400 years ago, this year, the world famous
play-writer William Shakespeare stopped happening.
I’ve been studying Shakespeare ever since I was
asked to do this programme and it turns out
he's more than just a bald man who could write with feathers.
And the story of whether he was best at writing
ever is more interesting than you’d imagine.
But why do we still talk about Shakespeare?
We don’t talk about Les Dennis any more,
even though hes still alive and hasn’t done anything wrong.
Did Shakespeare write nothing but boring gibberish with no relevance
to our modern world of Tinder and Peri-Peri Fries?
Or does it just look, sound and feel that way?
That’s what I’m going on a journey to find out.
About.
Along the way, Ill probe Shakespeare's life,
study his Complete Works
and speak to Shakespearian experts and actors.
Do you just learn the famous bits,
like "To be or not to be?"
Or do you learn all the bits in-between, as well?
I have to learn all the bits in between.
Are you fucking joking?
No, no, no.
I mean, its big and it takes a bit of time, but... Shut up.
So join me, Philomena Cunk,
as I go on a journey all the way into William Bartholomew Shakespeare,
the man they call The King of the Bards.
Deep below Stratford And Avon, in a secret location on Henley Street,
is a treasure trove of Shakespearean proportions.
That looks really old. It is.
So, this book dates from 1600
and it has the records that go back to 1558. Yeah.
Its written on the front "Stratford-upon-Avon."
Its a bit wonky, int it?
Like a... Suppose they didn’t have rulers, did they?
Its a very old book that’s made from animal skin
and then Ill just use the weights to keep...
Its sort of like waxy A4 paper, int it?
It is a little bit waxy, yeah. That’s the, the, erm...
That’s the juices of the animal... Coming out, yeah.
And this is the page where we have Shakespeares baptism recorded.
And its written in Latin, the inscription... What does that say?
This baptism record is for William, the son of John Shakespeare.
This is a bit like Who Do You Think You Are?, isn’t it?
It is in a way, yeah.
If you’re tracing your family history,
these are the records that will give you the information you need.
But he’d, sort of, call it, Who Dost Thou Thinkest Thou Art?
He might, yes. And he’d go like that.
He may well have done, yes. Flourish. Yeah.
This is the actual house in which Shakespeare was born,
here, on our Planet Earth.
As a baby, Shakespeare showed few signs of becoming
the most significant figure in literary history,
so nobody bothered noting down the details of his life.
That’s why we cant be sure about his date of birth
and don’t know anything about his childhood,
except that he probably had one,
otherwise he’d never have become a grown-up.
The facts may be hazy, but we can probably guess that Shakespeare
as a boy would have looked much like boys today,
but bald and with a ruff instead of an Angry Birds T-shirt.
This is the actual school he probably went to.
School in Shakespeares day and age was vastly different to our own.
In fact, it was far easier
because you didn’t have to study Shakespeare.
At the age of 18,
Shakespeare married his teenage sweetheart Anne Hathaway.
But when did Shakespeare stop mooning about with his wife
and start doing plays?
We don’t exactly know,
because what happened next were Shakespeares lost years.
We don’t know what happened during the lost years.
Shakespeare probably spent a lot of his time staring wistfully
out of leaded windows and pretending to think,
and then write things down with a feather pen.
But we do know he eventually came to London,
just like his most famous character, Dick Whittington.
Almost immediately, he began to make waves in the world of theatre.
Its hard to believe today,
but back then people really did go to the theatre on purpose.
And they went to see something called "plays".
In plays, things happen in front of you, but at actual size.
Unlike television, which is smaller,
or cinema, which is bigger.
You’d think that would make plays the most realistic form
of entertainment in existence,
but instead they’re nothing like real life, at all.
And that’s because everyone shouts.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,
trippingly on the tongue.
Not proper shouting, like when a bus wont let you on,
or shouting because of an emotion.
In plays, people shout no matter how they’re feeling,
because they put the seats too far away.
There were many plays written in ancient times,
but the plays Shakespeare wrote echoed through the ages
and not just because they were shouted -
but because they were good.
Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by this sun of York.
We few,
we happy few,
we band of brothers.
To be, or not to be:
That is the question...
Shakespeare actually invented seven different genres of play:
tragedy,
fantasy,
romance,
comedy,
horror
and historical.
And Shakespearean.
Throughout this programme,
I’m going to be taking a look at each genre in turn,
in a sort of format point thing they’re making me do.
Well start with horror.
Popular entertainment in Shakespeares day was often unpleasant,
involving public humiliation and mindless cruelty to animals,
with no Ant and Dec to take the edge off it all.
This brutality was reflected
in some of Shakespeares most horriblest plays.
For instance, his early work Tightarse And Ronicus
is so jam-packed with violence and murder,
its basically a posh Friday the 13th.
Here we see Titus himself slitting the throats of his enemy’s sons,
while his daughter collects their blood.
All of it occurring in front of a horrified Harry Potter.
Graphic scenes like this were considered shocking
even in Shakespeares day,
which is quite an achievement
considering people used to shit out of their own windows back then.
But shitting out the window wasn’t all fun.
It encouraged rats,
who carried a devastating illness called the Bionic Plague.
The plague killed about 10,000 people in London
and when they’d finished coughing, the survivors needed cheering up.
And luckily, Shakespeare had just invented a new type of play
called a comedy.
Some of Shakespeares most successful plays were comedies.
Critics say his comedies aren’t very funny,
but to be fair that’s only because
jokes hadn’t been invented back then.
Of course, if you go to watch a Shakespeare comedy today,
you’ll hear the audience laughing as though there are jokes in it,
even though there definitely aren’t.
That’s how clever Shakespeare is.
Even at this early stage of his career,
there was no doubt Shakespeare was the best at writing plays.
But there was enough doubt
that he had to start his own theatre company to put them on.
He also built the Globe Theatre from old bits of another theatre,
inventing upcycling, and he probably made the word up as well.
He was a better playwright than he was an architect.
That’s why he didn’t put a roof on it.
But, to be fair, Wimbledon didn’t get a roof until a few years ago.
If you’ve never seen Shakespeare at The Globe,
imagine a three-hour YouTube clip happening outdoors,
a long way from you in a language you barely understand.
And if I find it confusing, it must
have blown the minds off some of Shakespeares first audiences,
who were only slightly more sophisticated than trees.
They might have been thick,
but Shakespeares audiences had loads of fun,
heckling the actors and cackling a lot in a sort of mad peasanty way.
Like that. RAUCOUS CACKLING
And that.
To tell me more about Shakespeares disgusting audiences,
I spoke to this man.
Who are you and whats your game?
I’m Iqbal Khan and I’m a theatre director.
What was theatre like in Shakespeares day?
Were all the audiences really rowdy then, you know?
Did they wear tunics and have mud on their faces?
The audiences ranged from the ordinary common working people,
who’d stand around the theatre here
and then they’d range to the aristocrats,
who would sit at the top of the theatre.
Right, so some of them had to stand up. They didn’t have chairs.
No. No, they’d be standing.
I’ve never had to stand for a whole Shakespeare.
I don’t think I could do it.
I'd be livid if I didn’t have a chair.
I think audiences quite enjoy it. Particularly now...
I don’t think they do enjoy standing, do they?
They actually enjoy the experience of standing.
Who’s told you that?
Erm...
Shakespeares works are still performed now
and not just in theatres.
There are countless different ways of interpreting Shakespeares plays.
There’s properly - with all wooden furniture and beards and swords
and people dressed up as sort of two-legged pageants.
Or there’s modern - where they speak in Shakespearean gobbledegook
while dressed in contemporary clothing -
a bit like Russell Brand.
You decentious rogues,
That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?
And there’s startlingly avant garde productions,
which look and sound like this.
How now, spirit! Whither wander you?
Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere.
Incredibly, even today
people actually go to see this sort of thing,
despite it being completely fucking unwatchable.
Speak again, thou run away, thou coward.
What sort of people come to see Shakespeare today?
Is it mainly people who wear glasses?
Um...
Yeah, I’m sure there are
a few people that wear glasses that come to see it.
Yeah, I think all kinds of people come to see it.
But a lot of short-sighted people.
Possibly? Not a lot though... Yeah, loads!
Loads, I was looking around.
Right, 80% of the audience were wearing glasses. I doubt that.
Are you saying I’m a liar?
No, I just said I doubt that 80% of the audience were wearing glasses.
I think they were.
Right.
Maybe you need like a big bifocal lens in front of the stage.
"Leave your glasses at home, come to the theatre."
What about those people that aren’t short-sighted?
Oh, yeah, you’d need different lenses, don’t you.
Shakespeares just as popular today as hes always been.
There’s even a Royal Shakespeare Company named after him,
who insist on putting on his shows whether people want them or not.
What is it about Shakespeare that makes them bother?
Perhaps its because he wrote about universal human needs,
like wanting to murder a king, or have a romance.
We don’t know much about how love and romance worked in olden times,
because back then people didn’t write blogs about their dating misadventures.
But thanks to Shakespeare, what we do have is Romeo and Juliet,
easily the finest romance of the pre-Dirty Dancing era.
Romeo and Juliet is about
these two rich, powerful families who hate each other.
These two families are the Montagues - who sound quite posh -
and the Capulets, who invented the headache tablet.
They’re perfectly happy having their feud until the touching moment
Romeo, from one side, spots Juliet, from the other.
Its love at first sight, but from a distance -
just like on Tinder.
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Soon Romeo and Juliet are in love,
even though they come from two different families,
which is how we know it isn’t set in Norfolk.
O Romeo, Romeo!
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
To find out more about Romeo and Juliet,
I went to talk to Shakespearean expert Stanley Wells.
Why do you think Romeo and Juliet is
the most successful romcom of all time?
Well, its very beautiful, isn’t it?
The love story between Romeo and Juliet.
It has some very beautiful poetry in it.
People like a happy ending, don’t they?
Oh, they like a happy ending, yeah,
but they don’t get it, of course, here.
What do you mean?
Oh, you know, the ending -
they die.
You know, the lovers - Romeo and Juliet, I mean...
They die at the end? Oh, yes.
Juliet poisons herself, then Romeo comes in and he dies, too.
So, we should put a spoiler there, should we?
OK.
But after that, their families are reconciled, so that’s quite nice.
I don’t understand why the Montagons and the Caplets
just wont let them muck about together.
Well, they’re not really adults, are they?
I mean, Juliets not yet 14.
You know, her nurse says so in the play. What?
She's only a young girl.
- She's 13 years old?! - That’s right, yes.
I’m not surprised the families are trying to split them up then.
I'd have rang the police.
With the success of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was on a roll.
He had respect and prestige and he was coining it,
if they had coins back then. I haven’t checked.
As his reputation grew, Shakespeare became popular with royalty.
So, he wrote stuff they’d enjoy
in the hope of gaining power and influence,
like Gary Barlow does now.
Shakespeares first royal fan was Queen Elizabeth One.
The person, not the boat.
Shakespeare wrote loads of plays about royals,
known as his History plays.
It was his way of pleasing the king and queen
by doing stuff about their families.
A bit like when your mum buys the local paper
because your brothers court appearance is in it.
Perhaps Shakespeares best history play is Richard Three,
which is about this sort of Elephant Man king.
He'd be done in computers now by Andy Serkis covered in balls,
but in the original he was just a man with a pillow up his jumper.
Its quite modern because its a lead part for a disabled actor,
providing they don’t mind being depicted as the most evil man ever.
I am determined to prove a villain.
Richard Three is actually based on the real King Richard of Third,
who was in the Wars of the Roses.
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
At the end he loses his horse and ends up wandering around a car park
looking for it, where he eventually dies.
Because in those days you couldn’t find your horse
just by beeping your keys and making its arse light up.
Its quite moving and human,
because we’ve all worried we might die in a car park, if we, like,
lose the ticket and cant get the barrier up and just die in there.
Shakespeare makes you think about those things,
and that’s hard.
When Queen Elizabeth died, James One took over.
He was Scottish and dead into witches,
which Shakespeare put straight into Macbeth.
Like an arse kisser.
Macbeth is a tale of paranoia and king-murder set in Scotland,
probably for tax reasons.
Its about a man called Macbeth,
who’s so famous hes only got one name.
Like Brangelina.
Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!
Macbeth also has a female sidekick called Lady Macbeth,
who was very much the Ms. Pac-Man to Macbeths Pac-Man.
In a spooky encounter, Macbeth meets some witches,
who tell him hes going to become king of Scotchland.
Which back then was apparently considered a good thing.
The witches aren’t in it as much as you’d expect,
quite a lot of its about ordinary murder.
This is a sorry sight!
It seems a shame to introduce witches in it
and then make all the murders normal with just knives and swords.
Maybe if Shakespeare had thought a bit harder
he’d have put some magic murders in.
Like a big magic hand coming out a toilet
and pulling someones arse inside out.
Nevertheless, there’s plenty of violence and bloodshed
and an iconic scene in which Macbeth is startled at dinner
by the unexpected appearance of Banquos Ghost,
played here for some reason by the letter H.
Which of you have done this?
What, my good lord?
Thou canst not say I did it: never shake
Thy gory locks at me.
By now, Shakespeare had built a considerable body of work,
which is collected in something called the First Folio.
This is the actual book Shakespeare wrote with his bare hands,
the only remaining copy of any of his plays.
Its amazing to think that if anything happened to this,
the entire works of Shakespeare would be lost forever.
So, before I touch it, I need to put on special white gloves.
Well, we don’t actually need to wear white gloves, Philomena.
The advice we have and the best practice we follow
is not wear gloves, because you lose the sensitivity in your fingers
and you’re more likely to damage the book by wearing gloves than not.
Well, they’re here now. If you’ve got clean hands,
take the gloves off, we don’t need them at all.
Well, I’ve brought them, so... Its very good
of you to bring them, but we don’t need them
and we cant let you turn the pages of the book if you’ve got them on.
Simon Schama gets to wear gloves. Well, he doesn’t wear them here.
Why not?
Because when were handling books and documents
we don’t need to wear gloves, at all.
So whats the difference between a book and a folio?
A folios the name that’s given to the paper that’s in the book.
It implies its been folded once,
which is where the name folio comes from.
So, why don’t we just call it a book?
We can call it a book. That’s absolutely fine. OK.
You know when you read a word in a book
and you sort of hear that word in your head? Mm-hm.
How did they get the sounds into the ink to make it play in your head?
Well, what they’re doing is they’ve got all the words written down
and spelled out and they put those letters into the printing process
and then print them on the page.
And then its as you’re reading it,
you’re making the sounds in your head.
And you can hear them talking, cant you?
Yeah, because you know what the words mean and how they sound,
you can then play it back to yourself, if you like.
Are these plays like computer code
and the actors like characters in a computer game?
I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.
The words are the lines
- so they’re telling the actors what they need to say -
and then you’ll find stage directions telling them what to do.
So, in a way, they’re like a set of instructions.
So, in a way, Shakespeare invented computer games?
I don’t think he’d have seen it like that and
that’s not quite the case with what it is,
but you can make a comparison or an analogy between the two.
So, he invented computer games.
No, not really, no.
That’s amazing.
Most of Shakespeares plays
are about stuff that actually happened, like kings.
Or could happen, like a prince talking to a ghost.
But some of his plays are more magical. They’re fantasies.
The Tempest is about this shipwreck,
which happens at the beginning, not at the end like Titanic,
which is a brave move.
The survivors get stuck on this island where this wizard lives
with his daughter and these monsters.
Whats interesting about The Tempest
is that usually Shakespeares stories sort of make sense,
even though all the talkings in gibberish.
But in The Tempest, the story doesn’t make sense either.
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is int, the never-surfeited sea
Hath caused to belch up you.
Its like Shakespeare squared,
which is probably why hardcore Shakespeare fans like it,
because it shows they understand it, which they cant.
The way Shakespeares written makes it hard to wrap your head around,
which is why its taught in school when your brains at its bendiest,
by people like this man,
the fictional English teacher from TV drama Educating Yorkshire.
When you teach a kid Shakespeare, do their heads grow physically bigger?
No. They don’t, no.
How does iambic pente-meter work?
I think you’re talking about iambic pentameter,
which is the way that, kind of... Iambic penta-meter.
Pentameter, yeah. Penta-meter.
Well, pentameter, so...
It would be a line of prose that would have ten syllables
with five particular stresses on.
Not Pente-meter? No, not pente-meter.
No, its pentameter. Right.
Someone told me... I was misinformed, its fine.
Who told you?
See him, over there? Oh, right.
Erm... No, its pentameter, yeah. Iambic pentameter.
Just to clarify.
I wonder if all of Shakespeares plays are suitable for kids.
Because there’s that one about the dairymaid, isn’t there,
with the special pump.
I’m not aware that that’s a Shakespeare play.
She works on a farm. She's got a special pump.
No, I don’t think that’s a Shakespeare play, at all.
No, it doesn’t sound very much like a Shakespeare play, at all. Its disgusting.
Shakespeare once said, "Every dog will have his day."
and with his own theatre and lots of plays,
he was certainly having his.
But soon that day would turn to night. A long, dark night.
Like in Finland.
In 1596, Shakespeares son Hamnet shuffled off this mortal coil,
then he died.
And a few years later, his father John kicked the bucket
and also died.
As Shakespeares life went sad, so did his plays.
If you were asked to pick what Shakespeare did best,
most people would say tragedy,
which is one of the few things he has in common with Steps.
Shakespeares tragedy plays are the most performed of all his works.
None more so than Hamlet, with its famous speech about bees.
To be, or not to be:
that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?
To die: to sleep, no more.
And by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache
and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,
tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep.
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
What was all that about then?
Alas, poor Yorick.
Most people have heard of Hamlet, even if they haven’t seen it
because it sounds quite boring.
So, whats it about?
Well, I have seen it and its about four hours long.
The main character, who is Hamlet, is visited by his father,
who is a ghost.
Remember me.
The ghost tells Hamlet to take revenge,
but Hamlet doesn’t know what to do and that’s why the play is so long.
I do not know why, yet I live to say:
this things to do.
In something gritty like Taken,
Liam Neeson knows exactly what to do.
I will look for you, I will find you...
...and I will kill you.
So you’re - bang - straight down to action.
Which makes the film really exciting and over quite quickly.
If Shakespeare had written Taken, it’d be four hours long
and be mainly Liam Neeson fretting and pacing and talking to bones.
That’s the basic difference between Hamlet and Taken.
Liam Neeson makes up his mind.
I told you I would find you.
Shakespeare never wrote anything even close to this
white-knuckle knife fight in a kitchen.
Instead, he wrote incredibly long speeches full of words.
How important are the words in a Shakespeare play?
Like, could you do it without the words?
without the words, there isn’t much left, to be honest.
So I think probably that’s the bedrock of what we do.
And to be fair, Shakespeare was no ordinary word-monger.
He didn’t just use words, he invented them, too.
Shakespeare made up words, didn’t he?
He did that all the time. Mm-hm. He made up so many words.
He made up about a thousand words that we still use today.
Did he? Mm-hm.
Right, I’ve got a list of words...
OK... that he might or might not have made up. OK.
And you tell me if Shakespeare made them up or not. OK.
Cuckoo.
No, I don’t think so.
Ukulele.
No. Truffle-balling.
No. Ceefax.
No. Omnishambles.
No.
Nutribullet.
No. Mix-tape.
No. Spork.
No. Roflcopter.
No.
Bumbaclart.
No.
Zhuzh.
No.
Potatoey.
No.
Bromance.
No. Sushi.
No.
Tit-wank.
No. Hobnob.
Yes!
Suppose it makes sense that he came up with hobnob, doesn’t it?
Because its sort of the most old-fashioned of biscuits.
Its got, like, bits of hay in it and stuff.
Its like eating a thatched roof.
By the end of his life, Shakespeare had reinvented theatre,
created memorable characters, built a playhouse,
invented a language and secured a legacy.
But the Swan of Avon still had one last trick up his sleeve.
Throughout this programme, we’ve seen how Shakespeares genius spans
seven different genres of play.
But all of these pale into insignificance against Shakespeares
most greatest work:
Game of Thrones.
Game of Thrones is a proper bloodthirsty, action-packed epic,
which skilfully combines all the genres
Shakespeare invented into one coherent work.
Its got everything.
Its got history, comedy,
Shakespearean...
Have you ever held a sword before? I was the best archer in our hamlet.
...tragedy.
Horror...
...fantasy.
And romance.
Game of Thrones also has one of Shakespeares best kings in it,
Queen Joffrey.
Surely there are others out there
who still dare to challenge my reign?
Queen Joffrey, like all Shakespeares queens,
is played by a young boy in a dress.
And they stuck with that when they adapted it for television.
Game of Thrones remains the most popular
of all of Shakespeares plays
and the only one to have been made into a television series,
which proves its the best.
Its almost as if at the end of his life,
Shakespeare finally worked out how to write something really good.
His final masterpiece accomplished,
Shakespeares work on our planet was complete.
He died on his birthday,
which must have been depressing for his family,
who would have had to
finish his cake with tears in their little Shakespearean eyes.
We don’t know what Shakespeares last words were -
probably made-up ones.
Nobody wrote them down, so they couldn’t have been all that.
I used to think Shakespeare was stuffy and pointless and not for me,
but exploring his world and works for the past half-hour
has really brought him to life, so I’m gutted hes just died.
He remains the best and only bard this country has ever produced.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
I’m loving angels instead.