Who Was Shakespeare?

Hello. What do you know about Shakespeare?

How many please? Did you write?

He's this great playwright. He's this great

genius. There are hundreds of books with titles like The Genius of Shakespeare,

Things like that.

We are going to look at

the facts and figures a bit,

and I happen to think he is the greatest experimenter in the history of theatre.

He's one of the very greatest poets that ever wrote,

and you probably didn't realise he was one of the

big best sellers of the 15 nineties as well.

So what do we know?

Well,

one of the great things is we don't know a lot.

He was born in 15 64

in Stratford upon A.

He died in 16 16

in Stratford,

and Stratford

has made an industry out of Shakespeare ever since.

If you get the chance, you go to Stratford.

You have a look around the historical site. You'll see this bust of Shakespeare

in the church,

and that's the image that we tend to see of him. Slightly balding,

uh, looks a bit sort of middle class, doesn't really look sort of theatrical,

but of course, he was the greatest playwright in the English language.

At least we think he was.

One of the things about Shakespeare

is, as I suggested,

that we don't know a lot.

There is quite a current of opinion

that

doesn't think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

They think Marlo wrote Shakespeare or the

Earl of Pembroke wrote Shakespeare or Walter,

Riley wrote.

There's quite a list of other contenders

to be Shakespeare

and some really big figures in the Shakespeare industry. Like Derek Jacoby and Mark

Rylands firmly believe Shakespeare was not this guy who was born in Stratford.

Others, like Stanley Wells, who is the great authority on Shakespeare.

And at the moment, I, I believe Stanley very much.

Uh, Stanley Wells is one of the great

writers on Shakespeare, and

he more or less dismisses these

others who say it wasn't Shakespeare.

But

part of the mythology is

that we have his birth date and his death date as being 23rd of April, which is,

of course, Saint George's Day.

And

that makes him sort of emblematically English.

Shakespeare, to that extent, is a construct.

It is. It's the sort of

he's the national poet,

and that construct of Shakespeare

in many ways has to be deconstructed if we want to look at him as a human being, a

man who wrote plays and a man who was a constant experimenter in the theatre

and in other forms. Now that's the big point. I want to make Shakespeare,

whoever he was. But I think he was William Shakespeare.

Born in Stratford upon Eamon,

he was a young actor. He started writing plays

towards the end of the 15 eighties when he was maybe what, 23 24

and

we have. Do you know how many 37 plays

that we know? He wrote,

and quite a few others that we think he had a hand in?

Because it was quite normal

for playwrights at that time.

To collaborate, to chip in a scene or two or to rework the works of somebody else,

much the same way as you get somebody in

to help the script of a movie or you have a writer's room. You have a team of writers.

This whole idea of single authorship is not a prevalent idea

at this time in the writing of plays in particular.

So there is a group of plays called the Shakespeare Apocrypha,

which may or may not

have had contributions by Shakespeare.

They can do computer analysis of the language and style and stuff. Nowadays,

one play

has been kind of brought into the canon recently,

which would mean the correct answer

to the question. How many plays did Shakespeare write would be 37 or 38?

How many plays did he have a hand in? Oh, over 40.

How many plays are completely and utterly by Shakespeare

as a single writer,

probably in the mid thirties?

And therefore, if you count

the years in which he was active,

which is about 15 90 to about 16, 12 or 13,

count that That's 22 23 years

and way over 30 plays

who

the guy was working.

He was working hard,

and one of the fabulous things to do is to follow him

through over the years and see the things he learned to do,

the things that made him really rich and famous

and

the final phases of his career, when even

his colleagues and contemporaries

admired him as probably the best of them all.