Hello and welcome to Home School History.
I'm Greg Jenner, the historian behind TV's Horrible Histories and the host of the BBC podcast You're Dead to Me, though that one is mostly for the grown -ups.
I'm here to deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family.
Who says homeschooling can't be fun?
Today we are journeying back to 16th century England to explore the life of one of the greatest writers ever, some people called him England's national poet, others the bard but most people know him as William Shakespeare because, you know, that was his name, or was it?
Hmm, more on that later, you may have seen films inspired by Shakespeare plays such as Gnomeo and Juliet based on Romeo and Juliet, even Lord of the Rings contains references to Macbeth or the Lion King based roughly on Hamlet.
But this extraordinary writer came from a surprisingly ordinary background.
William was born to John and Mary Shakespeare in April 1564 in a town called Stratford -upon -Avon in the West Midlands.
His family wasn't poor, but they certainly weren't rich either.
Dad, John, worked a few different jobs as a glove maker, a trader of leather and wool and even a beer taster.
Ordinary jobs for an ordinary dad.
William was the third child of eight, but his two older sisters died tragically young making him the oldest. A home shared with five younger siblings would have been quite cramped Uhh William go away and the house was also their dad's glove shop.
Talk about working from home.
William went to the local perfectly ordinary grammar school where he would have learned all sorts of things including Latin.
But one of the things he wasn't taught was spelling.
thing. People just spelled things any way they liked back in those days, even their own names.
William Shakespeare spelled his name at least six different ways, including Willem Shakespeare and Wom Shakespeare.
Hmm, maybe I'll add a few more Gs to my name.
Grerrrr -genna. Grenna?
Grudge? No, it's not really working is it?
Nevermind. Shakespeare got married very young, aged 18, to a slightly older lady called Anne Hathaway, no, not the Hollywood actress.
Possibly because she was pregnant with their first daughter, Susanna.
And it wasn't a good idea to have a child when you weren't married back then.
Two years later, Anne and William had twins called Judith and Hamnet.
Young William Shakespeare was a middle child of a middling family in middle England and he was all settled down with a wife and three kids.
He was Mr. Average.
Yeah, a bit boring.
But William didn't spend much time at home with the family as he was always away in London.
Poor kids. And poor Anne.
And didn't even have zoom calls back then.
In London William tried his luck as an actor first, in fact he wasn't the only Shakespeare to try.
His younger brother Edmund Shakespeare also followed him.
Under different circumstances, Ed and Will might have been the Hemsworth brothers of their day, but it didn't work out for Edmund.
But William did better because he started writing plays.
Wanting to be successful, he paid attention to what was trendy and noticed the fashion was for historical subjects, so he wrote a medieval trilogy about King Henry VI.
Also trendy were mega -gory tragedies where most of the characters got horribly killed.
So William scribbled Titus Andronicus set in ancient Rome, which features some properly grizzly scenes that I don't recommend you google if you've just had your breakfast. Yuck!
To prove he could do a bit of everything, Shakespeare also wrote a controversial romcom called The Taming of the Shrew about a man bullying a strong, confident woman into being his obedient wife.
Hashtag Not Okay. Like you, William also lived through a pandemic, the plague in his case, which tragically killed his 11 year old son Hamnet.
This devastating loss affected William's work in a really big way.
Disease, death and grief are common Shakespearean themes and you may have noticed that Hamnet is a very similar name to Hamlet, one of his greatest ever tragic characters.
to be or not to be that is the question, but Shakespeare also wrote a lot of comedies and this made him unusual in fact a lot of his tragic plays have a naughty sense of humor and many of his funny plays are actually quite sad.
He also wrote a lot of cheesy dad jokes and puns but I guess he was technically a dad so I'll let him off.
Oh Dads! His versatility came in really handy and unlike Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare actually finished things.
In fact he wrote at least 37 plays in his life which averages out at two per year.
Even though he was living in London and writing for Londoners, Shakespeare often set his stories in faraway places like Denmark, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Austria, Egypt and the Middle East. For example A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of his most famous comedies is set in Athens in Greece.
These locations would have been exciting and exotic but London was also home to many immigrants and diplomats and foreign merchants so his audiences might have known people or been people from those places.
Shakespeare's genius was that he wrote complex characters of many different backgrounds.
Othello is a Moor from Africa.
Shylock is Jewish. And Shakespeare's lower -class characters speak very differently to his posh and powerful ones.
He also wrote great roles for women although those parts were played by boys in a dress because women weren't allowed on the stage back then.
Well, that's not fair, is it?
After his successes, Shakespeare was also rubbing shoulders with the A -listers of his day.
He hung out with playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton and his famous actors like Will Kemp and Richard Burbage, who starred in many of his plays.
Fancy. In fact, audiences were probably more excited about seeing Kemp and Burbage perform than they were in seeing something written by Shakespeare, who himself wasn't really made properly famous until a hundred and fifty years after his death.
Shakespeare! Never heard of him.
Shakespeare's friends and colleagues were really important to him.
It's easy to imagine him as a lone genius scribbling away.
But he collaborated closely with his trusted actors, musicians, costume makers, business partners and other writers, such as his famous pal, Thomas Middleton, who is possibly responsible for adding some of the famous witchy bits in Macbeth.
Double -double, toil and trouble, fire -burn and cauldron -bubble!
and this was normal at the time and it still is normal today.
i wrote this script with my pals emma and gabbie because teamwork makes the dream work.
shakespeare wasn't just good at writing he was also a savvy businessman he co -owned his theater company the lord chamberlain's men and the globe theater which was built in london in 1599.
now public theaters were really new and exciting and were visited by people from all different walks of life.
The globe had expensive seats and comfy cushions at the back for the posh people and it had mega cheap tickets for the common people called the Groundlings.
Now the cheap tickets didn't get you a seat, you had to watch the whole place standing up for as long as 4 hours sometimes.
Oh and there was no roof so you might get rained on.
The atmosphere was also quite raucous, today you're not meant to talk in a theater but 400 years ago, the audience would shout at the actors on stage, who would often turn and talk to the audience directly.
A bit like panto. Is that a dagger I see before me?
Oh no it isn't. Even though the scenery was very simple, the actors' costumes were really flamboyant.
And Shakespeare even used special effects.
No CGI goblins or lightsabers, but they could make thunder sounds by rolling a cannonball across the roof.
Oh, and they could make lightning by throwing fireworks through a trapdoor in the ceiling… a bit dangerous.
Also, the fireworks were partially made of dung, so when you burned them, they gave off quite the aroma.
In fact, in a stormy scene during Macbeth when the three witches say this...
Well the mention of that filthy air may have actually been a joke about the special effects team just having set off a poo firework.
Gross. oh Shakespeare's success kept growing in 1597 he bought the biggest house in Stratford -upon -Avon which had maybe as many as 30 rooms and in 1603 his theatre company became the King's Men the official performers for the new King James I of England who is also James VI of Scotland William mr. average Shakespeare had officially made it big and his family were granted a special family crest meaning he was now a gentleman pretty impressive for a guy who grew up in a glove shop.
Now that he was proper fancy, William opened up a second, much posher theatre called Blackfriars.
Unlike the Globe, Blackfriars was an indoor theatre, and was just for very rich people.
Between the 1590s and early 1600s he also wrote a lot of poetry, mostly poems called sonnets, and in 1609 he published a whopping 154 of them!
Crikey! whoa, Shakespeare stopped writing in 1613 because this was the year that his theatre, the Globe, burned down during a performance of Henry VIII, his play, the canon that they used to announce that the play was starting, well, it set fire to the roof.
Yeah this is why you don't have cannons in theatres.
Anyway, Shakespeare went home to Stratford -upon -Avon and he died there three years later in 1616.
Some people think he died on his 52nd birthday, though we're not sure about that.
His wife, Anne, only lived a few years longer than William.
But his story didn't end there and in the mid 1700s he became recognised as England's greatest national poet.
So why do people still love his work so much?
Well it helps that he wrote so much stuff, because there's loads of things to enjoy, so many different things of course.
And he was incredible at making up clever phrases that we still use today.
Have you ever said melted into thin air or wild goose chase or I haven't slept to wink or have you ever tried to break the ice, well then you have performed Shakespeare, well done you.
Hooray! He was also brilliantly good at rude insults.
I'm very fond of a blinking idiot which is a Shakespeare line, but a less subtle one was thou art a boil, a Plague Sore, mean.
I also love the line You have such a February face, so full of frost of storm and cloudiness.
Beautiful, but also savage.
You wouldn't have wanted to get in a TikTok insult battle with Billy Shakespeare, I can tell you.
Do you need some ice for that burn?
Shakespeare's exciting storylines, tantalising cliffhangers, fascinating characters, and the way he could capture feelings like love, fear, and sadness, meant he was beloved by audiences, rich and poor, for years after his death.
And even today Shakespeare's work feels profoundly meaningful to people all over the world.
He wrote about humanity in all its forms. Bravo William!
And that brings us to the end of Shakespeare's story, so now it's time for the quiz.
We have five questions.
Are you ready? Okay, here we go.
Question 1. Where was William Shakespeare's home town?
Question 2. Who was William Shakespeare married to?
Question 3, Shakespeare worked in and co -owned which famous outdoor theatre in London?
Question 4, when performing a play how did they create the sound of thunder?
And question 5, Shakespeare's 154 poems were published in 1609 but what type of poem were they?
OK, let's do the answers.
The answer to question 1, Shakespeare's hometown was Stratford upon Avon.
The answer to question 2, he was married to Anne Hathaway.
The answer to question 3, the outdoor theater was The Globe.
The answer to question 4, they used cannonballs to make thunder.
The answer to question 5, the poems were called sonnets.
How did he do? If you didn't get all 5, that's ok, why not listen a different episode from series one or two?
Hopefully you're now a William Shakespeare wiz, tune in next time for some more home school history, and make sure to subscribe on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.
Thank you for listening, take care and goodbye.
Home School History was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
The script was by Gabby, Hutchinson Crouch, Emma Nagoose and me.
The research assistant was Hannah McKenzie.
The producer was Abby Patterson and the historical advisor was Professor Farah Karim Cooper, head of higher education and research at Shakespeare's Globe.
Hello, I hope you've enjoyed the podcast you just heard. There's another podcast available as well.
It's called The Infinite Monkey Cage with me Robin Ince and - Me, Brian Cox.
And it's going to be, I think, more educational than whatever it is that you just listened to because we're going to consider subjects such as the nature of reality which encompasses whatever it is that you just listened to.
So yeah, Jan 11, Eric Heidel, Frank Wilczyk, Sara Pascoe, Ross Noble, Chris Jackson, Alan Davies, David Dill, there's a huge number of people talking about many big ideas, there won't be that many equations, there might be one equation won't there Brian?
There will. And also Erica McAllister, Lady of the Flies, very 2021.
And you can hear The Infinite Monkey Cage on BBC Sounds.
Yeah, there's hundreds of them actually.
Hundreds. Loads of them.
Who would have thought you could do over a hundred episodes about everything that's in the universe?
There's a lot more than I first imagined.
That's why you're a comedian, not a scientist.
