Hermia, and they have physical traits as well. One is very tall and one is very short. And then in the comedy, As You Like It, we have Rosalind and Celia. And won't you know it, the same traits exist. Rosalind's very tall and Celia's very short. And this is referred to in the text as well. So you have this sense that part of the process is writing quite literally for the actors that are in front of him. It is the 29th of June, 1613.

At the Globe Theatre, a show is underway in front of a good crowd. The play is called All Is True, a story about Henry VIII. Shakespeare has high hopes for this one. After all, people can't get enough of England's most colorful king. But today, the audience seems restless, and some mutter that it is not Shakespeare's finest play. It was written in collaboration with a younger author, John Fletcher, and this has perhaps resulted in a disjointed script. On stage, Henry VIII marches into the home of Cardinal Wolsey. The scene is supposed to evoke his majesty, but the crowd only titters. A cannon fires to announce the arrival of the king.

A few women in the audience scream, but the scene plays on. But then people start to glance around, looking worried. It is now that Shakespeare smells smoke. He follows the gaze of the distracted crowd up to the thatched roof. It is on fire. Wadding from the cannon must have caught in the dry straw. At once there is pandemonium. Henry VIII shouts for calm, but he has no more authority in real life than he did in fiction. The crowd surges, and hundreds of people try to cram through two narrow doors to

escape. Flames race around the Ring of Thatch until it is all ablaze, and timbers catch fire in the stalls too. Burning clumps of straw fall onto the stage. One man howls in panic as his britches burst into flames before a quick-thinking friend douses him with beer. After a few terrifying minutes, the audience and players escape onto the bankside. There is no fire brigade, only leather buckets of water dragged from the Thames.

Everyone rolls up their sleeves and pitches in. But it is not enough. Within an hour, the Globe Theatre is burnt to the ground. The Globe is rebuilt within a year, but by this time in 1614, Shakespeare has retired to Stratford. Ironically, his hometown suffers its own great fire in the summer of that year, and 54 of its buildings are destroyed. Shakespeare's house at New Place is spared. He enjoys family life with his wife Anne, sharing the house with his daughter Susanna and her husband, a physician. Shakespeare is now a grandfather too. At 50 years old, he's the most celebrated writer of his generation, a multi-millionaire in today's parlance. Even with

the loss of the Globe, he receives a generous income from the company's playhouse at Blackfriars, which is the fashionable place to be seen. In more upmarket surroundings, with more expensive ticket prices, this indoor theatre attracts a respectable crowd, including ladies who wish to watch plays in comfort. In Stratford, Shakespeare occupies himself with business matters. Perhaps he still writes in collaboration with younger authors, encouraging the young blood, but his heyday is over. No one knows exactly how many plays Shakespeare writes in his lifetime. The figure accepted by the Royal Shakespeare Company is 38, but others are known to be lost, and there are scripts to which William may have contributed uncredited monologues or scenes. All is True, now known as Henry VIII, proves to be one of his last.

On the 25th of April, 1616, the curate at Holy Trinity Church once more picks up his ink pen to update the register. He notes a burial service for Will Shakespeare, gent. Again, the register is marked with an X in a later hand to highlight the significance of this entry. In death, Shakespeare achieves the social status of gentleman that eluded his father. It is not known where and how Shakespeare dies. He leaves a will dated January 1616, so it may be that he fell ill around this time. An inscription on a monument in the church says William Shakespeare died on April the 23rd, widely believed to be his birthday. Over the centuries, scholars have interpreted Shakespeare's will in the same way they look for subtext in his plays.

Some have suggested that he used his Last Testament to insult his wife, by leaving her what he refers to as his second-best bed. But scholars say that, in fact, the gesture reveals an affection between them. By law, a third of his estate would have passed to his wife, Anne Hathaway, or Anne Shakespeare at this point. But in it, he very famously leaves her his second best bed. And it is interesting that he mentions this bed very specifically, which suggests that there's some sentimental value attached to it. And it's very important to him that his wife keeps that. Perhaps it's something she brought with her as part of her dowry. Perhaps it was their marital bed.

We can speculate as much as we like, but it's very telling that he mentions both this object and his wife by name, which is pretty unusual. Some have also used Shakespeare's will to doubt his authorship of the plays and poems credited to his name. They ask why his will doesn't include a collection of books, when surely the true author must have had his own library. Some go back earlier in Shakespeare's life to question his credentials. They ask how a man who went to a provincial grammar school until the age of 14 and who never went to university could have acquired the wide knowledge displayed in the plays. Where did it come from, that wealth of learning about history, travel, languages, classics,

courtly life, food, medicine, and even niche subjects like falconry. Defenders of Shakespeare say he is, like many writers, a magpie who collects shiny details from the people he meets and his research. He could have learned about the monarchy in the same way that he studied witches' spells. He didn't have to be an aristocrat or a sorcerer to write those scenes. But controversy about the authorship of Shakespeare is evergreen. There are many schools of thought. Stratfordians believe in William Shakespeare. They say he wrote the works attributed to him and collaborated with other writers too. Oxfordians believe that a man named Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the true Shakespeare.

The argument goes that the aristocrat wrote under a pen name to protect his identity because he was a noble. The Marlovian camp believe that fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe is the true author. While it's believed that Marlowe died in a bar brawl long before many of Shakespeare's works first appeared on stage, they say Marlowe faked his own death to avoid prosecution for heresy. To keep up the pretense, he then wrote under the pseudonym of William Shakespeare.

Another candidate for authorship is Sir Francis Bacon, the aristocrat, not the 20th century artist. Yet another is Mary Sidney, a countess who supposedly used a male pen name because she couldn't produce plays as a woman. The claims and counterclaims go on. In more recent times, academics have used a digital mapping technique to shed light on the dispute. It tracks idiolect, which is like an author's fingerprint. Unique patterns of words, phrases, and sentence structure can tell writers apart. Even if one author is trying to write in the style of another, their personal idiolect gives them away. But there is still no definitive answer to the controversy,

and probably never will be, although it is now widely acknowledged that other contemporary writers did contribute to the works of Shakespeare. For example, a playwright called Thomas Middleton may have edited parts of Macbeth after Shakespeare died. Shakespeare's linguistic fingerprints also appear in works that have never been attributed to him. For example, scholars studying an obscure script held in the vaults of the British Library concluded that he may have added a scene to a play about the Tudor lawyer Sir Thomas More. The character gives an impassioned plea

in favour of refugees arriving in England from the continent. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs and their poor luggage plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, and that you sit as kings in your desires. There are other controversies about his work. Scholars deduce hidden meanings in his verses and try to find answers to the greatest literary question of all. Who inspired Shakespeare? Some argue that his frequent mention of a fair youth in the sonnets

suggests that he was gay and had a young male muse. Others argue that the fair youth refers to his lost son, Hamnet. In the sonnets, he also mentions a dark lady, a woman with curly hair and dun-colored skin. Is this dark lady the love of his life? Not Anne Hathaway, who kept his home fires burning back in Stratford, but a mysterious woman of colour who mesmerised Shakespeare in London. Academics have studied his works and the history books for centuries, trying to identify the Dark Lady. There are endless theories that she was an aristocrat he met at court, or a woman of African origin who owned a tavern. Or was she a prostitute or a fellow poet?

Maybe she was the performer who appeared on stage in 1601 under the name Lady Negro, or the French-born wife of his publisher Richard Field, with whom he had an affair. Aside from the many identities given to the Dark Lady, some argue instead that she is not a person at all, but a figment of his imagination, a poetic symbol of erotic love. All we know for sure is that in the aftermath of Shakespeare's death, his friends John Hemmings and Henry Condal spent years gathering together as many quartos and stage scripts of Shakespeare's play as they could find. Finally, in 1623, seven years after his death, a huge book is published as The First Folio.

It contains 36 plays and comes with a foreword from another of Shakespeare's friends, the fellow playwright Ben Johnson. He describes William as the soul of the age, the wonder of our stage. He was not of an age, but for all time. So the first folio is really significant because it keeps a record of at least half of Shakespeare's plays.

So there would be no other version of Macbeth. There's no other version of Measure for Measure Measure of Twelfth Night, for instance. It's interesting because we have so many lost plays, for example, Love's Labour's One, which isn't anywhere to be found in the first folio. But had that book not been made by Hemmings and Condell, we would be asking questions about Macbeth. We'd be thinking, oh, well, this is a lost play. It really is quite frightening to think that had they not made this enormous effort, this huge undertaking, you know, this brash enterprise of putting this book together, that we would be missing at least half of Shakespeare's plays.

As well as the cultural wealth of the plays, without the first folio our language itself would be denuded. It is impossible to list all the words and phrases we've inherited from Shakespeare. He is the man behind the phrases brave new world, seeds of time, dogs of war. Shakespeare warned us that a leopard does not change its spots, that all that glisters is not gold. These slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is a typical Shakespearean device, using a physical action to make an abstract idea more visceral and memorable. From Macbeth we get the be-all and end-all. Knock, knock, who's there? And come what may.

Hamlet tells us he must be cruel to be kind. Romeo and Juliet take us on a wild goose chase. Othello wears his heart upon his sleeve. Thanks to Shakespeare, we wait with bated breath. Say, it's all Greek to me. Have a heart of gold. Break the ice, melt into thin air, come full circle. It's almost impossible to speak the English language without quoting Shakespeare. As we approach the 400th anniversary of the publication of the 1623 first folio, Shakespeare's work remains as current and relevant as ever.

What matters is the play that we have left to us and the way that that inspires people today. You know, the fact that words from Macbeth find themselves in the Harry Potter films and that Hamlet's retold as the best Disney cartoon ever made, The Lion King. I do think that that's what matters. The legacy that these stories and these plays have and the language itself is so powerful and has such a profound effect, not just in terms of its literal vocabulary and phrases that we've inherited,

but the way in which these works characterize universalities of emotions, of feeling, of desires, but the power of the plays and their legacy that they've left with us is the way in which they capture what it means to be human. In the next episode of Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of Las Vegas. The mob actually, in the old days, worked very hard on the image. They didn't want people killed here,

and they were concerned with how TV networks portrayed them. There is certainly an attraction in the idea that there are questionable things going on here, while at the same time, you should feel safe here. They're not going to kill you. They were business people. They may have at one time had to do the dirty work, but they ran a business, and they ran it well, frankly. They built the strip. They also helped build the image. They also understood that if they were going to be successful, they needed to fly under the radar and not draw attention to themselves if they could help it. That's next time on Short History Of.