How Shakespeare Became the Greatest Writer of All Time (2004)

Stephen Greenblatt what did you write about Shakespeare that others haven't I've tried to bring Shakespeare back into the world in the world he lived in and in our world I've tried to take the traces that he left little chicken scratching is really in the sand and make a human being out of them what's your reaction when you read about professors and say he didn't even exist I don't think too many professors say this but there are people who have this idea or that he didn't write these people had to have a lot of strange ideas about a lot of things Brian I mean in the case of Shakespeare he left a lot of Records he was famous in his own time as a playwright and it would require a conspiracy theory quite of an extraordinary magnitude to cover his tracks are you comfortable that he wrote everything that juice you know that what is it how many plays yeah 38 plays and lots of poems did he write everything absolutely everything by himself alone no absolutely not he collaborated on a bunch of the place he worked in the medium in which collaboration was quite widespread like television writing or movie writing but what's very striking is that the work that's been done the last few years very serious computer work and other work trying to establish exactly the parameters of how much he wrote and how much collaborators wrote seems to confirm to astonishingly more conservatively than I would have imagined the the the least interesting place or the most problematical plays the ones that aren't simply as good are the ones that tend intended to collaborate with someone else on Pericles Prince of Tyre Titus Andronicus the ones that are exceedingly creaky for one reason or another Henry the eighth they have interesting things in them but aren't fully achieved those tend to be the ones that were collaborative performances the ones that he apparently wrote by himself seem to be precisely the ones we would hope he wrote by himself when did he live was born in 1564 in stratford-upon-avon in the Midlands in England and died in 1516 in 1616 right which made him what 52 yeah what is it main stress on a upon avon it's a town that was it is located on the avon river so it's upon the avon then there was a very fancy bridge in Shakespeare's time the same bridge is there now what is there now of Shakespeare well since the 18th century the town has been a tourist site of a major kind so there's a lot of Shakespeare there or at least a lot of things claimed to be Shakespeare sound actually quite a few things that are actually from the time that he lived the house that he lived in that he was born in birthplace is there the schoolroom that he was in the guild hall where he might have seen his first play is there are lots of things because actually it became so valuable to the town to keep anything associated with Shakespeare that things are very well preserved and Stratfor it's a lovely place one of the reasons we wanted you to come here was because over the years of booknotes some fifteen and a half years we checked in some fifty different authors mentioned in our discussion William Shakespeare I want to show you just a couple so you can get the flavor what they're saying about and ask you about that great what I try to do with you more and with serious columns is to let the reader see politics almost like a Shakespearean drama in the sense that you have running characters if you want to understand life there's no better way than reading Shakespeare and then discussing it with a lot of people one of the characteristics of some extraordinary people in particular Mozart Shakespeare Keats are often used as examples these individuals are called to have negative capability what negative capability means is that rather than having a strong personality themselves they had an incredible ability to pick up the personalities of individuals around them and to be able to capture that in their works these children have to learn English how are they gonna learn English let's read Shakespeare I'm a huge Shakespeare fan I can recite for you the opening 45 lines of which of the third from memory Shakespeare was right about the Warriors I'm a new world African who dreams in a European language dreams in English and that language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Tony Mara said the only figures of had more things written about them than Lincoln our our Jesus Shakespeare and Napoleon when the alaa ghazzal mentioned Lincoln it brings back memories of reading about how he used to read Shakespeare when he was very young did you ever study that part of Lincoln I didn't but it doesn't surprise me because the fashioning of eloquence first of all in the 19th century was very much bound up with reading Shakespeare and still really there's no better way of crafting your mastery of the language I think why is that Shakespeare because he was the best because he had the most astonishing creative mastery of his medium of anyone in our language and he was unrivaled in his own time and unrivaled now what makes him the best he had astonishing natural gifts that is to say there are things that are difficult to explain other than they must have been genetic accidents of fantastic alertness to language and then he found a way of deepening and deepening and deepening his experience and understanding until he could create whole worlds he has the most at least in the English language tradition the most powerful ability imagination most powerful ability to conjure up human beings and complex convincing circumstances of any writer in our language what were his parents like simple people at least in their social background Shakespeare comes from a modest social family one of the reasons we don't know as much about him as we would certainly like is that this is the family that goes under the radar of the usual 16th century 17th century attention not because they weren't in some way significance the father was the equivalent of the mayor of Stratford and not other Civic offices but because they're not aristocratic people not Gentry and the father was a Glover made fancy gloves for the trade and also probably a small-time user also bought and sold wool illegally maybe some other things to get by nearest mother came from farming family actually the mother's parents were the yeoman farmers that the father's father was a tenant farmer for so the father married up by marrying into her family but they're compared with other writers from the period Sir Philip Sidney or Sir Walter Raleigh these are people of very modest means modest background how many kids did his parents have his parents had I should now I forget the actual answer partly because the pay the kids died in the usual way rather quickly six I think but of those only Shakespeare sister Joan a brother Richard a brother Edmund brother Gilbert survived for them it had been eight actually if you if you did the kind I'm sorry and in what's the first document you can find in his life that still lives perfectly good documental which is a christening record so we know we was christened and the date the birth date the April 23rd birthday is it just a convention because he was christened three days later and that's the usual it's usually a three day interval we don't have a birth record but we have a christening record and he was born into what religion he was born in a very good question he was born officially into Protestantism England had decisively become Protestant in 1559 after going rocking back and forth but with the accession of Queen Elizabeth so there wasn't a tolerance of religious tolerance in the 16th century with 17th century for that matter and so England was officially Protestant Shakespeare nominally was born into a Protestant family whether they actually were Protestant thereby hangs a rather complicated tale well you say that his father John was a Catholic and maybe a Protestant and we're not sure yes it's a complicated world though probably not more complicated than our um our life world our spiritual world it's not so clear if when when push comes to shove that people are unequivocally one thing and not another there are plenty of people who are very very clear their religious beliefs but they don't want to walk under ladders and have all kinds of other things that I if you push very hard would look a little strange in terms of an equivocal single thing in a case I think Shakespeare's father you know certain things that he did we know that he signed off on the order to destroy some of the old Catholic whitewash over the old Catholic paintings on the wall of the guild hall as part of the iconoclasm part of the destruction of religious art in the period so he's definitely on board as it were as a civic official in the new Protestant World Order on the other hand there are lots of strange signs that seem to indicate that he has ties in the other direction toward Catholicism so often it's said that the at least recently it's been said more unequivocally that the father was a secret Catholic and there are interesting signs of this but as I say I try to not simply hedge my own bets but hedge the bets of that family by saying that well maybe Shakespeare discovered that his father was both Catholic and Protestant as mother his mother comes from a more unequivocally Catholic family the father's will her father's will is manifestly from it's formulas Catholic will and his mother's family is related to what are the leading Catholic families in the area the Arden's of Park Hall near Birmingham so that's a quite important Catholic connection so the likelihood with a mother that we don't know is that the mother's roots are more decidedly Catholic Queen Elizabeth the first was a reigning queen for how long she came to power in 1559 she died 16 3 a lot of years a lot of years and and why was it that for instance the Pope back in those days had really authorized the assassination ever anybody get away with it well she wasn't popular among the the Pope's of the time several of them were in office during her reign for good reason her father Henry the 8th was a kind of equal opportunity persecutor basically a doctrinally rather saunch Catholic but certain moment decided to seize the wealth of the monasteries and tilted the country in the least to that extent in a in a Protestant direction but managed to continue to persecute Protestants then his son Edward was a child when he came to the throne was really much more doctrinally Protestant was in the in the hands of tutors and Guardians who were very in a much more determined ideological way Protestant and they persecuted the Catholics then when Edward died Edwards sister Mary came to the throne who sold his sister and Mary Tudor was a very committed Catholic so they started burning Protestants in the country those who hadn't been able to escape to the continent seeing what was going to happen so the country had gone back and forth Elizabeth had been extremely circumspect she had a fantastically dangerous childhood because any indication she was in the tower much of the time in the indication that she was unequivocally Protestant would have been greeted by lots of suspicion and the possibility that she'd be executed it was this happened and she was you know a very young girl she was unbelievably adroit at hedging her bets and it hinting that she might be one might be the other though it was reasonably clear to people that she was Protestant when she came to power she made it much more unequivocally clear that she was a Protestant but so to that extent she was fair game if in the political assassination business because that was all that was holding England clearly in the Protestant camp it wasn't at all clear to the Pope and to his spies that England because there were many spies for the papacy in England that that and they spies were sending reports back to the Vatican saying that the English aristocracy was fundamentally in sympathy with Catholicism but they were keeping their counsel because of the Protestant Queen so the Pope figured that if he could get rid of the Queen they could bring England back via the Queen's cousin Mary Queen of Scots who was a Catholic back into the Catholic camp that made it very dangerous when did you get interested in all this oh I got interested in it actually back in college and graduate school in a case I became interested in Sir Walter Raleigh and fascinated by that life and fascinated by the whole idea this was have a lot of years ago 40 years ago so about what ties the things that people write in the lives they lead particularly if those lives are striking or interesting what ties these things together why did Sir Walter Raleigh an adventurer courtier remarkable fellow why did he leave poetry behind and and history what what accounts for the integration of writing and life in this period and that interest has continued through to the present when'd you first read Shakespeare first memory I have reading Shakespeare is being assigned as you like it and junior high school in Haiti again well sweet my cuz be merry I thought oh man I can't deal with this it was it just seemed impossibly old-fashioned and silly what do you say to someone who says yeah I like the story of Shakespeare but I really don't like to read him well I usually would say once you rent a video take a look because the place was certainly written they may have been written to be read or they were read at the time things were printed and people bought the books at the time but principally they were written to be performed so that is its I can see that someone wouldn't want to pick up a libretto Mozart libretto and read it and but you wouldn't expect someone to say I don't like Mozart what I can't make any sense of this well you need a little work to make sense of it you have to know how to read music but if you listen to Mozart didn't have that much difficulty getting those mark magnificent what do you prefer the plays or the sonnets I don't know I'm not someone who feels compelled to make a choice but but I do prefer the plays fundamentally to the Sun it's a I find the sound it's remarkable fascinating but I find them so richly worked so fine and complex such complicated mechanisms that I rarely allow myself the time to play with them enough to open them up whereas the plays give themselves much more easily to you where'd you grow up I grew up in Newton Massachusetts and where did you go to college I went to college at Yale and then I was in England for a couple of years afterwards no Cambridge Cambridge and then I went back to Yale for my graduate school and where do you teach now I teach at Harvard and what DT I teach English literature a lot of Shakespeare to be sure but from time to time I teach other things as well partly in the field of the Renaissance as a whole but I've taught other things over the years courses on memory courses on the invention or the reimagining of curiosity curiosities to be thought of as a vice and then at a certain point people began to think it was a good thing and lots of other things why has Shakespeare lasted so long and and everybody you know you hear very people say it's the most important writer in the English language do you agree with that I do agree with that I think actually rather few people would disagree with it why has he lasted so long because he is infinitely pleasurable and rich the it's not that we can say lots of wonderful things about him that are sound morally uplifting but it starts with pleasure and interest not in my view not with meaning and truth it's not fundamentally a like reading something that's making a truth claim on you the Bible let's say would be an example but it's about giving you pleasure deep pleasure complex rich pleasure and Shakespeare was fantastically good at this and was very clever in his own time and then astonishingly turns out to be good for centuries at doing an what looks like an impossible thing of pleasing the most sophisticated Raffin a complex demanding literature's of his time and drawing in hundreds thousands of ordinary people in the theater the theatres depended on bringing 1,500 2,000 people in an afternoon you couldn't take 10 people with fancy education sand please them you had to get a huge crowd in there paying a penny to stand up and watch the play and you had to do both at the same time and Shakespeare almost uniquely figured out how to do that how much education did he have more than people think he didn't go to Oxford or to Cambridge and thereby hangs a tale I mean something happened in the family couldn't might have been expected to go to Oxford not that his father did or his mother did they might have been illiterate but they would have wanted him to go if they had that possibility I think because it was part of a strategy of social advancement but he didn't go on the other hand there's a exceedingly high likelihood that he would have continued all the way through or very close to to the end of a quite rigorous secondary school education which would have come free to him and and we know quite a bit about and was very very good and that's true by the way not just of Shakespeare but of that whole environment in the Midlands and work sure there are unusually good schools and lots of remarkably good writers these aren't people living in a remote backwater in where they have no access to education this is someone who had by our standards least maybe not by the highest Renaissance standards but by our stand as a rather impressive education at least in the what we call the humanities Stratford is how far from London a couple of hard day's ride in its time and a horse on a horse yeah I was along it was a long difficult trip I mean was something you did I mean Shakespeare must have done it relatively regularly but not every weekend how many miles is it I want to say 80 or 90 miles but I I'm someone will call in and correct me I'm sure I've got it wrong by something or other and at what age did he marry he married at 18 which was probably not the best idea you ever had in his life he married a woman who's 26 years old and there's he was a minor she wasn't and we know that six months later she gave birth to their first child so the nervous Susanna Susanna and the reasonable presumption is that therefore they knew each other before he married and what was she doing at the time you know a farmer's daughter living in a town called Chaudhary her father was dead which gave her an unusual liberty freedom she didn't have brothers either who watching over her so she was an unusually independent woman with a small income and and obviously a will of her own and what was he doing when he got married well we don't know exactly it's part of that time of his life about which the records are silent there's lots of speculation including the ones I indulge in what we know is that he was walking wasn't very far mile and a half or two miles whatever it was from Stratford where his family lived up to Chartres eat a little town of Chartres and visiting and Hathaway I think he might have got a shot at Chartres II because there's a very complicated Catholic set of traces that lead back to this very small town and that can be connected I think though we have to connect the dots to Shakespeare so he might have gone originally for something an errand for somebody but in the case II merit he met and eventually married and Hathaway this we're going to jump to the very end and his will as you say had nothing in it for Anne Hathaway first draft of the will doesn't mention her not to my loving and not to an nothing to my wife of 34 years zero it doesn't mean that she wouldn't have inherited something anyway they were what they called our rights in the age and the people who want to sentimentalize this will say well there was no reason for the shakespeare the lawyer to write anything in because everyone understood that you'd have these dower rights as his surviving wife but it's very peculiar I've looked at a lot of these wills now in the period and most people make some gesture or other to their wife often very touching justice of affection and love and there's nothing what there is is a very strange int'l in EI ssin that is to say after the world was written the lawyer came back and he wrote something in between the lines on Shakespeare's behalf and between the lines is written that he gives to his wife his second best bed if that isn't an insult I don't know quite what is how many years did he live in London and did his family live in Stratford almost the whole of their marriage the first presumably the first two years between eighteen and twenty he was around at least him we know he was around long enough to have two more kids of twins born before Shakespeare's 21st birthday and then I think quite shortly thereafter he must have gone we don't know the exact time but he must have gone up to London and then he stayed there as far as we can tell right through his virtually his entire career until in probably in his late forties he returned again the date isn't exact he returned to Stratford to the wife to the two surviving children back in Stratford but it was basically his whole professional life and in effect his whole married life he spent apart from his wife you say that his son Hamlet died when he was 11 one of the twins what was the death caused by we don't know they didn't keep death records that specified this we just have a death record that says the son died at the age of eleven 1596 could have been any number of illnesses the actuarial chances of making it through were fairly modest though it's interesting that the twin sister Hamlet's twin sister Judith lived a good long life by the by the standards of the age so something I mean look in your life or my life probably if we actually look to think back there's something that would have been likely to have taken us off if they hadn't invented penicillin or they hadn't done this of that or we could have got strep throat recovered from it also but who knows so could have been anything that took him away and what impacted the death have on Shakespeare well some people say no impact some people say it was a cold bastard who just went on with his work because we know that in the years after the writing of after the death of Hamlet Shakespeare his father went on to write place like much ado about nothing or Merry Wives of Windsor as you like it that's to say light-hearted happy place with lots of laughter joy happy marriages but I don't believe it I don't believe it not for sentimental reasons really but because first of all in addition to writing those plays he also wrote King John for example which has excruciatingly beautiful and painful lines about the death of a son the death of a child and he also in 1601 so five years afterwards he wrote a play that basically bore the same name as his dead son Hamlet and Hamlet are basically the interchangeable names in this period we used interchangeably in the time and I think there are many many fingerprints of the dead son and if Shakespeare is grappling with the death of his son in the writing of Hamlet what was Hamlet about the play Hamlet the play that that Shakespeare had inherited the Shakespeare Canada use what was given to him but he could find in his voracious reading but he could pick up and steal from somebody else so the play that that he inherited was a revenge story about a son taking vengeance for the murder of his father but Shakespeare Frey did that story with extraordinary weight extraordinary material about mourning and grief and loss and what your relationship is with dead people whether they can speak to you any longer whether they live in some other place or simply have been erased forever and that weight that extraordinary weight I think can be traced back to the experience of this loss of the 38 plays which one in your opinion is the most important if there is such a well I think Hamlet actually an watershed play and I mean it's hard to decide among with a playwright who had so many astonishing achievements whose careers so full of recreating himself but I think that Hamlet does represent the historic lling pivot in Shakespeare's life I think if he had died before he wrote Hamlet we would think exceedingly highly of him I mean this is a man who had written Midsummer Night's Dream and and Romeo and Juliet another magnificent works but I think we wouldn't have guessed that he had in him what then came out after the writing of Hamlet let's say I don't think we could have predicted that what lay on the other side of Hamlet Hamlet didn't exist was going to be Macbeth Othello Antony Cleopatra The Tempest this King Lear this astonishing outpouring of genius tragic genius especially a tragic comic genius and I think that Hamlet is the pivot point and there are other signs of it being the pivot point there are there's a kind of volcanic eruption of of language in Hamlet though he had already written about 20 or so plays there are suddenly six hundred words not only that he had never used before but that had never been used before in any printed text that survives in the English language that that is an astonishing something just erupting from him and then he invent the language he did largely invent the language I mean he he invented it usually he's very cunning at telling you what the words actually mean when when Lady Macbeth says that the blood in her hands that she's imagining in their hands is gonna make the multitudinous seas incarnadine incarnadine the next line is making the green one red that is say incarnadine means making something red but Shakespeare if he's introducing a very fancy 50-cent word will usually give you a five cent explanation afterwards so that you're not completely lost in the place but lots of the word he does this I couldn't off him off the top of my head recite to you the number of the words that he uses but many of them are words that we use in the English language now like unpolluted let's say in the for the first time in Hamlet people might have known polluted but they wouldn't have used unpolluted and so forth and so on he often plays with language that way and then there's something else that's going on in Hamlet that fascinates me which I think Shakespeare does here as far as I can tell for the first time he had been very good at giving motivations to his characters if you think back at Richard the third for example quite energetic and wonderful tragedy he had a poor history tragedy they'd written let's say a decade roughly before he wrote Hamlet he gives you a character who tells you so much about why he's acting this way I'm acting this way I'm this miserable villain because I have a hunchback my mother didn't love me I can't get any women dogs barked at me in the street it gives you 58 different reasons why he's the miserable wretch that he is murderous fellow that he is so you get a very elaborate structure of motivation when you get to Hamlet Shakespeare had to play that had a very good motivational structure for what is going on the play that Shakespeare inherited from the ancient from the older medieval Danish source and then again from the Renaissance adaptation by the by a Frenchman named Belle for a that source said look the King's brother killed him openly the King's brother was not named Claudius in the original thing but thing so Fenn kills until the equivalent of old Hamlet openly and it's a Scandinavian world in which you're expected to avenge a murder like that so naturally if the old king had a son which he did named Hamlet Hamlet would be expected when he grows up to take revenge against the uncle and therefore stands to reason that the uncle is no fool would want to kill Hamlet as well as killing the father because he wants to protect his life so in the original story Hamlet has a problem he's a little he's basically a little kid minor and he has to live long and have to be able to exact revenge for his father against this miserable murderous uncle and everyone knows this is what this is about so what little Hamlet does is start drooling and acting strangely and behaving like a lunatic and people laugh at him and the rather coarse way people laugh at at least in those days people felt comfortable laughing at idiots and the result is that they let him live because he's a kind of trophy of in the in the Danish Court and he lives long enough in order to grow up to be it's the it's basically the Lion King version of The Lion King story he grows up to be to go back and take revenge kill off his miserable uncle and exact revenge had become the triumphant prince Shakespeare takes the story makes perfect sense as to why the original story is the why Hamlet has had to behave like it that he's mad he takes that story he has instead the murders a secret and no one knows they think it's a serpent that's killed the old king while he's sleeping in his garden they don't know that the brother has poisoned him the only one who knows is Hamlet who knows because a ghost has told him the ghost of his father so Hamlet is alone in the kingdom of knowing besides the murderer himself knowing the secret and then Hamlet pretends he's mad it makes no sense it made great sense in the original version it now makes no sense and instead of ruining the play which you would think it might because the whole place constructed now around something that is crazy it actually makes the play the greatest thing that Shakespeare had written up to that point the deepest the most complex the most motivationally maddening the thing that you can't completely I mean Hamlet is that bone stuck in the throat of Western civilization we keep trying to swallow it I spit it out over and over and over again it's in it's everywhere it's in Freud it's in Marx it's they the great haunting in our life and it has to do it's not only this but it has to do with this extraordinary move of cutting out the motivation and throwing it away and then he did this again and again in the years afterwards he discovered that he could do this so that if you look carefully yet many of the great plays that follow at King Lear at a fellow you find that he does the same thing more in 1564 died in 1616 52 years old what year would he have written Hamlet he brought how about 16 1 where was that in the context of the poems that he wrote in the plays that he had probably written he hadn't written any of the great this is the first of the really immediate in Romeo and Juliet that's they were the one major tragedy before before and then the other outpouring of major tragedies follows he'd written about 2/3 of what he would eventually write he had probably written most of the sonnets in my view how do you teach this what I don't want to accuse you of using techniques but when you in a classroom how do you approach your students and when do you see them getting interested lots of different ways of teaching Shakespeare I mean one of the pleasures of Shakespeare is is a million different ways of getting into these plays I have my students often look at versions of the play videos' I have my students sometimes act out things but mostly we sit and look carefully try to to slow down because I assuming that my students are perfectly capable of though it's hard work of reading the plays through and getting the gist of them but it's the ability to sit and be patient and let it unlock itself as you can't do on stage on stage or if you watch it in a video it's going along at its pace and that's fine it gives you a wonderful effect that's meant to produce that that effect but I do what with with Shakespeare what people with music who are teaching music do slow it down see what happens see how it's put together so that's one way of doing it another thing I often do is to read other things written in the same periods and that are rather similar and see how what Shakespeare is doing that that that the other people aren't doing or what changes he's make the sources for example have students we know lots of the sources have students look at the sources see what happens when he takes Plutarch and he turns it into Anthony Becht or sometimes very very close sometimes very daringly far away or some I've done recently that I hadn't done before is to have students try to think about this as if they were going to try to write some of these place there are a couple of lost plays of Shakespeare so at least one play we know for sure that he wrote with a class and collaboration with a playwright named Fletcher with whom he worked on a couple of other plays and it's lost now but we know the source so I have the students start playing with the source and seeing if they can invent scenes that have a Shakespearean feel to them try to figure out what 10 or 20 or 50 things that Shakespeare characteristically does how does he do this as if as if instead of just rolling up one's eyes and holding up ones hands and saying this is incomprehensibly great we could actually figure out how this is done as if it were done by a real human being how much of or how many of his plays have politics in them a lot of them have politics in them I would say depending on how you a broadly define the term most of the plays have some politics in them of some kind or other on the other hand contemporary politics he had to be rather careful about as did everyone in this theatre this is a censored theater Shakespeare was actually quite good at staying out of jail unlike many of his contemporaries who censored his material well they were there were it was censored both by someone called a master of the Revels who worked you would have to present the script to the master the rebels and a few of those scripts of the master of the Revels his comments the censors comments survived including one that Shakespeare the hand in and then if you were publishing if you're printing it it went through a different sensor ran out of the bishops office and he would read the text and decide whether it could be printed so we have two different censoring systems working on Shakespeare did he have secret messages and he liked to deliver for political reasons and what did he think of the the monarchy it's hard to tell of course if it was really secret I mean the and it's probably the case that there are parts of some secrets that we would have difficulty unlocking I think that on the whole but this is a subject about which there can be many I think quite legitimately competing views I think on the whole he was deeply deeply skeptical about the system of charismatic monarchy in which he lived but I think at the same time that he was fascinated by it and willing to imagine it and think through it I mean this is a writer who wrote henry v let's say about that kind of charismatic warrior king but it's a strange play because on the one hand it's a celebration of that kind of regal heroism on the other hand Shakespeare goes out of his way to depict this king war during the massacre of prisoners violating the rules of war threatening rape behaving in a monstrous way and of course it would be possible to say that Shakespeare approved of that behavior but actually I think there's very strong internal evidence in the place that he is not approving of this of this behavior that he actually is interested in in the ways in which certain kind of charismatic Authority is often intertwined with something that we might call criminal behavior in that earlier bunch of clips we showed from book notes Maureen Dowd was there and she talked about when she was here for book notes about studying Shakespeare and using a lot in her columns I want to run another little clip about she's talking about comparing Karl Rove to Yago and you can explain this after a listen to but let's listen to what she was saying then Yago in Shakespeare Othello's is a fellow's top military aide who keeps whispering in his ear saying that a fellow's wife has been unfaithful when she hasn't because it serves his own purposes and he makes a fellow crazy and then a fellow ends up killing his wife so and why karl rove well karl rove I guess was early on because karl rove you know it's kind of they call bush's brain although i don't think that's her I think Bush is bright he's just was a more malleable than his father because he hadn't studied up on foreign policy as much as his dad karl rove i think you know he he was the one they found his computer disk or whatever and found out that he intended to thought you know he could win majorities in Congress by pushing the war and so in the beginning of the book Karl Rove is featured as someone who wants to use war for political purposes what do you think of the way she used Shakespeare she's using Yago as a figure for a kind of cold reptilian evil can be used that way it's a slightly strange analogy only because you'd have to believe that karl rove ultimately were trying to destroy george w bush which is what a fellow what Yago is trying to do to Othello and I'm not sure that she's claiming that I think she wants to was maybe we all try to do to carve off a certain piece of the character he is certainly the most hateful character that Shakespeare imagined I think and attribute that to the manipulative dark power behind well what do you think of using and she's not the only one that does this using Shakespeare to define politics I plead guilty to the charge I haven't either give us an exam well I confess I wrote something about the first debate the first presidential debate recently that in in The Times op-ed page that simply tried to talk about the debate between between if if debate is the right word for it but this debate the right word for this current enterprise between Anthony and Brutus over the body of Caesar to try to decide the course of the Republic and in which I tried to tease out the kind of analogy rough analogy something Maureen Dowd liked between those two figures and the current figures now why does one do that as I suppose because the place are cunning about human behavior the plays reveal as one of your other clips said this is actually a very good way of thinking about our human beings behave it's one of our best representations that we have available to us for the way in which human beings behave and so it's irresistible another fella you talk a lot about is Christopher Marlowe who was he Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's contemporary exact contemporary born in 1564 Shakespeare was from a provincial town the way Shakespeare was Canterbury and Marlowe's case and from a middle-class family not an aristocratic family in Marla's case shoemaker father rather than a lover like Shakespeare's father so they're almost eerily like twins but Christopher Marlowe went to Cambridge University made it to University and made it to London before Shakespeare made it to London so that when checks we arrived in London he would have encountered lots of people in a rather wild London theatre world but the most brilliant was Christopher Marlowe the most adventurous the most imaginative and the most reckless and dangerous and I think Marlowe made a profound impact on Shakespeare it's sometimes said about Shakespeare that he was so magnificently powerful that he was completely indifferent to his rivals but I think this is not true I think that there's there the fingerprints of Christopher Marlowe all over Shakespeare's work and very very clear clear evidence of Shakespeare brooding about Marlowe thinking about MSA as a rival as a model and also as a faith a destiny that he doesn't want for himself do I remember correctly that Paris and Naples were the only times bigger than London and that's about two hundred thousand by two hundred yeah a huge city by by European standards London that's back in the 15 yeah there aren't there as you say there are only three cities like this in Europe I don't know actually whether whether Istanbul what the size of that was at that point but any case in these are remarkable cities and London was unique and certainly in the British Isles I don't know if there's a way to do this but Shakespeare and those times if you moved to today how big a name would he be can you comparing with anybody today you suggest he was quite an entrepreneur he owned theatres he did make a lot of money he did he made a lot of money and he was quite celebrated in his times it's hard to sort of pick out a a single figure now who become probably because Shakespeare dominated his industry if that's the way to put it in a way that no one eye I think dominates writing now let's say I've sometimes thought because I admire the person I and I love him as a as a human being that Seamus Heaney the poet has something of what I might have encountered and Shakespeare a kind of exuberant linguistic generosity that that is recognized as as admirable by a very very wide swath of people but I'm speaking now after all of an Irish poet not of American but if you walk around Dublin as I once a vacation to do with Seamus Heaney you see everyone sort of smiles at him and knows who he is and looks at him I mean waves to him and I think Shakespeare had something of that celebrity in his own time though of course that didn't mean that anyone sat down and wrote his biography they didn't now today we think obvious is quite intellectual and that was an intellectual experience you say it was entertainment in those days 1,500 to 2,000 people there how much did they pay to get into one of these plays cheap seats were if you've gone to the public theater that is to say the outdoor theater the globe for example you paid a penny to get in the door and went into a box hence box office and the if you wanted to get that just got you into the theatre and got you a place where you could stand as you know it rains from time to time in England and the weather is often miserable also it can even be sunny in England unpleasantly sunny so that if you wanted to get into a sheltered place you had to pay another penny to get into one of the out of the standing area and onto a into a covered gallery and if you wanted the cushion that would cost you another penny so there yeah that was in the public theaters can you relate that form of entertainment then there's something we do now would it relate to Broadway or it relate to a concert or how would you probably I don't know comparable system in which you would you although we have the we have the we've changed the rules in a way now our rule is the more you pay the closer you get to the stage in those days than where you pay further back in effect you were under there one of the canopies but I think that the experience would probably be closer to a a constant rock concert or maybe a football game then it would have been - decorous entertainments that we think of us as theatre after all week there's lots of evidence that that prostitutes of working the theaters and people were selling oranges and other things to munch on drinks at the theater I mean it was a it was a much rougher by our standards much rougher world what was the first thing he ever wrote no one knows for sure the dates of this of these things aren't so clear if you really want to know the first thing that I think we have a trace of that he wrote I think there's a little jingle that he wrote to sell gloves in his father's workshop that is Shakespeare's a jingle that someone in Alexander Aspen all bought some gloves I think at the Shakespeare family a glove shop and there's a poem that survives in a commonplace book as it's called people kept these records it says the will the gift is small the will is all Alexander Aspen all he gave it to his woman he was courting and the person who wrote that in the commonplace book in the 17th century said Posey on a pair of gloves written by mr. Shakespeare so I think Shakespeare was probably a teenager and wrote that totally undistinguished little poem jingle to go with the gloves but the first serious there's there's lots of leeway to argue about this but probably to gentlemen of verona what year again these things are very very difficult to say maybe the late 1580s could have been another play too could have been the Henry that whenever Henry the sixth place so he would have been in his late thirties oh no in in the I know 20s late galleries yeah the first you say the first seventeen sonnets in yeah you say he wrote a one hundred and seven hundred and fifty four sides yes first seventeen were written for the Earl of Southampton well that's what I say but but we don't they we don't know for sure and we don't for sure because they're rather can either these poems when you're not identifying exactly whom they're being written for or identifying exactly what the social situation is in which they're being written there that's the game that's on it's played in this period sonnets are our curtain rooms and there are more and more diaphanous curtains around them and you look through the curtain you think you see someone doing something somewhere back in there but you can't be sure who it is at what they're doing at Shakespeare was a genius at constructing those little boxes within boxes did he have a personal relationship with Errol something he did that we do know because almost the only documents of the kind that we have are the two dedicatory epistles that he wrote for the two narrative poems the long marvelous mythological poem Venus and Adonis and the classical poem the rape of Lucretia that he wrote for both of which are dedicated in extravagant terms particularly the rate of increase in very very loving terms to the erosive have been unusually intimate language for a poet of no particular social standing to write to an earl who is of absolutely the highest point of the social hierarchy you talk about Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare writing a play about Jews and then you also tie that into the fact that this Spanish Jews out of the the country and that there were no Jews in in Great Britain back in his time explain all that and what was being the English had had performed their act of ethnic cleansing before any other country in Europe 1290 I think it was that they expelled the Jews of England for reasons that are not clear my mastery quantico we construct the usual anti-semitic story the so that when Shakespeare was writing there were no Jews legally no Jewish community in England there might have been a few people who belong to Morano communities secret Jews but we don't really have very clear record of this there was some rumors of this kind there were some people who were from conversa families that is to say they were families of that that had been Jewish a generation or more more before but it converted to Catholicism under pressure of the persecutions for first in Spain and then in Portugal and one of those people from a family that had been Jewish a generation or more before was was the Queen's physician named Lopez were Lopez and he fell into trouble in the 1590s accused of having accepted a very large bribe from the king of Spain to do some skullduggery and it was charged the skullduggery was poisoning the Queen whether it's true or not your guess is as good as mine there are some people think there is some evidence for it some people think there wasn't that he was on the take is very very likely but everyone who was in the court who had access to the Queen was almost certainly on the take in this period that's the way the system worked the clothes he were to the person in power the more money you could make I know this never happens any longer but in those days it it happened two plays so what happened was that Christopher Marlowe had written a very brilliant play called the Jew of Malta brilliant but wild and reckless that was anti-semitic also anti-christian manty Muslim you name it it was ante in a kind of very very reckless play it was successful and it was revived on numerous occasions in one time it was almost certainly revived was at the time that the charges came against this man Lopez because the prosecutor at the trial at recent trial for Lopez said not only you are agent of the Jesuits the wicked Catholics the king of Spain but you are a Jew and you're you are worse than Judas and so forth and so on Lopez said he was a Christian good Christian and when Lopez was taken out to be executed queen protected him for a while and finally withdrew protection Lopez was taken out to be executed and the executions were unspeakably horrible in this period but were also major public events and he said from the scaffold in his speech when he was bidding farewell to the world he said that the charges against him were not true and that he loved the Queen as much as he loved Jesus Christ and the crowd that was at the foot of the scaffold burst into laughter now why did they burst into laughter they burst into laughter because they thought that he was lying but specifically they thought he was making a joke and then we where they had learned that joke was from Christopher Marlowe because Marlowe's Jewish hero had the hero bare of us who poisons people is a doctor who poisons people of poisons Wells does every unspeakable thing he's always making jokes of this kind I love you with a burning zeal enough to burn your house down he says in a aside or someone says how much it's gonna cost you oh just your life he says that means a little planning to kill someone and so forth it's that kind of Joker so I love you as much as I love Jesus Christ is a Marlo vien joke and I think Shakespeare was in the crowd watching this execution and I think he heard that laughter and I think he had two different kinds of responses to the laughter that abraded together in the play that he wrote that was in effect a response to the Jew of Malta and the play he wrote was the Merchant of Venice and the two responses are on the one hand this is a man who makes his profession making people laugh he's interested in crowd laughter and he is excited by the fact that he's heard this mass response and there's lots of laughter in the Merchant of Venice the Merchant of Venice is obsessed with laughed at people are always talking about laughing when will we laugh again how can I make you laugh and so forth and so on at the same time I think he was made tremendously uncomfortable by the laughter at that execution and I think that that discomfort is eloquently registered in the Merchant of Venice where every time you want to laugh at the laughter turns to a kind of gagging you're in your throat and this is a very very complex comedy as anyone who's ever seen it form that nose because we're near the end he died in 1616 of what we don't know we have a record that says he drank a lot his daughter was getting married you listen maybe did drink a lot more than you should have but it's not likely that a father drinks too much in his daughter's wedding is gonna die of it so we don't know if I heard right this morning you've been nominated for the National Book Award today I have the day we're taping this yes was that a surprise to a complete surprise have you ever had this before are you kidding no I'm delighted what does it mean the dog surprise I I wanted very much in this book to figure out a way of of telling an audience other than the the audience that I usually write for which I'm happy about the audience of people who read academic books of telling them about this astonishing life but telling them about what in the 40 years of thinking about Shakespeare I've learned about this human being of of crossing a line from the world little swimming pool in which I'm happily paddling around most of my life to a much larger pool or at least maybe it may be something even bigger than a pool and that that's what this means to me that this book has has reached the audience that I had dreamt that it might reach will in the world how Shakespeare became Shakespeare by our guest Stephen Greenblatt the cover of the book looks like this thank you very much for joining us thank you very much Brian

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 26,059

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Keywords: literature, fiction, history, criticism, movements, periods, renaissance, biography, memoir, arts, theatre, british, irish, shakespeare, books, education, finance, management, risk, insurance, lawyer, attorney

Id: CYomcC6mV3M

Length: 56min 57sec (3417 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2017