September 18, 2024 • 55 mins
Welcome to another captivating episode of Talking Tudors! I'm your host, Natalie Grueninger. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Darren Freebury-Jones about his fascinating new book, Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers. Darren shares his insights on Shakespeare's interactions with contemporary playwrights and how these relationships influenced his work.
We also dive into the vibrant world of 16th-century London, exploring the bustling city that inspired so many legendary plays. Darren discusses the collaborative nature of playwriting during this period, the pressures of theatrical production, and the dynamic interplay between Shakespeare and his peers.
Join us as we uncover the lesser-known influences that shaped the works of the world's greatest playwright. Don't miss this enlightening discussion!
Visit Dr Freebury-Jones' website
https://darrenfj.wordpress.com/
Find out more about your host at https://www.nataliegrueninger.com
Buy Talking Tudors merchandise at https://talkingtudors.threadless.com/
Support Talking Tudors on Patreon
Join 'A Bookish Weekend with the Tudors'!
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/a-bookish-weekend-with-the-tudors-tickets-936941385907
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.
My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey
through 16th century England.
Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous
world of the Tudor court?
Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.
(00:23):
Music.
Thanks for watching!
(00:46):
Thank you for watching! Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.
I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Before we begin, I'd like to mention an upcoming online event that I'm hosting
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called A Bookish Weekend with the Tudors.
Over the weekend of the 28th and 29th of September, we'll explore 16th century
printing, books, and manuscripts through a series of six online lectures and
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Joining me are Joe Saunders, Dr. Owen Emerson, Kate McCaffrey, Dr.
(01:31):
Rebecca Quass-Moore, Professor Martine van Elk, and Dr. Vanessa Wilkie.
This is unmissable for lovers of books and Tudor history.
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(01:53):
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(02:15):
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Now, on to today's episode. I'm thrilled to welcome Dr Darren Freebury-Jones
to the podcast to chat about his new book, Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
(02:36):
Darren is author of the monographs Reading Robert Greene, Recovering Shakespeare's
Rival, Shakespeare's Tutor, The Influence of Thomas Kidd, and Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
He is associate editor for the first critical edition of the collected works
of Thomas Kidd since 1901.
He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston's dramatic corpus as
(02:56):
part of the Oxford Marston Project and is general editor for the collected plays of Robert Greene.
His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed
in national newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph,
The Observer and The Independent, as well as BBC Radio.
His debut poetry collection, Rambling, was published in 2024.
(03:18):
In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition
of his contributions to historical scholarship.
Let's dive straight into our conversation.
Welcome to Talking Tudors, Darren. How are you? I'm great. It's all the better
for hearing you, to paraphrase the big bad wolf.
Thank you so much. It's so lovely to have you here. So let's start with an introduction.
(03:42):
Would you mind just telling us and our wonderful listeners a little bit about
you and your background?
Yes, of course. So I'm a Welsh-born author of books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
and I'm Associate Editor for the Collected Works of Elizabethan playwright Thomas Kidd,
and General Editor for the Collected Plays of Robert Greene.
(04:03):
So I lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I'm also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Wonderful. And I was just saying to you before we started recording that I'm
excited to talk about Shakespeare because I don't often get the chance.
I'm always stuck with Henry VIII for some reason. So it's nice to get out of
that period of Tudor history.
(04:24):
So let's talk a little bit about your new book, very exciting,
called Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
Can you tell us a bit about it and maybe what inspired you to write it? Yeah.
Well, I've long been interested in Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights,
how he interacted with, was sometimes influenced by, and collaborated with other dramatists.
(04:47):
And my PhD thesis at Cardiff in Wales was on Thomas Kidd's relationship with
Shakespeare's early plays.
And I wrote a book on that topic, published in 2022. And that year,
I also wrote a book on fellow Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene.
So having written books on Shakespeare, Greene, and Kidd, I thought,
(05:09):
you know what, I'll write a book on everybody.
I'm being a little bit facetious there, but Shakespeare's Bottled Feathers charts
Shakespeare's engagement with each major playwright of the period,
going back to the 1580s up to Shakespeare's retirement around 1613.
Wonderful. And so before we dive in to talk a little bit more about some of
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those relationships and influences that you've just mentioned,
would you mind setting the scene for us a little?
So maybe telling us about what we know of Shakespeare's early life,
his education, his training, that sort of thing.
Yeah, of course. Well, we don't have enrollment records for Shakespeare's grammar school education.
And this is also the case with other literary figures of the period,
(05:53):
like Robert Greene, who I just mentioned, and an author named Thomas Decker.
But it seems more than likely that Shakespeare would have attended King's New
School between the ages of around 7 and 14, which was just a short walk from
his home in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon.
So King's New School was free for boys in the borough, and tradition holds that
(06:17):
John Shakespeare bred his son for some time at a free school.
And I think Shakespeare's education would have been more than robust enough
to equip him with the knowledge and skill set he required to write poetry and
plays, pretty much the equivalent of a modern classics degree.
So schoolboys of the period would have studied Latin anthologies by the likes
(06:41):
of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, as well as Aesop's fables through a Latin translation.
And in the classroom, Shakespeare would also punch over the works of classical
writers such as Terence, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil.
Now, Shakespeare, often regarded as the world's greatest playwright,
(07:02):
isn't exactly renowned for coming up with his own plot lines.
But it's worth stressing that he was writing during a period when emphasis was
placed not on telling new stories necessarily, but retelling existing stories in innovative ways.
And this was reflected in the standard school curriculum instituted by Erasmus,
(07:25):
for which imitation, parody, and translation served as bedrocks.
This was fundamentally education that prized imitation and advised students
to read as many different types of author as possible in order to fill up their storehouse.
So pedagogical emphasis on bettering imitated sources, that would have been
(07:48):
drilled into Shakespeare at school.
They worked schoolboys pretty hard at the time. So Shakespeare would have been
thoroughly immersed in classical rhetoric as well.
So the language of persuasion. And I think this would have been a particular
use to a budding actor-dramatist.
So figures of repetition would benefit Elizabethan actors when it came to learning
(08:12):
lines, including long, declamatory speeches.
Speeches and having embarked on a career as an actor in London at some point
in the late 1580s or early 1590s,
Shakespeare would have experienced training in rhetoric and memorization not
too dissimilar to his school lessons, I think.
And that would inform his dramatic writing when writing roles for himself and
(08:37):
other members of his playing company.
And as a side note, it's worth pointing out that schoolboys of the period would
have acted out scenes from the works of Terence and Plautus.
So Shakespeare's relationship with drama might have started at a young age.
And as I argue in Shakespeare's Borrowing Feathers.
Shakespeare's rhetorical training and his background as an actor,
(09:00):
they were fundamental to the development of his dramatic style.
The trained habits of imitation was intrinsic to the composition of Shakespeare's plays.
Now, I always remember I was doing a lecture tour in the United States.
And after giving a talk about Shakespeare's works, Life and Times,
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an American lady came up to me and she said, what do you think Shakespeare was really like?
And before I had a chance to answer, she said, I think he was very opinionated.
Take that exchange in what sense thou wilt. And my response was that Shakespeare's
works often display what I call an antithetical thought process.
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So he frequently weighs up competing arguments.
And this is reflected in Shakespeare's language, in which one image tends to
give birth to another, often diametrically opposed image, with remarkable speed.
And again, this goes back to his school days. So Erasmus was committed to teaching
schoolboys to argue in utramque partum.
(10:05):
And what that means is voicing two sides of the question in the art of a form of controversy.
I think Shakespeare's reluctance to commit to particular ideologies or viewpoints
in his works, that accounts in part for why they're still studied and performed today,
because we can adapt Shakespeare just as he adapted the works of other writers.
(10:30):
People often try to pin down Shakespeare, the man himself, his thoughts,
his opinions through his roles. But for me, the beauty of Shakespeare is that he's elusive.
He embraces contrasting perspectives.
He gives voice to very different characters. I think that's in part traceable
(10:51):
to his background as an actor, accustomed to inhabiting different roles.
Now, that's so fascinating. I think it is that sort of mysterious element about
him that makes him so appealing to so many people in so many different countries
around the world. It's so interesting.
And you talked there, Darren, you mentioned that, of course,
at some point, he does go to London to become an actor and to play, right?
(11:13):
Do we know when he first gets there or when is he first mentioned in the sources?
Yeah, we think he gets to London around the late 1580s to early 1590s,
that the first reference to Shakespeare as an actor-dramatist in London could
be considered something of a bad review.
So it comes from a 1592 pamphlet attributed to fellow playwright Robert Greene,
(11:39):
and that pamphlet's titled Greene's Grug's Worth of Wit, Bought with a Million
of Repentance. And in it...
Green-worn fellow university-educated dramatists against actors.
Those puppets, I mean, that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours.
(11:59):
And one actor in particular, because Shakespeare, or Shakespearean,
as he stars in the pamphlet,
has had the audacity to turn his hand to writing plays, despite being a non-university-educated actor.
So Green writes, there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,
(12:23):
that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.
And being an absolute Johannes Facktotem, so a jack of all trades.
Is in his own conceit the only Shakespearean in a country.
Now the pamphlet is open to various interpretations
(12:46):
when it comes to meaning authorship even
its target but for me the the green's groatsworth
of whip passage chimes with green's combativeness with actors in general and
maybe shakespeare was able to beautify himself in other playwrights feathers
because he delivered their words on stage he gained first-hand experience of
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what worked for audiences in terms of language,
verse, and dramatic devices.
And I think it gave Shakespeare an advantage. And I think it tallies with the
emphasis on imitation in grammar school education of the period.
Shakespeare was able to borrow the stylistic feathers from plays he's acted
(13:29):
in, or maybe he's heard in performance, and he was able to do something fresh with them.
Yeah. And before we go on to talk a little bit more about other playwrights
at the time and his influences.
Could you tell us a little bit about what the London that Shakespeare moved
to, you know, late 1580s, early 1590s, was actually like?
Yeah, I think it must have been a brave new world for Shakespeare,
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traveling from a relatively small market town, Stratford-upon-Avon, to the center.
And when Shakespeare appeared on the scene, there were around 180,000 people residing in London.
So it must have been exciting, frightening, bustling, but also potentially dangerous.
So dramatists would find plenty of material to inspire their works in London,
(14:15):
especially those dabbling in tragic matters.
So crossing London Bridge, you'd have the eyes of traitorous heads preserved
in tar and impaled on spikes, gazing down at you.
That's a pretty hefty warning for writers, I think, to avoid politicizing. And death is
(14:36):
was everywhere, particularly in the form of the plague, which often forced theater closures.
And you'd hear strange screams of death in the city, as well as the roars of
entertained crowds watching bear baiting. So a pack of dogs attacking a bear tied to a stake.
And sometimes a bull was sacrificed instead of a bear.
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And we know on a couple of occasions, a chimpanzee was strapped to a horse's
saddle, and audiences found it highly entertaining watching this poor monkey
clinging on for dear life.
Now, if Londoners didn't fancy cruel blood sports like bear baiting or cockfighting,
they could pay just a penny, which would fetch a loaf of bread at the time,
(15:22):
to watch public executions.
But theatre was also a thriving entertainment industry, with around 15% to 20%
of the London population going to watch plays.
And one academic estimates that there were well over 30 acting companies plying
their trades between 1598 and 1616.
(15:46):
So this was the world Shakespeare entered and the culture he absorbed and contributed to.
So tell us a little bit about some of those other playwrights that are there
at the same time as Shakespeare. be.
There's so many tremendous playwrights working in London at the time.
When Shakespeare first appears on the scene, you've got John Lilly writing plays
(16:08):
performed by children, often for Queen Elizabeth.
And his dramas feature cross-dressing heroines, battles of wit,
lots of song, all elements we later find in Shakespeare's comedies.
Now, the main dramatists writing for the public theatres are Thomas Kidd and Christopher Marlowe.
(16:29):
These are the big hitters producing hugely popular plays, such as Kidd's The
Spanish Tragedy, veritable box office hits, The Gone with the Wind,
The Titanic, and the early modern period.
And they're revolutionising dramatic language.
Marlowe's verse is mighty. It's bombastic, especially in the Tamburlaine plays
(16:53):
about a Scythian shepherd who rises to become a conqueror.
Have you seen the film Shakespeare in Love, Natalie?
I have, yes. So you might remember there's a scene where Shakespeare and Christopher
Marlowe meet up in the pub and Christopher Marlowe turns to Shakespeare and
says, what are you working on at the moment?
And Shakespeare very proudly says, I'm working on a very exciting play called
(17:18):
Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.
He says, what are you working on, Kit? And Marlowe just responds, the massacre at Paris.
And Shakespeare just sighs enviously. So Kit and Marlowe, they're working on
dark tragedies. You don't get
much darker than a dramatization of the 1572 Bartholomew St. Day Massacre.
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But they're also experimenting with genre. They're mixing comic and tragic elements.
Now, as Shakespeare's career progresses, genres like courtly masks and city
comedies are flourishing.
And we can see those genres in the works by writers such as Thomas Middleton,
Thomas Decker, and Ben Johnson. Johnson in particular is a very interesting,
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prickly figure of the period.
So he was a friend of Shakespeare's. And I don't know about you,
but I tend to find that my best friends say worse things about me than my worst enemies.
So Johnson has something of a banterous relationship.
With Shakespeare. For instance, having heard that Shakespeare rarely deleted
(18:28):
a line in his plays, Johnson famously wished he'd blotted a thousand.
But he also said he loved Shakespeare, that he worshipped him,
this side idolatry, and that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time.
So we know that Shakespeare acted in Ben Johnson's comedy Every Man in His Humour
(18:50):
in 1598 and his tragedy Sejanus in 1603.
And if the testimony of Stratford-upon-Avon vicar John Ward is to be believed,
Johnson was one of the last people Shakespeare ever saw.
So apparently Shakespeare and Johnson had a merry meeting, and it seems Trump
too hard, for Shakespeare dined of a fever, therein contracted.
(19:16):
I find it curiously comforting, the idea of the world's greatest playwright
dying of a really bad hangover.
Now, Shakespeare and Johnson's friendship might have succeeded,
not because of their similarities, but rather their complementarity.
So in many respects, they were opposites when it came to approaching drama.
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Johnson was a keen advocate of neoclassical dramaturgy.
So he placed a lot of emphasis on the unities of time, place, and action.
Drama is taking place in single locations over a period of around three hours and with a single plot.
And this is an approach largely rejected by Shakespeare, with the exceptions
(20:00):
of his plays The Comedy of Errors and The Tempests.
So Johnson tends to stick to the idea of comic realism as an imitation of life.
And Shakespeare's plays, on the other hand, tend to switch settings and mingle
comic and tragic elements, plots and subplots.
Whereas Shakespeare's imagination often travels abroad, with around a third
(20:25):
of his plays set in Italy, for example, Johnson's plays tend to recall London,
even when they're not set in that city.
So I think Johnson was developing self-aware dramas, representative of a sprawling
metropolis They were two great dramatists, Shakespeare and Johnson.
They were friends, but they were also very different in their outlook.
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And so tell us a little bit more, Darren, about how Shakespeare actually engages
with this community of actors, playwrights, and I suppose with the plays of
some of the other dramatists working at the time.
Well, first up, as an actor dramatist, Shakespeare would have acted in the plays of other writers.
So I mentioned Thomas Kidd earlier. Several of his plays are associated with
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Pembroke's Men, which I think is likely the company Shakespeare started off with.
And as I mentioned, we know Shakespeare acted in some of Johnson's plays because
the 1616 folio edition of Johnson's works tells us so.
It's worth thinking of Shakespeare as an entertainer, a bit like Robin Williams,
because theatre was a business enterprise.
(21:34):
It was designed to make money through entertaining and engaging audiences.
And there was lots of duplication going on between companies who were keeping
close eyes on what is proving popular with audiences.
So the history play genre, for example, is hugely popular.
(21:55):
And it's been estimated that around a third of plays, surviving plays of the
period, feature battle scenes.
So battle scenes, highly entertaining for audiences. And Shakespeare sometimes
goes back to older plays, but for new audiences.
A good example would be Shakespeare's King John.
And for that play, he seems to have had a copy of an older play attributed to
(22:20):
a university-educated writer named George Peel, titled The Troublesome Reign
of King John at Shakespeare's Elbow.
On his writing desk. And another older play, an anonymous play,
is The Famous Victories of Henry V, which recounts Prince Howe's wildness in his youth,
(22:41):
his victory at Ashen Court against all odds, and his marriage to Catherine of Balwa.
It's a real rollercoaster drama, and it isn't even that long a play.
So Shakespeare gets three plays for the price of one out of it.
His two Henry IV four plays and Henry V.
So I think there's a bit of an idea, Darren, that when we think about Shakespeare
(23:04):
actually writing, that he's at his desk, he's by himself, he's got his quill,
you know, he's there, you know, working away.
Do we know anything about his actual writing practice or anything along these lines?
Yeah, so chiefly, Shakespeare does seem to have written alone.
So yeah, you can imagine him toiling at his writing desk, can't you,
(23:26):
late at night when this movie as blotted with ink.
But he also seems to have collaborated with other playwrights,
largely at the beginning and near the end of his career.
So I argue that early Shakespeare plays like Titus Andronicus and The Reign
of King Edward III, what we might call orthodox collaborations.
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So you've got dramatists working from a shared plot outline and going off and
writing their respective stints.
And this also seems to be the case with Later.
Collaborations like Pericles, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII, we mentioned earlier,
and the two noble kinsmen.
So by my count, Shakespeare seems to have had a hand in over 40 plays,
(24:15):
around a dozen of which can be considered authorial collaborations in some ways.
And there appear to be different ways of working.
But for solo plays, a dramatist would usually conceive an author plot with detailed
stage action, which characters are on stage per scene, what happens.
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And these plots were usually based on sources like phonical history,
Italian novellas, and so on.
And playwrights would then copy out the finished play or pay a professional
scribe to provide what's called a perfect copy, which would be submitted to the playing company.
And so once you've got this play in your hand, how then do you go about working
(25:00):
with theatre managers and getting it actually performed or working with the
actors? What's that process like?
Well, we get some interesting insights into how playwrights and theatre companies
work together in letters kept by the Dulwich College Library.
And these letters were an exchange between a theater manager named Philip Henslow
(25:21):
and a dramatist named Robert Daybourne in 1613 to 1614.
So Daybourne agreed to supply Henslow with installments of a play titled Machiavelli
and the Devil between April and May 1613.
And he was paid six pounds for
as an advance, and he would have the other £4 upon delivery of three acts,
(25:45):
and the other £10 upon delivery of the last scene perfected.
So, totalling £20 for the complete play.
So, we learn here that Daybourne was commissioned by acts,
and that the theatre manager, Henslow, expected him to transcribe his original
drafts as a perfect or fair copy, or at least commission a professional scribe himself.
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We also learn in one of Daybourne's letters that he was expected to read his
play to the general company.
And this suggests that dramatists were closely with actors during the composition of their plays.
And even when their plays were finished, and they'd likely need to take account
of any criticisms or feedback they received from the the company of players.
(26:34):
Now, unfortunately, Daybourne kept delaying the submission of the fair copied
play while asking Henslow for more money, which annoyed Henslow so much that
he threatened to bring a suit for breach of promise.
And Daybourne eventually delivered an incomplete fair copy, along with a sheet
from his drafted or foul papers,
(26:57):
which he'd been interrupting the process of copying out by the very associates
of Henslow's who'd come to collect the completed play.
So Digbold promised to write the sheet of one or more pages fair and perfect
the book, sending the sheet as assurance that work on the play was practically complete.
(27:17):
These letters suggest pressures for speeding us when it came to dramatic writing
in order to keep theatre managers and their companies supplied with material.
It's been estimated actually that.
The composition of a play took approximately six weeks, and the theatre company
would then own the play, not the author, and they would produce several documents
(27:40):
from it, such as prompt books or cue scripts for the actors,
each of whom would only receive their own lines and the last couple of words
from preceding speeches.
I think it must have been quite intense, quite a spontaneous experience putting
on a play during the time,
because we think companies of actors would only have around three weeks to rehearse
(28:05):
a play, even a big hitter like Hamlet.
And they're performing multiple plays around six days a week.
That sounds absolutely exhausting.
And you mentioned that they obviously took feedback quite seriously and were
always looking out for what was popular with audiences.
So does this mean then that plays were altered after they were performed?
(28:25):
Do we have evidence of that? Or that they were perhaps adapted even for specific audiences?
So maybe if Elizabeth's coming to watch, are you going to ensure that there's
nothing that's going to make her cranky in there?
Yes, absolutely. So theatrical revision was commonplace during the early modern periods.
For example, we know the writer John Webster was commissioned by the King's
(28:49):
Men Playing Company, so headed up by James I, to add an induction to and revise
scenes of a play by the writer John Marston called The Malkin Tent.
And we know that Ben Johnson was not only called upon to revise other men's
plays, but also thoroughly revised his own.
It kind of reminds me of Star Wars a little bit, when George Lucas added scenes
(29:12):
and special effects to the original trilogy in 1997.
So you had viewers attending cinema screenings of these adaptations,
and they continued to purchase them in media such as DVD, Blu-ray,
or Disney Plus nowadays.
And I think early modern audiences, like modern movie fans.
(29:34):
They'd attend revivals of older plays, taking comfort in the fact that they
were going to hear and see something familiar, but also being enticed by the
proposition of a new spin on an old classic.
So just as George Lucas sought to adapt his franchise in light of improvements in special effects,
(29:55):
playing companies might seek to adapt older plays according to shifting theatrical
milliers, advances in stagecraft, venues,
changes in company personnel, and changing audience expectations.
And there are theories that Shakespeare revised his own plays,
such as The Tempest, for example, for a performance to celebrate the marriage
(30:18):
of James I's daughter, Elizabeth, to Prince Frederick of Bohemia.
And also, Shakespeare seems to have gotten in trouble with the Cobham family
by presenting the historical figure of Sir John Oldcastle in the Henry IV plays
and The Many Wives of Windsor.
So the epilogue to Henry IV Part II stresses that Oldcastle was a Protestant
(30:43):
martyr and And that John Falstaff, the gluttonous braggart knight in Shakespeare's
plays, is not the same man.
So the evidence there suggests Shakespeare actually changed the name of the
character from Oldcastle to Falstaff.
And Shakespeare also seems to have revised the plays of other dramatists in
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works like The Spanish Tragedy and the play known as Henry VI Part I in his 1623 first folio.
But sometimes Shakespeare's plays were revised by other writers.
So, for instance, some scholars believe the author Thomas Middleton adapted
Shakespeare's Macbeth, his measure for measure, and his play All's Well That Ends Well.
(31:29):
And with Macbeth, we have...
A real rarity, we have an eyewitness account of a performance at the Globe Playhouse
on the 20th of April, 1611, by the astrologer Simon Foreman.
So very rare to get eyewitness accounts of Shakespeare plays during his lifetime.
(31:50):
And Foreman describes the Weir sisters as fairies or nymphs.
So quite Quite different to the midnight hags with skinny lips and choppy fingers
that we all know and love.
Foreman's description more closely resembles how the Weird Sisters are described
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in Shakespeare's source material,
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, as well as an entertainment put on before King
James of Oxford in August 1605.
Where the king was greeted by three sibyls.
Now, we can't be sure, but Foreman's account presents the possibility,
(32:32):
I think, that the text of Macbeth included in the collection of 36 Shakespeare
plays, the first folio, doesn't fully represent the version originally performed
in Shakespeare's lifetime. time.
So Macbeth is around 30% shorter than other tragedies Shakespeare wrote at the
time, like Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Kinlea.
(32:56):
So this strikes me as a good example of theatrical revision.
Oh, I wonder what we're missing now. I want to know. I love Macbeth.
That's one of my favourite plays.
So you've given us some examples already, Darren, of how Shakespeare was influenced
by other contemporary playwrights and how he used early works.
You know, you said he had it there on his writing desk as he's writing.
(33:17):
Can you give us a few more of those sort of concrete examples,
if we have them, of he being influenced by other playwrights?
Yeah, I think we can see influence in Shakespeare's dramatic language.
So his early plays, we'd like patchworks and phrases that you'd also find in
the plays of Thomas Kidd, Christopher Marlowe, and that Oxford-educated dramatist
(33:40):
I mentioned earlier, George Peel.
And the evidence I've uncovered in the book suggests that Shakespeare becomes
less imitative when it comes to dramatic language as his career progresses.
So some phrases might have been recycled unconsciously through having acted
in a play or seen a play performance.
(34:02):
While other lines like ye papa jades of Asia seem to be parodic.
So that line is delivered by Marlowe's Contra Tamburlaine, when he's riding
a chariot drawn by captives, being treated like horses with bits in their mouths.
And Shakespeare puts the line in the mouth of ancient Pistol,
(34:25):
a character who frequently recycles and often butchers, to be honest,
phrases that were popular in the theatrical vernacular of the period.
Ancient pistol appears in henry the fourth henry
the fifth plays in the many wives of windsor and another
good example of shakespeare being influenced by
the playwrights can be seen in in thomas kiss the spanish tragedy so that's
(34:49):
the first revenge tragedy on the english public stage and it features a ghost
crying for revenge play within a play and a murder victim in a garden and plot.
And these are all elements we see in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
And it's worth pointing out that Kidd has been suspected of writing an older, now lost, Hamlet play.
(35:14):
So I'll just give you some of the evidence for Thomas Kidd's authorship of this
lost Hamlet play that served as a source for Shakespeare.
So you have the pamphleteer and playwright Thomas Nash attacking tacking kid
in his preface to Robert Greene's pamphlet, Menaphon.
And kid, like Shakespeare, didn't have a university education.
(35:36):
So he was also open to criticism from the so-called university wits.
So Nash alludes to the kid in Aesop, another dodgy pen, a bit like Robert Greene's
Shakespeare, who has left the trade of noverant, so meaning a professional scribe,
and now medals with Italian translations.
(35:58):
As Kidd had done with his translation of Torquato Tasso's Padre de Familia in
a work called The Householder's Philosophy.
And Kidd's father was a professional scribe, by the way, a writer of the court letter.
Now, Nash claims that Kidd bleeds the work of Roman tragedian Seneca line by
line in order to afford you whole hamlets.
(36:22):
And he mocks the opening of Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy, in particular,
because Kidd thrusts Elysium into hell during the ghost account of his descent into the lower world.
And Nash also claims that Kidd is prone to bodge up a blank verse with ifs and
ands, which parodies a line from a Spanish tragedy.
(36:44):
What, villain? Ifs and ands? So here, Nash is mocking Kidd's reliance on the
works of Seneca, who Kidd very much saw as his tragic ancestor.
So Seneca was responsible for tragic plays like The Madness of Hercules,
The Phoenician Women, and Agamemnon.
(37:04):
And Kidd draws from Senecan elements that had been seen, especially in courtly
English tragedies, like ghosts bellowing for revenge, bloody violence, that kind of thing.
But Kidd refines Roman tragedy for the English public stage.
Now, we know that unlike all of Shakespeare's sources...
(37:28):
This lost Hamlet play featured a ghost.
So that's a really important innovation that, of course, had a major impact on Shakespeare's play.
And according to the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslow's diary,
that old Hamlet play was performed at a theatre called Newington Butts in June 1594.
(37:50):
And two years after the record of its performance, you had a poet and dramatist
named Thomas Lodge alluding to the play in a pamphlet titled Wit's Misery.
So Lodge writes of the visit of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theater
like an oyster wife, Hamlet's revenge.
(38:13):
So the fact that the play, to which the arguably most famous work in English
literature, Shakespeare's Hamlet is heavily indebted and was likely written by Thomas Kidd.
So it's much for his influence on Shakespeare's drama, I think.
And by the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, revenge tragedy had gone a bit stale as a genre.
(38:37):
And it might sound amazing to us today, given how hugely popular a work it is.
But Breitig Hamlet was something of a commercial risk for Shakespeare.
And he goes back to the revenge tragedies of yore by earlier playwrights for inspiration.
It's amazing. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know that about Hamlet at all.
(38:58):
So that's so interesting.
So if you had to summarize then, Darren, the influences, the greatest influences
on Shakespeare's style, what would you say to that?
Yes, yes. Founded in a nutshell. shell. Again, I think kids,
for me, was probably the greatest influence on Shakespeare's dramatic style.
(39:19):
So most of the university-educated playwrights, when Shakespeare first comes
on the scene, they stuck to 10-syllable verse lines.
So five unstressed syllables, five stressed syllables.
De-dum, de-dum, de-dum. A
lot of us are taught in school that it sounds like a human and heartbeat.
(39:39):
Others might say that's de-dumbing it down. But Kidd's verse is very different.
So he often adds an extra unstressed syllable, the so-called feminine ending.
And the most famous example in literature would be Hamlet's to be or not to be.
That is the question. So that chun is a 11th unstressed syllable.
(40:02):
And in terms of this more flexible verse style that we see in Kit,
and also Shakespeare's habit of compounding words, so putting words together
in forms like eye-offending,
bunch-backed, and muddy-mettled, as well as phrases that Shakespeare recycles from other plays,
I think early Shakespeare's style is is closer to fellow non-university educated
(40:27):
playwright Thomas Kidd than his other greatest influence, which would be Christopher Marlowe, I think.
And I'm sure many of our listeners have, of course, heard that there are debates
when it comes to, you know, authorship and Shakespeare, and that there are some
people that think he didn't write any of the plays himself.
So can you sort of get us up to date on what the current authorship debates
are in the world of Shakespeare?
(40:49):
Yes, as you know, there's quite a few, aren't there? The authorship of the Henry
VI play is hotly contested.
So some scholars argue that Christopher Marlowe had a hand in them.
And I go into significant detail in Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers as to why
I don't think the internal or historical evidence supports that conclusion.
(41:14):
In any case, the Henry VI trilogy is brilliant.
It works brilliantly on stage. It's an epic of Game of Thrones proportions,
minus the dragons and the disappointing season finale.
There's also a true-life crime drama.
Titled Arden of Faversham. That play seems to have been written earlier than
(41:35):
any of Shakespeare's plays,
and it seizes on the sensational case of a former mayor of Faversham in Kent named Thomas Arden,
who was butchered in his home by hired assassins, his own wife,
and her bit on the side on Valentine's Day, 1551.
Some modern scholars argue that Shakespeare had a hand in that play,
(41:59):
which is dated to the late 1580s to early 1590s.
But as I try and show in the book, the evidence points overwhelmingly towards
Thomas Kidd's sole authorship and chimes,
I think, with the patterns of borrowing we see between other plays associated
with Kidd and Shakespeare's later dramas.
(42:19):
There are also arguments as to whether Shakespeare acted as a reviser or collaborated
directly in plays such as Titus Andronicus.
So Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, and it's one of my favorite
plays, which probably says a lot about me. It's bonkers.
(42:40):
I like to refer to it as the Quentin Tarantino movie of the Shakespeare canon.
It's got mutilation, decapitation, and it ends with a mother being tricked into
eating her own sons who have been being baked in a pie.
So 14 deaths in Titus Andronicus is a really bloody tragedy.
(43:01):
And this is a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peel.
But scholars often write about Shakespeare salvaging a play by Peel,
maybe finishing off a draft of his in Titus Andronicus.
And that disqualification of Peel is worthy of collaborating directly with Shakespeare.
Flouts the historical evidence, I think, because Shakespeare would have learned
(43:24):
a great deal from his more experienced co-author and hugely popular dramatist.
So I see Shakespeare and Peale working on that play in a process of simultaneous collaboration.
And I aim to show in the book how that method of working can account for some
of the mysteries still surrounding that play.
(43:48):
Well, you've certainly given us a lot to think about when it comes to Shakespeare and his work.
So thank you. There is another thing we do on Talking Tudors when I first have
guests on for the first time, and that is what I call 10 to go.
So these are just 10 questions just to get to know you a little bit better.
So the first one I have for you is, do you have a favourite historic site,
(44:08):
might be one associated with Shakespeare, that you'd like to visit? Oh, good question.
Yeah, I think I'd get in big trouble if I didn't say Stratford-upon-Avon,
where I work, particularly Henley Street, the site of the birthplace.
Yeah, that is a fantastic place to visit. And what about the last book that
you read, or perhaps one that you're currently reading?
(44:29):
Yeah, so I don't get a lot of opportunities to read fiction, really.
So what I've been doing is chipping away on Kindle on my phone,
where my eldest son, my five-year-old Oliver, is at swimming lessons with William
Peter Blatty's horror novel, Legion, which is a sequel to The Exorcist.
But most of my reading time is taken up with looking at academic works.
(44:54):
And I'm also reading at present Paul Menz's Shakespeare, A Brief Life,
which is a really witty and fascinating biography of Shakespeare.
Oh, that does sound good. And what about when you're in writing mode and you
are writing, do you have any kind of rituals that you like to follow?
Yes, I do a lot of my writing by candlelight, to be honest, when everyone's gone to bed.
(45:19):
So I find that my thinking about how to shape certain sentences,
certain paragraphs, that's almost going on unconsciously throughout the day.
And then I've got that short window of opportunity.
Everyone's gone to bed and then I am just hammering away at the keys on my laptop,
which is, I think Shakespeare probably wrote a lot of his plays at night time,
(45:44):
but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
As a ritual because it leads to really awful insomnia.
And I remember when I wrote the book on Robert Greene, I just spent around six
months of barely getting any sleep because once my cat hit the pillow,
I was still thinking, oh my gosh, I need to correct footnote 46 and that kind of thing.
(46:05):
Oh, I like the candlelight idea though. That's very cheater of you there, Darren.
What about an ideal Sunday morning? What does that kind of consist of?
Oh, an ideal Sunday morning.
I think in a fantasy world, it would be a lion, because inevitably I'll get
woken up by my five-year-old or my 18-month-old boy as well.
(46:26):
But I think, yeah, a nice relaxing morning and then leisurely making our way
out of the house and undertaking some kind of family activity.
So maybe a walk in the park with the family.
Yeah, that sounds lovely. And is there a new skill that you would like to learn?
So my eldest, Oliver, he goes to a school which is an all-Welsh-speaking school.
(46:53):
So he's encouraged to speak Welsh in the classroom, in the playground.
And I always remember I was at a meal before giving a talk on Shakespeare and kingship.
And I was talking to this lady about my eldest.
And she said, oh, are you worried that that's going to impact his skills when
it comes to English and the English language?
And my response to that was that Shakespeare was encouraged to speak Latin at
(47:18):
all times in school and even at home.
And he was pretty good at English, I think.
So I would love to learn another language.
We were hoping that with Oliver...
Learning welsh we would pick up on certain words
certain phrasings and it would develop our own welsh
speaking skills but he's kind of progressed from speaking
(47:41):
the odd welsh words and now just rattling off fluent welsh
and i think he's so so far ahead of us that we don't have much chance i always
love studying french at school i find that such a fascinating beautiful rhythmic
language so yeah if i had the time i think that's what i would love to do i'd
love to learn another other language,
(48:01):
maybe French or probably more usefully for me, Welsh.
I love languages as well. And I think children, they're such sponges,
aren't they? You could literally teach them five languages and they would learn all five languages.
So, you know, I don't think there's any worry that he's not going to know how
to speak English, that's for sure.
So how do you find or where do you find inspiration?
(48:24):
Oh, that's a good question. Where do I find inspiration?
I think I'm often inspired by reading the works of non-Shakespearean dramatists.
And my inspiration kind of comes from seeing what inspired Shakespeare.
So I guess just reading as widely as possible.
And I'm inspired by hearing different authorial voices, different styles.
(48:46):
That's something that really fascinates me.
And what about, let's turn our attention to travel. I love to travel.
So I like to ask people about their favourite travel destinations,
perhaps somewhere that you haven't been that you would like to visit.
Yes. I think top of my bucket list would probably be Japan. So maybe Tokyo.
And I've always really wanted to go to Florida, but specifically Universal Studios.
(49:12):
So I remember as a kid, obsessed with Jurassic Park and Jaws.
And I think it's changed quite a bit since watching old videos of Universal
Studios now, but I still love to go there. Wonderful.
And what about a favorite season? Do you have one and why?
Yes, yes. So I'm not autumnal in my outlook.
(49:34):
I'm very much a sunny bunny. I love the summer.
I do. I do really like September because I think it has long felt like a time
of change for me, September.
So going back to university days, that's when the new term would start.
I think, yeah summer and september specifically yeah i have to say september is beautiful.
(49:57):
Anywhere like i've traveled a lot and we tend to travel a lot in september it's
lovely here in australia southern hemisphere but it's beautiful in the northern
hemisphere as well so i think it's a good a good travel time so when you were
a child darren what did you hope to be when you when you grew up yeah you've
only got the impression i was quite an odd child which i was.
I i wanted to be a paleontologist as
(50:20):
a lot of little boys who are obsessed with dinosaurs would
say i had the nickname dino darren for
a long time so well well lots of kids you know into dinosaurs i took it quite
far and we'd be out for a meal me and my parents and apparently i I would just
wander off between tables and start lecturing people on dinosaurs.
(50:44):
I would tell them about the Proconsultnethus, the Brachiosaurus,
that kind of thing, which is not too far removed from what I do now.
So I'm a lecturer, just not...
Not on dinosaurs. And then as I grew up, I wanted to be a rugby player for a period.
So rugby is an intrinsic part of our DNA in Wales, even though we're quite awful
(51:08):
at it at the moment, but I thought we'll get back to form. And then I wanted to become an actor.
So I still continue to do quite a bit of acting on the side.
So I guess those interests and those kind of dreams when it came to what occupation I wanted to take.
A lot of them form part of my current role as a lecturer on Shakespeare.
(51:31):
Apart from the rugby, I don't get much opportunity to tackle people to the ground these days.
No, well, I think teachers and lecturers are kind of always performing, aren't they? Yes.
You're right. You're absolutely right. And lucky last question,
what do you like to do then to relax and unwind?
You're obviously very busy. Yeah, this is a troubling one because for me,
(51:53):
the writing process can be quite relaxing, but it's also the most stressful thing you can do.
So yeah, there's something about sitting down and creating.
I find that quite relaxing, but also, like I said, quite a stressful thing to do.
But sometimes, and quite rarely, I just need to put some garbage on the television
(52:14):
and just not think about Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
But I always remember I was running a course on Shakespeare and it was quite
a week jumping between different talks and so forth.
I was driving back to my home in Cardiff and I pulled up and I said,
(52:34):
you know what, that's been quite the week.
And I just want to take a couple of days and not talk or think about Shakespeare
whatsoever this weekend.
So I opened my front door and Oliver, my eldest, ran up to me.
And the first thing he said was,
Daddy, why did Shakespeare use a quill pen? So instantly, I was back in lecture mode.
(52:58):
He never asked me about Shakespeare. It was just so ironic.
That's so funny. Yeah, typical that it would happen at that moment.
And I said that was the last question, but I have one more thing,
and that is our Tudor takeaway.
So I like to ask my guests for something for our listeners perhaps to go off
and explore after the episode. So do you have a Tudor takeaway for us?
Yeah, I definitely encourage listeners
(53:19):
to check out some of the works of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights.
So there are new editions of the works of Thomas Kidd, John Fletcher,
and forthcoming editions of writers like Thomas Nash, John Marston, and Robert Greene.
So yeah, check out these other writers because you'll develop an understanding,
(53:40):
I think, that Shakespeare was not the only playwright in town and there were
so many tremendous playwrights and they were working in a broad and brilliant community.
It sounds amazing. I love it. And I encourage everyone to grab a copy of your
book if they can, if they want to learn more about what we've been discussing.
And Darren, thank you so much for taking the time to talk Tudors with us.
(54:03):
It's been an absolute pleasure and privilege. Thank you so much, Natalie.
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.
Thank you so much for joining us. I absolutely love to hear from listeners,
so if you have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hi,
please get in touch with me via my website,
www.onthetutortrail.com, where you'll also find show notes for today's episode.
(54:26):
If you've enjoyed the show, please share the podcast with friends and family,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review.
I also invite you to join our Talking Tutors podcast group on Facebook,
where you can interact with other Tudor history lovers and hear all the behind-the-scenes news.
You'll also find me on Twitter. My handle is on the Tudor Trail and on Instagram as the most happy 78.
(54:48):
It's time now for us to re-enter the modern world. As always,
I look forward to talking Tudors with you again very soon.
Music.
Hello and welcome to Talking Tudors, a fortnightly podcast about the ever-fascinating Tudor dynasty.
My name is Natalie Gruniger and I'll be your host and guide on this journey
through 16th century England.
Are you ready to step through the veil of time into the dazzling and dangerous
world of the Tudor court?
Without further ado, it's time to talk Tudors.
(00:23):
Music.
Thanks for watching!
(00:46):
Thank you for watching! Hello, everyone.
Welcome back to another episode of Talking Tudors.
I'm your host, Natalie Gruniger. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Before we begin, I'd like to mention an upcoming online event that I'm hosting
(01:09):
called A Bookish Weekend with the Tudors.
Over the weekend of the 28th and 29th of September, we'll explore 16th century
printing, books, and manuscripts through a series of six online lectures and
one live Zoom discussion delivered by experts in this field.
Joining me are Joe Saunders, Dr. Owen Emerson, Kate McCaffrey, Dr.
(01:31):
Rebecca Quass-Moore, Professor Martine van Elk, and Dr. Vanessa Wilkie.
This is unmissable for lovers of books and Tudor history.
For details and to reserve your place, click on the link in the show notes or
just Google A Bookish Weekend with the Tudors.
I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the generous listeners who continue to
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(01:53):
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As an independent podcaster, this means a lot to me. If you love the podcast,
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Visit patreon.com slash talkingtudors for more information.
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Check out all the products at talkingtudors.threadless.com.
Now, on to today's episode. I'm thrilled to welcome Dr Darren Freebury-Jones
to the podcast to chat about his new book, Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
(02:36):
Darren is author of the monographs Reading Robert Greene, Recovering Shakespeare's
Rival, Shakespeare's Tutor, The Influence of Thomas Kidd, and Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
He is associate editor for the first critical edition of the collected works
of Thomas Kidd since 1901.
He has also investigated the boundaries of John Marston's dramatic corpus as
(02:56):
part of the Oxford Marston Project and is general editor for the collected plays of Robert Greene.
His findings on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have been discussed
in national newspapers such as The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph,
The Observer and The Independent, as well as BBC Radio.
His debut poetry collection, Rambling, was published in 2024.
(03:18):
In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition
of his contributions to historical scholarship.
Let's dive straight into our conversation.
Welcome to Talking Tudors, Darren. How are you? I'm great. It's all the better
for hearing you, to paraphrase the big bad wolf.
Thank you so much. It's so lovely to have you here. So let's start with an introduction.
(03:42):
Would you mind just telling us and our wonderful listeners a little bit about
you and your background?
Yes, of course. So I'm a Welsh-born author of books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
and I'm Associate Editor for the Collected Works of Elizabethan playwright Thomas Kidd,
and General Editor for the Collected Plays of Robert Greene.
(04:03):
So I lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I'm also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Wonderful. And I was just saying to you before we started recording that I'm
excited to talk about Shakespeare because I don't often get the chance.
I'm always stuck with Henry VIII for some reason. So it's nice to get out of
that period of Tudor history.
(04:24):
So let's talk a little bit about your new book, very exciting,
called Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers.
Can you tell us a bit about it and maybe what inspired you to write it? Yeah.
Well, I've long been interested in Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights,
how he interacted with, was sometimes influenced by, and collaborated with other dramatists.
(04:47):
And my PhD thesis at Cardiff in Wales was on Thomas Kidd's relationship with
Shakespeare's early plays.
And I wrote a book on that topic, published in 2022. And that year,
I also wrote a book on fellow Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene.
So having written books on Shakespeare, Greene, and Kidd, I thought,
(05:09):
you know what, I'll write a book on everybody.
I'm being a little bit facetious there, but Shakespeare's Bottled Feathers charts
Shakespeare's engagement with each major playwright of the period,
going back to the 1580s up to Shakespeare's retirement around 1613.
Wonderful. And so before we dive in to talk a little bit more about some of
(05:32):
those relationships and influences that you've just mentioned,
would you mind setting the scene for us a little?
So maybe telling us about what we know of Shakespeare's early life,
his education, his training, that sort of thing.
Yeah, of course. Well, we don't have enrollment records for Shakespeare's grammar school education.
And this is also the case with other literary figures of the period,
(05:53):
like Robert Greene, who I just mentioned, and an author named Thomas Decker.
But it seems more than likely that Shakespeare would have attended King's New
School between the ages of around 7 and 14, which was just a short walk from
his home in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon.
So King's New School was free for boys in the borough, and tradition holds that
(06:17):
John Shakespeare bred his son for some time at a free school.
And I think Shakespeare's education would have been more than robust enough
to equip him with the knowledge and skill set he required to write poetry and
plays, pretty much the equivalent of a modern classics degree.
So schoolboys of the period would have studied Latin anthologies by the likes
(06:41):
of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, as well as Aesop's fables through a Latin translation.
And in the classroom, Shakespeare would also punch over the works of classical
writers such as Terence, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil.
Now, Shakespeare, often regarded as the world's greatest playwright,
(07:02):
isn't exactly renowned for coming up with his own plot lines.
But it's worth stressing that he was writing during a period when emphasis was
placed not on telling new stories necessarily, but retelling existing stories in innovative ways.
And this was reflected in the standard school curriculum instituted by Erasmus,
(07:25):
for which imitation, parody, and translation served as bedrocks.
This was fundamentally education that prized imitation and advised students
to read as many different types of author as possible in order to fill up their storehouse.
So pedagogical emphasis on bettering imitated sources, that would have been
(07:48):
drilled into Shakespeare at school.
They worked schoolboys pretty hard at the time. So Shakespeare would have been
thoroughly immersed in classical rhetoric as well.
So the language of persuasion. And I think this would have been a particular
use to a budding actor-dramatist.
So figures of repetition would benefit Elizabethan actors when it came to learning
(08:12):
lines, including long, declamatory speeches.
Speeches and having embarked on a career as an actor in London at some point
in the late 1580s or early 1590s,
Shakespeare would have experienced training in rhetoric and memorization not
too dissimilar to his school lessons, I think.
And that would inform his dramatic writing when writing roles for himself and
(08:37):
other members of his playing company.
And as a side note, it's worth pointing out that schoolboys of the period would
have acted out scenes from the works of Terence and Plautus.
So Shakespeare's relationship with drama might have started at a young age.
And as I argue in Shakespeare's Borrowing Feathers.
Shakespeare's rhetorical training and his background as an actor,
(09:00):
they were fundamental to the development of his dramatic style.
The trained habits of imitation was intrinsic to the composition of Shakespeare's plays.
Now, I always remember I was doing a lecture tour in the United States.
And after giving a talk about Shakespeare's works, Life and Times,
(09:20):
an American lady came up to me and she said, what do you think Shakespeare was really like?
And before I had a chance to answer, she said, I think he was very opinionated.
Take that exchange in what sense thou wilt. And my response was that Shakespeare's
works often display what I call an antithetical thought process.
(09:41):
So he frequently weighs up competing arguments.
And this is reflected in Shakespeare's language, in which one image tends to
give birth to another, often diametrically opposed image, with remarkable speed.
And again, this goes back to his school days. So Erasmus was committed to teaching
schoolboys to argue in utramque partum.
(10:05):
And what that means is voicing two sides of the question in the art of a form of controversy.
I think Shakespeare's reluctance to commit to particular ideologies or viewpoints
in his works, that accounts in part for why they're still studied and performed today,
because we can adapt Shakespeare just as he adapted the works of other writers.
(10:30):
People often try to pin down Shakespeare, the man himself, his thoughts,
his opinions through his roles. But for me, the beauty of Shakespeare is that he's elusive.
He embraces contrasting perspectives.
He gives voice to very different characters. I think that's in part traceable
(10:51):
to his background as an actor, accustomed to inhabiting different roles.
Now, that's so fascinating. I think it is that sort of mysterious element about
him that makes him so appealing to so many people in so many different countries
around the world. It's so interesting.
And you talked there, Darren, you mentioned that, of course,
at some point, he does go to London to become an actor and to play, right?
(11:13):
Do we know when he first gets there or when is he first mentioned in the sources?
Yeah, we think he gets to London around the late 1580s to early 1590s,
that the first reference to Shakespeare as an actor-dramatist in London could
be considered something of a bad review.
So it comes from a 1592 pamphlet attributed to fellow playwright Robert Greene,
(11:39):
and that pamphlet's titled Greene's Grug's Worth of Wit, Bought with a Million
of Repentance. And in it...
Green-worn fellow university-educated dramatists against actors.
Those puppets, I mean, that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours.
(11:59):
And one actor in particular, because Shakespeare, or Shakespearean,
as he stars in the pamphlet,
has had the audacity to turn his hand to writing plays, despite being a non-university-educated actor.
So Green writes, there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,
(12:23):
that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well
able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.
And being an absolute Johannes Facktotem, so a jack of all trades.
Is in his own conceit the only Shakespearean in a country.
Now the pamphlet is open to various interpretations
(12:46):
when it comes to meaning authorship even
its target but for me the the green's groatsworth
of whip passage chimes with green's combativeness with actors in general and
maybe shakespeare was able to beautify himself in other playwrights feathers
because he delivered their words on stage he gained first-hand experience of
(13:09):
what worked for audiences in terms of language,
verse, and dramatic devices.
And I think it gave Shakespeare an advantage. And I think it tallies with the
emphasis on imitation in grammar school education of the period.
Shakespeare was able to borrow the stylistic feathers from plays he's acted
(13:29):
in, or maybe he's heard in performance, and he was able to do something fresh with them.
Yeah. And before we go on to talk a little bit more about other playwrights
at the time and his influences.
Could you tell us a little bit about what the London that Shakespeare moved
to, you know, late 1580s, early 1590s, was actually like?
Yeah, I think it must have been a brave new world for Shakespeare,
(13:51):
traveling from a relatively small market town, Stratford-upon-Avon, to the center.
And when Shakespeare appeared on the scene, there were around 180,000 people residing in London.
So it must have been exciting, frightening, bustling, but also potentially dangerous.
So dramatists would find plenty of material to inspire their works in London,
(14:15):
especially those dabbling in tragic matters.
So crossing London Bridge, you'd have the eyes of traitorous heads preserved
in tar and impaled on spikes, gazing down at you.
That's a pretty hefty warning for writers, I think, to avoid politicizing. And death is
(14:36):
was everywhere, particularly in the form of the plague, which often forced theater closures.
And you'd hear strange screams of death in the city, as well as the roars of
entertained crowds watching bear baiting. So a pack of dogs attacking a bear tied to a stake.
And sometimes a bull was sacrificed instead of a bear.
(14:59):
And we know on a couple of occasions, a chimpanzee was strapped to a horse's
saddle, and audiences found it highly entertaining watching this poor monkey
clinging on for dear life.
Now, if Londoners didn't fancy cruel blood sports like bear baiting or cockfighting,
they could pay just a penny, which would fetch a loaf of bread at the time,
(15:22):
to watch public executions.
But theatre was also a thriving entertainment industry, with around 15% to 20%
of the London population going to watch plays.
And one academic estimates that there were well over 30 acting companies plying
their trades between 1598 and 1616.
(15:46):
So this was the world Shakespeare entered and the culture he absorbed and contributed to.
So tell us a little bit about some of those other playwrights that are there
at the same time as Shakespeare. be.
There's so many tremendous playwrights working in London at the time.
When Shakespeare first appears on the scene, you've got John Lilly writing plays
(16:08):
performed by children, often for Queen Elizabeth.
And his dramas feature cross-dressing heroines, battles of wit,
lots of song, all elements we later find in Shakespeare's comedies.
Now, the main dramatists writing for the public theatres are Thomas Kidd and Christopher Marlowe.
(16:29):
These are the big hitters producing hugely popular plays, such as Kidd's The
Spanish Tragedy, veritable box office hits, The Gone with the Wind,
The Titanic, and the early modern period.
And they're revolutionising dramatic language.
Marlowe's verse is mighty. It's bombastic, especially in the Tamburlaine plays
(16:53):
about a Scythian shepherd who rises to become a conqueror.
Have you seen the film Shakespeare in Love, Natalie?
I have, yes. So you might remember there's a scene where Shakespeare and Christopher
Marlowe meet up in the pub and Christopher Marlowe turns to Shakespeare and
says, what are you working on at the moment?
And Shakespeare very proudly says, I'm working on a very exciting play called
(17:18):
Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.
He says, what are you working on, Kit? And Marlowe just responds, the massacre at Paris.
And Shakespeare just sighs enviously. So Kit and Marlowe, they're working on
dark tragedies. You don't get
much darker than a dramatization of the 1572 Bartholomew St. Day Massacre.
(17:44):
But they're also experimenting with genre. They're mixing comic and tragic elements.
Now, as Shakespeare's career progresses, genres like courtly masks and city
comedies are flourishing.
And we can see those genres in the works by writers such as Thomas Middleton,
Thomas Decker, and Ben Johnson. Johnson in particular is a very interesting,
(18:08):
prickly figure of the period.
So he was a friend of Shakespeare's. And I don't know about you,
but I tend to find that my best friends say worse things about me than my worst enemies.
So Johnson has something of a banterous relationship.
With Shakespeare. For instance, having heard that Shakespeare rarely deleted
(18:28):
a line in his plays, Johnson famously wished he'd blotted a thousand.
But he also said he loved Shakespeare, that he worshipped him,
this side idolatry, and that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time.
So we know that Shakespeare acted in Ben Johnson's comedy Every Man in His Humour
(18:50):
in 1598 and his tragedy Sejanus in 1603.
And if the testimony of Stratford-upon-Avon vicar John Ward is to be believed,
Johnson was one of the last people Shakespeare ever saw.
So apparently Shakespeare and Johnson had a merry meeting, and it seems Trump
too hard, for Shakespeare dined of a fever, therein contracted.
(19:16):
I find it curiously comforting, the idea of the world's greatest playwright
dying of a really bad hangover.
Now, Shakespeare and Johnson's friendship might have succeeded,
not because of their similarities, but rather their complementarity.
So in many respects, they were opposites when it came to approaching drama.
(19:37):
Johnson was a keen advocate of neoclassical dramaturgy.
So he placed a lot of emphasis on the unities of time, place, and action.
Drama is taking place in single locations over a period of around three hours and with a single plot.
And this is an approach largely rejected by Shakespeare, with the exceptions
(20:00):
of his plays The Comedy of Errors and The Tempests.
So Johnson tends to stick to the idea of comic realism as an imitation of life.
And Shakespeare's plays, on the other hand, tend to switch settings and mingle
comic and tragic elements, plots and subplots.
Whereas Shakespeare's imagination often travels abroad, with around a third
(20:25):
of his plays set in Italy, for example, Johnson's plays tend to recall London,
even when they're not set in that city.
So I think Johnson was developing self-aware dramas, representative of a sprawling
metropolis They were two great dramatists, Shakespeare and Johnson.
They were friends, but they were also very different in their outlook.
(20:49):
And so tell us a little bit more, Darren, about how Shakespeare actually engages
with this community of actors, playwrights, and I suppose with the plays of
some of the other dramatists working at the time.
Well, first up, as an actor dramatist, Shakespeare would have acted in the plays of other writers.
So I mentioned Thomas Kidd earlier. Several of his plays are associated with
(21:11):
Pembroke's Men, which I think is likely the company Shakespeare started off with.
And as I mentioned, we know Shakespeare acted in some of Johnson's plays because
the 1616 folio edition of Johnson's works tells us so.
It's worth thinking of Shakespeare as an entertainer, a bit like Robin Williams,
because theatre was a business enterprise.
(21:34):
It was designed to make money through entertaining and engaging audiences.
And there was lots of duplication going on between companies who were keeping
close eyes on what is proving popular with audiences.
So the history play genre, for example, is hugely popular.
(21:55):
And it's been estimated that around a third of plays, surviving plays of the
period, feature battle scenes.
So battle scenes, highly entertaining for audiences. And Shakespeare sometimes
goes back to older plays, but for new audiences.
A good example would be Shakespeare's King John.
And for that play, he seems to have had a copy of an older play attributed to
(22:20):
a university-educated writer named George Peel, titled The Troublesome Reign
of King John at Shakespeare's Elbow.
On his writing desk. And another older play, an anonymous play,
is The Famous Victories of Henry V, which recounts Prince Howe's wildness in his youth,
(22:41):
his victory at Ashen Court against all odds, and his marriage to Catherine of Balwa.
It's a real rollercoaster drama, and it isn't even that long a play.
So Shakespeare gets three plays for the price of one out of it.
His two Henry IV four plays and Henry V.
So I think there's a bit of an idea, Darren, that when we think about Shakespeare
(23:04):
actually writing, that he's at his desk, he's by himself, he's got his quill,
you know, he's there, you know, working away.
Do we know anything about his actual writing practice or anything along these lines?
Yeah, so chiefly, Shakespeare does seem to have written alone.
So yeah, you can imagine him toiling at his writing desk, can't you,
(23:26):
late at night when this movie as blotted with ink.
But he also seems to have collaborated with other playwrights,
largely at the beginning and near the end of his career.
So I argue that early Shakespeare plays like Titus Andronicus and The Reign
of King Edward III, what we might call orthodox collaborations.
(23:49):
So you've got dramatists working from a shared plot outline and going off and
writing their respective stints.
And this also seems to be the case with Later.
Collaborations like Pericles, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII, we mentioned earlier,
and the two noble kinsmen.
So by my count, Shakespeare seems to have had a hand in over 40 plays,
(24:15):
around a dozen of which can be considered authorial collaborations in some ways.
And there appear to be different ways of working.
But for solo plays, a dramatist would usually conceive an author plot with detailed
stage action, which characters are on stage per scene, what happens.
(24:36):
And these plots were usually based on sources like phonical history,
Italian novellas, and so on.
And playwrights would then copy out the finished play or pay a professional
scribe to provide what's called a perfect copy, which would be submitted to the playing company.
And so once you've got this play in your hand, how then do you go about working
(25:00):
with theatre managers and getting it actually performed or working with the
actors? What's that process like?
Well, we get some interesting insights into how playwrights and theatre companies
work together in letters kept by the Dulwich College Library.
And these letters were an exchange between a theater manager named Philip Henslow
(25:21):
and a dramatist named Robert Daybourne in 1613 to 1614.
So Daybourne agreed to supply Henslow with installments of a play titled Machiavelli
and the Devil between April and May 1613.
And he was paid six pounds for
as an advance, and he would have the other £4 upon delivery of three acts,
(25:45):
and the other £10 upon delivery of the last scene perfected.
So, totalling £20 for the complete play.
So, we learn here that Daybourne was commissioned by acts,
and that the theatre manager, Henslow, expected him to transcribe his original
drafts as a perfect or fair copy, or at least commission a professional scribe himself.
(26:10):
We also learn in one of Daybourne's letters that he was expected to read his
play to the general company.
And this suggests that dramatists were closely with actors during the composition of their plays.
And even when their plays were finished, and they'd likely need to take account
of any criticisms or feedback they received from the the company of players.
(26:34):
Now, unfortunately, Daybourne kept delaying the submission of the fair copied
play while asking Henslow for more money, which annoyed Henslow so much that
he threatened to bring a suit for breach of promise.
And Daybourne eventually delivered an incomplete fair copy, along with a sheet
from his drafted or foul papers,
(26:57):
which he'd been interrupting the process of copying out by the very associates
of Henslow's who'd come to collect the completed play.
So Digbold promised to write the sheet of one or more pages fair and perfect
the book, sending the sheet as assurance that work on the play was practically complete.
(27:17):
These letters suggest pressures for speeding us when it came to dramatic writing
in order to keep theatre managers and their companies supplied with material.
It's been estimated actually that.
The composition of a play took approximately six weeks, and the theatre company
would then own the play, not the author, and they would produce several documents
(27:40):
from it, such as prompt books or cue scripts for the actors,
each of whom would only receive their own lines and the last couple of words
from preceding speeches.
I think it must have been quite intense, quite a spontaneous experience putting
on a play during the time,
because we think companies of actors would only have around three weeks to rehearse
(28:05):
a play, even a big hitter like Hamlet.
And they're performing multiple plays around six days a week.
That sounds absolutely exhausting.
And you mentioned that they obviously took feedback quite seriously and were
always looking out for what was popular with audiences.
So does this mean then that plays were altered after they were performed?
(28:25):
Do we have evidence of that? Or that they were perhaps adapted even for specific audiences?
So maybe if Elizabeth's coming to watch, are you going to ensure that there's
nothing that's going to make her cranky in there?
Yes, absolutely. So theatrical revision was commonplace during the early modern periods.
For example, we know the writer John Webster was commissioned by the King's
(28:49):
Men Playing Company, so headed up by James I, to add an induction to and revise
scenes of a play by the writer John Marston called The Malkin Tent.
And we know that Ben Johnson was not only called upon to revise other men's
plays, but also thoroughly revised his own.
It kind of reminds me of Star Wars a little bit, when George Lucas added scenes
(29:12):
and special effects to the original trilogy in 1997.
So you had viewers attending cinema screenings of these adaptations,
and they continued to purchase them in media such as DVD, Blu-ray,
or Disney Plus nowadays.
And I think early modern audiences, like modern movie fans.
(29:34):
They'd attend revivals of older plays, taking comfort in the fact that they
were going to hear and see something familiar, but also being enticed by the
proposition of a new spin on an old classic.
So just as George Lucas sought to adapt his franchise in light of improvements in special effects,
(29:55):
playing companies might seek to adapt older plays according to shifting theatrical
milliers, advances in stagecraft, venues,
changes in company personnel, and changing audience expectations.
And there are theories that Shakespeare revised his own plays,
such as The Tempest, for example, for a performance to celebrate the marriage
(30:18):
of James I's daughter, Elizabeth, to Prince Frederick of Bohemia.
And also, Shakespeare seems to have gotten in trouble with the Cobham family
by presenting the historical figure of Sir John Oldcastle in the Henry IV plays
and The Many Wives of Windsor.
So the epilogue to Henry IV Part II stresses that Oldcastle was a Protestant
(30:43):
martyr and And that John Falstaff, the gluttonous braggart knight in Shakespeare's
plays, is not the same man.
So the evidence there suggests Shakespeare actually changed the name of the
character from Oldcastle to Falstaff.
And Shakespeare also seems to have revised the plays of other dramatists in
(31:05):
works like The Spanish Tragedy and the play known as Henry VI Part I in his 1623 first folio.
But sometimes Shakespeare's plays were revised by other writers.
So, for instance, some scholars believe the author Thomas Middleton adapted
Shakespeare's Macbeth, his measure for measure, and his play All's Well That Ends Well.
(31:29):
And with Macbeth, we have...
A real rarity, we have an eyewitness account of a performance at the Globe Playhouse
on the 20th of April, 1611, by the astrologer Simon Foreman.
So very rare to get eyewitness accounts of Shakespeare plays during his lifetime.
(31:50):
And Foreman describes the Weir sisters as fairies or nymphs.
So quite Quite different to the midnight hags with skinny lips and choppy fingers
that we all know and love.
Foreman's description more closely resembles how the Weird Sisters are described
(32:12):
in Shakespeare's source material,
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, as well as an entertainment put on before King
James of Oxford in August 1605.
Where the king was greeted by three sibyls.
Now, we can't be sure, but Foreman's account presents the possibility,
(32:32):
I think, that the text of Macbeth included in the collection of 36 Shakespeare
plays, the first folio, doesn't fully represent the version originally performed
in Shakespeare's lifetime. time.
So Macbeth is around 30% shorter than other tragedies Shakespeare wrote at the
time, like Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Kinlea.
(32:56):
So this strikes me as a good example of theatrical revision.
Oh, I wonder what we're missing now. I want to know. I love Macbeth.
That's one of my favourite plays.
So you've given us some examples already, Darren, of how Shakespeare was influenced
by other contemporary playwrights and how he used early works.
You know, you said he had it there on his writing desk as he's writing.
(33:17):
Can you give us a few more of those sort of concrete examples,
if we have them, of he being influenced by other playwrights?
Yeah, I think we can see influence in Shakespeare's dramatic language.
So his early plays, we'd like patchworks and phrases that you'd also find in
the plays of Thomas Kidd, Christopher Marlowe, and that Oxford-educated dramatist
(33:40):
I mentioned earlier, George Peel.
And the evidence I've uncovered in the book suggests that Shakespeare becomes
less imitative when it comes to dramatic language as his career progresses.
So some phrases might have been recycled unconsciously through having acted
in a play or seen a play performance.
(34:02):
While other lines like ye papa jades of Asia seem to be parodic.
So that line is delivered by Marlowe's Contra Tamburlaine, when he's riding
a chariot drawn by captives, being treated like horses with bits in their mouths.
And Shakespeare puts the line in the mouth of ancient Pistol,
(34:25):
a character who frequently recycles and often butchers, to be honest,
phrases that were popular in the theatrical vernacular of the period.
Ancient pistol appears in henry the fourth henry
the fifth plays in the many wives of windsor and another
good example of shakespeare being influenced by
the playwrights can be seen in in thomas kiss the spanish tragedy so that's
(34:49):
the first revenge tragedy on the english public stage and it features a ghost
crying for revenge play within a play and a murder victim in a garden and plot.
And these are all elements we see in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
And it's worth pointing out that Kidd has been suspected of writing an older, now lost, Hamlet play.
(35:14):
So I'll just give you some of the evidence for Thomas Kidd's authorship of this
lost Hamlet play that served as a source for Shakespeare.
So you have the pamphleteer and playwright Thomas Nash attacking tacking kid
in his preface to Robert Greene's pamphlet, Menaphon.
And kid, like Shakespeare, didn't have a university education.
(35:36):
So he was also open to criticism from the so-called university wits.
So Nash alludes to the kid in Aesop, another dodgy pen, a bit like Robert Greene's
Shakespeare, who has left the trade of noverant, so meaning a professional scribe,
and now medals with Italian translations.
(35:58):
As Kidd had done with his translation of Torquato Tasso's Padre de Familia in
a work called The Householder's Philosophy.
And Kidd's father was a professional scribe, by the way, a writer of the court letter.
Now, Nash claims that Kidd bleeds the work of Roman tragedian Seneca line by
line in order to afford you whole hamlets.
(36:22):
And he mocks the opening of Kidd's The Spanish Tragedy, in particular,
because Kidd thrusts Elysium into hell during the ghost account of his descent into the lower world.
And Nash also claims that Kidd is prone to bodge up a blank verse with ifs and
ands, which parodies a line from a Spanish tragedy.
(36:44):
What, villain? Ifs and ands? So here, Nash is mocking Kidd's reliance on the
works of Seneca, who Kidd very much saw as his tragic ancestor.
So Seneca was responsible for tragic plays like The Madness of Hercules,
The Phoenician Women, and Agamemnon.
(37:04):
And Kidd draws from Senecan elements that had been seen, especially in courtly
English tragedies, like ghosts bellowing for revenge, bloody violence, that kind of thing.
But Kidd refines Roman tragedy for the English public stage.
Now, we know that unlike all of Shakespeare's sources...
(37:28):
This lost Hamlet play featured a ghost.
So that's a really important innovation that, of course, had a major impact on Shakespeare's play.
And according to the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslow's diary,
that old Hamlet play was performed at a theatre called Newington Butts in June 1594.
(37:50):
And two years after the record of its performance, you had a poet and dramatist
named Thomas Lodge alluding to the play in a pamphlet titled Wit's Misery.
So Lodge writes of the visit of the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theater
like an oyster wife, Hamlet's revenge.
(38:13):
So the fact that the play, to which the arguably most famous work in English
literature, Shakespeare's Hamlet is heavily indebted and was likely written by Thomas Kidd.
So it's much for his influence on Shakespeare's drama, I think.
And by the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, revenge tragedy had gone a bit stale as a genre.
(38:37):
And it might sound amazing to us today, given how hugely popular a work it is.
But Breitig Hamlet was something of a commercial risk for Shakespeare.
And he goes back to the revenge tragedies of yore by earlier playwrights for inspiration.
It's amazing. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know that about Hamlet at all.
(38:58):
So that's so interesting.
So if you had to summarize then, Darren, the influences, the greatest influences
on Shakespeare's style, what would you say to that?
Yes, yes. Founded in a nutshell. shell. Again, I think kids,
for me, was probably the greatest influence on Shakespeare's dramatic style.
(39:19):
So most of the university-educated playwrights, when Shakespeare first comes
on the scene, they stuck to 10-syllable verse lines.
So five unstressed syllables, five stressed syllables.
De-dum, de-dum, de-dum. A
lot of us are taught in school that it sounds like a human and heartbeat.
(39:39):
Others might say that's de-dumbing it down. But Kidd's verse is very different.
So he often adds an extra unstressed syllable, the so-called feminine ending.
And the most famous example in literature would be Hamlet's to be or not to be.
That is the question. So that chun is a 11th unstressed syllable.
(40:02):
And in terms of this more flexible verse style that we see in Kit,
and also Shakespeare's habit of compounding words, so putting words together
in forms like eye-offending,
bunch-backed, and muddy-mettled, as well as phrases that Shakespeare recycles from other plays,
I think early Shakespeare's style is is closer to fellow non-university educated
(40:27):
playwright Thomas Kidd than his other greatest influence, which would be Christopher Marlowe, I think.
And I'm sure many of our listeners have, of course, heard that there are debates
when it comes to, you know, authorship and Shakespeare, and that there are some
people that think he didn't write any of the plays himself.
So can you sort of get us up to date on what the current authorship debates
are in the world of Shakespeare?
(40:49):
Yes, as you know, there's quite a few, aren't there? The authorship of the Henry
VI play is hotly contested.
So some scholars argue that Christopher Marlowe had a hand in them.
And I go into significant detail in Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers as to why
I don't think the internal or historical evidence supports that conclusion.
(41:14):
In any case, the Henry VI trilogy is brilliant.
It works brilliantly on stage. It's an epic of Game of Thrones proportions,
minus the dragons and the disappointing season finale.
There's also a true-life crime drama.
Titled Arden of Faversham. That play seems to have been written earlier than
(41:35):
any of Shakespeare's plays,
and it seizes on the sensational case of a former mayor of Faversham in Kent named Thomas Arden,
who was butchered in his home by hired assassins, his own wife,
and her bit on the side on Valentine's Day, 1551.
Some modern scholars argue that Shakespeare had a hand in that play,
(41:59):
which is dated to the late 1580s to early 1590s.
But as I try and show in the book, the evidence points overwhelmingly towards
Thomas Kidd's sole authorship and chimes,
I think, with the patterns of borrowing we see between other plays associated
with Kidd and Shakespeare's later dramas.
(42:19):
There are also arguments as to whether Shakespeare acted as a reviser or collaborated
directly in plays such as Titus Andronicus.
So Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, and it's one of my favorite
plays, which probably says a lot about me. It's bonkers.
(42:40):
I like to refer to it as the Quentin Tarantino movie of the Shakespeare canon.
It's got mutilation, decapitation, and it ends with a mother being tricked into
eating her own sons who have been being baked in a pie.
So 14 deaths in Titus Andronicus is a really bloody tragedy.
(43:01):
And this is a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peel.
But scholars often write about Shakespeare salvaging a play by Peel,
maybe finishing off a draft of his in Titus Andronicus.
And that disqualification of Peel is worthy of collaborating directly with Shakespeare.
Flouts the historical evidence, I think, because Shakespeare would have learned
(43:24):
a great deal from his more experienced co-author and hugely popular dramatist.
So I see Shakespeare and Peale working on that play in a process of simultaneous collaboration.
And I aim to show in the book how that method of working can account for some
of the mysteries still surrounding that play.
(43:48):
Well, you've certainly given us a lot to think about when it comes to Shakespeare and his work.
So thank you. There is another thing we do on Talking Tudors when I first have
guests on for the first time, and that is what I call 10 to go.
So these are just 10 questions just to get to know you a little bit better.
So the first one I have for you is, do you have a favourite historic site,
(44:08):
might be one associated with Shakespeare, that you'd like to visit? Oh, good question.
Yeah, I think I'd get in big trouble if I didn't say Stratford-upon-Avon,
where I work, particularly Henley Street, the site of the birthplace.
Yeah, that is a fantastic place to visit. And what about the last book that
you read, or perhaps one that you're currently reading?
(44:29):
Yeah, so I don't get a lot of opportunities to read fiction, really.
So what I've been doing is chipping away on Kindle on my phone,
where my eldest son, my five-year-old Oliver, is at swimming lessons with William
Peter Blatty's horror novel, Legion, which is a sequel to The Exorcist.
But most of my reading time is taken up with looking at academic works.
(44:54):
And I'm also reading at present Paul Menz's Shakespeare, A Brief Life,
which is a really witty and fascinating biography of Shakespeare.
Oh, that does sound good. And what about when you're in writing mode and you
are writing, do you have any kind of rituals that you like to follow?
Yes, I do a lot of my writing by candlelight, to be honest, when everyone's gone to bed.
(45:19):
So I find that my thinking about how to shape certain sentences,
certain paragraphs, that's almost going on unconsciously throughout the day.
And then I've got that short window of opportunity.
Everyone's gone to bed and then I am just hammering away at the keys on my laptop,
which is, I think Shakespeare probably wrote a lot of his plays at night time,
(45:44):
but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
As a ritual because it leads to really awful insomnia.
And I remember when I wrote the book on Robert Greene, I just spent around six
months of barely getting any sleep because once my cat hit the pillow,
I was still thinking, oh my gosh, I need to correct footnote 46 and that kind of thing.
(46:05):
Oh, I like the candlelight idea though. That's very cheater of you there, Darren.
What about an ideal Sunday morning? What does that kind of consist of?
Oh, an ideal Sunday morning.
I think in a fantasy world, it would be a lion, because inevitably I'll get
woken up by my five-year-old or my 18-month-old boy as well.
(46:26):
But I think, yeah, a nice relaxing morning and then leisurely making our way
out of the house and undertaking some kind of family activity.
So maybe a walk in the park with the family.
Yeah, that sounds lovely. And is there a new skill that you would like to learn?
So my eldest, Oliver, he goes to a school which is an all-Welsh-speaking school.
(46:53):
So he's encouraged to speak Welsh in the classroom, in the playground.
And I always remember I was at a meal before giving a talk on Shakespeare and kingship.
And I was talking to this lady about my eldest.
And she said, oh, are you worried that that's going to impact his skills when
it comes to English and the English language?
And my response to that was that Shakespeare was encouraged to speak Latin at
(47:18):
all times in school and even at home.
And he was pretty good at English, I think.
So I would love to learn another language.
We were hoping that with Oliver...
Learning welsh we would pick up on certain words
certain phrasings and it would develop our own welsh
speaking skills but he's kind of progressed from speaking
(47:41):
the odd welsh words and now just rattling off fluent welsh
and i think he's so so far ahead of us that we don't have much chance i always
love studying french at school i find that such a fascinating beautiful rhythmic
language so yeah if i had the time i think that's what i would love to do i'd
love to learn another other language,
(48:01):
maybe French or probably more usefully for me, Welsh.
I love languages as well. And I think children, they're such sponges,
aren't they? You could literally teach them five languages and they would learn all five languages.
So, you know, I don't think there's any worry that he's not going to know how
to speak English, that's for sure.
So how do you find or where do you find inspiration?
(48:24):
Oh, that's a good question. Where do I find inspiration?
I think I'm often inspired by reading the works of non-Shakespearean dramatists.
And my inspiration kind of comes from seeing what inspired Shakespeare.
So I guess just reading as widely as possible.
And I'm inspired by hearing different authorial voices, different styles.
(48:46):
That's something that really fascinates me.
And what about, let's turn our attention to travel. I love to travel.
So I like to ask people about their favourite travel destinations,
perhaps somewhere that you haven't been that you would like to visit.
Yes. I think top of my bucket list would probably be Japan. So maybe Tokyo.
And I've always really wanted to go to Florida, but specifically Universal Studios.
(49:12):
So I remember as a kid, obsessed with Jurassic Park and Jaws.
And I think it's changed quite a bit since watching old videos of Universal
Studios now, but I still love to go there. Wonderful.
And what about a favorite season? Do you have one and why?
Yes, yes. So I'm not autumnal in my outlook.
(49:34):
I'm very much a sunny bunny. I love the summer.
I do. I do really like September because I think it has long felt like a time
of change for me, September.
So going back to university days, that's when the new term would start.
I think, yeah summer and september specifically yeah i have to say september is beautiful.
(49:57):
Anywhere like i've traveled a lot and we tend to travel a lot in september it's
lovely here in australia southern hemisphere but it's beautiful in the northern
hemisphere as well so i think it's a good a good travel time so when you were
a child darren what did you hope to be when you when you grew up yeah you've
only got the impression i was quite an odd child which i was.
I i wanted to be a paleontologist as
(50:20):
a lot of little boys who are obsessed with dinosaurs would
say i had the nickname dino darren for
a long time so well well lots of kids you know into dinosaurs i took it quite
far and we'd be out for a meal me and my parents and apparently i I would just
wander off between tables and start lecturing people on dinosaurs.
(50:44):
I would tell them about the Proconsultnethus, the Brachiosaurus,
that kind of thing, which is not too far removed from what I do now.
So I'm a lecturer, just not...
Not on dinosaurs. And then as I grew up, I wanted to be a rugby player for a period.
So rugby is an intrinsic part of our DNA in Wales, even though we're quite awful
(51:08):
at it at the moment, but I thought we'll get back to form. And then I wanted to become an actor.
So I still continue to do quite a bit of acting on the side.
So I guess those interests and those kind of dreams when it came to what occupation I wanted to take.
A lot of them form part of my current role as a lecturer on Shakespeare.
(51:31):
Apart from the rugby, I don't get much opportunity to tackle people to the ground these days.
No, well, I think teachers and lecturers are kind of always performing, aren't they? Yes.
You're right. You're absolutely right. And lucky last question,
what do you like to do then to relax and unwind?
You're obviously very busy. Yeah, this is a troubling one because for me,
(51:53):
the writing process can be quite relaxing, but it's also the most stressful thing you can do.
So yeah, there's something about sitting down and creating.
I find that quite relaxing, but also, like I said, quite a stressful thing to do.
But sometimes, and quite rarely, I just need to put some garbage on the television
(52:14):
and just not think about Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
But I always remember I was running a course on Shakespeare and it was quite
a week jumping between different talks and so forth.
I was driving back to my home in Cardiff and I pulled up and I said,
(52:34):
you know what, that's been quite the week.
And I just want to take a couple of days and not talk or think about Shakespeare
whatsoever this weekend.
So I opened my front door and Oliver, my eldest, ran up to me.
And the first thing he said was,
Daddy, why did Shakespeare use a quill pen? So instantly, I was back in lecture mode.
(52:58):
He never asked me about Shakespeare. It was just so ironic.
That's so funny. Yeah, typical that it would happen at that moment.
And I said that was the last question, but I have one more thing,
and that is our Tudor takeaway.
So I like to ask my guests for something for our listeners perhaps to go off
and explore after the episode. So do you have a Tudor takeaway for us?
Yeah, I definitely encourage listeners
(53:19):
to check out some of the works of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights.
So there are new editions of the works of Thomas Kidd, John Fletcher,
and forthcoming editions of writers like Thomas Nash, John Marston, and Robert Greene.
So yeah, check out these other writers because you'll develop an understanding,
(53:40):
I think, that Shakespeare was not the only playwright in town and there were
so many tremendous playwrights and they were working in a broad and brilliant community.
It sounds amazing. I love it. And I encourage everyone to grab a copy of your
book if they can, if they want to learn more about what we've been discussing.
And Darren, thank you so much for taking the time to talk Tudors with us.
(54:03):
It's been an absolute pleasure and privilege. Thank you so much, Natalie.
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of Talking Tudors.
Thank you so much for joining us. I absolutely love to hear from listeners,
so if you have any comments or suggestions or just want to say hi,
please get in touch with me via my website,
www.onthetutortrail.com, where you'll also find show notes for today's episode.
(54:26):
If you've enjoyed the show, please share the podcast with friends and family,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review.
I also invite you to join our Talking Tutors podcast group on Facebook,
where you can interact with other Tudor history lovers and hear all the behind-the-scenes news.
You'll also find me on Twitter. My handle is on the Tudor Trail and on Instagram as the most happy 78.
(54:48):
It's time now for us to re-enter the modern world. As always,
I look forward to talking Tudors with you again very soon.
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