William Shakespeare - The Time & Life of the World's Greatest Writer | Free Documentary History

[Music] it is essential to commence our journey into the world of william shakespeare in stratford upon avon [Music] it was here that he was born spent his childhood fell in love and raised his children stratford was the place to which he returned time and time again [Music] during his career he bought land here and the impressive house new place after gaining literary and financial success in london [Music] this building holy trinity church in stratford-upon-avon is the perfect place to start delving into the life of william shakespeare he was baptized here on april 26 1564 and

he was buried here we don't know for certain but it is possible that shakespeare's birthday was on the very same day as the day he died april the 23rd since george's day [Music] this holy trinity church goes back to the early 13th century and is the oldest building in stratford upon haven but great changes that happened within these walls in the few years before shakespeare's name was entered into the baptismal register here the church had lost its connection with rome this was the england of elizabeth the england of the reformation initiated by henry viii like

many other families the shakespeares were deeply affected by this enforced change in their religious practice nothing was certain the many shifts and changes in the years after henry viii first to protestant edward vi then back to catholicism with mary and then elizabeth who was determined to rule in the protestant way stratford at the time of shakespeare's birth it was a town of about 2 000 people it was a market town it served the neighborhood people would come from neighboring villages to bring their produce stratford is a town that was predominantly agricultural and it's very ideally

situated for the cotswolds so the war trade was very very prominent in stratford stratford-on-avon in the mid-16th century was an unremarkable little town a small population around 2000 and it was a struggle for the town to maintain such a number outbreaks of the plague were common here as they were across the country the black death had come to england 200 years before and everyone lived in daily fear of a return of this deadly disease the plague was always always a concern in stratford as it was in other towns as well almost every year the plague

would have hit stratford the year shakespeare was born happened to be a particularly bad year for the plague there's one very good example in the parish register in front of me here that is from july of 1564 just three months or so after shakespeare himself is born the clerk who's recording the burials for stratford has taken special care to note in latin hick in kepler pesti so here begins the plague and you can see that from the list of burials that follows a huge number of people are dying in a very short period of time

the almost 200 people are about a seventh of the population of stratford so if you think that shakespeare would have been just a few months old what infant mortality would have been like at the time we sort of are very lucky to have survived that whole incident we know that on houses on either side of the house where they were living children born in the same year as shakespeare had died from the plague so he survived [Music] it was in this house in henley street that we believe william shakespeare was born he was the son

of john shakespeare and mary arden now the ardens were very well established family here in warwickshire they traced their roots back to before william the conqueror and when william shakespeare arrived his parents must have seen that as a very great blessing indeed because they'd already lost two baby girls [Music] john shakespeare william shakespeare's father um started very humbly in stratford started as an apprentice glove maker he became a nail taster he became somebody who checked that bread was made properly and then worked his way up to eventually becoming the mayor of stratford when young william

was four this is when his father's made the mayor and he would have had on the day he went to to any council meetings he would have had almost like a procession from the front of the house down henley street and along to the town hall so that must have made a huge impression on a very young william shakespeare seeing his father dressed in all his regalia parading down henley street he was always known as a glove maker stroke whittler now a witterer is a tanner a tana but who's producing really fine white leather and

that ties in with the sort of gloves that john shakespeare was making these are fashionable high quality gloves made for the for the well to do as a young boy william would have been in contact with all kinds of people through the trade connections of his father this could have given him inspiration and language for the colorful characters in his plays [Music] john shakespeare had a mysterious side which we can only guess at it is very possible that he was a secret roman catholic now was this the reason that he didn't attend church that he

received a fine from the queen and that he had his name on a list nailed to the church door or was it because he'd been exposed dealing illegally in wool so that he was nervous of stepping out and being arrested see this was the atmosphere of the time if you stretched the law even a little bit you were reported i think it was this sense of turmoil of not being certain how long elizabeth's reign was perhaps going to last and with the changes that happened in previous reigns with with mary and edward and henry before

them um there was that element of uncertainty and the state wanting to control things much more closely so john shakespeare's name appears on a list of on a recusancy list which is people who have failed to take the protestant communion we now know of course queen elizabeth has a network of spies throughout england if you're a wool merchant you pay taxes to the crown on your transactions so of course john shakespeare isn't doing this so did the war merchants guild get tipped off by one of queen elizabeth's spies hey there's this guy in stratford john

shakespeare buying all this wool he's not in the guild he's not paying taxes what are you going to do about it but of course what they did john shakespeare was fined the wool he'd bought which he hadn't actually sold on it was all confiscated and from that moment on john shakespeare is heavily in debt [Music] john shakespeare lost much of his wealth and his property because of the fines imposed upon him but he didn't lose this house in henley street later on things got better because john was still held in good opinion by the alderman

of stratford he was granted his own coat of arms in 1592 and was therefore back in business for the rest of his life [Laughter] [Music] the town in shakespeare's boyhood had an important school king edward school of foundation of king edward vi it would have been a normal education so perhaps it would be challenging by our standards and it was often said that the latin and greek that shakespeare would have learned or any grammar school pupil would have learned would be the equivalent to a university classics course today school starts at six o'clock in the

morning and they go through the whole day they would have started learning simple alphabet and the catechism sort of the lord's prayer things like that and then moved on to more complex things start with perhaps esop's fables you'd learn your grammar as well perhaps some seneca virgil so all of the sort of the classic authors that we think of would have been very much the foundation of that curriculum he would have read ovid's metamorphosis for example the great latin classic who would have read virtually near it was an education in oratory and rhetoric and that

is reflected in this place i think he would have learned there to argue he would have learned there to argue on both sides of the case and he's brilliant at doing that in the plays if you take a play like measure for measure for example where claudio the young claudia is condemned to death there's a wonderful scene where the duke is disguised as a friar is trying to persuade claudio to be absolute for death as he says and he's trying to persuade him of the consolations of religion uh that it's not all that bad today

after all but then a few hundred lines later there's a wonderful speech from claudio which puts the exactly the opposite point of view i but to die and go we know not that where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot now there's an example of shakespeare's dialectic skill the way that he can present two totally opposing cases within a single scene of a play [Music] now of course stratford is synonymous with the name shakespeare and you can see memorials to his legacy all over this town but of course william had no chance of establishing

himself as an actor or a playwright here although his father had a very prosperous career in william's early years later he had huge financial problems and it was only by a very risky move to london that william was able once again to restore the name of shakespeare [Music] this is the cottage of the hathaway family we know that william shakespeare married anne hathaway in 1582 when william was 18 and she was some eight or nine years older but it is remarkable how little else we know about her and we can only speculate about their marriage

we do know they had three children there was susanna the firstborn and then the twins hamnet and judith hamnet was to die when he was 11 years old from an outbreak of the plague but for a man who wrote wonderful love sonnets and who penned the greatest love story ever romeo and juliet it is remarkable how little we know about his own love story it is my lady oh it is [Music] oh that she knew she were she speaks yet she says nothing what of that her eye discourses i will answer it i am too

bold [Music] it is not to me she speaks we do know that in august 1582 stratford enjoyed the benefits of a bountious harvest and it must have been at this time that william and anne had their lovers tryst perhaps on summer's evening sitting on a set hay bale during the feasting to celebrate the end of harvest william still a teenager his quick and easy wit charms and maybe they had a hand-fasting ceremony it's an ancient tradition still existing in warwickshire at the time in which the couple shared vows and then shared a bed before the

official church wedding [Music] on she speaks [Music] oh speak again bright angel oh romeo romeo [Music] the legal age to marry is 21. so if you imagine you're a young man you've served your apprenticeship you're in your early twenties you then have to get yourself a job and so the the logical thing is you're not marrying and you're not marrying girls from the villages until your mid-twenties so here we have young william shakespeare who's only 18 and he's under age i'm sure she would have had young farmers queuing up to marry her so what's this

young william shakespeare got going for him at this point in time romeo doff thy name and for that name which is no part of thee take all myself i take the thy word call me but love and i'll be new baptized whatever the details were we know for certain that anne became pregnant and an official church ceremony had to be rushed through before a noticeable bump developed there was a hurried dash to bishops court in worcester to enable the marriage to proceed and the huge sum of 40 pounds was paid a surety for a marriage

bond to be paid if the marriage were to prove invalid [Music] we know that william shakespeare married anne hathaway in 1582 when they had their first child susanna in the year after but the years 1585 to 1592 are a time of intense frustration for shakespeare historians we know practically nothing at all about that elusive seven year period and consequently we have no idea how and why he first began his career upon the stage many theories have been advanced some say that he headed off the lancashire the catholic stronghold an earlier biographer said that he became

a schoolteacher in the country i think it's perfectly possible that he was kept on at stratford school as an usher they were called the assistant school master he was obviously a very talented clever boy i think it's quite possible that he did some teaching here or perhaps he joined a traveling group of players many of which came through stratfor to perform and this is where he found his calling [Music] we know that in 1587 the queen's men came to stratford these were a group of traveling players backed by queen elizabeth the first government who performed

around the country what was essentially propaganda to support her reign the queen's men weren't a touring company in the modern sense of the word no they're more of a variety act acrobatic performances and comic routines alongside the plays but it is the list of those plays and the fact they were here in stratford which is the interesting point we know from old records that they put on the story of richard iii the story of king lear the famous victories of henry v and don't they sound familiar is it possible that shakespeare did join that company

and was inspired to write his own version of the stories of the plays that they were producing omit no happy hour that may give furtherance to our expedition for we have now no thought in us but france save those to god that run before our business therefore let every man now task his thought that this fair action may on foot be brought we know that two of the queen's men went and performed in elsinore famously the setting for hamlet i have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have by the very cunning of the

scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions for murder though it have no tongue shall speak with most miraculous organ another of the queen's men william nell was killed in a brawl outside a tavern near oxford just before the company came to stratfor there was a fighting and one of the actors was actually stabbed to death and there is a belief that possibly william shakespeare stepped in to that role and then carried on and eventually got to go to london that way it is possible but unless some late 16th

century document turns up in some old draw that we sadly will have no hard evidence to support this or any other theory at some point he makes that decision to move to london we know in henley street there was a stable owned by the green aways and he would have hired his horse or had his horse stabled there and then made that journey to london whether shakespeare arrived in london as part of a troop or followed them on his own this was a momentous undertaking for him it would mark the dawn of an unparalleled talent

as the author of a body of work that would be unsurpassed and would influence generations to come [Music] the london that shakespeare found was a dynamic mix of people involved in various trades shipping makers and bakers lawyers and priests and a court at whitehall with queen elizabeth at its head london was about a hundred times bigger than threatford it was a town of about 200 000 people a city of course it was a walled city with numerous churches over 300 churches a cosmopolitan place of course being on the thames it was a place where travelers

would come and go bringing their goods from abroad it was a bustling thriving busy in some ways rather sordid place it was just beginning to have a theatrical community that begins during shakespeare's lifetime shakespeare had arrived in london as an ideal time playhouses dedicated to theatrical performances were a very recent development normally actors and playwrights had to make do with performing in the yards of taverns or in the homes of aristocats but now the opportunities were endless just as with the invention of cinema and the birth of television a whole new medium was opening up

to the masses and shakespeare capitalized on it it wouldn't all be plain sailing though an outbreak of plague struck the city in 1592 and the theaters were shut just as shakespeare had hit his stride but as always it seems he adapted quickly and soon had great success publishing the narrative poem venus and adonis it was based on metamorphoses another narrative poem by shakespeare's favorite writer ovid whom he adored from the time he first would have encountered his work back at school in stratford shakespeare simply couldn't resist a return to the theater and he threw himself

almost exclusively into the life of a playwright once the theaters reopened perhaps he knew that it was his true calling or perhaps he simply missed the thrill of acting it's thought that he took on roles himself throughout his career whatever the reason we can all be very grateful that he turned his back on what seemed to be more relaxed and lucrative career as a poet at least the noble mortimer leading the men of heritage to fight against the irregular and wild glenn dower was by the rude hands of that welshman taken thousand of his people

butchered upon his dead cultures of such misuse such beastly shameless transformation by those welsh women done as may not be without much shame retold or spoken it seems then that the tidings of this boil break off our business for the holy land this match with others does my gracious law given that shakespeare had thrown himself back into the world of a playwright he was going to need to create new material at an alarming rate writer's block didn't seem to exist in elizabethan england as theaters had such a very quick turnover of the plays that they

staged just as he took inspiration from ovid for his poems shakespeare dug deep into a very handy book called the holland sheds chronicles of england scotland and ireland holland sheds chronicles is a hugely significant source book for shakespeare it's essentially as the name suggests a chronicle history of england ireland and scotland there are two editions of holland shed one published in 1577 and this one published in 1587 which is the one that we believe shakespeare used as a source for much of the history plays [Music] with henry v for example hollingshev describes the battle of

agincourt and the campaigns overseas so you can see where shakespeare's getting the story ideas from that he then turns into the plays on stage themselves however many of our princes while the wildlife drowned and soaked in mercenary blood i'll give us leave great king to view the field in safety and dispose of their dead bodies i tell you truly harold i know not if the day be ours or no the day is yours as the 16th century came to a close shakespeare had managed to bring together everything that he needed to dominate the london theatrical

scene he knew how to leave audiences in stitches with his early hits the comedy of errors and the taming of the shrew and his trusty copy of holland sheds chronicles had provided the material for his plays on the english kings including henry vi and richard iii but he needed a star creation of his own a character that would bring in bigger crowds than ever on the rapidly expanding london stage scene and he found it in john 4 staff have a foolish night give me a cup of sack road is there no virtue egg stand go

thy ways old track die when i will good man who'd be not forgot about the face of the earth then i'm a shot and herring they live not three good men aren't hanged in england and one of them is fat first off delighted audiences more than any other character of the year he stole the show in henry iv part one and two and was so popular that shakespeare had to knock out a comedy with full staff as the main character the rather hastily written the merry wives of windsor they say that jealous wittily knave had

masses of money for the witch's wife seems to me well favored now i will use her as the key to the cockledy rogue's coffer and there's my harvest home i would you knew ford sir that you might avoid him if you saw it having created such a smash hit you could say that the world was now shakespeare's oyster which would be fitting as he invented that phrase when writing the character of four staff london had given william shakespeare a stage but too often it had been a precarious one his friends the burbidge family had to

move their playhouse the theater as they did not own the land william and his colleagues became the shareholders of the globe which they erected from the timbers of the previous theater [Music] shakespeare's success in london as a playwright had brought him much fame sometimes perhaps unnerving when it came to royal attention life in shakespeare's england could be a dangerous endeavor london was a city full of intrigue and espionage elizabeth was never easy in her role as queen and was always on the lookout for possible usurpers and employed a contingent of spies [Music] elizabeth in england

with all its excitement would have been amazingly a vibrant place to live we know at one point he's living literally a few hundred yards from the globe theater it was the red light district of of london so i mean it's outside the city walls so people would have been ferred across the thames and that's the soho of the day really it's an amazingly lively place the building of the globe theater would at last give shakespeare a proper home for his plays which inspired him to become more and more creative this is shakespeare's globe theater in

bankside it welcomed its first audiences in 1997 almost four centuries after the original globe theater which this building is intended to replicate first opened its doors it was 1599 and shakespeare was a shareholder in the playing company the lord chamberlain's men it was a formidable troop shakespeare was the resident genius playwright but also still an actor of course they had a superstar leading man in richard berbich who had the enormous honor of taking on williams greatest roles for the first time including hamlet king lear and macbeth they also had a supreme comedian the other will

in the group will kemp who would send audiences into raptures with his performances as sir john falstaff shakespeare would often be at court entertaining the queen with his plays when elizabeth died and james became king the royal patronage stayed with him shakespeare was now a significant member of the king's men it was at the globe that shakespeare truly cemented his legacy as the greatest writer in the english language hamlet julius caesar macbeth king lear they all had their first ever performances at the globe [Music] such a tragedy that it burnt down in 1613. they were

having a performance of the play about henry viii all is true as it was called at the time that play has a procession and they were using cannon uh to have special effects and sadly one of the cannon was aimed in the wrong direction and somebody must have got in trouble for that and it set the patch on fire and the theater was burned down it must have been a terribly traumatic event for shakespeare and it's towards the end of his play writing career and i sometimes think that perhaps it was so devastating that that's

why he's ceased writing plays towards in the last couple of years of his life [Music] once the globe went down so did shakespeare's desire to write he appears to produce nothing after this date most scholars agree that the tempest is the last play that he wrote on his own and it appears to be a deliberate swan song the character of prospero relinquishes his magical powers at the end of the play and delivers poignant speech where he asks the audience to let your indulgence set me free in a way that many people have interpreted shakespeare's own

retirement speech he did collaborate with other authors on a few works after the tempest but he appears to have been happy to bring his solo literary career to a deliberate end [Music] when the opportunity arises he comes back to stratford this is where his family this is where his wife his children his his siblings are all living his friends [Music] i think he was a stratford man all his life his family remained in stratford he bought a big house for them quite early in his career he owned new place the large house in the middle

of stratford from the time that he was 33 years old we believe for probably 15 to 20 years shakespeare is earning between two to 300 pounds a year he is a playwright who actually hangs on to his wealth and invests it and where is he investing it it's always in stratfor upon evil he bought 102 acres of land which is about the same size as stratford itself land to the north of the town he purchased an interest in the tithes which he spent a lot of money on when he was up in court as a

witness in a court case in 1614 he was referred to clearly as william shakespeare of stratford-upon-avon he was thought of as a stratford man [Music] william shakespeare died on april the 23rd 1616 and it may be that his death was sudden and unexpected because just a month earlier he had signed his will in which he said he was in perfect health in that last will and testament shakespeare left money behind to his wife and sister his niece and nephews his children and his grandchildren to his friends and to the poor in this his hometown stratfor

upon haven but to the world of literature and to the english language he left behind an unparalleled legacy [Music] as fated as shakespeare was in his own lifetime his legacy along with all of his remarkable plays could have easily been lost what became known as the first folio was published in 1623 seven years after shakespeare's death 36 of shakespeare's plays were collected together by shakespeare's colleagues and fellow actors john hemmings and henry condell it was a project of great determination and devotion to shakespeare [Music] the first folio is particularly special because it records the first

time the collected plays of william shakespeare and without this book 18 of the plays would be lost to us forever because they don't survive in any other printed form and it's clear that they've been putting together a lot of work to gather up the plays to edit them to bring them into what they consider their preferred format to be presented for the first time in their authentic state it brings together the plays in their division into tragedies histories and comedies for the first time and it presents them in a standard format shakespeare's plays have gone

on to have a huge impact on our collective thoughts of so many historical figures the way that the world views richard iii cleopatra henry v mark anthony and so many many more has been forever altered by shakespeare's works for me how perfectly did he capture the sense of betrayal felt by julius caesar as he was assassinated by brutus cassius and many others with the simple but devastating line it's too brutal it too brutally then fall season [Music] [Music] the funerary monument in the holy trinity church may look a little kitsch it has gone through centuries

of retouching after all but it remains one of the only two images that we are certain was intended to depict william shakespeare the other is the drushout portrait which was an engraving placed on the front cover of the first folio on which ben johnson declared was a very good likeness [Music] in 2009 a new portrait of shakespeare came to light it was held by the cobb family who had had it in their family for many many years and saw a relationship between it and another portrait lots of research went into these portraits and identified them

as being one of william shakespeare probably painted during his own lifetime the birthplace trust owns a copy of the cobb portrait known as the shakespeare birthplace trust portrait when it shows him perhaps as a wealthy more youthful man than this traditionally been the case for shakespeare portraits and it's an interesting addition to the the sort of the canon of portraiture of shakespeare starting with the first folio and the bust that's inholding to church perhaps being the more traditional views of what shakespeare would have looked like shakespeare's greatest legacy of all remains in the language we

all use every day there's the incredible number of words that he coined that are as varied as bedroom zany gossip vulnerable lustrous fashionable monumental eyeball savagery and lonely they all trace back to the bard he was very fond of expanding the horizons of the english language with his own inventiveness shakespeare's had colossal influence a lot of his plays and poems have produced phrases which are in anybody's mouth even if they don't know shakespeare a lot of people know who what a romeo is for example and phrases like a man more sinned against than sinning for

example which is a line from king lear will be used by people who who've never heard of king lear even possibly [Music] it was shakespeare's ability to create a turn of phrase that really resonates today to wait on baited breath to vanish into thin air to fight fire with fire to be made of sterner stuff to be cruel to be kind all phrases conjured in shakespeare's plays any ad man today would kill to have shakespeare's ability to create such memorable sound bites in fact as many as one in ten of the common phrases that we

use every day are most likely the work of the bard which is a truly astonishing number quite a few of shakespeare's many phrases have also become the titles of works by later authors brave new world aldous huxley's most famous novel is taken from the tempest john steinbeck wrote the winter of our discontent title coming from the opening speech of richard iii even the very recent hitch novel the fault in our stars by john green is taken from julius caesar shakespeare forever remains the ultimate inspiration [Music] the colossal influence that shakespeare is having increasingly still on

the world of the arts the music that's been inspired by shakespeare the films the theatrical productions which go on the fact that actors love playing shakespeare's rules because they give actors such incredible [Music] opportunities he's always a very chameleon type person i can never quite pin him down but i'm very fortunate there are moments quite often in the morning when i open the house up on my own and just when you walk through it's a very humbling experience to be there having spoken to so many people who it's been a lifetime's ambition to come to

the birthplace the works go on being replicated inspiring other composers inspiring operas inspiring ballets novels poems so that shakespeare is now in the water supply you can't get away from any television programs pop songs all of them frequently referring to shakespeare even subconsciously very often yes shakespeare is here to stay [Music] to the reader this figure that thou hears he has put it was for gentle shakespeare cut wherein the graver had a strife with nature to outdo the life oh could he button drawn his wit as well in brass as he have hit his face

the print would then surpass all that was ever written brass but since he cannot reader look not on his picture but his book [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you