Shakespeare – from Car Park Attendant to Genius

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!