In this episode, Anjna talks all things fitness: body and mind! We learn all about the power of music and dance with former Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe, Bill Barclay, and historian, Roxanne Bennis. The social and cultural signficiance of exercise is covered by Dr. Eleanor Rycroft and the marvellous Dr. Sara Read (whose book about Gossips is defo where it's at!). Voicework is from Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, Jonathan McGarrity, Constanza Ruff, Neil Hancock, Sarah Horner and Rich Bunn.
Thou shalt follow me on the Ter of Twits thusly: @ShakespearesPa2
In this episode, Anjna talks all things fitness: body and mind! We learn all about the power of music and dance with former Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe, Bill Barclay, and historian, Roxanne Bennis. The social and cultural signficiance of exercise is covered by Dr. Eleanor Rycroft and the marvellous Dr. Sara Read (whose book about Gossips is defo where it's at!). Voicework is from Tim Atkinson, Will Harrison-Wallace, Jonathan McGarrity, Constanza Ruff, Neil Hancock, Sarah Horner and Rich Bunn.
Thou shalt follow me on the Ter of Twits thusly: @ShakespearesPa2
[00:00:02] Anjna Chouhan: Welcome to Shakespeare's Pants the podcast that explores the ins and outs of English domestic activity during the life and times of William Shakespeare. My name is Anjna and I'm a Shakespearian, which is a strange thing to do with one's life; but in my attempt to be useful for a change, I'm using my otherwise pointless superpower to make history and literature come together for you, my lovely listeners. And so without further ado, here is my podcast Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:00:37] Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:00:41] Anjna: Having a healthy body was vital as an indication of physical and moral robustness; but what exactly constituted what we might call fitness and how did people actually do exercise and where, if at all, was mental fitness in all of this? Let's do it with episode eight, fitness. Let's try to put exercise into some context. This is Dr. Eleanor Rycroft from Bristol University.
[00:01:12] Dr. Eleanor Rycoft: You have your humours which make up your body and you also have animal spirits and vital spirits which help to communicate these humours through your body. A particularly important aspect of early-modern physiological thinking is this idea of the six non-naturals and Hannah Newton defines these as 'the various dietary and lifestyle factors that were believed to affect the body excretion, sleep, food, passions, air, and exercise'. These are things that are external to the body that you might imbibe such as food, but they're absolutely crucial for the maintenance of humoural equilibrium. As with all things early-modern, this is about moderating those things.
[00:02:01] Anjna: So exercise was a non-natural: an external factor that ensured the wellbeing and health of one's body.
[00:02:09] Eleanor: During this period, in particular, there are more and more medical treatises being issued from the presses which are instructing people how to exercise. This is partly because as classical texts are being rediscovered, ideas around exercise are being particularly developed because Aristotle and Galen had a lot to say about exercise and how it helps to contribute to the equilibrium of the body. What exercise does is it heats up the body and that's necessary to evacuate the excess humours from the body through sweat so it facilitates humoural balance. There lots of references particularly to how exercise helps digestion.
[00:02:53] Anjna: This is physician Thomas Cogan.
[00:02:56] Actor: The second commodity of labour is increase of heat whereby happeneth the more alteration of things to be digested also more quick alteration and better nourishing. The third is more violence of the breath or wind whereby the pores are cleansed and the filth of the body naturally expelled. Labour then, or exercise, is a vehement moving, the end whereof is alteration of the breath or wind of man. Of exercise do proceed many commodities.
The first is hardness and strength of the members whereby labour should less grief and the body be more strong to labor. That exercise or labour does strengthen the body. Labourers for the more part be stronger than learned men and can endure greater toil.
[00:03:49] Anjna: Physical fitness was somewhat ironically an inverse of class hierarchy in that the fittest and strongest people were labouring sorts while the upper sorts were notably unhealthy, unable to enjoy toil. Even so, many kinds of activity counted as exercise, hunting, hawking, riding, all of these for the wealthy sorts, of course; but there was a clear understanding that different activities were beneficial for specific body parts. This is Cogan again.
[00:04:21] Actor: Running and going are the proper exercises of the legs. Moving of the arms up and down or stretching them out as in shooting and playing with weapons, serveth most for the arms and shoulders. Stooping and rising oftentimes, as playing at the bowls, as lifting great weights, taking up of plummets, or other like posies on the end of staves, these do exercise the back and loins. Of the bulk and lungs, the proper exercise is moving of the breath in singing, reading, or crying. The muscles and together with them the sinews, veins, arteries, bones are exercised consequently by the moving of the parts aforesaid.
The stomach and thighs and reins of the back are chiefly exercised by riding. As for sitting in a boat or barge, which is rode, riding in a horse litter, coach or wagon is a kind of exercise which is called gestation and is mixed with moving and rest and is convenient for them that be weak and impotent or in long and continual sickness. Above all other kinds of exercises, Galen most commendeth the play with the little ball, which we call tennis, and prefereth it before hunting and all other pastimes because it may be easily used of all the states, as being of little cost, but chiefly for that it doeth exercise all parts of the body alike as the legs, arms, neck, head, eyes, back and loins, and delighteth greatly the mind making it lusty and cheerful.
[00:06:11] Anjna: There's so much to unpack here. I love the reference to tennis being cheap, a good full-body workout, and just fun. Shakespeare's characters also enjoy a spot of tennis. You might recall Prince Hal's joke about Poins' habit of not turning up for tennis matches when he's run out of underwear that I mentioned in Episode 2.
[00:06:33] Actor: What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name, to know thy face tomorrow, or to take note how many pair of stockings thou hast, vis these and those that were thy peach-coloured ones, or to bear the inventory of thy shirts. One for superfluity and another for use, but that the tennis court keeper knows better than I for it is a low ebb linen with thee when thou keep’st not racket there.
[00:07:00] Anjna: I'm also tickled by Cogan's reference to sitting in a coach or wagon as exercise for the weak. I asked Dr. Eleanor Rycroft to explain what was meant by this.
[00:07:12] Eleanor: Being carried around and being moved around is a sign of social superiority. It's actually also seen as a form of exercise especially if you're old, they're being jostled around in a coach is seen as a type of exercise because your muscles are moving but, yes, a very non-exerting form of exercise. It's actually seen as suitable for women particularly.
[00:07:39] Anjna: Circling back to Cogan, he's reference to singing or declamatory talking as movement of the breath is linked directly to both exercise and what we would call mental health. Cogan makes the vital observation that exercise 'delighteth greatly the mind making it lusty and cheerful'. To link physical exercise with the mind, we're going to take a slight detour into the realm of music with early-modern music expert and former Director of Music at Shakespeare's Globe, Bill Barclay.
[00:08:14] Bill Barclay: When we think about music in the Elizabethan home, when you think about a middle-class Elizabethan family, hearing music in church, hearing music in the tavern on the street corner, hearing balladeers cry out songs that are about the king, news of the king this week, but sung to the tune of Greensleeves. The role that music played in Elizabethan life was very much to drive bad thoughts away, keep people together, remind us that harmony is important and train us to sng the same song to the same beat. It glues the family unit, it builds community and it builds social infrastructure.
The tunes that are played out on the street corner, on certain feast days in the Christian calendar, these are all things that build social infrastructure and that bind communities together, and all those elements stave off things like depression, isolation. Very often, music was printed in such a way that you could put a manuscript on a table, and a family could stand around the table on all four sides and could sing or play the piece of music together. Now, what you would have to imagine is music that looks very different because you've got one part facing left, one part facing right, one part facing up and one part facing down on the page, but the point was stand together or sit together after you've cleared the table of your dinner to play in four parts together.
We know that participatory music has positive effects in bringing people together and in training people together. Really, it may just be about your listeners understanding that when they're asking about the role of Elizabethan music played in their lives that they should really just think of what role participatory music plays in our life. Because all of music, almost all music in the Elizabethan period was participatory. You were either making it yourself or you're next to the people making it.
[00:10:15] Anjna: Remember the Erondell and Hollyband book of dialogues in which we hear from a father hosting a feast at his home. Well, once the dining experience ends, he declares:
[00:10:26] Actor: Shall we have a song? Katherine, take the key off my closet. Behold, there be fair songs at four parts. David shall make the bass, John the tenor, and James the treble.
[00:10:39] Anjna: The communal significance of music and its function as something shared was self-evident and Shakespeare often references the civilizing condition of harmony within music. If music allowed people to exercise their lungs and breath in making it and their minds and spirits in enjoying it, it stands to reason that the embodied enjoyment of music and exercise combined in the form of dance was celebrated as a vital aspect of a healthy and of course, respectable early-modern life. Before we get to dance, let's try to understand walking. Now, walking was class-related, gendered, and indeed, very socially coded.
[00:11:28] Eleanor: We can see that there are different types of walking depending on your social status. There's a class difference between the exercise of promenading or going for a walk in a park, and a royal park or something, or in a very lavish city space, and the necessity to walk which is part of a working-class occupation. So what's really interesting is when we get these mixed class spaces, like the Royal Exchange, where businessmen are going there to walk and talk and citizens are going there to be seen in their finery; but you also have people there going through London as part of their everyday life for work, as members of the working class. Then you get these mixed encounters going on socially.
[00:12:21] Anjna: One thing that was understood by exercise, not just walking, was its social aspect. It was vital to encourage cohesion and community, therefore, deviation from the ensemble associations of walking or indeed generally exercising, was a sign of trouble.
[00:12:40] Eleanor: If somebody is walking on their own a lot and not socially, and if they're walking at strange times of day like at night or very early in the morning, or if they're walking up and down their chamber rather than in a more sanctioned space of pedestrianism, all of these things, the way in which they're walking in a disordered way, can signal that there is something wrong physically with them. You can almost use walking as a diagnostic tool for various types of bodily disorder as well. The lovelorn, so people who are in a state of unrequited love or uncertainty in love, they're often depicted as walking on their own, maybe in the woods or something.
[00:13:31] Anjna: Romeo wanders around alone by day and night, much to the alarm of his family.
[00:13:37] Actor: Madam, an hour before the worshipped sun
Peered forth the golden window of the east,
A troubled mind drave me to walk abroad
Where underneath the grove of sycamore
That westward rooteth from this city side
So early walking did I see your son.
[00:13:55] Actor: Many a morning hath he there been seen
With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew.
Away from the light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out
And makes himself an artificial night.
Black and portentous must this humour prove.
[00:14:17] Anjna: In As you like it, Orlando runs around the forest alone in an effort to declare his love for Rosalind.
[00:14:26] Actor: Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love
And thou, thrice-crownéd queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books
And in their barks my thoughts I'll character
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
[00:15:10] Anjna: Perhaps most famously, Hamlet walks alone around Elsinore Castle, admittedly with his stockings around his ankles; but the solitary wandering is enough to cause concern.
[00:15:23] Actor: You know sometimes he walks four hours together here in the lobby.
[00:15:30] Anjna: As well as the lovesick or indeed mental health associations of walking, there were important status implications to moving the body, notably in haste in public.
[00:15:44] Eleanor: One thing that the elite don't seem to do is run, and that has particularly lower-class associations. If you think about servants in early-modern drama, they're characteristically hasty. They're often running on and off the stage or being told to run. You wouldn't tell a Duke to run anywhere.
[00:16:08] Anjna: A form of exercise that crossed all social boundaries was dance. The social aspect of the dances themselves was considered invaluable to communal and by extension, spiritual harmony. This is music and dance historian Roxanne Bennis.
[00:16:26] Roxanne: Just music as a whole was perceived as making you a better person. This is John Dowland, he says: "Human music is the concordance of diverse elements in one compound by which the spiritual nature is joined with the body and the reasonable is coupled in concord with the unreasonable, which proceeds from the uniting of body and soul." If you've got that going on with music, then the dancing was a physical embodiment of that harmony and that concordance.
It is interesting because when you look at the Jacobean masques, they very often start with what is called the antimasque which is this absolutely wild crazy music and satyrs and devils and all sorts of crazy people come out, and they dance in a weird and wild way. Then the music comes in, the proper masque music comes in, and it is calm and harmonious. This is when you usually got then the goddesses or the nobility who were taking part, they would then come in doing stately dances like Pavanes, which of course, were always danced gracefully, with a live but a graceful and a tasteful manner.
You really were presenting the embodiment of harmony and concordance in your dance and the way you conducted yourself in the appearance of the dance, the patterning as well. For example, in a Pavane, you would have couples, man and woman couple again, but in a long line, and you all move together. You move to the left, you move to the right, you move forward. The idea was as you would go around the room two or three times, if you were entering, say for example, at a ball or a banquet, you get this lovely feeling of flow and movement coming together.
[00:18:17] Anjna: The movement of the body itself, and the resulting effects on breathing posture and constitution, were readily acknowledged.
[00:18:26] Roxanne: Nothing as obvious as 'get fit with galliards', or 'improve your health through dance', nothing like that, but there's these little comments that just appear. It is interesting that especially for gentlemen, the nobility, that it always seems to be mentioned, you get dancing, often mentioned in the same breath as fencing, tennis, horseback riding, even wrestling. If you think about it, they're all physical activities that need agility, and balance, and strength, and coordination.
If you really wanted to be a gentleman, dancing wasn't just your social thing to be able to function in social settings, it was seen as a way of keeping yourself fit and in that overall balance that was necessary. You do find as well a lot of the dancing masters also taught fencing and the fencing masters also advertised that they would teach dancing.
[00:19:25] Anjna: Agility or fitness of body was associated, in this logic, to soundness of mind, of intellect, and refinement. There's records of schools teaching boys how to dance in an effort to improve their posture and ultimately their oration.
[00:19:43] Roxanne: As when you are in school, you learn your nouns and your verbs and your declensions and how to put them together so, in dancing, you learn the different steps, and then you join them together in different patterns to make a dance. Yes, that idea of having concrete little building blocks which you linked together to present something new would definitely tie in with orating as well - that mental mindset.
[00:20:06] Anjna: If hastiness and excess movement were associated with labouring sorts, how was the physical effort of dancing reconciled with being respectable, with being genteel? A book that was immensely influential on English upper sorts with regards to this subject was the translation of the Italian text, The Book of the Courtier, first published in English in 1561.
[00:20:32] Roxanne: It's funny you say about not being rowdy, because again, in the Courtier, when he's saying, maintain your dignity and be live and airy, that's why you dance in public. Then he says, In private, it's perfectly all right for a gentleman to dance Morris dances and brawls, but you would never do that in public unless you were masked, because again, those are the really robust, over the top physical dances and you would never want to be seen doing that in public.
The one thing about 16th-century dance is you don't do a lot with your arms. You never raise them above your shoulders or above your head, but the emphasis was you would hold yourself erect but in a relaxed manner. You would just let your arms hang down naturally, but you could move them as your body moved, it would give you a small sway in the arms. You could put your hand on your hilt if you were a gentleman. That was very good because it stopped it from waggling about.
If you were a lady, you could reach up and maybe hold your pearl necklace, or a brooch. The idea was that you just moved gracefully and subtly. It's pretty obvious, if you're waving your arms around, it's wrong. If they're just moving naturally and you're not holding them stiff like you're a wooden doll, then that's fine. There is a wonderful comment, it is in a dance manual, it's a French dance manual:
'The young man who wants to learn how to dance says, "Yes, now, talking about exercise, fencing and tennis pleased me upon friendly terms with young men, but without knowledge of dancing, I could not please the damsels. The comment was, this is an exercise that gets the girls!
[00:22:17] Anjna: Dancing leads to some pretty obnoxious flirting, especially in the comedies. It's the basis of one of my favorite cheesy pickup lines in Love's Labour's Lost, that kind of like the romance itself in the play, falls flat on its face.
[00:22:33] Actor: Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?
[00:22:35] Actor: Did not I dance with you in broadband once?
[00:22:38] Actor: I know you did.
[00:22:40] Actor: How needless was it then to ask the question?
[00:22:44] Anjna: I'm curious about how all of this transcended status. Roxanne explains that country and court dances were distinctive by physicality and by style, but the crossovers did indeed occur.
[00:22:58] Roxanne: Music was very socially mobile because the most famous country tune of the 16th century was Sellinger's Round. The way we know that tune is because William Byrd wrote a set of variations on the tune for the virginals, which were played by the upper-class ladies. Music could be socially mobile, and there are actually references to Queen Elizabeth enjoying watching country dancing. They were obviously being done at court. They were known at court, they were seen as something perfectly fine to do, although she herself tended to stick to the galliard and the volta and all of that.
It is interesting, while there was a court-style and a country-style, one wasn't necessarily to the detriment of the other. Unless you were a Puritan, and Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses, roundly declares that they should banish 'all lewd, wanton, and lascivious dancing in public assemblies'. I think the reason he was railing against it so loudly is because it was so commonly accepted, and enjoyed.
[00:24:18] Anjna: Picking up on the gendered aspects to dance, Roxanne explained to me that dancing was never culturally feminized in the way that it seems to be today. However, there was one notable exception.
[00:24:31] Actor: Grim visaged war has smoothed as wrinkled front and now instead of mounting barbered steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
[00:24:46] Anjna: Shakespeare's Richard III here proposes that dance is the antithesis of war, the most masculine of activities. It's somehow a waste of time and primarily because it takes place in a lady's chamber.
[00:25:01] Roxanne: Equally, you had more dancers, and those, they involve capering and leaping up and down. It was again, the local country lads showing how strong they were and lusty as well as just having fun dancing.
[00:25:16] Anjna: Showing off male prowess through dance or otherwise, had tangible consequences for women who, by contrast, were not encouraged to showcase their limbs, movements, or indeed bodies. Dancing offered them a rare occasion in which to do so in male company. But what about exercise for women more generally? Let's go back to Eleanor Rycroft.
[00:25:40] Eleanor: Walking shared between men is a really important context for business discussions or political discussions. It serves more functions than just maintaining bodily health. It's how men converse with each other intellectually. Conversely, women are not allowed to go outdoors really on their own, or if they do leave the house, they have to have a chaperone. Just the very fact of being outdoors and walking for a woman is often enough to put her in sexual danger in plays.
At the same time as all these books are saying, it's really important to take your exercise and then the problem of women comes up. Some writers seem to think that doing women's activities like weaving, or just going around the house doing housework is enough exercise for a woman. There's a nice reference in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster from 1609 for instance, where three gentlewomen are talking and one of them says, "Come, ladies, shall we talk around as men do walk a mile, women should talk an hour after supper, it is their exercise." So women's talking is seen to be the equivalent of men's walking!
[00:27:00] Anjna: Physician John Jones and his book, The Benefit of the Ancient Baths of Buckstones from 1572 wrote, "The Ladyes, Gentle Woomen, Wyues, and Maydes, maye in one of the Galleries walke: and if the weather bée not aggréeable too theire expectacion, they may haue in the ende of a Benche, eleuen holes made, intoo the which to trowel pummetes, or Bowles of leade, bigge, little, or meane, or also, of Copper, Tynne, Woode, eyther vyolent, or softe, after their owne discretion, the pastyme Troule in Madame is termed".
[00:27:39] Eleanor: They're allowed to do a minimal form of ball, I suppose, in order to take their exercise. If you want to avoid getting sweaty as a man, you doubly want to avoid getting sweaty as a woman. There's that famous instance from Thomas Laqueur, of the French woman Marie Germain running across the field after some pigs and she jumps over a Brook and she spontaneously changes sex into a man. If you do too much exercise, then you can actually change sex from female to male.
[00:28:15] Anjna: Not only were wealthier women dissuaded from rigorous forms of movement, but they were roundly condemned for in any way displaying themselves, even at windows.
[00:28:29] Eleanor: Until about Juliet taking her exercise at the window, that's an actual thing. There's galleries indoors where you're walking. If a woman exercises even too much in front of her window, that's problematic. She's probably a loose woman who's trying to display her wares, even when she's inside her house if she could be seen that still places her in potential categories.
[00:28:54] Anjna: Now, this causes some grief for a handful of Shakespeare's women who are seen windows, including the teenage Juliet.
[00:29:04] Actor: 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. Oh, it is my love.
Oh, that she knew she were.
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
[00:29:41] Anjna: It's no wonder Juliet is accosted by the solitary Romeo. After all, she's positioned herself at a window whereupon she can be freely gazed. A more perverse example of this logic can be found in Much Ado About Nothing, when Hero is accused of all manner of lewdness by her fiance Claudio, Don Pedro and his wicked half-brother, Don Jon.
[00:30:04] Actor: Myself, my brother, and this grieved count, did see her, hear her, at that hour last night, talk with a ruffian at her chamber window.
[00:30:15] Eleanor: There's a thing as well in Volpone where Celia is at the window. And Volpone as the disguised doctor sees her and she gets basically beaten by her husband just for being seen and just for being, in the wrong part of the house at the wrong time. There's lots of instances of the windows as this porous boundary between the outside world and the indoor oppression. The key thing is that it all has to take place indoors.
The moment, a woman does find herself out of doors, then all kinds of things are justified that might happen to her because it's her own fault, and time and again, you get this image of a woman gadding about if she leaves the house she's not walking, she's gadding, she's like a horse that you've lost control of.
[00:31:13] Anjna: When Capulet sees Juliet return home from a trip outdoors, he expostulates:
[00:31:17] Actor: How now my headstrong, where have you been gadding?
[00:31:21] Anjna: An important consequence of women not being physically fit amongst the middling upper sorts was childbirth. As with labouring men being stronger and living longer lives in their wealthier counterparts. So too were women of the lower sorts thought to be more able to withstand labour, and as we discovered in Episode 5, emerge from confinement much sooner than women of the upper sorts. This is Dr. Sara Read from Loughborough University.
[00:31:53] Sara Read: People work, we're conscious, definitely of taking the right amount of exercise or having some exercise in their day. For that reason, they thought that women of the upper classes were much weaker than the working women. If you're physically labouring for your job, they thought that women had less problems with their periods, less period pain, and that they carried and gave birth much more easily than your higher ranking women.
Just embroidering all day isn't going to keep your face and strong. For that reason, they thought high-ranking women were quite weak in body. The idea that the country women, as they usually call them are healthier and more robust and give birth more easily to more robust children is very prevalent. I think that does come down to exercise and that your higher ranking women struggle a lot in the bed chamber because they're not very strong and their bodies are not used to the exertion because it's called labour for a reason. It's hard work!
[00:32:55] Anjna: If women with leisure time were not able to exert themselves, what exactly were they allowed to do for exercise? This is Eleanor again.
[00:33:05] Eleanor: There was a problem of female exercise and the fact that trying to find something which is both strenuous enough and also restricted enough to maintain femininity recurs. Which is also why promenading is quite interesting when that emerges in the 17th century, because that becomes a legitimate form of outdoors exercise for noble or genteel women, or it could be a mixed gender group and often is which is also really important because as we know, men and women are so often segregated into different spaces.
[00:33:42] Anjna: Maintaining a fit body, whether for labour, to keep up with the other chaps, or to help digest your food was an absolutely essential early-modern practice. For Shakespeare's characters, it's even a rite of passage most, especially for youths. They have the time and leisure to roam free and to enjoy themselves, after all. Of course, exercise was vital for physical health; but not unlike 21st century thinking on this subject, bodily fitness was also tied up with mental health.
As the wise old Roman poet Juvenal once said, "mens sana in corpore sano": health of mind means health of body. It's just fascinating that early-modern England folded society and communal health into its conceptualisations of individual fitness. Exercise was about socialising as much as it was about keeping fit, especially if it was something one chose to engage in whether it was playing instruments or singing as a group, dancing, playing tennis, or even promenading. Solitary physical activity was the preserve of the labouring sorts. The people who had no other choice. And like absolutely everything I've explored in this series from bathing and beautifying to eating and copulating, the most important aspect of fitness was in moderation. All health in this period was strictly individuated, a personal responsibility to maintain balance in the humours, in the spirits, and in mind and body. In the wise words of the not so wise, uncle Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida:
[00:35:28] Actor: Be moderate. Be moderate.
[00:35:29] Anjna: So pack your spare underwear in your tennis bag, keep all arm-related dances to a minimum, and ladies, steer well clear of any windows.
That's the end of not just this episode, but the entire series of Shakespeare's Pants. I cannot thank you enough and lending me your ears and your time throughout this wonderful journey. I have loved every moment of it and if you've enjoyed listening to it, please consider leaving me a review or following the pod on Twitter @ShakespearesPa2. Should anyone care for a second Shakespeare's Pants series, for heaven's sake do let me know!
In this episode, you heard from Dr. Eleanor Rycroft, Bill Barclay, Roxanne Bennis, Dr. Sara Read, and me, Dr. Anjna Chouhan. You also had the voices of Rich Bunn, Tim Atkinson, Sarah Horner, Neil Hancock Will Harrison-Wallace, Jonathan McGarrity, Constanza Ruff, and the marvellous voice of the jingle is Pete Smith. My hearty, thanks to everyone who's contributed their wisdom to this entire series and to you, my lovely listeners, farewell.
[00:36:47] Shakespeare's Pants.
[00:36:52] [END OF AUDIO]