What would Shakespeare make of our modern world? If he were suddenly to appear in London as a time traveler to the future he would find himself in the middle of a street crowd. The London of his time had a population of about twenty thousand but here he would see that number of people in one street. And in all sorts of ways they would look different.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He would wonder what this was, but being Shakespeare, and knowing he was in the future, he would soon work out that it was a building. But nevertheless, it would stretch his imagination as to its use. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps he would make for some place he knew and, there on the Southbank he would find something recognisable. He would be a bit puzzled because although it’s called the Globe Theatre it doesn’t look quite right. And also, it’s in the wrong place. It’s near to where his theatre was but not in the same spot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But then he would go inside, and once he had got through the gleaming carpeted, chrome-filled reception area with its ticket office and postcards he would find himself in a space that he might recognise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He might decide to take a trip to Stratford. It would be hard to find a horse that he woujld be allowed to ride all that way but this is how he would have remembered the journey.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He would have to find another means of transport. He would find the train ride terrifying, of course. Its speed would be something quite difficult to deal with as he watched the countryside flash by. If he looked up at the sky he might see something like this. What would he be thinking?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Then he would arrive at the station, the kind of place even he couldn’t have imagined in his home town.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Shakespeare loved music. However, to listen to it one had to be in the same place as the musicians and music was only available as a live performance. He would undoubtedly see several people with this contraption, dancing as though there was music playing. If you told him they were indeed listening to music he wouldn’t understand. And if you told him that there may be thousands of songs in that little box and that the music was only in their ears he would most certainly want to have a go. Can you imagine Shakespeare with earphones in his ears, listening to an ipod? And dancing in the street?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare’s plays are full of images of the moon, and he always seemed aware of the earth as a small round ball but no doubt it wouldn’t be long before he came across a poster something like this – a picture of Earth taken from the moon. It’s mind-boggling, even for us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As he walked along the bank of the Avon, perhaps the weather was good, and he might think back fondly of his leisure hours with other young people. No matter how hot it was no Elizabethan would have revealed naked flesh – limbs were always covered in public. This is what he might see on the river. I hope he would like it.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By now he might be itching to put something down on paper. He would have quite a hard time finding a quill. If he were to find himself stuck in the twenty-first century. he would soon discover that this is probably the best instrument for writing and no doubt he would soon master it.

 

 

 

It’s quite common for Londoners to attend the theatre in Stratford upon Avon and also, most Americans visiting London make the journey to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It’s a hundred and two miles, an easy trip that takes about two hours. You just drive straight up the M40. Or you could go by train, about an hour and a half. It’s a pleasant outing: leave in the morning, park the car, have lunch, attend a matinee then drive home in time for dinner. Or you could go to an evening performance and stay in one of the hostelries.

Imagine that you lived in Stratford, with a house, family and childhood friends, but had to go to London for extended periods because that’s where your job or your business or important associates were. It would eventually become quite tedious, even in a comfortable air-conditioned or heated car. But Shakespeare did that throughout his career. It’s interesting to imagine what it would have been like for him.

In the sixteenth century there were no real roads, only rough muddy tracks. No-one travelled in a vehicle. If you were rich you rode a horse, if you weren’t you walked. There were wagons carrying cargo and perhaps you could hitch a ride with one of them. But it would be very uncomfortable and much slower than walking. The elderly rich sometimes travelled in a carriage slung between two horses trained to walk at the same pace. It was only after Shakespeare’s death that the government did something about the state of the roads, allowing for the development of vehicle travel.

When Shakespeare was twenty-one, already married with children, he went off to London to find a job as an actor. There was a huge demand for new plays and, as we know, his talent emerged and a star was soon born. The first thing he would have had to do was get a licence to travel away from the town he lived in. That was a government health measure, to minimise the effects of the plague. He would have walked to London. This is thought to be the route he would have taken.

Historians and scholars think that, leaving early every morning from wherever he slept at night, walking briskly across fields and if they were not too muddy, roads, it would have taken him six days. If you and I undertook a journey like that we wouldn’t want to do it again in a hurry. It would be a huge achievement and it would make us famous among our friends. But Shakespeare did it frequently – there and back.

Shakespeare’s career was meteoric. He worked very hard, as actor, writer and theatre manager and soon started to become prosperous. We can assume that he would have bought or rented horses as soon as he was able to afford it. Even so, it would have been far more tedious and laborious than travel today. If you go along that route now you will see many of the inns that he would have passed, probably staying in at least three of them on each journey. Shakespeare’s friend, John Davenant, owned the Crown Inn in Oxford, and Shakespeare would probably have visited him on each trip: Davenant was more than a friend: Shakespeare was his son William’s godfather.

 When Shakespeare retired he settled into his house in Stratford and didn’t visit London again. It must have been quite a relief, or perhaps, if he loved the noisy, busy life of London and the travelling, quite disorientating. As a busy man, working so hard in London and organising such things as buying property and attending to family business when he was in Stratford, perhaps, the long walks and horse rides gave him the chance to think. As a serious writer he would always have had his next play or set of sonnets on his mind and perhaps it was on those long journeys that he worked out his plots, ideas and characters in his head, perhaps even composing entire sonnets, in the peace and quiet of the English countryside.

Writers often use their own lives as a resource for their creative work. Some take events in their lives to build their fictional scenes: others relive the emotions of things that happen to them and build entirely new events around those emotions.

Scholars have tried to match Shakespeare’s work to his life. In the case of a writer like Shakespeare who creates situations and characters that are so numerous and wide-ranging, it’s almost impossible to do. He writes with ease about kings and beggars; males and females, youth and old age, nobility and commoners. His plays are set in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt; Renaissance Italy, Mediaeval England, Scotland, Denmark  and France, and the England of his time. No-one could have such diverse personal experience. The events in the plays spring from the creative mind of this great genius but where do the emotions come from?

Take one of his early plays, Romeo and Juliet, which he wrote when he was in his twenties. It deals with, among other things, teenage sexuality and forbidden love. We know little about Shakespeare’s life but one of the things we do know is that Shakespeare married at eighteen and his bride, Anne Hathaway, was pregnant.

Both William and Anne came from socially respectable families. Anne’s family were farmers and William’s were skilled artisans. His father was an alderman in Stratford and therefore a man of rank in the town. Premarital pregnancy was unacceptable in those circles. We know nothing more than that William made Anne pregnant when he was seventeen and that therefore, like Romeo, he was involved in an unacceptable love affair. Whatever emotions and feelings that relationship may have created is something we will never know. Could it be, though, that it was that experience that helped Shakespeare in his vivid portrayal of the star-crossed lovers and their anguished plight?

A writer who has such emotional intensity in his works must have experienced those emotions in some form in order to have written about them. Boiling it down to basic emotions – sexual passion, fear, envy, compassion, love, hatred – which he would have experienced in the course of living, just as the rest of us do, it’s clear that Shakespeare had the capacity to squeeze the most out of every experience. That’s one of the things that makes him such a good writer.

It’s difficult to define genius. Some people will sometimes call a high-scoring football player a genius, others will regard someone who’s good at his/her job as a genius, so the word is often loosely used. It can’t be defined, but we probably all agree that the likes of Darwin, Newton, Shakespeare and Michelangelo were geniuses.

Most of those towering figures are known for just one thing – evolution, physics, writing, art and so on. Imagine, Einstein, the greatest academic of his era, running a university. Perhaps he would have been brilliant at it but perhaps, also, he wasn’t interested. But one genius, Shakespeare had quite a diverse career, albeit focused on the theatre.

Shakespeare’s career was short by today’s standards, lasting fewer than thirty years, but he managed during that time to make himself a very rich man.

He started as an actor, although there is some evidence that his first job in a theatre was looking after the horses of the theatre-goers – a sort of car park attendant. London at that time had more than twenty theatres and theatre-going was by far the main leisure activity. The demand for scripts was enormous – there had to be new plays every day – so there was a great opportunity for writers. Shakespeare grasped that opportunity and very soon became one of the most popular playwrights in London.

A group of actors, which included Shakespeare, opened the Globe Theatre in 1599. They made serious money, using Shakespeare’s scripts and commissioning those of others who also became giants of the Elizabethan theatre, like Webster, Tournier, Middletone, Rowley and many others. We know that Shakespeare worked with those writers on their plays, sometimes writing or rewriting bits of them. The Globe became the most famous and highly-regarded of the London theatres, They were so successful that they opened another theatre at Blackfriers and continued to rake it in.

So Shakespeare was at the top level of acting, writing and theatre management. He also directed plays and managed the talent of others. And during all that time he was writing. It’s hard to imagine how he found the time to write so many plays when he was a full-time actor, director and business manager. It’s because he was a genius, generally, with a huge intelligence, a very high level of skill and impeccable judgment, in several areas.

It’s even harder to imagine when we know that he spent half his time in London and half in Stratford, commuting between them, using a transport system that most of us would use once and never again.

So once again, well done, Bill!

What would Shakespeare have thought about the things that we take for granted and which he never dreamt of? We all jump in a car at least once a day; we get on a plane and travel at incredible speed from once country to another; we push a button and watch wars being fought thousands of miles away; we watch a play without moving from our armchairs. I could go on forever, outlining all the things we do without giving them a second thought.

Shakespeare regularly commuted between Stratford and London, and each time it would have been a very bumpy journey taking the whole day and possibly longer. We can travel from London to Stratford in about an hour, very comfortably, listening to any music we choose. To listen to music Shakespeare would have had to take the trouble to go the place where the musicians were.

Could he have possibly imagined that we would send people to walk on the moon? That we have landed vehicles on Mars and Titan, sat back and watched moving pictures of their activity there? Even the idea of pictures that hadn’t been painted by an artist would have been beyond his imagination.

The technology of his time was strictly mechanical, based on the wheel and operated by manpower. And he had no reason to think it would go beyond that, just as we, with all our electronic miracles, can’t imagine what our descendents four hundred years into the future will be taking for granted.

Writers today work on computers with the internet running in the background. Whenever they need a piece of information they just make a couple of clicks and they get it. We are overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s knowledge but the truth is that ten-year-old kids have more knowledge than he had. It may be different knowledge but kids have far more knowledge as such.

Shakespeare was well-read but not as well read as the average educated adult is today. He had a few books on his shelf – two history books, a book about classical mythology, a bible, some medieval philosophy – and look what he made of that. All his history plays were based on the stories taken from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicle of English History and the stories he presents in his Roman plays from North’s translation of the Roman historian, Plutarch. Look what he made of those two sources!

Try and imagine yourself without the internet. Try and imagine what your great great great great great grandchildren will take for granted. You can’t. As Hamlet says: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Shakespeare didn’t know what they were but he knew that they are there even though we couldn’t begin to imagine them.

Sunday 25^th October was St Crispin’s Day. Henry V is structured around that day because  October 25^th was the day on which Henry defeated the French at Agincourt. It’s also the day on which two other celebrated battles were fought: the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War, immortalised by Tennyson in his poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, 1944.

St Crispin’s Day is burned into our culture because of Henry’s speech, encouraging his troops in the face of overwhelming odds, and here’s a piece of it:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

St Crispin’s Day is actually the feast day of  both St Crispin and St Crispinian, Roman twins, the patron saints of cobblers – for that’s what they were, teaching the gospels to the Gauls by day and making  and mending shoes by night. In modern times they are also the patron saints of cyclists, of all things!

Thebrothers fell foul of the authorities because of their Christian preaching and were tortured and beheaded in 256. Strangely, although the majority of recognised saints are legendary rather than historical figures, St Crispin’s Day was removed from the Catholic list of feast days because the Vatican decided that there was little evidence of their existence.

But because of one of the most famous passages in Shakespeare’s works we remember St Crispian and St Crispinian (Crispian in Shakespeare)’

There is nothing to stop you from celebrating their feast!

People like to reflect on greatness and to make lists of the ten or hundred greatest men and women in history. Or in Britain, or in America, or in the world.

When the Brits make lists of the greatest men and women in history the list tends to be dominated by Brits, American lists by Americans, German lists by Germans etc.  So from Britain you get Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Lord Nelson, Winston Churchill, of course – and always Shakespeare – dominating the lists.

American lists of the great men and women in history are dominated by Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and so on. Of course, William Shakespeare is always there.

A lot depends on who it is compiling the list. I have seen lists that are dominated by men of war and lists dominated by religious figures. American lists tend to leave Darwin out. For some reason Americans generally have more of a dread than an admiration for him, even though he changed our understanding of life on earth more profoundly than anyone else.

I have seen some strange things on the lists I have looked at. Take Shakespeare out of the equation because he is usually there, but, having said that, I sometimes wonder what is going on in people’s minds. Mother Theresa among the top twenty greatest men and women in history? And Billy Graham?

Some historical figures have become legends, their stories reinvented as fiction and told to children in school and so you get people like Florence Nightingale as one of humanity’s greatest people. And David Livingstone! Where is Rip van Winkle on the lists? His presence wouldn’t surprise me.

In a recent list compiled by a British tourist organisation, totaltravel.com, the list went like this: William Shakespeare; Winston Churchill; Sir Christopher Wren; Queen Victoria; John Lennon; Isaac Newton; David Hockney; Charles Darwin; Boudicea : C. 30 – 62.

John Lennon? That great? David Hockney? And Darwin so far down? The compiler was probably trying not to put American tourists off.

In 2003 the BBC world satellite news conducted a poll of overseas listeners and here is their list.

Sir Isaac Newton • Winston Churchill • Princess Diana • William Shakespeare • Charles Darwin • John Lennon • Isambard Kingdom Brunel • Queen Elizabeth I • General Oliver Cromwell • Admiral Horatio Nelson

Shakespeare comes fourth to Princess Diana’s third. What can one say? When it’s left to democracy and you vote on who were the best writers of all time, here in the UK you get people like Jeffrey Archer and JK Rowling topping the polls. I wonder what that just goes to show? I wouldn’t have Archer in the top million writers.

One thing is clear. Shakespeare is consistently on the lists, and somewhere near the top. If you were to find a way of analysing the lists and making an aggregate I think you would find that Shakespeare is The Man.

It seems to be catching. But after all, this is the second Elizabethan age so harking back to the golden age of English theatre shouldn’t be surprising. Sam Wannermaker’s Globe Theatre in London has proved a great success and now it’s the turn of the North of England.

Dame Judi Dench, Shakespearean actor and movie star, won awards for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in the movie Shakespeare in Love. After the actors and crew had packed up and gone  home she was given the set of the film as a gift. The oak timbers have been stored in a warehouse since it was dismantled after the completion of the filming and now she is exploring the possibility of turning the set into a Shakespeare centre in York, the city of her birth.

Dame Judi wants to see the set turned into a full-scale replica of the Rose theatre, which stood close to the Globe on the south bank of the Thames and was also used by Shakespeare. The actress has donated the set to the touring British Shakespeare Company to use as a permanent Shakespeare centre in the north of England.

There has been a long-standing campaign for recognition of Shakespeare’s northern links, after suggestions that the Bard fled to Lancashire after prosecution at Stratford-upon-Avon for poaching deer.

This will certainly be a good start.

It’s a wise child that knows its own father. (That’s a reversal of ‘It’s a wise father that knows his own child’ from ‘The Merchant of Venice’!)

There is a BBC television show – ‘Who do you think you are?’ where well-known people are offered resources and researchers to look into their background and then present an account of that on television.

Recently, Zoe Wannemaker, daughter of Sam Wannemaker, the American actor who built the Globe Theatre in London, was one of the show’s subjects.

How long has it taken us to learn some of the lessons Shakespeare’s plays offer us? Even in 1956 the two democracies of Britain and the United States were persecuting people for their beliefs and opinions. Sam Wannemaker was a victim of persecution in both democracies, as Zoe discovered as a result of her research for the TV show.

Wannemaker became a communist in 1943 after playing a Russian soldier at the National Theatre in Washington. He moved to Britain in 1951 as the communist witch-hunt was hotting up and actors were prevented from working.

The US Foreign Office was in close contact with MI5, however, and while the pursuit of communists was not as ferocious in the UK, his ‘ciminal’ files follwed him and MI5 recommended that the Wannemaker family be interned. That wasn’t done but his application for permanent residence in the UK was turned down when he applied in 1955.

In 1957 the UK authorities changed their mind and he was granted indefinite stay in Britain. The file entry includes ‘The Wanamakers have not come to adverse security notice for some years.’

Sweet.

Wannemaker went on to be a national treasure and hero because of his work on the Globe project, and the Theatre stands, not only as a wonderful memorial to Shakespeare, but a fitting one to Wannemaker too.

NoSweatShakespeare aims to present Shakespeare to our own generation as exciting and relevant…However, as children and young people all around the world are obliged to encounter his plays as part of their formal education, teachers and students are forever looking for resources that will give them a better understanding of the texts.

During the past twenty years there has been a major effort by the world’s English teachers to find or invent ways of having fun with Shakespeare in English lessons.

I read recently that politicians in England have criticised teachers for accepting ‘text-speak’ in English assignments. When I looked into it a bit more I found that politicians in the United States, Australia and New Zealand have expressed a similar horror at the idea.

But what could be more relevant to the modern teenager?

Here’s a challenge for you. Read these pieces of  text-speak and see if you can place them. I think Shakespeare would smile if he could see them.

‘2 b, r nt 2 b dat iz d Q wthr ts noblr n d mnd 2 sufr d slngs & arowz of outrAjs fortn r 2 tAk armz agnst a C f trblz, & by oposn nd em?’

‘2mrw & 2mrw & 2mrw crEpz n dis pety plAs frm dA 2 dA 2 d lst silabl of rcrdd tIm & al our ystdAz hv lItd f%lz d way 2 dsty def…tis a tAl tld by an ejit, ful of snd & fury sgnfyn nutin.’

‘bt, sft! wot lIt thru yndr wndo brAkz? Ts d Est, & Juliet iz d sn. ArIs, fair sn, & kil d envios m%n, hu iz alredi sk & pAl w grEf, dat thou hr mAd art fr mo fair thn she.’

‘& gntlmn n Englnd, nw a-bed shl fnk thmslvs acrsd dey wr not hr, & hld thr mnh%dz chEp whl NE spk dat fort w us on St Crspns dA’

I’ll give you a clue. They come from Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. (not in that order, though)

I don’t care what the politicians think. Most of them can’t use text-speak but the students they are critcising can speak and write ‘proper’ English so they have an additional language that their critics don’t. And translating Shakespeare into text-speak is not only fun but makes them concentrate unwittingly on the language of Shakespeare. It’s an English teacher’s dream come true!!