Presenter

Presenter: It's hard to know where to begin talking about Shakespeare. No other writer in the story of the world has succeeded so well in engaging the imaginations of different

generations. He is a cultural phenomenon, a kind of myth; yet behind that there is the

reality of a man, who lived and wrote and felt, 400 years ago. Who was he? Here's

Professor Stanley Wells from the Shakespeare Institute who is one of the leading

authorities on Shakespeare.

Wells: Shakespeare was a genius who was fortunate in that he was born at exactly the right time.

He was born at a time, for one thing, when the English language was in a state of

ferment, when it was burgeoning, when new words were entering the language at an

extraordinary rate. He himself introduced many of them. He was born at a time when the

theatre was developing with extraordinary speed; when he was born, there were no

public theatres in England at all, but by the time he died, the English theatre had started

on a renaissance of quite amazing power of virtuosity.

Presenter: Shakespeare was born on 26th April, 1564, the son of a glover and wool dealer in the town of Stratford-on-Avon, in central England. When he was 18 he roamed a local

woman Anne Hathaway, but sometime soon after this, he moved to London and became

an actor in one of the leading theatre companies of the time. Dr. David Starkey teaches

18th-century history at the London School of Economics. London, as he points out, was

an exciting place to be.

Starkey: There was a shift taking place, in the quite dramatic growth of London. One of the things that's striking about Shakespeare is where his plays were written. Some of them, of

coupe, were produced at court, but they were essentially produced for this very

remarkable city, the city of London--which at the beginning of the 16th century was an

ordinary, big European city of about 50,000 inhabitants. But by the time you re getting

towards about 1600, its population is multiplying at the rate of a modem Bombay. Presenter: When Shakespeare began to write for the stage isn't known. His first play was probably performed in the early 1590s and may well have been The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Over the next 20 years, a cascade of masterpieces—history plays, comedies, fantasies,

and tragedies—flowed from his pen. As Stanley Wells says, their variety is astonishing.

Wells: Shakespeare wrote at the rate of about two plays a year. This is a good rate, but it's not the rate of somebody who is expanding all his energy at extraordinary speed and

therefore is in danger of repeating himself. To me, one of the great things about

Shakespeare is that each of his plays has its own individuality. He's constantly

experimenting. It's astonishing that the same man, for example, could have written the

light, delicate comedy of The Comedy of Errors and also the profound, thoughtful

tragedy of King Lear. And yet those two plays have things in common. This range is

one of his greatest characteristics.

Presenter: In performance, most of Shakespeare's plays take between two and three and a half hours They're written in a mixture of prose and poetry, in a great range of styles: some

very wordy and artificial, others much plainer. Every linguistic technique seems to be

found Shakespeare: bawdy sexual jokes, intellectual puns and beautiful romantic

metaphors. It's as if the language is being squeezed like clay into lots of different

shapes. As David Starkey points out, words and the meaning of words were becoming

enormously important to people in the late 16th century.

Starkey: For them, there was a single medium that dominated, which is words. Their world was

a verbal world. It was a world that existed through words, through language. And so

words are everywhere, everything is in words. And it's this sense of language, the importance of words themselves, which is the key to Shakespeare.