That Shakespeare Life

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...

One of the heroes of American history and the story of the survival of the English colonists at Plymouth in the mid 17th century is a man named Squanto. His given name was Tisquantum, but he came to be known as Squanto. He was a native American interpreter and guide for early English colonists. While little is known about his early life, some scholars believe that he was taken from home to England...

Thomas Gresham served as Royal Agent to the King t in England under Edward VI, Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth I. A hugely influential man of his time, Thomas Gresham's legacy continues today at Gresham College, the university he founded in 1597 when William Shakespeare was 33 years old. Competing with the likes of Oxford and Cambridge at the time, Gresham College was unique not only because unive...

Famously in Shakespeare's play,  Macbeth , the title character becomes convinced he cannot be killed because the witches tell him he cannot be killed a man "of a woman born." It is only when it is too late that Macbeth learns his nemesis, Macduff, was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped", in reference to a cesarean surgery, that Macbeth learns of his ultimate fate. Shakespeare's inclusion of c...

From 1560 until her death in 1603, Queen Elizabeth employed a group of privateers to raid, pillage, and rob ships that were acting against English interests. This group of private sailors known as sea dogs included famous naval explorers like Sir Francis Drake who circumnavigated the world, and Sir Walter Raleigh who founded the colony of Roanoke and went looking for El Dorado, the city of gold. R...

In November of 1621, English colonists celebrated what's known today in the US as The First Thanksgiving. Indian natives and English colonists gathered around a celebration of their first successful harvest in a new land. The bounty that this feast enjoyed included one of the staple foods of Thanksgiving that's become almost ubiquitous with Fall itself, and that's the pumpkin. Referred to as "pump...

Coffee, tea, and chocolate may be regular items in the daily lives of the English today, but for Shakespeare these items were not on the everyday menu. In fact, drinking coffee or tea was seen with much superstition and hesitancy. While Shakespeare does mention "one poor penny worth of sugar-candy" in Henry V, he would not have been talking about chocolate. Confections like chocolate and drinking...

In William Shakespeare's Henry V Part II, Scene 3, Pistol uses the phrase "men's faiths are wafer-cakes." Wafer cakes were thin baked breads that would eventually become what we know today as waffles. During the Renaissance and Middle Ages, specialty iron tongs were used to bake wafers that were served as a final blessing after the Eucharist in churches. The art of making waffles was so popular in...

One of the most common issues with Shakespare's plays is understanding the language. He used not only words that have fallen out of fashion for today's English language, but the pronunciation and even colloquial expressions, cultural references, and some jokes we find in the plays are all so far removed from the way we talk today that it can be hard to understand what's going on, especially if you...

In Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, he writes about a tumbler wearing colours in their hoop. This reference is to a specific act of theater performance called tumbling. If you've already studied the all-male stage we know Shakespeare had at his theater, you may be tempted to think that tumblers were men. However, as the research of the project Engendering the Stage aims to bring to light, histo...

When I'm not recording That Shakespeare Life, I'm usually researching for DIY History, my YouTube channel where I look into games, recipes, and crafts for Shakespeare's lifetime that you can do at home. In preparing a new episode, I was going through Hugh Plat's Good Housewives Jewel , a cookbook that was written in 1596-1597. One recipe that caught my eye called for "sweet bread." I ambitiously d...

When you visit Stratford Upon Avon, you can stop in and see a place called Hall's Croft. It is right down the road from Shakespeare's Birthplace and is the house where William Shakespeare's oldest daughter, Susanna, lived with her husband, John Hall. John Hall was a physician in Stratford Upon Avon, and is thought to have influenced, if not outright advised, Shakespeare on the many uses of medicin...