Episode #108 - Why Is Shakespeare "The Bard"?
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Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I'm not bad, how are you?

I'm alright, I'm ticking along, it's nice and warm, the sun is out in Northern Ireland, the spring has sprung and yeah, can't complain. Yeah, that's fair. I'm looking at my cat who has somehow managed to find some plastic from somewhere. So if at any second I suddenly make a big bang crash noise, it's because I'm having to wrestle sellotape out of Livia's stupid little face. Livia, come on Livia. Yes.

Yeah. There is one thing that Livia loves in this world and it is eating sellotape and then immediately throwing it back up again. I mean, you've got to have a hobby. It's good to have a hobby. She doesn't go out. So she has to find her hobby somewhere else. And her specific hobby is just a real like supernatural ability to find plastic, eat it and then vomit it up in a disgusting manner. Yeah.

There we go. She's mad at me now. She'll just have to live. I think she can do without it. They're going to throw it up next to me. Yeah. Right. Now that's done. Janina. Yes. Who are we? What are we doing? We are History is Sexy. We answer your history questions. Yes, we do. You can't be bothered answering them yourselves because you've got lives.

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We do. We strongly appreciate and love everybody who supports us on Patreon, who get things a week early and get a sticker. Yeah, it's a delightful place to be. Whose question are we answering today? So today we are talking about Shakespeare. This question comes from Morgan. And the question is, why is Shakespeare the bard? Why him? How did he get so famous? And why does his work stick out? And also you want some...

some explanation of the anti-Stratfordian authorship. That's me. I just feel like, so this is partly because there have been two books out recently. Obviously, I work in a bookshop a couple of days a week and there have been two books out recently. There was one called Shakespeare as a Woman and Other Heresies in Literature. And then Jodie Pickholt or Pickoo, however you pronounce her name, who wrote My Sister's Keeper, has a book out called By Any Other Name, which also posits that

Shakespeare's plays were really written by a woman and I think that the whole like theory is very silly and

So, and I feel like, you know, the kind of one thing that I know about Shakespeare is that he's like the image of Shakespeare as the Bard in capital letters is like relatively recent in comparison to how long his plays have been around. And so, yeah, I think it's interesting that they have like, as his star has grown, so has the idea that actually it's all a lie. Yeah.

that is pertinent and we will get to that. That is one of those things that when I was originally planning this, I was like, let's just get the authorship stuff out of the way, out the top, because it's silly. It's silly. Yeah.

But then the more research I did and the more I started writing things up, I figured it was important to place it in its historical context because those two things are related. Shakespeare becoming like Shakespeare and there being an authorship question. They are connected. And so it's more interesting to put them in context with each other. Yes. And more accurate. Excellent. I see. I've inadvertently done something good. You've been so smart.

Yes, it was on purpose for sure. So essentially the way this is, there are two parts to this answer. The first, and it's essentially chronology. The first is like what happened to Shakespeare in

and around Shakespeare and what did he do to become the writer that he was and then what did we do as a culture over the past 400 years to make him the cultural icon that he is today if that makes sense so we're basically just going to follow through in order and look at the those two things

I'm always happy to do things in chronological order. I think it's usually more useful. Yeah. You could argue, to start with, that Shakespeare is Shakespeare because of the plague in a few different ways. So there are partly because he happened to survive the outbreak of the plague that hit Stratford a few months after he was born, which is nice. If he hadn't survived it, he wouldn't be Shakespeare. He wouldn't be. He would be just a...

Like it's just a baby in a grave. It's a dead baby. We would never have heard of him at all. It's a significantly more depressing story. Starting on a high there. Survived childhood. But also the plague sort of impacted everything to do with theatre at that time. In the first place, prior to...

this era of Elizabethan history, theatre was conducted in private homes. Like if you are a fancy rich person, you bring a company of players in to perform a play for your friends at a party, or it's in the inn yard of a... It's in an inn yard for the riffraff to see a play. But...

But because of the plague, players were banned from the City of London, which is obviously even when London was teeny tiny Elizabethan sized, it's where it's easy to get the most business more simply. You know, the distance you have to travel from house to house to do your plays is smaller. So after players were banned from the city,

James Burbage built a theatre in what is now Shoreditch. I think it was called Shoreditch at the time, actually, but it wasn't in London at that time. It was outside the border of the city. When it's still like little villages down in the south there. Yeah. It wasn't the first custom-built theatre, but it was so new a concept that it was literally just called the theatre. LAUGHTER

blowing people's minds out here so that one of the first theaters that Shakespeare wrote for or worked in or acted in was literally just called the theater and then there was a curtain a little bit down the way um curtain yeah which was strange because theaters didn't have curtains at this point because their apron their aprons dated yeah yeah so that meant that the way theater was approached changed completely because you have a building that's just for that they're not

exclusively for that. There were also like cockfights in there and that sort of thing. But predominantly the purpose was entertainment and that was unique. That was new. And it created a space in the city that was for theatre. They were really close to each other and everyone was around there. And so you have this collaborative environment because theatre is a very collaborative art form.

It's all kind of happening in the same place. So people can talk to each other and see what each other are doing and switch between companies. Kind of put that into place. And then also, early in Shakespeare's career, the plague hits again and

when the actual theatre buildings themselves are closed down because the outbreak is so bad. So companies had to go on tour around the country instead to survive. But Shakespeare didn't go with them at this point in time. Instead, he stayed. I don't know where he was physically, if he stayed in London or if he went back to Stratford. We know very little about how his day-to-day life operated. Yes, I remember very recently, like literally in the past few weeks, there's somebody...

turned up a letter that had like a whole new address for Shakespeare that no one ever knew he had lived at. Yes, and it also suggested that Anne Hathaway had visited him in London, which I don't know why we were all assuming that she hadn't.

That she'd just been like, bye husband, let's never meet again. I guess you're moving to London, but not that far away. We never speak again. Normal. Yeah, it's very funny. We project a lot into the absence of knowing anything about Shakespeare and most of it I think is probably not true. Yeah. But, so instead of going on tour and continuing to write plays, he stayed home and wrote songs.

long-form narrative poems. He wrote Venus and Adonis in, I think, 1593, and then The Rape of Lucretia in 1594. They were both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who was this young lord, and they are very much shilling for a patron. So based on how those different dedications are worded, it seems likely that Venus and Adonis was like, please, please be my patron. And The Rape of Lucretia was like, I'm so delighted you're my patron. Yeah.

He can't have been his patron for very long or given him very much money because the Earl of Southampton was not very rich and not very good with money and ran through his fortune. But those two plays were published. Probably by giving it to poets. Yeah. Those two plays were published and they did gangbusters, like multiple reprintings. Oh, damn. And they were published under Shakespeare's name.

At this point in time, you could publish a play, but it wasn't the point. And plays were owned by the company. So if they were published, which is a big if, most of them weren't. Most of them were not, yeah. They didn't bother to put the playwright's name on it because no one gives a shit about writers. Yeah. Relatable. After this point, yeah. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah.

But these two poems have Shakespeare's name on them and they make him a name. Well, they contribute to him being a name to the point where a bit later, a printer happens to have a couple of Shakespeare's sonnets and he just bungs them in a book with a bunch of other random poetry and claims it's all his and sells the book as a book of Shakespeare's poetry. So this contributes to him becoming a name in his own time, sufficient to be used by someone to make a profit.

which we hadn't been before. And then he's having to be out here like, please, God, no, I didn't write that one. Yeah.

That's not me. I'm this mediocre poet. Yeah. And the third way they play Matrix with Shakespeare is that because touring is gruelling and expensive and you don't get the same amount of return as you do from staying in one place, most theatrical companies didn't survive it. They all sort of fell apart, which meant that the remaining companies, including Shakespeare's company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, just could hoover up the best talent of the age and put them all together in one company.

The Lord Chamberlain's Men, it was a really stable and strong company, partly because of this. And Shakespeare is the only playwright of the time that had a really long-term relationship with a working company. Like, basically his whole career

From very early on until he left London, he was working with the Lord Chamberlain's men. So he was able to develop a really strong working relationship, which you needed because theatre at this time was insane. It wasn't like it is today. You didn't rehearse a play and then put it on for a month because you were serving, even just in London, the calculations that I saw are to get by, you need to have 2,000 people in your theatre, 200 nights of the year.

This is in a London of 200,000 people. So...

So you need everyone to see your play twice, basically. You need everyone to be coming frequently, which means you need to have different plays on all the time. So you basically have a roster of plays that you can put on at a moment's notice. These guys, their memories must have been insane. They must have had so much. You have to be able to commit stuff to memory immediately and then keep it in there alongside 10 other full plays.

For Shakespeare plays. Yeah, it's phenomenal what they could do. So you have to be able to work efficiently, which all theatre has to be efficient anyway. This is why I'm ill-fitted for corporate environments, because I'm used to working in the theatre where you have to be like, there's no room for mistakes. There's no money. There's no time. You can't be wasting. There's no fiddle-faddling about on emails. There's no fiddle-faddling about.

You've got to get down to business. So that's what he was able to do with the Lord Chamberlain's men, who later were the king's men after they got a royal patent from King James. So that basically gave him a really strong, stable environment in which to work.

And he was a partner in the company as well, so he had a real stake in it. So that's the plague. Plague made Shakespeare Shakespeare. Well, I mean, I guess it did kill like a third of people in the country, but, you know, there's always a silver lining. Which one did it do? Sometimes, yeah. And it did make most of the theatre companies go out of business. It did do that, but we kept this one real good one. We kept one real good one. Yeah.

The second thing that made Shakespeare Shakespeare as a writer is this weird sort of interdependent

triumvirate of what is going on right now one of which is just he's there and the other one is this was a really exciting time for theatre outside of the fair I mean partly because everyone's in the same place but there was theatre was based on the classic tradition right it was based on Latin based on Greek all of these boys grew up in grammar school reading Ovid and Plutarch and Virgil and that

And then performing little versions. Performing little versions that were learning about rhetoric. And then they came out and started writing themselves and they started messing with all of the rules of classical theatre. Like, for example, there used to be a restriction about how much time a play could cover.

Okay. And a restriction to how many people could speak in a given scene. Yeah. And characters didn't talk to themselves or to the audience. So playwrights in this era are messing with all of that. They're introducing soliloquies. They're introducing ensembles that aren't choruses, just an ensemble. My God. Yeah.

And all of this builds into the Elizabethan form, which is more dynamic, it's more naturalistic. I know it doesn't seem naturalistic to us, but compared to what had gone before, it's extremely grounded.

At the same time, the English language is going buck wild. Yes. Lee Stanley makes the point that Shakespeare was born in Latin and dies in English. Yeah. Like this is the period in time when English was becoming a respectable scholarly language. It's obviously around the era when the Bible was written out in

out in English translated into English for the first time. This is, yeah. Which is also related because some of the anti-Stratfordians claim that, for example, their particular pet, alternate Shakespeare, also wrote the King James Bible because they just can't be content with one thing. What a prolific human, whoever this person was. It's a good thing.

Well, it started with Francis Bacon, which he was quite busy enough without writing the Bible and all of that. And all of Marlowe and Ben Johnson. Well, maybe he didn't have much to do when he was doing all of that piratical stuff. There's like long nights when you're just sailing. When you could be translating the Bible into English for the first time and also writing every single one of Shakespeare's plays. Yeah. And then brutalizing some people. Brutalizing some people just while you're at it. I mean, look.

Everyone needs a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. And to never sleep. Yeah. So there's a very innovative time in theatre and Shakespeare was good at innovating within it. He was predominantly an adapter. Most of his plays are based on existing work. And even sometimes the language that he uses is like his description of like Mark Antony seeing Cleopatra, which is pulled from Plutarch and rendered in poetry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tons of it is just straight from Plutarch. Tons of it's straight from Plutarch. But what he was great at, what his innovations were, was grounding that in a real sense of humanity. And that's what set him apart from other Elizabethan playwrights as well. So, for example, you have Christopher Marlowe, his biggest competition until Ben Johnson appeared. And Marlowe writes these great antiheroes and these great villains who sort of

storm about with all of this bombast and then Shakespeare takes that tradition of the great villain and he makes them complicated and human and... Yes. So you have these moments like in Macbeth where Macbeth, you know, the murderous king finds out his wife has died and he's baffled by it and confused and tired and

which is not a response that anyone else would have been writing at that point in time for this kind of situation. Like, here's...

His unique gift in Elizabethan theatre is rendering heroes and villains into human beings. Yeah, into believable and complex human beings rather than stock characters, which so much of... I mean, you don't have a lot of space in theatre and, as you say, so much of pre-Elizabethan theatre is...

formulaic in a way and especially when they are working off of classical stories and so there's you know hundreds thousands of years worth of this story being told over and over and over again and so yeah there's no need for a lot of people to make these people these characters anything other than villain and hero but he he

At work, we have got put up over COVID and it's one of the things that remains. But the out, damn spot, out bit from Macbeth, Lady Macbeth speech, which if you recite it, you can do it while you're washing your hands. So that was what we had up for the washing your hands over COVID times. And it's still there. And even that, which is like quite a short little bit, has so much complexity of her transgressions.

Trying to get this Imaginary spot out of her hand Then her like Responding like yeah but no one can stop us Like why am I even stressed About this to Will all the perfumes of Arabia Make things Who would have thought he would have so much blood in him So much blood in him And it's like it got In just a few lines has like so much In the way of emotional Like tidal waves really Like pushing back and forth

But also writing villains like that, like Lady Macbeth, who were women, was one of his innovations. No one else was doing that, right? So, like, his first one is Tamara in Titus Andronicus. She's this great villain. And I don't know, I don't think it would even have occurred to Christopher Marlowe that you could make a woman do that on the stage. Yeah.

I don't think I've ever seen Titus Andronicus. I've only seen their film version, which is pretty good. I've read it, but I've never seen it staged. No, I don't think I ever have. Anyway, that's unrelated. So yeah, an incredibly innovative time. Also a time when it was easy to get your hands on a lot of material. Like printed works were accessible for the first time to a lot of people just in terms of the price point. And there were a lot of plays coming in and out online.

that he could get his hands on and read and used to inspire him and a lot of great playwrights that he was bouncing off of many of whom also and this is another reason why Shakespeare is Shakespeare died young the mortality rate in London for playwrights is insane like Christopher Marlowe obviously died at 29 Thomas Kidd who wrote The Spanish Tragedy which was like the blockbuster play of its day died at 35 it was just it's a high risk profession

Not particularly high reward, but yeah. I read a claim that the average age in London at the time was 35 and in the poorer areas the average age was 25. Like it's a young city because you just die there. Yeah, it's just a lot of disease going around. A lot of disease going around. Also probably more accidents. Some very rickety buildings. Yeah.

Yeah, did get all those burnings like not long after. Yeah. Shakespeare also put working class people, lower class people in his plays with big roles, which was new and exciting. And I mean, we'll get into the anti-straf audience, but like,

One of the points they make is how could he write about court so well when he was never there, which is, A, he was there because he performed at court all the time. And B, all plays were about court. All books were about the royalty. And if it was really, you know, the Earl of Oxford, how could he write so well about stable boys? And, you know, it's far more likely that Chase, when you understood court, than the Earl of Oxford understood anything outside of court. Yeah.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to understand. He also is very concerned with how we as humans are perceived and how we control how we are perceived. Jonathan Bate makes the point that Marlowe's villains step into a role and they talk about this is who I am. I am the villain. Whereas Shakespeare's villains, they are aware that they are playing a role. Richard III in particular knows how to shift roles.

from one role to another and he talks about what he's doing. Yeah. The idea of perception comes up again and again with Hamlet, obviously, pretending to be mad to get what he wants. It's all over the place. Also, one of the reasons I think he kind of hit that sweet spot at the time is he really, he toes the line really well between lewd humour and respectability. Mm-hm.

So Shakespeare's full of jokes and it's full of innuendo, but then Ben Johnson is just saying, I farted thee. So... LAUGHTER

If you don't have that, like that kind of goes more towards a particular type of humor that people want. But if you don't want that, then you can just get, you know, Shakespeare's right in the middle of the line. Yeah, you need to, the balance is what makes I Fart at Thee funny. Just people repeatedly saying I Fart at Thee is just, it wears thin real very, like real quickly. Real quick.

Whereas I distinctly remember what we did, I think when I was in year nine, we did, or year 10 maybe, we did Othello. And I distinctly remember having the beast with two backs explained to us. And then the entire class just going absolutely hysterical. Yeah, well, that's what you've got to do when you're teaching Shakespeare to children. Poor Jamie, he was in university before someone told him about the dick jokes. And then you have to pretend to be an adult about it.

When you're 14, you can just be a nightmare. And honestly, the teachers signed up for that. Sorry. I think it is the responsibility of teachers to explain things.

Because this is the thing. The way we treat Shakespeare and all the classics now is alienating, right? They feel elitist because of the way we talk about them. And I think your job when you're teaching them to students is to break down that barrier because they're a populist blockbuster nonsense. I will say that by far the most effective way that I was ever taught Shakespeare, because I did As You Like It,

A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello in school. And A Midsummer Night's Dream was by far the best because my teacher, Mrs. Todd, who's still alive. Hello, Mrs. Todd. She still talks to my mom. Made us act it out.

Yeah. And we kind of took it in turns. We weren't a very big class for some reason, but we did it in turns to perform different bits. And we did a couple of scenes in each class and we performed it. And when you perform it, like the jokes are funny. Yeah. And like Pyramus and Thisbe having like the workmen perform Pyramus and Thisbe and have somebody being like the wall and whatever. It's funny. The whole wall is funny. Yeah. Whereas reading it,

It's not particularly funny. No, only the people who should ever read Shakespeare are nerds like me.

Yeah. Don't read it. This is why Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet is such a gift, right? Because it's sexy and cool and violent and it should be violent and sexy and cool. And then it only takes you a little bit, like it takes a little bit to acclimatise yourself to the language. But once you get through that, it's just like a series of banners. Like when I was, just before I moved to London, this is my experience with Shakespeare is that

the plays I love the most are just the ones that I have worked on the most. Like the more you look at any given play, the more you love it. So I never really liked Hamlet. And then a friend of mine was directing a production of it. And she asked me to be the production manager and Hamlet bangs like it ripped. Yeah. And the wee boy who was doing like this 20 year old kid who was doing our lights thing.

It was like, I've always hated Shakespeare. I hated when we had to do Shakespeare in school, but actually this one's pretty good. And I was like, that's the point. That's the problem is that you had to do it in school and you didn't get to experience it as it's meant to be experienced, which is like a rip-roaring play. Yeah. Well, I think that a lot of my understanding of the...

or like appreciation of the tragedies only came because of slings and arrows oh I mean absolutely god that like the layers of performing Shakespeare while doing adapted Shakespeare plays in the plot is so clever and gives you such an appreciation for the

how the plays can be both very, very of their time and completely timeless. Which I think is partly because he was adapting and so he made these adaptable works. And I'm going to talk about this more at the end. But I think the fact that it's the things you can slot into. And this is the thing.

Actors love Shakespeare because he makes your job so easy. Like, you still have to do work. There's a lot of interpretation that comes into it. There's a lot of analysis you have to do to sort of get into a character, but then...

You can really just sink into the roles that he's done it all for you. This is the thing about acting is that the worse the writing, the harder your job is. And nothing is easier than Shakespeare. Once you are used to the language, it's so, so easy. And I think that's one of the reasons he endures because actors will always love to perform these plays. Mm-hmm.

It's also part of that, a part of why it's so lovely to hear once you do get used to it is the fact that the fashion at the time was for iambic pentameter

Which is poetry, right? And it's usually blank verse. Shakespeare usually, it will be blank verse except for the last line in the scene. The last couple of lines in the scenes will be a rhyming couplet. But normally it's just this blank iambic pentameter. So it has this lyrical nature to it. It has the rhythm of poetry, but it is the...

poetic rhythm that is the closest to natural human speech so it doesn't feel as mannered as for example iambic quatrameter which is four sections instead of five if you don't know what iambic pentameter means an iamb is a da dum and then pentameter is five so you have five da dums and that's iambic pentameter and it just it's just a it's just a powerful rhythm manager and i want to tell you

Just don't see why we need to talk about it any further than that. It just fucking works. It's just good shit. Yeah. It's not complicated. So that's kind of what built him to be the playwright he was. Jonathan Bate also talks about him being constantly haunted by the idea of Marlowe after Marlowe died because he was the titan before he died. And that's the...

Puring into the question is what he could have done if he hadn't been killed. And he probably would have been a greater tragedy than Shakespeare, but he would never have caught up with him for comedy. And that's another thing that makes him unique is he's so good at both tragedy and comedy, which also means he's so good at knitting the one into the other. None of his plays are wholly funny or wholly tragic. They always have something else undercutting them. A bit of both.

Which is harder to do well than it looks. I mean, God, yeah, we've all seen rubbish attempts. Yeah. So many, so many rubbish attempts. So that's kind of what made Shakespeare Shakespeare in his day, what made him the writer that he was. And he was one of the most popular writers of his day by the time he died, but also not...

Like a big enough deal that anyone tried to write a biography like at the time or immediately after he died. No one tried to write a biography until he'd been dead for almost 100 years. So that's why we don't know anything about him. Yeah. Because no one wanted to find out when you could talk to people who knew him when he was alive. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and there was less of an interest in biography in general at that time anyway. Well, there was less of an interest as well in theatre as an art form. It was really, theatre was a low art. It was the soap opera television of its day. No one is out here looking for information about people from Love Island. Yeah, and maybe we should be.

Maybe we should be. I think it's more important to know about low art. Low art is popular. High art is, frankly, less so. The great test of any art is how long it lasts for. And history has told us that it's usually the last. Dickens, low art. Shakespeare, low art. Yes. Disappointingly less so from the ancient world, but that's because of monks. Yeah.

So once Shakespeare dies, the next stage in him becoming the bard is the first folio. Yes. This was almost unique. So plays, being published was not the point of a play. Being performed was the point. The final form is the performance, which kind of means that plays never have a final form because you stage them again and again and each version of that is the final form. It's slightly different. Yeah.

Yeah. So the only reason to compile a play into its text is to license it to other companies, unless you're a very big deal, in which case you publish it in a quarter, which is like a little cheap paper, well, not paperback, but essentially the equivalent of a paperback.

And a lot of these are kind of only semi or unofficial. They are scrambled together from whatever scrapes people can find. And that includes people transcribing it as they watch the show. Not very accurately. So quartos are kind of a hot mess, but they're around. And there's like literally grades of good quarto and bad quarto. Yeah.

But no one cared about publication. Shakespeare didn't care about having his work published, which we know because when he published his narrative poems, he took a great deal of pains about that and he never bothered to follow up on the publication of his plays at all. They wouldn't have belonged to him. They belonged to the company, which he was a partner in, but he didn't have ownership as an author does today. So they were not the sort of... It was not the sort of work that was ever published in a folio. Folios were for serious academic...

academic work and religious work. They were for the real goods. There was some Chaucer in folio, but for the most part, it's...

fancy Latin stuff and religious texts. People having big things. People having their big, serious things of important things. Until 1616, which is the year Shakespeare died, when Ben Johnson published his plays in a folio while he was alive, which was an insane thing to do.

I appreciate the balls in that. But like, this is for big things and I have had a big thing. Not just that, but he called it the works of Benjamin Johnson. Like, these are my great works, which applying that term to plays at this point in time, that is insane. And everyone made fun of him for it. Everyone thought he was being so dumb. He'd lost his mind. He'd lost his mind. But that did set a precedent. So after Shakespeare died...

The remaining two members of the Lord Chamberlain's men, John Hemmings and Henry Condal, they decided to publish a follow of his plays, which was published in 1623. This was such a massive undertaking to get done. Because...

Most of Shakespeare's... I think like 18 of the plays had never been published in quarto. And so if they hadn't done this, we wouldn't have those plays at all. We wouldn't have Macbeth if they hadn't done that. That was never published in quarto. Twelfth Night was never published in quarto. So it was the first publication of 18 of Shakespeare's plays. And that meant...

them hunting down whatever scraps of whatever pages of all the plays they could find, making sure it aligned with their memories of the plays, which they would have had because they've been performing them over and over again all of this time. Yep. And then getting them printed up, which was again, also insane for the publishers who had to, a folio is like six pages stuck together and then folded. So it's 12 pages in total, but you build it to get each set of 12. You build from the outside in. So yeah,

Christ. You have one sheet that has page one and page two and page 11 and page 12. So you have to kind of try and predict what you're going to need to have on pages five and six. And frequently you're flat wrong and you have to like squash in extra words or you have all this blank space.

I'm stressed. Yeah, it's very stressful. I honestly immediately gave up the second that it was... They were like, oh, no, you have to try. No, not happening. Yeah. So they did that. It did pretty well. This is also... I did not realise that this was how people did books at the time. You could buy a fully bound edition, but you could also buy just the pages separately.

and get bound yourself and this is why so many ancient gentleman's libraries they match because they will have had their own binding they have them all bound themselves yeah and so we'll have the family's crest of it yeah um the first folio is one of like the most important books in of all time now

They go at auction for millions of pounds. The ones that remain, I think there are something like 300 left. Half of them are in the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. because of a guy who just got obsessed with them and collected a whole bunch. Just got well into collecting them. What's fun is there's a big project to look at all of them and compare them all. And the folio that once belonged to Samuel Johnson is covered in gravy stains.

What a guy. And you can tell by looking at them what sort of plays people were interested in. Some of the folios will be like, there'll be all these annotations all throughout the histories and then the comedies will have been completely ignored and then there'll be annotations through the pages. Someone was only interested in Henry IV Part II. Which is really, really fun.

But that book existing and being made and doing all right is why the plays remain today. Like that's why we still have them. There was then also a second folio and a third folio and a fourth folio. And there's a varying quality because people start changing things.

Obviously people start knocking it off. Well, what the issue is, is that the theatrical tradition means you can mess with stuff. Every time you stage a play, you kind of mess with it. And we hadn't yet developed, in terms of preserving English text at least, a reverence for the author's original version. It's likely that Shakespeare himself didn't have a particular reverence for his own original version. But we as a culture didn't develop that.

until like a wee bit later because the journey of his plays after the first folio is hilarious. The issue with copyright at this time is kind of every man for himself. There's various laws come into place and go away again about player companies owning copyrights and what have you. And then in 1710, we get the Statute of Anne.

which is also the Copyright Act of 1709. So this is 100 years after Shakespeare died, almost 100 years after Shakespeare died, and we've had various versions of the folio of varying quality versions

The text has changed. Sometimes they just throw in another couple of plays because they're like, is this Shakespeare? And it's probably not. And sometimes they leave plays out that they shouldn't. So you go through this time where everyone thinks that they need the newer version because it's the most up-to-date one. But often the newer versions were degrading the actual quality of the text. Yep. Yeah. But it's new. How could it be worse? So the copyright act of 1799 under the statute of Anne is basically...

ownership to specific authors or specific printers to have the exclusive license to print a particular work. So Shakespeare's

copyrights all get snapped up by a publisher called Jacob Thompson who just steals them from he just buys them or steals them from wherever he can get them until he's got the whole plays and then he's responsible for any further publications as long as he releases a new one semi-regularly like every 10 years or so he has to put out a new edition of Shakespeare to keep hold of that. That's pretty good. Oh yeah so you protect your copyright yeah. Yeah and

There are a few different versions that come out and then there is one that is done by Alexander Pope.

And Alexander Pope had very strong feelings about what was really written by Shakespeare and what was put in by someone else based on what he thought was good and what he thought was bad. So he edited the plays within an inch of their lives. He's just like, I just, I really don't like this. Shakespeare definitely intended for it to be this. So I'm just going to rewrite it as this. And this will be the definitive edition as verified by me, Alexander Pope.

It reminds me of when they made Caligula, the Bob Guccione film, at least two people in the crew claimed to have psychically contacted the Emperor Caligula and got his approval for their portrayal. One of whom was the director. And that's why that movie is perfect in Capture Dome. And that's why it's so good. It's so good.

Yeah. Anyway, continue. So a contemporary of Alexander Pope's called Louis Theobald, who was also a writer and a lawyer and was kind of a hack. Like he wrote, I think he had aspirations to a more artistic career, but he largely did panto sort of stuff. Okay. Yeah. But he was obsessed with Shakespeare. He knew he had read every copy he could get his hands on and he basically read

a volume that was like, here is everything that Alexander Pope got wrong. And he published it to match that edition of the play so that people could buy both and go through and correct their Alexander Pope edition. Delightful. So good. And then there's sort of this competition where you get like loads of copies printed. So there are just like millions of these about. Like anyone can get their hands on

of the complete works of Shakespeare because of this back and forth. It's real cheap now. It's real cheap now. And it's everywhere and anyone can stage them. So that kind of spreads that around, but it also makes Shakespeare relevant as an intellectual study. Like the idea that you can debate Shakespeare

and what they meant and what he was going for and the fact that they can be academic back and forth over what the words mean is relatively new and that gains prominence because of these two men and they were violently opposing using what Offworld Shakespeare said.

I think it's nice to have two violently opposing views. Like, that means everybody gets to get involved because you'll read it just to see what, you know, this guy said about that guy this time. Yeah, exactly. You want to be in on the fight. It's just like when you discover some nonsense on Blue Sky and you're like, I've got to know where the divorce started from. Yeah, exactly. Or you just join in. We're like, before you know it, you're quote tweeting bullshit. Exactly. Yeah.

Livia is just having a big scream. Sorry. She's real mad about the plastic. Yeah. Yeah.

You then get to this point a few years later where you have Samuel Johnson comes in and he also does his own edition of Shakespeare, which he, Samuel Johnson had such a stressful life. He was just constantly selling subscriptions to things he was going to write and then running out of money before he finished writing them. Because again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah. Then spending all that money on something else. He's just always like, I'm in debt as president, I need to write a book. Constantly. Yeah.

So he comes in with this real hard line on Shakespeare as a literary icon and how important it is to have this preserving of the text as a sacrosanct literary product. And at the same time, you have David Garrett, who is like the actor of the moment, who is also obsessed with Shakespeare, but from the opposite angle.

as a theatrical import and something you can play around with and mess with and interpret and reinterpret. So they're both sort of using their... Yeah, like a living document. Yeah. Their platforms to advocate for Shakespeare as someone important. And it's David Garrick who then stages the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford in 1769, which is to celebrate his 200th birthday or 205th, really. Yes.

Close enough. Round it up. It's fine. And it's that that makes Shakespeare a commodity, right? It makes Stratford a tourist trap. Yeah.

the place you want to go for your Shakespeare tat, which you do. You do want some Shakespeare tat. It's great. You do. Yeah. When I, because I did all of my degrees in Birmingham and during my postgrad, you used to be able to get student tickets for £5 for Stratford. Yeah. And so you used to be able to go and see the RSC in Stratford for a fiver. And the seats were terrible, but it was still better than not going. I did standing seats at Stratford. No.

No, I didn't do that. I have done it to teetering on tiny little stools. The sad thing about that is that it was like a bad play. It was Twelfth Night and I just didn't like the production. So I really noticed that I was standing. But then I also did standing tickets, groundling tickets at the Globe. And I barely noticed I was standing because it was so good. I saw Loveless. Just having a great time. I've obviously seen other RSC and Globe stuff since then, but that was the first time I did standing Shakespeare. Yeah.

Yeah, it was a great time. And you could get, I had a student rail card, could get the train down with some friends, go and get the train home again. What a delightful time it was. I did a tour of Anne Hathaway's cottage and that's where I learned that the expression on the shelf

comes from the tradition of having like a fold down shelf in the kitchen and when you had a guest to stay you would kick your unmarried daughters out of their beds and make them sleep on the shelf in the kitchen that's why they were on the shelf oh wait that's why they're on the shelf yeah just hanging around the house failing to be married yeah being in the way of the guests yeah

So at this point, we've got Shakespeare as a literary icon, Shakespeare as a theatrical icon, Shakespeare as a commodity. And then we run straight into the romantics. And the romantics fundamentally change the way we think about poetry and genius and authors. It is...

the romantics who developed the notion that all writing and definitely all poetry is autobiographical, which was not the case in Elizabethan poetry. In Elizabethan times, if you were a poet, you were writing for a patron to try and get a patron or to celebrate your patron. And that's the point of it. So most of Shakespeare's sonnets were not written to be published. They were written to

make his patron happy. Or written as a fun thing for his friends. The point was to play with the form more than it was to express personal feelings. It doesn't mean that they're not sometimes expressing personal feelings, but that's not the primary goal. But the Romantics view poetry differently and their views are what sort of remain today. We've never quite let go of the idea that if you're writing a poem it's to express your deep inner truth. Yes, that every eye in poetry must be an eye.

And that it's a great art, right? Like, I think there's an argument to be made that Shakespeare didn't really think of himself as a great artist at all. That's not what his goal was. His goal was to entertain people. Yeah. Because otherwise he wouldn't have stayed in the theatre, which was not considered an art at the time. It doesn't seem like, yeah, he certainly doesn't seem like he acted like he was doing great art at any point. Seems like he acted like he was having a good time.

He had had a massive success with publishing narrative poems. If he wanted to keep doing that, he could have, but he only did that when the play was closing the theatres and then the moment they were open, he was back to writing a play. Yeah. So the Romantics bring in this idea that poetry is all autobiographical and they also bring in this idea of the writer as this genius who sits alone in a garage and pours out of himself. Yeah.

the truth of his age and his humanity and that. Yeah, exactly. This really romanticised idea of what writing is like, which all writers know is not accurate at all. My hair is magnificent and I gaze out of windows in a pained and tortured fashion. Yes. And it is at this point...

that Shakespeare becomes a god which means that it is at this point when you start to get heretics ah yes yes people who wish to bring down the god yeah exactly so there are there are a couple of mentions in like the late 18th century about oh I don't know if Shakespeare could have written all this but it really kicks off in 1852 with a lovely lady called Delia Bacon who is kind of one

I kind of want to be able to read more about her because the way she's talked about is like the cliche of a mad spinster. Like she's...

She's romantically embarrassed and out of that embarrassment she becomes obsessed with Francis Bacon because they share a last name and maybe they're connected somehow. So she's a Spitzer school teacher from New Haven, Connecticut. And in 1852 she convinces a wealthy businessman to fund a research trip to England so she can prove that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's plays.

And this is the sort of thing that I wish that I was good at because I think it would solve all my problems. But she convinces him to fund a four-year trip. And she doesn't. During that time, she does not meet with any academics. She does not go to any libraries or museums or attempt to see any documents from anyone anywhere. She just kind of wanders about places where Francis Bacon was known to go and so except the Vibes. And then she publishes.

an incredibly unreadable book called The Philosophy of the Place of Shakespeare Unfolded with an introduction by Nathaniel Hawthorne who when it's published and roundly panned is like yeah I didn't actually read it oh I don't know what I was just a friend of it like when you like people do blabs for books and like oh yeah no we have an agent like yeah

I didn't read it. I just assumed. So the book is bad and everyone says it's bad, but it catches the attention of a few people, including Mark Twain and Henry James. And this is when the conspiracy theory really takes off. This is interesting. So it's very American, like conspiracy. Yeah.

Not exclusively. Because I tend to associate it with, these days, I suppose, with people like, God bless him, Mark Rylance and Derek Jacoby. We are going to get to that because the Mark Rylance, Derek Jacoby thing, I find very confusing for reasons that I will get to. Thank you. But yeah, so at this point, the conspiracy theory really looks conspiratorial because what they are doing is scanning the plays for hidden codes. LAUGHTER

I am Francis Bacon written backwards. Like literally. I'm JK Rowling.

Yep. Then, so it kind of continues in 1918, a guy called J. Thomas Looney publishes a book claiming that the real author was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who was one of the other leading candidates people love to talk about. Looney had to fight to find a publisher who was willing to put it out under his real name because he was like, it's actually pronounced Looney and it's nothing to do with me being mad. And I'm not.

Not mentally ill, I promise. Yes. So there have been loads of other candidates put forward. Christopher Marlowe having faked his own death is one of the favourites. Oh, I like that one. That one's fun. Faked his own death and then came back. Yeah. Or like scarpered away to Italy and then wrote from there. Because he was, at the time of his death, Marlowe was awaiting trial for heresy and atheism. Yeah.

So, you know, you can understand him wanting to fake his own death and get out of the country. I don't think he did, but, you know. I mean, and then write a series of plays that turned out to be extraordinarily brilliant, thus giving away the fact that he's still alive. Yeah. So there are loads of candidates and there are loads of people who have been obsessed with proving that their particular candidate is the real Shakespeare, none of which have ever found any evidence to support their claim at all. Yeah. Like, one of them...

of the things they say is that there's no records of his text. There's no Shakespeare writing a letter about his plays. There's no manuscript. He didn't take any time-lapse footage of him writing it. Exactly. There's none of that for any of the others either. So here is the thing. Shakespeare's name appears as the author of his works multiple times during his life. He

He is recorded by the Master of Ceremonies. His name is on the quartos. There are people mentioning him in their diaries. Isn't he in Peeps? I think Peeps hates one of his plays, doesn't he? I think he is in Peeps. Peeps is not a fan. Yeah, I did not... I don't remember exactly what he said about him, but yeah, Peeps wasn't a fan. I think it's Romeo and Juliet, and I think that Peeps is like, this is the worst dog show I've ever seen in my entire life. I can't believe that we've performed this stuff, which is funny, because I feel like a lot of students have agreed. So...

If Shakespeare didn't write his plays, then he was in a conspiracy with the real playwright to

front for him, which is nonsense. Weird. A weird behavior. But also doesn't make any sense if you have any awareness at all of how new theater is developed. Yeah. Plays right from the beginning are generally very collaborative. Like if I wanted to write a play right now, I would definitely knock up a draft. I might work with some actors to devise some stuff and improvise some stuff as I'm working that out. I might not.

Then when I've got a draft, I have a reading and I work with it and you rewrite it in the room with rehearsal and then you stage a workshop in which you are like maybe working with actors for like two weeks together. Like it is very collaborative. When you are writing for something to be performed, you want to see how it is performed as you go. And in Shakespeare's case, he has this company that he works with for almost his entire career. This is how they work. So it's...

it's not Shakespeare who is the writer then everyone of the Lord Chamberlain's men is also involved in this conspiracy I mean what I'm hearing is that this is basically the same as the flat earth that you need everybody to agree to be very quiet forever yeah exactly and remarkably successful on that front yeah and like what reason would they have for doing that

It's absolutely nonsense. And added to that, the fact that if he was any of, almost any of the candidates, he wouldn't need to be shilling for a patron because they're all like, Northern ladies. Which, yeah. Which also we will get to more. But that's...

But that's why when a theatre person, when an actor buys into the conspiracies, that's why I just don't understand it. If you're involved in theatre and you see how theatre works, I don't understand how you could ever believe that there was a conspiracy to protect the real playwright. It just doesn't make sense.

Mark Rylance I know is very into other conspiracies because he's also very into crop circles like he loves crop circles to a degree there's also weird so I think he might just like the maybe conspiracy element of it maybe but great actor though but not right about this a great actor but not correct all the time

I do think that a lot of them, and certainly the bits and bobs that I've read about the authorship, is that there is a real kind of classist element. Well, we're going to get to that. Don't you worry. I'm going to go off on that in a second. But that's the last thing I'm going to talk about. Okay. So one of the key...

quote unquote pieces of evidence is that there's no preserved manuscripts they weren't found in his belongings where are the manuscripts and um some of the debunkers of the conspiracy theory will will say that well he why would he bother to look after his manuscripts this is classic writers you just move on to the next thing and you don't think about the last thing which is true but i also think that it's possible that in a lot of cases there were no manuscripts

Because the point was not to publish. The point was not to preserve. The point was to perform. So you write out the play as you need to write it out to perform it, which often I think would have mean. And this is one of those things where, because I've looked at Shakespeare in literature classes, I've studied Shakespeare historically, and I've studied Shakespeare theatrically. And it's one of those things that you hear different things in different environments. And one of the things that I was told in drama school is that plays will be written out character by character.

So you give Romeo, the actor who was playing Romeo, which would have been Richard Burbage, he just gets all Romeo's lines and cues. Because you're writing it out by hand with a quilt. Have a photocopier. You're not going to write out the whole play 12 times so every member... Exactly. It's not practical. So...

Going to be rehearsal copies, I really think would have been a mess. Rehearsal copies of modern plays end up a mess by the end of the rehearsal period anyway. But I just think that it's very likely that after doing all of that work, writing it and rewriting it out as you rehearse, why would he sit down and be like, I'm going to now write out the full text from beginning to end? I'm now going to write down my clean version and spend several days doing that.

Yeah, it just doesn't make any sense to me. There will have been copies licensed to other theatre companies. There are also, people talk about there being prompt copies for the prompter. I'm always a bit, I don't know that that's not true. And I haven't looked into Elizabethan play documents enough, but I'm always sceptical of prompt copies because I'm always sceptical of there having been a prompter. Ah, yes. Because that's rank amateur shit.

It's the worst way to solve the problem of dropping a line. It takes up so much time and energy for a small thing that may never happen. Especially when you think about the layout of the stage on an apron stage where the actors are half the time, the audience is going to be closer to the wings than the actors. So you can't give someone a prompt without everyone else hearing it. And I think...

In a professional setting, what you normally do when you drop a line is you just keep moving forward. You know the scene well enough to keep it moving forward. And the actors on stage with you know the scene well enough to keep it moving forward. It's not that big a deal to drop a line. You just keep going, yeah. You just keep going. And I just don't know. Respectable scholars talk about prompt copies, but I just don't quite buy it personally. That's fair.

But either way, I think the idea of Shakespeare having perfect manuscripts that he kept for himself is nonsense. I just don't understand why he would do that. The other piece of evidence is that he can't have been smart enough or educated enough to write what he wrote. He writes about the law and he writes about medicine and he writes about the military and how does he know all of these things when he probably barely had any education at all.

Which in the first place, there's no reason to think he didn't go to the local grammar school in Stratford. And that local grammar school seems to have been really good. The principal of the school was paid twice what similar schools were paying. He was paid more than Eton, the headteacher of Eton was paid twice.

That's a negotiator. Well done him. All of the teachers that worked there were from Oxford. So like this was a school that valued good instruction and it would have been all Latin rhetoric and literature. I would also like to introduce to people the concept of the writerly magic known as talking to other people about what they do.

Now, you see, write that down into a book, Janina. The writerly magic of talking to other people. You've got a bestseller on your hands. You want to write about the law, you find a lawyer and you ask them about the law. It's not that complicated. And the third thing is his plays are full of hot nonsense. Do you know how old Hamlet is? Because Shakespeare doesn't. At some points 18 and at some points 30. There are clocks striking in Julius Caesar. He is consistently wrong about Italian geography.

Sets so many plays in Italy, he clearly knows nothing about it. No, no, no. He imagines what Italy is, yeah. Exactly. It's just that he also does a play, I think, Measure for Measure is set in Vienna, but everyone has Italian names. It's the Italian community of Vienna, yeah. There was a lot of great Italian theatre at this point, and he was reading a lot of Italian plays, probably. But...

He didn't know anything himself about Italy, you know? Yeah, and why bother? Nobody knows anybody else. No one else knows about Italy either, so... Right, it doesn't matter. And that's great. I think it's great that his plays are full of hot nonsense and yet still works of genius. I think all writers should hold on to that fact. Yeah, I mean, these days people would come and harass you at big festivals about your, like, mildly incorrect statement. But those days everyone was like, yeah, sounds about right.

And I honestly think that when people do come and harass you at book festivals about a minor inaccuracy in your books, you can just point them to Shakespeare. Yeah. This is again from Slings and Arrows when they're staging Hamlet that Shakespeare didn't care about anachronisms, so why should we? And I think we should all take that to heart. I think that that is perfectly fine. And he did all right. To back up the claim that Shakespeare wasn't smart enough or educated enough to have written his plays, there is the claim that his father was illiterate.

Oh no. His father was the High Bailiff of Stratford at one point, basically the mayor. He was the alderman and the chief magistrate. The only evidence that he was illiterate is that he signed his name with a mark. So the received wisdom is he didn't know how to write his own name. But it was actually reasonably common for Elizabethan men to sign their names with a mark, and it didn't necessarily indicate anything about their literacy. There is another Stratford resident from the same time, one of their neighbours, Adrian Quiney.

who also signed his name with an X. And we would also believe him to have been illiterate if it weren't for the fact that a letter that he wrote happened to survive. Proving that he wasn't. Yeah. John Shakespeare was a skilled craftsman. He was a leather worker and he made gloves. And then he was this, for most of his life, he had a...

He had some setbacks, but he was this distinguished person in his community. He had lots of positions of authority. He was, you know, chief magistrate of the town council at one point. He was the alderman. He was in charge of making sure that measures were accurate in pubs and stuff like that. It's reasonable to assume he had some degree of authority.

reading and writing and numeracy. And his wife, Mary Arden Shakespeare, was the daughter of a gentleman farmer, so she would have also probably been able to read. She would have had governesses and whatnot. It's just not a reasonable assumption to make. You can argue it, but I don't think you can prove it, and I don't know what the goal is, except for you're a snob. So at this point in time, as well as having this

vision of the author as a romantic genius sitting alone and penning all their work and never collaborating with anyone which we know shakespeare collaborated he has co he like he co-wrote plays some of his plays anyway we also have a real uh a class warfare uh as this year in england like this is after the french revolution um this is there is a real um

drive to prove or to believe that the gentry are the gentry for a reason. Yes. You can also see this with the unveiling of the Chandos portrait at the National Gallery. Chandos portrait is, if it is Shakespeare, the only portrait that was done, that survives, that was done during Shakespeare's lifetime.

It was just found in someone's like an estate sale and it was donated to the National Portrait Gallery as its first portrait.

Oh wow. Yeah. So our idea of what Shakespeare looks like is based on three things. The Chandler's portrait, the etching in the first folio, which was done after he was dead, obviously, but approved by people who knew him, and the bust at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, which was also, after his death, but approved by people who knew him, but then whitewashed and repainted, so we don't actually know what it looked like.

God, I love people. It was because of a Shakespearean scholar who was like, how dare you tart up this pristine bust of Shakespeare that was surely meant to be just perfect white. Surely meant to be white, yeah. Yeah, but obviously it was not meant to be white because as sculpted, it's very bland and plain and basically shows nothing.

Yeah. But he was like all of the classical statues that we have are white, not because the paint came off or anything. Yeah, it couldn't be a ruin. It couldn't be because they've just been in the ground for a really long time. It must be something else. It must be something else. It must be meant this way. The Chandos portrait was unveiled to the public in 1856.

by which time, obviously, the conception of Shakespeare is, like, the great English poet. The great poet of the English language anywhere. The distillation of this entire country is Shakespeare. And when the portrait was unveiled, the claims that it couldn't possibly be actually be Shakespeare are wall-to-wall xenophobia. Just, he's too dark and swarthy. He looks Italian. He couldn't possibly be Shakespeare because...

Shakespeare is a great Englishman and this man doesn't look English. And in a case of you scratch a conspiracy theory and you find anti-Semitism... Every time. Every time. Even one critic who hopefully was like, maybe it is okay, maybe he is this great English playwright, he's just in makeup to play Shylock. Yeah. Because you can't... Every time. England's very tall and comfy. He can't look Jewish, he can't look foreign...

No. Every fucking time. So yeah, that is what is behind it, is classism and racism and xenophobia and antisemitism and all of this...

these things that are always going to come into conflict when you view a writer as a real person rather than a signifier, right? If Shakespeare is to be a signifier of great English art, then you need him to look like your idea of a great English artist. And if you can't cope with the idea that someone who didn't go to university is a great artist, then you insist that it can't have been him. Yeah, it has to be someone from the nobility. The way...

The weird thing is, I mean, this is why it arises out of Shakespeare being Shakespeare more than anything else. Because Ben Johnson also didn't go to university and his plays are much more steeped in academia and scholarship than Shakespeare's. So no one ever questions that he wrote his plays. And it's not because his level of education doesn't match what's in the plays. It's because he's not England's great playwright.

Yeah, he's not the icon and the image of English genius. Yeah. What's fun is that the first ever mention in any source of Shakespeare as a playwright comes from Robert Greene's Grotesworth, which is... Robert Greene was also a playwright known as one of the university wits who...

wrote this. Let me find the actual quote because it's fun. So he, when he was dying, he arranged for a pamphlet to be published called Green's Grotes Worth of Wit, which basically just means my two cents. Yep. And it is just his random thoughts

I'm glad that this has always existed. They just get a guy who publishes his things. Yeah, I've written down some thoughts and now I'm publishing them for everyone to read. Enjoy my thoughts. In his groatsworth, he complains about Shakespeare. This is where the phrase upstart crow comes from.

He calls Shakespeare an upstart crow because he's only a player and he thinks he can, because obviously, I don't think we've talked about this, Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer and he acted throughout his career as well as writing. Everybody always hates actors in the past. Everybody always hates actors and how dare he think he can write as well and he's stealing the feathers of real university educated people.

playwrights like Robert Greene. Yeah. So it's kind of nice that his first mention is someone complaining about him daring to write plays when he hasn't been to university and that that then underpins the whole conspiracy about whether or not he wrote his plays at all. Yep. As you say, the more things change, the more things change to stay the same. Yeah. And that's... So that obviously has been...

Going on for the past couple of hundred years, 150, 160, 170? Yeah. 170 years? 170, yeah. And it definitely, I think, has the effect of making people look closer and pay more attention than in my other ways would have. Because it's fun to look at a conspiracy theory, even when there's nonsense. But I think the real thing that makes Shakespeare endure is you can do whatever you want to him and you can't hurt him.

Yes. In New Zealand, there's a festival called the Sheila Wynne Shakespeare Festival where it's a competitive high school Shakespeare competition. Competitive competition. This is what my brain is fine. Basically, you perform a wee scene from Shakespeare and there are winners in the city and there's a national competition. And if you win the national competition, you get to come to London and go to the Globe.

And it's very cool and fun and it's sometimes terrible. Yeah, obviously. I think almost once a week I think of the Lady Macbeth who said the line, you are too full, full stop.

Oh, the milk of human kindness, which makes me very, very happy. My brother's best friend won the national competition with a Henry V We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers We scene, which she staged as a bunch of football fans getting ready to watch their team lose.

See, this is exactly why it works. This is exactly why. And I've been thinking about this a lot because I went to see, a couple of months ago, I went to see Jamie Lloyd's Much Ado About Nothing, which is terrible. Like, he butchers that play. Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell, very good Beatrice and Benedict. Jamie Lloyd, I've never seen any of his plays before. I know his whole thing is making things cool.

Is this one where they had cardboard cutouts of themselves? Yes. Yeah. But he also, like, the cast is really small and loads of the characters are just cut and there are lines assigned to other characters kind of arbitrarily. He gets rid of the character of Dogsberry, which I do understand he's an annoying character. It's like high comic relief in a play that's already a comedy. Fine. But him, who solves the whole mystery...

So if you take out the character, then you don't solve the mystery. You don't figure out what's happened. So to deal with, I mean, you also lose a huge amount of time. Anyway, so what they did is they have just another character come in and cobble together some of the lines enough to be like, it was this all along. And the character they choose to do that with is Margaret, who is the unwitting and unwilling co-conspirator in the plot.

Okay. She suddenly reveals everything. Which doesn't make any sense because Margaret is devastated to find out. That's not going to make any sense if you don't know much about anything. But if you do, then you're going to be furious right now.

But it's a real butchering of the text. It doesn't make any sense. And that's kind of because that's what was happening. That's what has been happening with these plays for the last 400 years. Even while Shakespeare was alive, probably, another company would take one of his plays and do a rubbish version. It's so beautiful that you can take these texts and they're still going to be eternal, even if you batter them about. You can make the movie O.

And you can make the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. You can take 10 Things I Hate About You and she's the man. And people will because they're rich texts. They've got so much in them and they've got so much in them that is still applicable in some way. And it's like, I don't necessarily want to go out on a limb and say that he is the greatest writer who has ever lived because I don't believe that that exists. But like...

But he was good. He was really good. He's beloved for a reason. I mean, we've talked about the preservation of documents before and how what it takes for a text to survive over time is for enough people to value it enough to preserve it.

Yeah, and for it to be valued by different... Yes. Different culture. The real reason why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, why he is the bard, is that over the last 400 years, a lot of people have valued him very highly and they will continue to do that for a good while longer. We can't say forever. Maybe everyone will give up on him in 100 or 200 years and we'll never hear of him again. But, like, it's... Currently, he's doing all right. Currently, he's doing all right. And, like...

I don't know. I think there will always be someone who finds something. And it does become a self-perpetuating thing, right? It's like the mousetrap. Mousetrap is the longest running play. And at a certain point, you keep it running because it is the longest running play. Yeah, because if anyone tried to end it, then people would leap in and give them their money to prevent it from ending because it has been going on for so long. That then also has types. Like the first time I saw the mousetrap,

It was an almost... The first two times I saw The Master, I've seen it three times. The first two times, it was an almost empty theatre. And then the most recent time, it was packed and expensive. And I think that is because whodunits are really fashionable right now. Like everyone loves...

Knives Out and there's a million TV shows, you know, Only Murders in the Building and whatnot. And so it's just in right now. And that will fade and it will go back to being half full houses, if that, but we'll still want to keep it going because of the status it has as the longest running play. And Shakespeare, I think, oh, look, I love Agatha Christie, but Shakespeare, I think more deservedly, also has that status. He's important because he's important. Yeah.

Yeah, even if the original importance is because he is great. And that is, you know, sometimes the right guy gets lauded. Yeah. And I think that a thing with Shakespeare that kind of...

like he's popular because some friends of his were like we can't let these works be forgotten it's not like with Johnson or other people where they publish their own stuff because they're like I cannot be forgotten yeah he didn't

Shakespeare didn't give a shit if he was forgotten, but his friends did. And there is that recognition at the time. Ben Johnson wrote in the introduction to Shakespeare's first folio that he is not for this age, but for all ages. And I mean, anyone could say that about anyone, but it's nice that he was right.

Yeah. And then, you know, it's sold because people like to read them. And then it became a thing because people like to argue about it because there's enough in there to argue about. And then he becomes an icon because there's still stuff to enjoy in there. And he is still staged because people who are in the arts get something out of it.

There's still always something new to say about it, a new way of doing it, even if it's fucking awful. And there's still another way that you can think about Lady Macbeth, who's been played like a bazillion times, but every time is slightly different. And so, yeah, it's nice to see something that's not artificial, if you know what I mean. It feels like an organic appreciation of Shakespeare rather than...

Yeah. Like, industry stooge bullshit. Yeah. And this is why I get frustrated with how Shakespeare is taught, because, like... Yeah. He's... Like, there is something there for everyone. Like, he's funny. There are adventure stories. They're violent as shit. It's... They're so cool. I'm gonna...

I'm going to say right now that if you are an English teacher and you're listening to this, of which I'm sure there's at least one, get your students to act them out. Like, don't let them just sit and read them. Like, make them push the tables to the side of the room and perform them because honestly that was, like, it's so transformative for me and everybody in my class and for years afterwards we talked about it. And it's, like, the only thing that really made Shakespeare and I think, like, really any...

feel like something I could engage with in my incredibly shit school. And when I say incredibly shit school, I mean we had a special class for people who were on parole and a separate special class for people who brought their babies to school. So that was that bad. But

but we had a great time with the Midsummer's Night's Dream. But also pick the ones that are going to be fun. When I was in third form, every other English class did Midsummer Night's Dream and my class did Julius Caesar. And even for me, that was a bit much. And I might not have, if I hadn't then happened to watch the Kenneth Branagh Much Do About Nothing quite soon after that, I might have been put off Shakespeare for a while. It might have been the end of it. Um...

But fortunately, Emma Thompson saved me. Just do a Midsummer Night's Dream if you can. That's her exam. Yeah. Right. Janina, thank you for teaching me about Shakespeare. I now honestly just desperately want to go watch Slings and Arrows again. Yeah. One day. Someone put it on a streaming platform for me. Do you not have copies?

I have copies of GBS Legality, but one day I will buy the DVD. I have the Blu-rays from a beautiful time when they happened to be on Amazon for £60. Nice. Which they are no longer. Maybe I should drop some hints about my birthday. But anyway, next time we are going to answer a question from Jennifer in Arizona. And we're back in my comfort zone this time. And we're going to talk about...

And we're going to talk about the year of the four emperors, 69 CE. Nice. Which is the first civil war between guys fighting to be the emperor. Jennifer says that her dad had the middle name Otho, which was something that I teased him about in my youth. And that is a fascinating middle name. And I'm glad it's Otho and not only the other ones, because he's my favorite one. Yeah.

So we're going to talk about the Year of the Four Emperors. Someone else called who just put Jay in the box said Rex Factor, the Year of the Four Emperors. So I might do a modified. We won't do the actual Rex Factor things unless I can ask Graham for permission. But we will go through the Four Emperors of the Year of the Four Emperors and discuss how good they were at being emperors.

And before I forget, I also want to say thank you to Matthias and Elke who both emailed to tell me what a Felderschlange is in the episode that we did with Hero about Tumblr history myths. We had a guy who had his arm shot off, German knight, and then had a metal hand. And on Tumblr it said that

that it was like, this is the shot off left hand of this guy and then had a lot of information about him and it very clearly showed a picture of a right hand. So I went, got real deep into that one. Didn't know what a Feldschlanger was because nothing I found could really translate it for me and they have able to say that it is a small piece of artillery or a culverin, which is a small cannon. So thank you. So he got his hand shot off with a cannon and also several, Elke certainly said that

that all of the English language stuff about him including his Wikipedia says that he was a poet and I couldn't find anything in German at all including in his own autobiography about whether he was a poet and so I asked our German listeners whether he was a poet and they all said no so thank you for everybody who was like literally never heard of him just made it up

Specifically, I think a person on Tumblr made it up. Great. But it's now in his Wikipedia. But as far as I can tell, and as far as our delightful German speaking and German listeners are aware, this man never wrote a line of poetry in his fucking life. I love that. So still, no matter how good Wikipedia is these days, do not trust it. The things that I was telling people when I worked in universities, testers,

10, 15 years ago still holds. People can put any old bullshit on Wikipedia. Don't trust it. Until next time then, Janina. Thank you to everybody for listening and supporting us and sending us questions and making Janina rant about Shakespeare because that was very funny. It's very easy to make me rant about Shakespeare, to be fair. Just show you Tom Hiddleston holding a cardboard cart of himself being in a bad mood. He didn't even use it for anything. It was just there.

See, it is easy. It was in the scene where they were hiding and overhearing stuff and they didn't even make them hide behind the cardboard cutouts of themselves. Oh, poor Tommy Liston. We'll have to go up with this stuff. Anyway, thank you. And until next time. Bye. Bye, Janina.