Shakespeare: The Legacy

It is essential to commence our journey

into the world of William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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.

During his career, he bought land here and the impressive house, New Place,

after gaining literary and financial success in London.

This building, Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon,

is the perfect place to start the delving into the life of William Shakespeare.

He was baptized here on April the 26th, 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, St George's Day.

This Holy Trinity Church goes back to the early 13th century

and is the oldest building in Stratford-upon-Avon.

But great changes had 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.

There were 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 wool trade was very, very prominent in Stratford.

Stratford-on-Avon in the mid-16th century

was an unremarkable little town.

It was small, a population of around 2,000,

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've 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.

"So here begins the plague."

And you can see from the list of burials that follows,

a huge number of people are dying in a very short period of time.

Almost 200 people, or about a seventh of the population of Stratford,

so if you think that Shakespeare would've been just a few months old,

what infant mortality would've been like at the time.

He's sort of 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.

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 a very well established family here in Warwickshire,

they trace their roots back to before William the Conqueror.

And when William Shakespeare arrived,

his parents must've seen that as a very great blessing indeed

because they'd already lost two baby girls.

John Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's father,

started very humbly in Stratford, started as an apprentice glove-maker.

He became an ale 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 4, this is when his father's made the mayor,

and he would've had on the day he went

to any council meetings, he would've had almost like a procession

from the front of the house,

down Henley Street and along to the Town Hall.

So, that must've 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/whittawer.

Now, a whittawer is a tanner.

A tanner, 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 well-to-do.

As a young boy, William would've been in contact

with all kinds of people through the trade connections of his father.

This could've given him inspiration and language

for the colorful characters in his plays.

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

and 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 Mary and Edward and Henry before them,

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've 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 Wool 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 gonna do about it?"

And, 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.

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 aldermen of Stratford,

he was granted his own coat of arms in 1592

and was therefore back in business for the rest of his life.

The town in Shakespeare's boyhood had an important school,

King Edward School, a foundation of King Edward VI.

It would've been a normal education,

so perhaps it would be challenging by our standards,

I mean, it was often said that the Latin and Greek

that Shakespeare would've learnt or any grammar school pupil would've learnt

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've started learning simple alphabet

and the catechisms, sort of the Lord's Prayer, things like that.

Moved on to more complex things,

starting with perhaps Aesop's Fables, you'd learn your grammar as well,

perhaps some Seneca, Virgil.

So, all of the sort of classic authors

that we think of would've been very much the foundation of that curriculum.

He would've read Ovid's Metamorphoses,

for example, the great Latin classic, he would've read Virgil's Aeneid.

It was an education in oratory and rhetoric,

and that is reflected in his plays, I think.

He would've learnt there to argue,

he would've learnt there to argue on both sides of the case

and is brilliant at doing that in the plays.

If you take a play like Measure for Measure, for example,

where Claudio, the young Claudio, 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 to die, after all.

But then a few hundred lines later, there is a wonderful speech from Claudio

which puts exactly the opposite point of view:

But to die and go we know not 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.

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.

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 that they had three children, there was Susanna,

the firstborn, and then the twins, Hamnet and Judith.

Hamnet, who 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 my love.

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.

'Tis not to me she speaks.

We do know that in August 1582,

Stratford enjoyed the benefits of a bounteous harvest,

and it must've been at this time that William and Anne had their lovers' tryst.

Perhaps on a summer's evening, sitting on a set hay bale,