That Shakespeare Life

Famously, William Shakespeare's Globe burned down from canon fire in 1599 and several of Shakespeare's plays mention guns, gunpowder, and bullets. While we think of Shakespeare's era as one of romantic sword battles, duels with a rapier in the streets, and even the massive naval battles with the Spanish Armada, for the life of William Shakespeare everything was under constant strain and a theme of...

After a long, and tense back and forth of letters, threats, offers of sisterhood, and ultimately betrayal, Elizabeth I ordered Mary Queen of Scots to be executed in 1587, when William Shakespeare was 24 years old, right in the middle of what is called Shakespeare's Lost Years, because historical records leave a gap here in the timeline of the bard about exactly what he was doing in these years of...

As William Shakespeare sat down to write Coriolanus , the Corn Famine of 1608 was in full swing. While the King, James I, took actions to combat the shortage of corn in England, theater seems to have played a role in communicating the citizens unrest and unhappiness over the famine. Not only was Shakespeare writing Coriolanus , where Roman citizens face a similar fate to the Londoners viewing the...

When you study Hamlet, especially in school or when you read or watch a commentary on the play, it is not surprising to have someone point out to you that the flowers Ophelia carries in her bouquet as she sings her sad song after the loss of her Father, Polonius, hold powerful 16th century historical significance. It's so important that I even included a nod to the flowers specifically in my 3 Min...

The term "hand-and-a-half sword" is often used in reference to long-swords but is not considered a historical description of the weapon. There is no evidence of the term "hand-and-a-half" having been used during the Middle Ages when the sword saw its heyday in popularity and there's no reference to hand and a half sword either in English or other languages before the 16th century. But the term doe...

During the 16th century, William Shakespeare had his own way of pronouncing words as well, and exploring how to define what that pronunciation was, and how it impacts our understanding of the plays, is a special field of historical linguistics called Original Pronunciation. Our guest this week,  Dr. David Crystal  is the leading expert in the field of Original Pronunciation and he joins us this we...

Shakespeare mentions kites seven times in his plays, often using the term to reference specific attributes of the bird to describe someone in the story. He'll refer to someone as "a kite" as if that's bad, or other times, he'll use the bird (or 16th century reputation of the bird) to suggest attributes like suspicion:  Although the kite soar with unbloodiebeak? (Henry VI Part II) In the late 15th...

Biron in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost declares " O my little heart:— And I to be a corporal of his field, And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop!"  And in Romeo and Juliet there are stage directions which call for Romeo to  [He climbs the wall, and leaps down within it] These references have gone largely overlooked by theater companies who perform these plays, being glossed over in dialo...

Ben Jonson staged a masque at court called The Fortunate Isles which begins with a spirit descending onto the audience, featuring a floating island so elaborately constructed that England's premiere architectural professional, Inigo Jones, who is the designer behind Whitehall Palace, Banqueting House, and Covent Garden square, was hired to construct an apparatus specifically for this performance....

Modern productions of plays include all manner of music, accompaniment, and we almost consider an orchestra pit to be synonymous with theater today. For William Shakespeare, however, his plays were performed in a variety of locations, all of which were void of any orchestra pit but we do know that Shakespeare's plays included music with works like Hamlet calling for Ophelia to sing a song, but als...

Along the North shore of England lies the Holderness Coast. Over 500 years ago a small town on this coast, named Ravenspurre, went down under the sea and into history as the spot where Henry IV rallied his troops on his way to dethrone Richard II. It is a story repeated by William Shakespeare in his versions of this historical rebellion, with Ravenspurre appearing as "Ravenspurgh" spelled with a g...

No one asks a question better than William Shakespeare. When we explore his plays, they are full of question marks but it turns out that for the 16th century, the concept of what constituted a question was still a new thing for printers who were in charge of selecting the actual marks which would go on the page to indicate a question. Not to mention, since Shakespeare's plays were written on paper...

For many of the performances we know Shakespeare performed at Whitehall Palace, including staging "Twelfth Night" in 1602, he would have performed at Banqueting House. Unfortunately, the original Banqueting House burned down after Shakespeare died, and while rebuilt in 1622 by the famous Inigo Jones for James I , the structure there today is not the original site where Shakespeare's company would...

Theater began in England as a way for the church to share messages about the Bible with the public. Written in Latin, the Bible was not accessible to parishioners outside of mass and Catholic England relayed the tales of heroism and miracles found in the Bible through dramatic productions. This tradition came with some particular approaches to storytelling, theater, and stagecraft. As with much of...

When you study the life of William Shakespeare, one of the first facts you will learn pretty quickly is that his wife, Anne Hathaway was pregnant when she and William were married. We know she was pregnant based on the birth records of Susanna Shakespeare, who was born just about 5 months after the November 2, 1582 marriage of Anne and William Shakespeare. But as anyone who has had children will t...

In the 16th century, King Edward VI before he died quite young, was focused on bringing education to the small towns and villages of England and that included officially chartering a school in Stratford Upon Avon called, fittingly, King Edward VI Grammar School. This school is where all the boys, including William Shakespeare, went to school for their primary education. There are a lot of myths an...

William Shakespeare lived in a time when politics and religion ruled the strategy of Kings and Queens throughout Europe, but perhaps the most notable method of securing peace for the self-styled King of Peace was through marriage. Bringing his own form of stability back to England through his marriage and children on the heels of the infamously virgin Queen and heirless monarch, Elizabeth I, James...

When Hamlet and Laertes duel in the final act of Shakespeare's Hamlet , they are using a very specific style of fencing called rapier and dagger fencing. It's called for in the stage directions and the dialogue of the text as well. Other plays like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as well as King Lear also use very specific fencing terminology that demonstrates a knowledge of contemporary fencing st...

One of the greatest mysteries about the life of William Shakespeare is where, precisely did the bard first encounter theater. Was it the roving theater companies which speckled the countryside with their pop up performances for which Shakespeare's father was the town alderman, and therefore would have had to approve the players when they appeared in Stratford? Or was it at Grammar School, where st...

In Elizabethan England, much of what we know about how theaters were operated comes from the diary of a man who ran dozens of theaters during Shakespeare's lifetime: Philip Henslowe. Henslowe was enterprising and ambitious, setting up the Bear Garden for bear baiting, and establishing the Rose, the Fortune, and the Hope theaters, among others. Throughout his dealings with numerous playing companie...

There were only a few hundred Jews living in England during Shakespeare's lifetime, and of the ones who were there, they would meet and worship in secret. Outwardly, these Jews would either have converted to Christianity or lied about their faith to keep from coming under suspicion. As callous as it seems for the nation to have been suspicious of Jews, famous Jewish people in high places, like Rod...

There are several references to Indians in Shakespeare's plays, which were being written right at the same time famous American Indians like Squanto and Pocahontas were interacting with explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh from the courts of Elizabeth I and later, under King James I. All of these explorations were big news back home in England, with many round trip voyages across the Atlantic to conn...

One of the biggest and grandest events occurring in London every year was the elaborate Bartholomew Fair. Celebrated in conjunction with St. Bartholomew's Day, this fair took over the city in Shakespeare's lifetime for three whole days of merriment that included the selling of wares, drinks and food vendors, as well as performances from stilt walkers, jugglers, puppeteers, and more. Here this week...

The development and use of metered and rhyming lines in theater is unique to the time period when Shakespeare was writing and our guest this week, Shane Ann Younts, professional voice coach and trainer for some of Broadway's most celebrated performers, is here to walk us through the history and application of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter.

The Renaissance in England brought with it the exploration of new lands as well as the invention of new technology. For William Shakespeare, the concept of using something as ordinary as a wrist watch was a brand new thought that most people had never seen before. In fact, one of the ways we even know there were wrist watches in Shakespeare's lifetime comes from a single reference to an "arm watch...