That Shakespeare Life

In the 1950s when Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was adapted into West Side Story , popular culture in the US resonated with the gang culture and street fighting depicted on stage because the brass knuckled "rumbles" taking place on streets like those in New York City were current events of the day. Turns out, historically, these gang fights were a real issue for Shakespeare's lifetime as well, an...

It seems even William Shakespeare had household floors to keep clean. While it likely wouldn't have been the actual William doing the majority of the sweeping in his household, one item the bard seems to have been familiar with through his nineteen uses of the word "sweep" and one use of the word "besom" across his works is the household broom used for sweeping floors. The bard uses "broom" at lea...

In Cymbeline , Act I Scene 1 Posthumus Leonatus says "I'll drink the words you send though ink be made of gall" and in Twelfth Night Sir Toby Belch calls attention to a particular kind of ink when he says "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen…" in Act III Scene 2. Both of these scenes from Shakespeare's plays are referencing the most popular kind of ink used in S...

Shakespeare mentions the word "crocodile" five times in his plays, but crocodiles not being native to England must have been introduced to the bard from outside his natural habitat there in London. The crocodile itself was well known in English literature, having been written about in association with Egypt and Africa by writers like Pliny the Elder centuries prior to Shakespeare. This particular...

In Elizabethan England, the basilisk was a feared and hateful creature, capable of killing someone with just a glance. Of the 8 references to basilisks in Shakespeare's plays, half of these invoke the reputation of being able to kill with a look. European bestiaries record the basilisk as a legendary serpent ruling as King of the reptiles and while the folklore far outpaces the science, recent his...

In Elizabethan England on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street was a fine dining and drinking establishment called the Mermaid Tavern. The building itself burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the legend of this storied tavern lives on through the records of people like Ben Jonson and 17th century travel writer Thomas Coryat, who wrote about the Mermaid Tavern in the early 1...

In 1588, one man named Tom Bright introduced an innovative new method for quickly writing down what you hear during a live performance, publishing a manual he called "Charactery." A term of Bright's own invention, Charactery is the first English version of an ancient method of shorthand dating back to the time of Cicero, that allowed anyone to pirate versions of live performance, provided they had...

In Elizabethan England two of the most popular forms of public entertainment were animal baiting and hunting. Bull and bear baiting happened in a dedicated arena while hunting was usually done on private lands or hunting parks where private, usually very elite, groups of people would gather for the hunt. What each of these sports has in common is they both employ use of dogs. Hunting dogs were rai...

Bull Ring market in Birmingham, England, UK was first known as Corn Cheaping because in the 12th century, which is when we have the first reference to Corn Cheaping, it was used as a corn market. Corn Cheaping had an iron ring setup on a grassy section of Corn Cheaping that was used as a bull baiting arena, where bulls who had been selected for slaughter would be tied and baited for entertainment...

As students of Shakespeare's lifetime, often we see the phrase "of certain status" to describe 16-17th century limitations on clothes, housing, and other material realities for various people. Particular if you study Elizabethan sumptuary laws, it seems like society was strictly controlled based on social status, and one's place in society was decided at birth, with little mobility allowed. The li...

In Elizabethan England, the Queen is immortalized in woodcuts that show her fondness for the sport of hawking. By the time James I comes to the throne in 1603, hawking is surpassed by a form of hunting called par force where animals like dogs and horses are used to round up prey. While the practical aspect of hunting animals for meat was utilized in these hunting expeditions, arguably the primary...

This week is Part 2 in our 2 part series on John Harington, the man who invented the first flush toilet in England. Our guest, Bob Cromwell, is back again this week to take us back to 16th century England and explore the exciting life of John Harington beyond his invention of the flush toilet. Harington was known as a literary figure, primarily for his translation of Orlando Furioso, and was a god...

According to an article on the Victoria and Albert Museum website, puppetry as an art form in Britain can be traced back over 600 years, with the first recorded puppet theater performance in London happening around 1600, when William Shakespeare was 36 years old. Medieval clergy used puppets to tell Bible stories, with one performance in 1599 at Coventry featuring a puppet version of the devil. Wh...

In Henry IV Part II , Shakespeare writes the earliest known reference to a Galloway Nag when Pistol he says "Know we not Galloway Nags?" That comes from Act II Scene 4. If you are not a 16th century Scotsman, however, the assumption that you know what a galloway nag is, or what it is suitable for Pistol in that scene, may not be as obvious as the character suggests. Turns out, in the 16th century,...

Walking across London Bridge seems like a merry trip for many, or perhaps even a dismissable part of the daily commute if you live in London today, and while travel across the bridge was a normal occurrence for William Shakespeare, as well, what was decidedly different for him is that it often featured heads of executed traitors displayed on the Southgate of London Bridge. Along with severed heads...

Surviving archaeological items from the first English settlements at Jamestown include intact chamber pots. One of these chamber pots was part of a 2009 exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, United States. These pots were brought over to the New World by 16-17th century colonists who, at the time, used chamber pots as essential items. However, when they arrived, the colonists...

There has been a bridge over the river Thames since the time of the Romans and the reign of Aethelred II, when the bridge was designed as a Saxon defense against the Danish. Since then, there have been at least 5 bridges either built, or repairs made to the predecessor, which have occupied the crossing of the Thames at London Bridge. The original structure we think of as the first London Bridge wa...

When medieval cartographers drew maps of the world they included mermaids among the fantastic ocean beasts that they believed roamed the waters of foreign lands. Professional explorers like Henry Hudson in 1608, described sighting a mermaid in the NOrthern Atlantic ocean, describing how the mermaid called to the men on his ship. Philosophers, physicians, and clergymen, all described, in detail, th...

The most memorable illustration of Robert Greene shows him dressed as an ear of corn, sitting at a desk, penning Groatsworth of Wit , his famous deathbed insult that calls William Shakespeare an "upstart crow." That upstart crow may have gone on to eclipse Robert Greene's fame in posterity, but for the moment in which those lines were written about the bard, Robert Greene was not only well establi...

Shakespeare uses the word "beard" in his plays over one hundred times, and almost always as a way to indicate a man's status, power, or authority. In Anthony and Cleopatra Caesar is referred to as "scarce bearded" as a slight against him by Cleopatra, several times the phrase "by my beard" is used in plays like Alls Well That Ends Well , as an oath, and in Henry V Gower refers to a specific style...

When telling about the Battle of Hastings, William Malmesbury wrote a description of the English ancestors, the Anglo Saxons, as having "arms covered with golden bracelets, tattooed with coloured patterns." The trend of tattooing oneself with coloured patterns seems to have fallen to the wayside by the time William Shakespeare was writing about skin used as parchment in Comedy of Errors, because t...

Ale was a popular drink in Shakespeare's London, due in part to the undrinkable nature of the water from the nearby Thames River. The fear of water and superstitions about drinking it, extended well beyond England's capital city, and extended even over the Atlantic Ocean to the colonies of Early American settlers, who coming from England, brought with them a surprising opinion about water in gener...

Many famous people from history have had their lives come to an end by execution. We tell these stories with gusto, reverence, and sometimes even humor, but the person responsible for being the executioner goes largely unnoticed beyond the recognition that someone, albeit we rarely know who, had to actually be the executioner.    The word "executioner" comes up in Shakespeare's plays 17 times, twi...

When Shakespeare was 39 years old, in 1603, King James of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth after her death, and he brought with him a famous repugnancy, and some call it outright fear, of witches during his reign. In Scotland, where James was dually King at this time, witchcraft had been considered a capital offense since 1563. The King brought this perspective to his management of witchcraft in...

Famously, the grave of William Shakespeare is marked with an ominous entreaty carved on his stone that warns against disturbing his bones, declaring a curse on anyone that disturbs the dust enclosed here. Respecting Shakespeare's wishes has meant that it was impossible to excavate the grave of the bard and explore questions like how he was buried, or even to confirm longstanding rumors about Shake...