STEPHEN GREENBLATT: We're standing on London's Millennium
Bridge, a bridge that crosses the Thames from the North Bank to the South Bank.
In Shakespeare's time, this bridge didn't exist,
but there was another large bridge, London Bridge,
which doesn't exist now any longer, not very far
from here that you could have walked across
to get to the South Bank of the Thames.
Many people would have done that, but many people, to go to the theater,
also would've paid a boatman to take them
across the river to the South Bank.
London was a very big city in Shakespeare's time.
Behind me is St. Paul's Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren
after the fire of London in the 17th century.
That cathedral didn't exist in Shakespeare's time,
but there was another more ancient medieval cathedral that did
and that was destroyed and replaced by Sir Christopher Wren's great building.
London in Shakespeare's time was a very large city.
It was one of the largest cities in Europe
along with Naples and Paris and a few others.
And everything in Shakespeare's career depended upon the fact
that there was a very, very large population here.
It's what supported the entertained industry,
the enormous amphitheaters like The Globe where Shakespeare and his company
performed, and the competing venues as well.
London was the magnet that drew people from all over the country
in Shakespeare's lifetime.
And, of course, it drew Shakespeare here.
Shakespeare was born in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon
but came here to make his fortune.
And in doing so, he did what many thousands of other people
did in his time, leaving their homes and coming
to London in hope of finding something here, some money, some career,
some fulfillment.
Many people found death instead of delight.
London was a very dangerous place.
There was a high incidence of plague.
There was a high violence rate by our standards.
But it nonetheless remained the magnet for thousands, tens of thousands,
of people in Shakespeare's time.
The city had a mayor and a group of city authorities
who tried to keep control over this enormous-- this enormous mass
of people.
They weren't happy about the theater.
They weren't happy about many of the forms of entertainment
that Londoners loved, but they couldn't completely
control them because they didn't control the entire city.
They controlled much of the area that lies behind me,
but the South Bank of the river, where Shakespeare's theater was located,
was less in their control.
And so we have an organization in which we have a powerful city behind me.
We have a court, which was located in this direction,
where the queen had her principal palaces
and also where parliament would have met.
And in this other direction, we had the notorious, the famous,
and sinister Tower of London, which you can almost see from here,
and in which prisoners, those accused of treason,
would have been taken to meet their ends.
These are locations that have some real force in Shakespeare's imagination--
the city behind us where the rioters like Jack Cade and the others
go rampaging through the streets, the court where the queen and her court,
glittering courtiers, met, and the sinister Tower of London.
All of these places inhabited Shakespeare's imagination.
Shakespeare is a global artist.
His presence is worldwide.
He's the possession of all of us, whoever we are,
whatever language we speak, wherever we live.
But he was also an artist who came from a particular place and time,
from the late 16th and early 17th century in England.
And not only in England, but he had his career
here in London, the greatest city in the realm.
And to understand something of Shakespeare,
we have to go back and forth between the sense
of the universal power of this remarkable artist
and the particular location, the particular world, that he came from
and on which he drew so powerfully.
So what we'll be doing in these modules is
to try to convey a sense both of the largest frames in which you
can understand Shakespeare, but also of the particular circumstances from which
he came and upon which he drew.