I’ll be honest.
I’ve never read Romeo & Juliet.
I’ve never seen a performance of it, nor have I ever seriously considered watching
it.
But I have completed the quest in Runescape, so hey, at least there’s that.
You can’t judge me.
If you’re new here, I’m Darius Cosden and this is Vlogs of Knowledge.
Make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell, because I do upload every single Wednesday!
I’m laughing because... because of Runescape.
This week, we look at perhaps the best writer in the English language: Shakespeare.
We’re going to look at his life, his plays and poems, his importance to the development
of English literature, and the way he changed how theatre and acting was seen throughout
Europe.
That’s pretty intense for just one man..
Shakespeare is said to have been born sometime in the year 1564 in a place called Stratford-upon-Avon,
located in England.
Now the exact date of his birth is unknown, since no documents survive of it.
And documents missing is something that we’ll be seeing a lot of in this episode.
However, we know that he was baptized on the 26th of April, that same year.
And in those times, babies would usually get baptized a few days after their birth, which
would put his birthdate around the 23rd of April.
Now, since the 23rd of April is also the day of his death, most historians have adopted
this as his official birthday.
Because it fits nicely.
Shakespeare was born to a good family for the time.
His father had seen some financial success in his life, as well has having been made
the mayor of the local town of Stratford.
His mother on the other hand, was also from an influential family, and even had inherited
her own piece of land, that she would rent out to to other people.
We have no written records of Shakespeare’s education.
But a good guess would be that he attended the King's New School in Stratford. because
his father’s position undoubtably qualified him for free tuition, and the school was very
close to his home.
It was like half a kilometre a way.
It would’ve been kinda strange if he didn’t go there.
There he learnt reading, writing, and the classics in Latin.
And this curriculum would have been enough to provide him with the proper foundation
in the English language, which would be very useful to him in the future..
Obviously..
But some people have actually debated his education and have put forth the argument
that Shakespeare wasn’t the true writer of his plays.
But we’ll come back to that later.
At the age of 18 years old, in 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, in what appeared to be a rushed
marriage.
At least that’s what the limited documentation supports.
This is because 6 months after the marriage, they had their first baby, a daughter named
Susanna.
And in those times, if you had a baby out of wedlock, you could face big consequences
by the church.
So it would make sense that they tried to rush the wedding, to make it look like the
baby was conceived during the marriage.
The couple also had a pair of twins two years later, but one of them died at the age of
11 from unknown causes.
The sad truth is that we don’t know much about Shakespeare’s personal life, about
the man behind the poems.
The only things that we have are like official documents like certificates, court appearances,
or logs where his name pops up.
And that's very unfortunate because it seems like there’s a lot more to the man than
we know.
As you can imagine, that makes it incredibly difficult to truly know who Shakespeare was,
how he thought, and why he started writing.
We don’t even have any surviving letters that he wrote during his lifetime.
We’re limited to.. boring old bureaucratic papers.
After the birth of his twins, he went in a period that we now call the “lost years”.
We call them that way simply because, well surprise surprise, we have no documents.
7 years of his life are completely gone, erased from the face of history.
Of course, people have tried to guess what he might have been doing during that time.
Some theories suggest he might have been busy taking care of his children, or he was running
from the government because of some debt, or he might have simply tried to enter the
theatre scene by taking up small, low-grade jobs.
We also don’t know exactly when he started writing.
All that we know, is that by 1592, the last year of his “lost years”, his plays most
likely were already on a few stages in London.
We know this because we have a criticism of Shakespeare by another playwright called Robert
Greene.
It goes as follows.
“... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, 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 factotum, is in his own conceit the
only Shake-scene in a country.”
Honestly, I totally expect you to have no idea what that means.
Trust me, I’m with you.
Even scholars argue on the exact meaning of Greene’s words, which should be reassuring.
But, despite that, most of them can get behind the idea that Greene was actually accusing
Shakespeare of trying to pass himself as a better writer than he actually was.
Mostly because of his level of education.
The part where it says “Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide” is a direct
parody of a line from one of Shakespeare’s plays, Henry VI, part 3.
We also have what would look like a pun where it says “Shake-scene in a country”.
Put these two together, and we can be fairly confident that it talks about Shakespeare.
Now, so far, we’ve talked about things we weren’t 100% certain of.
And I painted you the picture that we know very little of Shakespeare.
And that’s normal, given the circumstances.
But, fortunately, there are also some things that we know for certain.
Like the fact that he was part of a playing company, which is like a band of actors, that
would eventually become the most popular company in England, even performing for the king himself.
In those times, you had many of these playing companies performing different plays in different
places.
They usually were the same actors, performing different plays.
In some cases, they even had their own dramatists, writing plays specifically for the playing company,
as was the case with Shakespeare.
We have documents supporting the fact that Shakespeare made good money with his company
and that he even had a partnership in it.
One piece of evidence is that by 1597, just a few years after we find his name as a writer
for the first time, he bought the second most expensive house in Stratford for him and his
family.
This was a beautiful house, whom he no doubt must have walked by every single day during
his school years.
From roughly 1594 onward, basically right after his lost years, he is said to have been
an important figure in his playing company as well as the theatre scene in London.
His company had arguably the best actor, Richard Burgage, it had the best theatre, which they
themselves built in 1599, and of course, it had the best writer, Shakespeare himself.
While we don’t know how his personal life influenced his writings, we can safely assume
that he devoted the next 20 years of his life to his art and the managing of his playing
company.
We have records of him having purchased pieces of real estate, which no doubt secured him
financially and allowed him to work on his plays without interruption.
In 1616, after his writing career had slowed down dramatically, he sat down and wrote his
will: an extensive document outlying everything he wanted to happen after his death.
What’s surprising about this will is the fact that he left most of his wealth to his
eldest daughter, Susanna, on condition that she give it to the eldest of her sons.
Curiously enough, we also find a mention of his wife.
But the way it was written points us to think it may have been just an afterthought.
He wrote that he would leave her his “second best bed”.
Which can be seen as an insult, or can be seen as something honorable, since the best
bed was usually reserved for guests, and the second best would’ve been the finest he
could give.
And then, just a few months after he wrote his will, he died at the age of 52.
England’s best writer had left Earth, and left us with only but a few of his poems as
his legacy.
So now that we got Shakespeare's life out of the way, let’s look at his plays and how they influenced
both the English language, and how the Europeans of the time saw
literature.
Because I haven’t said it yet in this video, but Shakespeare was a phenomenal writer.
One of the best the English language has ever seen.
The first and most important thing to know is that most of his plays are hard to date.
We don’t know exactly when he wrote them, nor in what specific order.
In fact, if it wasn’t for some of his friends, we would’ve never seen the light of most
of his plays since he didn’t really think about preserving them for the future.
I mean can you blame him?
Who could’ve expected such fame after their own death.
We are, however, very lucky.
A few years after he died, two of his friends, John and Henry, who were part of his playing
company, decided it would be a good idea to get all of his plays together, and publish
them under a single book.
This book, often called the “First Folio” is one of the most influential books in the
English language.
It contains 37 plays all attributed to Shakespeare.
But that’s not what I meant when I said that we were lucky.
I said that because 20 of the plays in that book had never been published before.
That’s right, more than half of the book was entirely new content, having never been
read by anyone.
Had it not been for those two people, half of Shakespeare’s work would’ve been lost
to history, like most of his personal life.
And we already lost a bunch.
Let’s not lose more.
You can now understand why this book is considered so influential.
As little as we know of Shakespeare, we can try to piece together information through
his poems and plays.
The way he wrote was beautiful.
He had a profound way of writing that impacted the reader so deeply, that they couldn’t
help but keep reading.
His plays, of course, had the same effect.
Often an even more powerful one, if the actor was good enough.
He wrote many plays throughout his career.
He first began with historical plays, mostly talking about things that were happening in
the political sphere of the time.
And those plays were usually critiques, like Henry VI, King John, and Richard.
After histories, he started dabbling into comedies.
That’s when we see plays like “A midsummer night’s dream” or the Twelfth Night, which
were giving off a totally different vibe than what he had wrote previously.
But of course, that’s normal.
A writer has to evolve over time.
He cannot do the same thing over and over again.
Towards the end of his writing career, he moved on from comedies to tragedies and tragicomedies.
His plays took a dark turn, and that may indicate that his views on the world had changed.
We can see that in plays such as Hamlet, or the Winter’s tale.
Through looking at his plays, we can get a small glimpse of who this man was, how he
thought, and how he was feeling at the time of writing.
It’s really the best we can do at this point.
It’s not much, but it’s something and historians have spent many years trying to
decode Shakespeare’s mind.
He was very well known for using soliloquies in his plays not to express details about
a certain character, which was what everybody else was doing, but instead to reveal the
deep inner-workings of the character’s mind.
A soliloquy, is when a character talks to himself during a play, mostly to illustrate
the thoughts going on in his mind.
He was also known for breaking off the traditional way of writing poems, instead he chose to
adopt a more free style of writing, as you can see in his later poems.
And this deviation from the norm is really what allowed him to become so influential.
Now I mentioned earlier that not everybody agrees with the fact that Shakespeare is such
a great writer.
In fact, not everybody can even agree that he really did write any of his plays.
There are some people who argue that there was no way he could be the true, authentic
writer.
Such people usually make the argument that since we don’t have much of the documents
pertaining to his life, most of what we know or say about Shakespeare has to be false.
Usually, those same people also give the argument that there was no way he had the education
required, nor the political knowledge, to write most of his early history plays.
Because the way they are written, requires a certain high level of intellect.
There are also some similarities in the way he wrote with other writers, who them had
the education necessary to be able to write such plays.
And some people argue that it wasn’t Shakespeare who wrote his plays, but that it was one of
those other writers instead.
However, in any opinion matter on this show, I will always give you both arguments.
For one, Shakespeare wasn’t the only one whom we are missing documents of.
There are other important people of the time that we also have missing documents, it’s
entirely normal from that period.
Things weren’t always so well-documented like we have them today.
Also, we have a lot of press-releases with Shakespeare’s name as the headline, indicating
that newspapers were trying to use his name as ways to get more readers.
And what we have of his playing company, show him being heavily involved with it, and also
writing plays for them specifically.
So the argument is that if the newspapers loved him so much, to the point of using his
name to get more readers, and that we have documents proving he wrote for his playing
company, which we know was very successful, then that must mean that Shakespeare was the
true writer of his plays.
Whatever the case may be, one thing is fairly certain.
Shakespeare’s plays are so influential, so good, so well-written, that they have changed
the course of English literature forever.
I mean we still see his influences today.
And we will most likely continue to see them for the long future.
And that concludes a brief history lesson on Shakespeare and his plays!
I really, really do hope that you’ve enjoyed this video and if you did, please leave it a big thumbs
up, make sure to subscribe, make sure to hit the notification bell, join #TeamKnowledge, and be notified
whenever I release a new video.
And now it’s time for questions.
Do you think Shakespeare wrote all of his own plays?
And whats your favourite play of him?
Please do leave me a comment I would love to read and answer them all, and bonus points
for you if you do leave a comment you might get featured in next week’s video as a fan
of the week!
As you know and say at the end of every video, I haven’t talked about everything regarding
Shakespeare and his plays.
That’s actually ok.
I do this on purpose because I want you guys to go out and research more on your
own.
Because I believe in research and I believe in getting you guys educated on a subject.
It’s the whole reason why I do this show.
And for those that want to learn more, as always, you’ll find links in the description where
you can start!
With that being said, my name has been Darius Cosden, you can follow me on social media,
the links will be in the description, it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for
watching, thank you for giving your time to this video and I’ll see you all next Wednesday!