Greatest of Them All - Part 1

 The Greatest of Them All - Part 1

Now when I first decided to have a series of podcast episodes dealing with what I believe are the 25 most influential writers, it seemed easiest and most effective to have one episode for each writer. But I soon found that William Shakespeare easily deserved several episodes - so I'm going to devote two episodes to Shakespeare because of his importance to the English language and creativity -still fully realizing that's not enough.

Anyway, If you visit Stratford-upon-Avon today, the first thing you’ll hear is that William Shakespeare was born in 1564. We don’t actually know the exact day, but we do know he was baptized on April 26th at Holy Trinity Church. Since baptisms usually happened a few days after birth, tradition has settled on April 23rd — St. George’s Day — as Shakespeare’s birthday. A fitting coincidence, since St. George is England’s patron saint and Shakespeare would become its greatest poet.

He was the son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker and part-time wool dealer who rose to become an alderman in the town, and Mary Arden, who came from a well-off farming family. That gave young Will a household connected both to trade and to old Warwickshire landowners.

Like many boys of his station, he probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford. The curriculum would have been heavy on Latin, rhetoric, and the classics. Day after day, he would have been drilled in the works of Ovid, Seneca, and Plautus. Later, echoes of those schoolroom authors would resurface in his plays — Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Roman senators in Julius Caesar.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity Episode 457 - the greatest of them all - part 1 - now when I first decided to have a series of podcast episodes dealing with what I believe are the 25 most influential writers, it seemed easiest and most effective to have one episode for each writer. But I soon found that William Shakespeare easily deserved several episodes - so I'm going to devote two episodes to Shakespeare because of his importance to the English language and creativity -still fully realizing that's not enough.

Anyway, If you visit Stratford-upon-Avon today, the first thing you’ll hear is that William Shakespeare was born in 1564. We don’t actually know the exact day, but we do know he was baptized on April 26th at Holy Trinity Church. Since baptisms usually happened a few days after birth, tradition has settled on April 23rd — St. George’s Day — as Shakespeare’s birthday. A fitting coincidence, since St. George is England’s patron saint and Shakespeare would become its greatest poet.

He was the son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker and part-time wool dealer who rose to become an alderman in the town, and Mary Arden, who came from a well-off farming family. That gave young Will a household connected both to trade and to old Warwickshire landowners.

Like many boys of his station, he probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford. The curriculum would have been heavy on Latin, rhetoric, and the classics. Day after day, he would have been drilled in the works of Ovid, Seneca, and Plautus. Later, echoes of those schoolroom authors would resurface in his plays — Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Roman senators in Julius Caesar.

By 1582, at just eighteen, Shakespeare married the original Anne Hathaway - not the actress of the Devil Wears Prada - who was twenty-six and already pregnant. Their first daughter, Susanna, was born the next year. Twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585. And then comes the mystery: the so-called “lost years.” Between 1585 and 1592, Shakespeare disappears from the historical record. No plays, no mentions, no documents. Biographers have filled the gap with speculation — perhaps he was a teacher, perhaps a law clerk, perhaps an actor touring the countryside. We simply don’t know.

What we do know is that by 1592, Shakespeare was in London and making a name for himself. A rival playwright, Robert Greene, derided him in print as an “upstart crow.” For all its venom, the insult is proof that Shakespeare had arrived — he was already challenging the university-trained writers and beginning his rise to the very top of the Elizabethan stage.

By the early 1590s, Shakespeare was fully in the London scene — which meant two things: theater and plague. In 1592, theaters were shut down because of an outbreak, and with the stage dark, Shakespeare pivoted to poetry. This is his side-hustle era. He published two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to a wealthy young noble, the Earl of Southampton. They were like Elizabethan Kickstarter perks: you flatter a patron, they fund your career. And it worked. These poems put his name in print for the first time.

And in 1609, Shakespeare published a book of sonnets that included the famous “shall I compare to a summers day”

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

But Shakespeare’s real passion was the stage, and by 1594, the theaters reopened. He joined an acting company that would later become the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. From then on, his plays weren’t just circulating among companies — he had a “home team.” Think of it as the Netflix exclusive deal of the Elizabethan theater world.
What did he write first? That’s debated, but by the mid-1590s, we see Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare goes full Tarantino with blood and revenge) and

Now, Titus Andronicus is gory, brutal, and full of dramatic extremes. It shows Shakespeare testing the limits of tragedy, revenge, and spectacle for stage effect.

Let my tears staunch the earth’s dry appetite;
My sons’ sweet blood will make it shame and blush
O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain
That shall distil from these two ancient ruins
Than youthful April shall with all his showers.
In summer’s drought I’ll drop upon thee still;
In winter with warm tears I’ll melt the snow
And keep eternal springtime on thy face,
So thou refuse to drink my dear sons’ blood.

While it may seem shocking today, it was hugely popular with audiences, revealing how Shakespeare understood what a crowd enjoyed.  Today, it might shock us with its gore, but in Elizabethan London, the audience loved it. Shakespeare was learning how to grip a crowd, how to push the boundaries of emotion and spectacle. He was testing the limits of storytelling itself.

And most scholars believe that around this time he wrote Richard the Third - a great play about a very manipulative English king. In fact I recently interpreted for the deaf at the Indianapolis Shakespeare Company for a somewhat modernized rap version of Richard the Third called Ricky 3 - and the combination of Shakespeare and rap was very effective.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

And later Shakespeare wrote a great series of historical dramas that are known as the Henry VI plays (a trilogy of English history with more sword fights than a Marvel movie)

This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal of this fell war.
Here on this molehill will I sit me down.

And then there were the early comedies such A Comedy of Errors (pure farce, twins everywhere).

In this portion of  a “comedy of errors,“ the character of Antipholus and a bondsman describe the character Nell using geographical references. Comparing the lower part of Nell’s body to the Netherlands - the low country - Antipholus asks about the location of the Netherlands on her body, and the character of Dromio responds - To conclude: this drudge or diviner laid claim to me, swore I was assured to her, told me what privy marks I had about me, as the mark of my shoulder, the mole in my neck, the great wart on my left arm, that I, amazed, ran from her as a witch. And, I think, if my breast had not been made of faith, and my heart of steel, She had transformed me to a curtal dog and made me turn i’ th’ wheel.

And later the character says:

As from a bear a man would run for life,
So fly I from her that would be my wife.

These plays weren’t yet the deep, polished Shakespeare we quote today — but they were fast, funny, violent, and very popular.

Shakespeare was giving the Elizabethans what they craved: spectacle, laughter, and a dash of scandal.

By 1595, though, something changes. He writes Romeo and Juliet, and suddenly the kid from Stratford has found his voice. It’s a teenage love story, yes, but also a tragedy written with such lyrical power that audiences were hooked. In fact, if the Henry VI plays were Shakespeare’s “pilot episodes,” Romeo and Juliet was his breakout hit.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid, since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.
It is my lady; O, it is my love!
O 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.
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
O that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!

And here’s the best part: we can see Shakespeare experimenting in real time. In one decade, he goes from blood-soaked revenge tragedies to poetry, to romantic comedy, and then into high tragedy — like a playwright who refuses to get typecast. He’s the Elizabethan version of a director who makes a quality slasher flick - whatever that might be -  then an excellent rom-com, then a prestige drama, then an outstanding love story - just to prove he can.

By the end of the 1590s, Shakespeare was a household name in London. He had his own acting troupe, hit plays packing the theaters, and his reputation spreading beyond the city. The “upstart crow” had officially become the main attraction.

In these early plays, Shakespeare was experimenting with form, voice, and character. He was learning what words could do on a stage and what stories would make an audience sit forward, laugh, weep, or gasp. From the political machinations of kings to the secret yearnings of young lovers, his early works are the foundation of the genius we celebrate today—and the first steps on the ladder that would take him to the masterpieces of his later years.”

By the turn of the century, Shakespeare was no longer just successful — he was unstoppable. In 1599, his company built the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. Imagine it: a 3,000-seat open-air theater, round as a doughnut, filled with everyone from pickpockets and apprentices in the pit to nobles in the galleries. It was noisy, messy, and alive — more like a rock concert than a polite evening at the opera.

The Globe became Shakespeare’s creative laboratory. And what a year to start with: 1599 saw Julius Caesar,

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

It was during this period that Shakespeare wrote the masterful Henry V,

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Most scholars believe that it was around this time that Shakespeare wrote the comedy As You Like It with its famous all the world’s a stage monologue.  By the way, the word sans in the last line of this monologue means without - as you can probably tell, much of Shakespeare's language was quite different from today.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Shakespeare later wrote a play called a play by the name of “The Tempest with the line “What’s past is prologue.”  You might consider this an elegant way of saying that the first part of Shakespeare's life, which we have just covered, is the necessary set up for the second part of his life and career, which will be discussed in the next episode.