Part V
In this part . . .
Like all For Dummies books, this one ends with some fast and fun information. Sample the delights of Hampton Court, find out why bad boy Kit Marlowe died, and dabble in magic with Dr Dee. We have something here for everyone - snippets from a vanished and fascinating age.
Chapter 17
In This Chapter
● Getting to know chroniclers of the day
● Meeting some feisty ladies
● Creating legendary plays and poems
● Charting gruesome and mysterious deaths
We could write a whole book about people of interest from the 118-year Tudor period - some of them you’ve heard a lot about; others, little; and some you haven’t heard of at all. But we only have a chapter for this topic, so here we cover ten of the best - people who made their mark not just on Tudor society, but in the world at large and in history generally.
Anne Askew (1521-1546)
You meet some feisty women in this book, but none more so than Anne Askew. She was born to a wealthy landowning family in Lincolnshire, and with the shadow of the warnings of the Book of Leviticus (see Chapter 5) hanging over her, she was forced to marry her dead sister’s husband, Thomas Kyme.
Anne was a rarity - an intelligent woman whose family taught her to read and write. She hated Kyme, and although she had two kids by him she refused to take his surname and began to appal hubby (and lots of other people) by learning huge chunks of the Bible and preaching in public throughout the county.
When Kyme tried to put a stop to his wife’s preaching she left him and went to London, where her radical Protestant ideas were more widely accepted than in a rural backwater like Lincolnshire. It’s possible that Anne met queen Catherine (Parr) at this time, because when she was first arrested for holding illegal Protestant prayer meetings Catherine sent food and warm clothing to the Tower where Anne was being held and then got her released.
The deal agreed for Anne’s release was she had to give up preaching and go back to Kyme. Instead, she demanded a divorce on the Biblical grounds that she wasn’t bound to stay married to an ‘unbeliever’ (a Catholic). Anne’s was a clever argument, but the Court wasn’t having any of it. Because Anne didn’t have the wherewithal to set up a new Church to push her divorce through (which was what Henry VIII had done - see Chapter 6), she meekly obeyed.
Perhaps meekly isn’t the right word, because Anne left Kyme twice more, came back to London, preached and was arrested all over again. This time, the powers that be used torture on Anne, so vicious that the constable of the Tower, Anthony Kingston, left in disgust. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and Richard Rich, the ex-crony of Henry’s adviser Thomas Cromwell, interrogated Anne themselves. Then Kingston came back and put a stop to it - Anne was a gentle-woman and as such shouldn’t be subjected to being stretched on the rack . Kingston appealed to the king and Henry agreed to back off as long as Anne recanted. She refused.
Anne was brought to Smithfield just outside London’s city wall on 16 July 1546. A huge baying crowd watched as she once again turned down Henry’s offer of mercy. Her legs were so badly twisted by the rack that she couldn’t stand and she had to be tied to the stake on a chair. While the Catholic priest read out his words for the soon-to-be-dead in Latin, Anne argued with him in English. Then the executioners sprinkled gunpowder over Anne’s body and set fire to her.
Wriothesley and Rich had been hoping to get Anne Askew to implicate the queen as a closet Protestant, but she named no one during their interrogations. She richly deserved her place in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (for more on Foxe, scan down to the later section devoted to him).
Bess of Hardwick (1527-1608)
It isn’t often that you hear about women in the Tudor period who weren’t queens. And it’s interesting that Elizabeth Hardwick is better known for her house than herself!
Bess was the daughter of a well-to-do family who sent her (as was usual) into the service of a great household - the Zouche family of Derbyshire. At their town house in London she met and fell in love with Robert Barlow. She was 13 and her husband wasn’t much older, but he died of ‘chronic distemper’ (which could be anything!) and so she married again.
Bess’s second husband was William Cavendish, who was one of the commissioners of Thomas Cromwell (a top adviser to Henry VIII), and he was busy getting rid of the monasteries in the 1530s (see Chapter 6 for more) and making a small fortune buying up Church land cheap. The pair married at 2 a.m. (don’t ask!) on 20 August 1547. William was 22 years older than his wife but the marriage was happy and produced eight children.
As a landowner at the time of the Enclosure Riots (see Chapter 7), Bess was a hardliner, depopulating villages on behalf of her husband. Cavendish died in October 1557 and Bess married William St Loe, a wealthy widower with children of his own. She was now a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, owned the impressive Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and was a very good catch. St Loe became captain of the queen’s bodyguard.
Bess’s good fortune nearly came unstuck, however, when she got involved with Catherine Grey, sister of Jane, the Nine Days Queen (see Chapter 9). Bess knew of Catherine’s secret marriage to the earl of Hertford and didn’t tell the queen. Because Elizabeth hated being kept out of the loop as far as her ladies were concerned, it was off to the Tower for Bess for six months.
St Loe died in 1565 and Bess married George Talbot, the earl of Shrewsbury. Talbot was probably the richest nobleman in the country and got the job of guarding Mary Queen of Scots between 1569 and 1584. She and Bess became very friendly. Her links with Mary were bound to end in tears, and sure enough, Bess fell foul of Elizabeth again when she was found out for spreading malicious gossip about the queen. Her husband disowned her.
Bess bought Hardwick Hall in 1583 for £9,500 and rebuilt it for her adopted daughter, Arabella Stuart, whom she hoped would be the next queen of England. Bess plotted to get Arabella on the throne when Elizabeth died (see Chapter 16), but she failed.
The woman was hard-headed, calculating, a serial marrier and quite capable of bending the truth when it suited her. In that sense, although she had no links to the royal family, Bess Hardwick was a Tudor through and through.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Like Shakespeare (see the later section on Will), Marlowe was a playwright and poet. The pair were only two months apart in age and both wrote for the London stage. They must have known each other and the relationship portrayed in the film Shakespeare in Love is probably right - the Stratford man was in awe of Marlowe because Marlowe hit theatrical London first and wowed everybody with his ‘mighty line’, the thumping beat called iambic pentameter that Shakespeare (and everybody else) pinched later.
In Shakespeare in Love, Marlowe is played by Rupert Everett in such a mysterious way that he isn’t even listed in the film’s credits.
And mystery was what Marlowe was all about. He was born in Canterbury, the son of a shoemaker, but was a bright boy and went to the King’s School in the city (it’s still there, with a Marlowe plaque on the wall). He went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, getting his first degree in 1583 and his Masters in 1587. Marlowe was probably recruited as an agent by Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham between those dates. He was ‘on the queen’s business’ in the Low Countries (today’s Netherlands) then, though we don’t know exactly what he was up to.
Most scholars from Cambridge went into the Church but Marlowe went to London, lodged with fellow playwright Thomas Kyd in Norton Folgate and got his brilliant plays staged. The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Tamburlaine and the Tragicall Historie of Dr Faustus were all runaway successes.
Much of Marlowe’s short life (he was dead at 29) is lost in the murky underworld of Elizabethan England. As a projectioner (the Tudor version of James Bond; see Chapter 14) he worked in a clandestine way, spying for Walsingham. He had a short temper and fought two duels in broad daylight for which he was bound over to keep the peace (basically, given a good behaviour bond). He was probably homosexual, although much of the evidence for this rests on his play Edward II. He was definitely an atheist, denying the existence of God. Some of the articles he wrote - saying that Jesus and John the Baptist were lovers - still shock today.
Marlowe may have been a member of the School of Night, an exclusive club to which Walter Ralegh belonged. The members of this club were actually wannabe scientists, but in those days science and the black arts of devil worship went hand in hand (see the later section on John Dee).
Marlowe was killed in a pub brawl in Deptford, London on 30 May 1593 - or was he? Some people say he didn’t die at all, but, on the run from the authorities for his atheism (then a burning offence) he got to Europe and went on to write the plays of Shakespeare! The actual details of Marlowe’s death are peculiar. He wasn’t in a pub but in an eating house belonging to Eleanor Bull, a cousin of William Cecil (see Part IV). And the men with Marlowe were spies too. Marlowe may have been murdered by the state, on orders from the Council.
After 400 years Marlowe finally has a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey and a society of his own.
Cecily Bodenham (?-1543?)
The women in Tudor England were expected to know their places and do as they were told. But a surprising number of them were well educated, strong and resourceful. It’s a sign of women’s status generally, however, that we don’t have a clue when Cecily Bodenham was born or precisely when she died.
Cecily was born in Rotherwas, Herefordshire on the Welsh border, the daughter of Roger Bodenham and Joane Bromwich. At some point she decided to become a nun, which wasn’t unusual for girls of genteel but impoverished families - being a nun saved a bit of money.
Cecily became a nun at the Convent of Kingston St Michael in Wiltshire and was obviously a bright cookie, rising to be prioress. Check out Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in 1386. One of the Chaucer’s characters who goes on a fictional pilgrimage to Canterbury is a prioress. She wears gold jewellery and spends a fortune on her lapdogs, feeding them fresh meat and bread dipped in milk. Maybe Cecily was a bit like that, not the married-to-Christ virgin she was supposed to be, because in 1511 she was kidnapped by a local curate who also robbed the priory. After various negotiations, she got her old job back.
By 1534 the job of abbess at the huge Wilton Abbey came up. Wilton was an important saint’s shrine and very rich, and Cecily, who was known at Court, paid Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell £100 to get the job (who said money doesn’t talk?). With the job came a number of estates nearby, so Cecily was able to make quite a bit of cash.
In Chapter 6 we detail the story of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
Cecily was one of those who didn’t die in a ditch over principles. Complaining that she was all alone - ‘without father, brother or assured friend’ - she let Cromwell’s commissioners close Wilton down on 25 March 1539.
One of Cecily’s nuns had got her number, though, and wrote in her diary, ‘Methinks the Abbess hath a faint heart and doth yield up our possessions to the spoiler with a not unwilling haste.’ Leaving aside the fact that nuns weren’t supposed to have possessions at all, the smart sister had got it absolutely right. As Henry VIII sold off the monastic lands, Cecily got a very nice house in nearby Fovant with an orchard, gardens, three acres of meadow and unlimited firewood. She also got £100 a year.
Maybe it was Cecily’s conscience that led her to take in ten of the nuns and build the south aisle of St George’s Church in the village. Maybe she was buying her place in heaven.
Elizabeth Throckmorton (1565-c.1647)
Elizabeth was always known as Bess and was one of the ladies-in-waiting to Elizabeth I (who was only ever known as Bess by a very select few). These ladies were titled, clever and often pretty with a lot of social accomplishments, but woe betide anybody who tried to outshine the queen.
Bess was the daughter of a diplomat, Nicholas Throckmorton, and Anne Carew, so she was brought up in Court circles. She was intelligent and feisty, but because of her scheming dad’s behaviour, she had to tread warily. In 1569 Nicholas was sent to the Tower for pushing a scheme to marry Mary Queen of Scots to the duke of Norfolk (read all about Mary’s adventures in Chapters 13 and 14).
When Bess met the dashing seadog Walter Ralegh (see Chapter 16) she fell for him and he seduced her (up against a tree, according to one account). She came out with all sorts of excuses to explain her thickening waistline but also insisted on marriage, to which Ralegh happily agreed.
The problem came when Elizabeth found out. Ralegh had been her favourite (some even said lover) for 12 years and although Bess’s boy Damerei had died in the October of 1591 and Lady Ralegh was back at Court, the rumours finally reached the queen by May 1592. She was furious and jailed them both in separate apartments in the Tower for a time.
Elizabeth expected grovelling from the couple, but didn’t get it. Ralegh was out of favour for good, although he attempted suicide in the Tower and was allowed out to carry on the queen’s enterprising privateer business (see Chapter 12), raiding Spanish territory in the West Indies.
Bess produced a second son, Walter, in 1593 and another, Carew, later. The pair remained devoted, despite Ralegh’s chequered career. After his long imprisonment and execution in 1618, Bess worked hard to clear her lover’s name and re-establish his reputation.
The story goes that Bess kept her husband’s embalmed head. On the block, the headsman dithered and an astonishingly gutsy Ralegh told him to strike home. The man had to swing the axe twice. Family stories claim that Carew Ralegh had the head buried with him when he died.
Bess Throckmorton has appeared many times on screen. Joan Collins played her in The Virgin Queen when Bette Davis was Elizabeth; Abbi Cornish took on the role in Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age; but the greatest portrayal has to be Marge Simpson in Four Great Women and a Manicure. You have to be somebody to get on the Simpsons!
Dr John Dee (1527-1608)
We spend a long time in this book looking at the religious beliefs of the Tudors, but despite their religion, they all had astrologers like John Dee at Court to give them advice on what was happening in the heavens.
However much science you know and however much you understand the world, you can’t quite shake astrology off even today. Check out the horoscopes in any daily newspaper.
Dee had links to the royals from day one. His dad was a gentleman usher at Henry VIII’s Court and he himself claimed to be descended from Rhodri Mawr (Roderick the Great), the 9th-century Welsh king, so working for the Welsh Tudors made a kind of sense. Dee got his degree at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1544, and two years later he became one of the first fellows (tutors) at Trinity College (find out about the brilliant building in Chapter 19).
In the late 1540s, while England was becoming Protestant under Edward VI (see Chapter 8), Dee was lecturing in various European universities like Louvain and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Back in England in 1551, England was far behind the Spaniards and Portuguese when it came to navigation, so Dee used his considerable mathematical and astronomical skills to teach English sailors. One of his pupils was Martin Frobisher (see the later section on him).
Dee’s life took a downturn in 1553 when he was arrested on charges of conspiracy to kill Queen Mary with sorcery. He’d provided a horoscope for Princess Elizabeth, predicting when Mary would die - that sort of thing wasn’t just wishful thinking in the 16th century, it was treason. Even so, Mary pardoned him in 1556.
Under Elizabeth Dee did well, even deciding the best time for her coronation. He was often consulted by the queen and even the Council on all sorts of matters - out of this came his idea for the extension of the English fleet, paid for by a fishing tax (see Chapter 15).
But Dee is best remembered today for his occult dabbling. Like many scholars of his time, he was trying to find the Philosophers’ Stone, which would turn scrap iron into gold. He was also looking for the Elixir of Life, which would create immortality. His neighbours in Mortlake, west of London, were so sure he was a black magician that they burnt down his house and laboratory in 1583.
Unfortunately, Dee hooked up with con-men like Edward Kelly and the pair tried for years to bring people back from the dead. Kelly was a convicted charlatan - he even had the clipped ears to prove it. (A common Elizabethan form of punishment was to clip the ears of a conman. To this day, people use the phrase ‘I’ll give him a clip on the ear’, meaning ‘to give a punishment’.) He spent most of his time convincing Dee that the spirits wanted him to share Dee’s lovely young wife, which eventually happened.
After numerous adventures, mostly in Poland, Kelly was killed jumping out of a window in Prague and Dee came home to carry on his fortune-telling at the newly rebuilt house in Mortlake. In 1604 James I had to bail him out when he was once again accused of sorcery. Dee died four years later in poverty.
John Foxe (1516-1587)
We come across this man several times in this book, and there’s nobody better to record the cruelty of the Tudor age.
John Foxe was born into a middle class family in Boston, Lincolnshire and went to Brasenose College, Oxford at 16 (which was the usual age then). He was a bright spark, and could read Latin, Greek and Hebrew fluently. Foxe got his Masters degree in 1543 and became a lecturer in logic at the university. He was already a priest, as indeed were all lecturers, but two years later he got religion in a more serious way and resigned from the university because he wasn’t happy with the idea of celibacy (no sex) for priests. Broke and jobless, he went to work as a tutor for the children of the Lucy family at Charlecote near Stratford-upon-Avon. While there, Foxe married Agnes Randall and they had six children.
In London in 1547 Foxe got himself a patron (essential in those days) and found himself teaching the children of the Howard family (the dukes of Norfolk), one of whom, Charles, would later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588 (see Chapter 15). Foxe was now mixing with the top flight Protestant reformers of the day, many of whom would be burned in the years ahead.
Under Mary I from 1553 Foxe was walking a religious tightrope. The queen was bringing back the Catholic faith (see Chapter 10) and so Foxe got out of England quickly, the authorities on his tail. He travelled all over Protestant Germany, writing articles as he went and preaching at the English church in Frankfurt, where a lot of exiles had gone. There he got bogged down in a silly argument about which kind of Protestantism to follow. One type was led by Richard Cox; the other by John Knox (see Chapter 13), so it was Coxians versus Knoxians. Foxe was with Knox. (We know, it all sounds like a Dr Seuss book!)
After Mary’s death in 1558, Foxe was in no hurry to come back to England.
For a start, he couldn’t afford the journey and anyway, he wanted to see which way the religious wind would blow under Elizabeth. Finally, back in London in 1559, his friend Edmund Grindal, bishop of London, ordained Foxe. But Elizabeth’s Church wanted priests to wear surplices (white robes) and Foxe wouldn’t. So that was the end of his promotional prospects.
But what we most remember Foxe for is his Book of Martyrs (actually called Acts and Monuments), which began life in 1554. The book was originally about the 15th-century Lollards, an anti-Catholic sect. While in exile, Foxe heard about the burnings of heretics under Mary and decided to expand the book to his present day. The first edition appeared in Basle, Switzerland in 1559 and a much larger (1,800 page) version in English four years later.
The book was a runaway best-seller, but royalties for writers didn’t exist in those days and Foxe stayed as poor as ever. Catholics, of course, didn’t like the book - Thomas Harding called it ‘that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs, full of a thousand lies’. The 1570 edition had 2,300 pages and the version of 1583 was four times longer than the Bible. It’s a biased book and not much of a rattling good read today (the full title alone fills half a page), but as a diary of events of a ghastly time, it’s invaluable.
Foxe died in April 1587 and was buried in St Giles, Cripplegate (London) where the explorer Martin Frobisher would be laid to rest seven years later.
Martin Frobisher (c.1535-1594)
Most of Elizabeth’s seadogs came from Devon, but Martin Frobisher was a Yorkshireman from Altofts, near Wakefield. His father was a squire with quite a few estates and as a 13-year-old Martin was sent to London to get involved in business. This was quite unusual for the son of a man who had landed estates and the boy had no real head for business. We’re not even certain whether he learned to read properly, but his involvement in the get-rich-quick schemes of the City of London gave Frobisher a passion for the sea and exploration.
In the 1550s Frobisher was trading with the Africans in Guinea on the West African coast and fighting off the Portuguese who already had the area sewn up (see Chapter 12). At one point he was taken prisoner and spent months in the grim jail of Mina, emerging with the tough resilience he exhibited all his life.
Unlike Francis Drake (whom Frobisher hated) and John Hawkins (see these men in Chapters 12 and 15), we don’t know a great deal about Frobisher’s life. He was in the West Indies in the 1560s and had something to do with the spread of English plantations in Ireland, but his activities are shrouded in mystery and he may have been acting as an agent for Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham.
In 1576 Frobisher got the job of searching for a north-west passage to Cathay (China). Ever since the 1480s the overland caravan route to the East had been closed by the Ottoman Turks, so the rich spice trade was badly damaged.
This is why explorers like Columbus, da Gama and Magellan travelled all over the world, trying to find a new way east. If, as clever men were beginning to believe, the world was round, then by going west, you could end up east.
Frobisher was backed by a London merchant, Michael Lok, and various members of the Council. Setting off with 35 men and two ships, the Gabriel and the Michael, he was the first Englishman to reach Labrador and the land he called Meta Incognita (Frobisher Bay). Here he found icebergs taller than any building he’d ever seen and was probably the first white man (except maybe the Vikings) to see the local native, the Inuit.
In two later voyages (1577 and 1578) he brought an Inuit back with him - the man could be seen rowing his kayak in Bristol harbour - and some ore that everybody from the queen down hoped was gold. After much testing, the ‘black earth’ turned out to be pyrites (fool’s gold) and Frobisher fell from favour.
Frobisher was raiding with Drake in the Caribbean in 1585 (see Chapter 12), and when the Armada reached England from Spain three years later he was given command of a squadron and was knighted as a result of his bravery.
Six years later Frobisher was shot in the thigh fighting the Spaniards at Crozon near the French naval base at Brest. The wound became infected and he died on the way home. You can see a memorial to Frobisher in Blackwall, London, from where he sailed on his voyages, and a piece of his ore in a wall in Dartford, Kent. But the explorer never did find the North-west Passage.
Polydore Vergil (c1470-1555)
Okay, so perhaps this guy shouldn’t qualify as a Tudor, because he was Italian, but he spent so long in England and worked as Henry VII’s official historian so we figure he was in the loop.
Italy was the cradle of the Renaissance, the centre of the rediscovery of classical Greece and Rome that led to new ideas, discoveries and technology; and Polydore Vergil was part of all that.
The Vergils were a pretty cultured lot. Polydore’s great-grandfather, Anthony, was a doctor and astrologer. One of his brothers taught philosophy at the University of Paris and another at Pavia in Italy. A third brother (obviously the non-academic black sheep) was a merchant in London.
Polydore was educated at Bologna and worked for various Italian noblemen before coming to England in 1501 as collector of Peter’s Pence (one of the taxes that went to Rome - see Chapter 6). As Pope Alexander VI’s man in England he got the job of receiver to the bishop of Bath and Wells three years later.
Henry VII knew a clever guy when he met one and got Vergil working on a huge 26 volume Historiae Anglicae (History of the English) in 1505. He was either a slow researcher or busy on other things, because the book wasn’t finished until 1533 and was published the next year.
Vergil fell foul of Henry VIII long before the publication of his book. The king’s top man was Thomas Wolsey (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6), who wanted to be a cardinal and probably pope. Vergil didn’t back Wolsey and somebody found a letter he’d written that criticised both Wolsey and the king, so Vergil was put in prison. Pope Leo X pressured Henry for his release and Vergil was out after a few months.
In 1525 Vergil published a book on Gildas, the historian-monk from Strathclyde, Scotland in the 6th century. Vergil was a naturalised English citizen from 1510, but after 1538 he went back to Urbino in Italy for prolonged periods and he died there in 1555.
Vergil is important because in some ways he was the first of the real historians. We usually call historians of this period chroniclers, and the earlier ones were always churchmen (the only people trained to read and write in the middle ages). Vergil was sceptical and critical, as historians are supposed to be, but he was accused of burning manuscripts to cover his mistakes and stealing books from English libraries to ship them off to Rome.
His Book 27 of the History of the English covers the reign of Henry VIII and his hatred of Wolsey comes across very clearly. Even so, no better historian of the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487; see Chapter 2) existed.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
The man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire has a huge reputation. He was Man of the Millennium in 2000, the greatest playwright ever and you find more quotes from him than anybody else in a dictionary of quotations. In the Dictionary of Biography Shakespeare gets three times the page space given to his queen, Elizabeth I!
Shakespeare’s private life is so ordinary and boring that many people believe he didn’t write the famous plays and sonnets at all. His father was a glove maker and wool dealer in Stratford. Young Will probably went to the local school and he married local girl Anne Hathaway (we discuss her house in Chapter 19) when he was 18 and they had three children: Suzanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet. At 25 Shakespeare went to seek his fortune, Dick Whittington style, in London.
In the big smoke Will became an actor-playwright in the trendy new world of the theatre that was opening up in the 1580s, which the Puritans hated (see Chapter 14). He made a reasonable fortune out of theatre profits in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and spent it on a new state-of-the-art house in Stratford, but he seems to have only rented in London.
In his late 40s Shakespeare pulled out of his theatre commitments, went back to Stratford and died there, neatly, on his birthday, 23 April 1616.
Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote some superb plays that today are divided into comedies, tragedies and histories. Everybody’s heard of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and so on, and some of the phrases he invented have become part of everyday speech - neither a borrower nor a lender be; more sinned against that sinning; parting is such sweet sorrow; the world’s [your] oyster.
Check out the brilliant Shakespeare in Love starring Joseph Fiennes as the Bard. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay, cheats: he has a very 21st-century Will with writer’s block going to a psychiatrist and falling in love with a very unlikely heroine who’s disguised as a boy. Fiennes has got far too much hair for what we think Shakespeare looked like - but then, what did he look like? Accurate it may not be, but the film is great fun from start to finish.
Shakespeare wasn’t always popular in his day because he was so successful. Fellow writer Robert Greene called him an ‘upstart crow’. Like everybody else in his day, the only reason Shakespeare’s plays were put on and his poetry published was that he had a patron, probably the handsome Thomas Wriothesley (pronounced Risley), the third earl of Southampton.
Later generations turned Shakespeare into a literary saint and the word genius doesn’t begin to describe him. He only ever lived in Stratford and London; he was never an explorer, a soldier or politician. But his plays are rich with experiences. For example, he never went to Italy in his life, yet plays like the Merchant of Venice and Two Gentlemen of Verona are vivid. Will’s real skill, then, was pinching ideas from everybody else, knowing his theatre market very well and having a brilliant turn of phrase.
The Globe Theatre in Southwark, London, has now been rebuilt and is a working playhouse - check it out. Shakespeare’s birthplace is a fascinating museum in Stratford, but New Place, the superb house that his success bought him, is just a space surrounded by a wall. You can visit his tomb too in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.