That Shakespeare Life

During the 16th century in Europe, the Portuguese dominated the African slave trade. European ships were first exposed to African slaves when privateering vessels would find enslaved  Africans packed alongside Atlantic trade goods in the hulls of the captured ships. The Spanish were the first to try and break up the Portuguese monopoly on slaves, establishing a system known as the asiento de negro...

Prior to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, the section of London known as Blackfriars was as major religious institution extending along the bank of the Thames River. In its' entirety, Blackfriars was second in size only to St. Paul's Churchyard. After the Reformation, Blackfriars was located in what's known as a Liberty, which meant it was just outside the reach of the mayoral...

It's Shakespeare's Birthday this week! Happy Birthday Shakespeare! To celebrate, we're going to paly some card games! From Noddy and Maw to Laugh and Lie Down, card games were popular for Shakespeare's lifetime, with records from the court of King James and Elizabeth I outlining games played, losses incurred, and even insults traded between dignitaries all over the playing of card games. Shakespea...

Whether it's a diary entry or a side note in a ledger or account book, history leaves us records of plays that were performed during Shakespeare's lifetime, but their scripts never survived to the present day in any form that's recognizable as a complete play. Other than the occasional snippet of a line or two here and there, we cannot read these plays, and we certainly can't perform them, but we...

The difference in Shakespeare's plays between a tragedy and a comedy is defined as whether or not the characters end in marriage or end in death. The comedies often showcase the promise of a marriage, or even sometimes multiple marriages, with proposals happening in the midst of fun and elaborate parties including songs, dances, and frivolity. Then of course those happy marriages are starkly contr...

Of all the history we know about William Shakespeare and what it was like to live in turn of the 17th century England, one of the hardest things to know for sure about the bard is what he looked like. There are only two verified portraits of William Shakespeare, one is the bust available at his funerary monument in Stratford Upon Avon, and the other is known as the Droeshout portrait, which is an...

In 1594 and 1595, when William Shakespeare was 31 years old, fires tore through his hometown of Stratford Upon Avon, causing such destruction that this natural disaster is one of the few major events in Stratford Upon Avon that was recorded for posterity. The fires were known as The Great Fires and in the aftermath of the devastation the town gathered together to rebuild the timbers of their homes...

In the late 16th century, William Shakespeare was in his 30s, and staging plays like As You Like It, where Rosalind mentions the "howling of Irish wolves against the moon." (That's from Act V scene ii). While scholars today debate whether or not that's a reference to the legend of werewolves, we know from a painting completed in 1595 that there was at least one family whose hereditary disease made...

The Lord Chamberlain's Men is known as "Shakespeare's playing company" and was a group of actors for which Shakespeare wrote plays most of his career. By 1603, The Lord Chamberlain's Men were so popular that James I himself chose to patronize the company making it The King's Men. Today we are going to look at the man who made the company The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and that's Henry Carey, the Firs...

In her latest book, Mortal Monarchs: 1000 Years of Royal Deaths Suzie Edge writes about the deaths of several of England's monarchs who died in grotesque, weird, or elaborate ways. A former medical doctor now turned history, Suzie takes an indepth look at the sciene behind the deaths of Kings and Queens of England across a thousand years of history. Today, Suzie joins us on the show today to share...

In 1567, a young English sailor named David Ingram signed up to work on a ship captained by English privateer John Hawkins. They would travel up and down the coasts of Africa and Mexico raiding and trading goods. In November of 1567, Ingram found himself and close to a hundred of his fellow crewmates stranded off the coast of Mexico, in a city called Tampico, just south of the present day Texas/Me...

In his latest book, Shakespeare's Tutor, Darren Freebury Jones explores the unsung history of Thomas Kyd as a master playwright who belongs in the canon of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Lyly as one of the greatest playwrights of the Elizabethan Era. Darren writes that along with Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, specifically, paved the way for Shakspeare to be a successful playwright. While it makes se...

The theaters of the Globe, the Curtain, and the Swan all resided in parts of London considered outside of the law and housing disreputable players. In a strange twist of irony for Shakespeare's England, however, one of the most highbrow places in society also held dramatic performances in high esteem and that is the university. New establishments for England, colleges like Cambridge and Oxford pro...

Shakespeare mentions a "weather-cock" in his plays Merry Wives of Windsor, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love's Labour's Lost, which is a kind of weather vane used for measuring wind direction. During Shakespeare's lifetime, astronomers Tycho Brahe and David Fabricus kept daily weather diaries noting details like the rain, snow, and temperature for their respective parts of Europe. But these two as...

Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, talks about the shrieking mandrake while Henry IV and Henry VI use the word mandrake as an insult. These very real plants took on legendary qualities due in part to the chemicals in their makeup which make them useful for anesthetics. Our guest this week is an expert in historical plants and historical methods of growing them and we are delighted this week to...

There are many examples of letter writing from Shakespeare's plays, including letters getting lost in transit and even examples of letter forgery! While many of the examples from Shakespeare's plays about letters are amplified to be more entertaining on stage, they represent real history about how letters were written and delivered for the life of William Shakespeare. Here today to help us explore...

In April of 1601, four ships set out from England with hopes of establishing trade with Asia. Remembered by history as the first voyage of the East India Company that launched a momentous relationship between what would become Britain and Asia, the first, as well as the subsequent three, voyages by this group were wrought with danger, disease, and completed at great personal sacrifice. On all of t...

This Thursday, January 5, is Twelfth Night, the official end of the 12 Days of Christmas. For Shakespeare's lifetime, celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas was a huge occasion, and one which included merriment right up until the very last day. In Shakespeare's plays, we see many of the Twelfth Night customs come to play including the complete upheaval of established social order where we have b...

There were several pamphlets published during Shakespeare's lifetime featuring a menacing giant rabbit, sometimes even wielding a sword and looking very scary. It would be easy to think this character the pamphlet calls a "cony catcher" was invented for marketing purposes, except that we see the phrase "cony catcher" come up several times throughout Shakespeare's plays including Merry Wives of Win...

It's Christmastime again this year and our thoughts are full of sugar plums, candy canes, and hopefully some beautiful winter snow. Growing up children of the 20-21st century are very familiar with the concept of Father Christmas or Santa Claus as he's become known today who brought gifts to good children each Christmas Eve. For William Shakespeare, however, the characters and particularly the und...

It's Christmastime again this year and our thoughts are full of sugar plums, candy canes, and hopefully some beautiful winter snow. Growing up children of the 20-21st century are very familiar with the concept of Father Christmas or Santa Claus as he's become known today who brought gifts to good children each Christmas Eve. For William Shakespeare, however, the characters and particularly the und...

Shakespeare mentions the spice of nutmeg in his plays three times, once in Henry V to comment on the color of of this spice, once in Love's Labour's Lost to talk about a "gift nutmeg" which was a gift given at Christmas for the 16th century, and then again in The Winter's Tale when the clown lists nutmeg as one of the spices he needs to make warden pies, along with mace, dates, prunes, and raisins...

Shakespeare mentions the spice of nutmeg in his plays three times, once in Henry V to comment on the color of nutmeg, once in Love's Labour's Lost to talk about a "gift nutmeg" which was a gift given at Christmas for the 16th century, and then again in The Winter's Tale when the clown lists nutmeg as one of the spices he needs to make warden pies, along with mace, dates, prunes, and raisins. Nutme...

In Shakespeare's play, King John , Eleanor of Aquitaine is portrayed as "Queen Elinor," who is decrepit and old, but strong willed and highly intelligent. For many Shakespeareans, the real history of this extraordinary woman is confined to this portrayal in Shakespeare's works. Our guest this week, Alison Weir, joins the show to introduce us to the real history of Eleanor of Aquitaine not only as...

William Shakespeare mentions fish over 70 times in his plays including certain kinds of fish like dwarfish, a finless fish, and even a dogfish. Types of fish, being a fishmonger, and applying all manner fish metaphors were a consistent theme in many of Shakespeare's works, which lead me to wonder about the role of fishing and fish in Shakespeare's lifetime for not only the individual who might hav...