Horizon TV - Michael Wood TV - The Taming of the Shrew 1956 - Shakespeare’s Tomb TV - Shakespeare Live! From the RSC TV - Cunk on Shakespeare TV - A Midsummer Night’s Dream TV - The Complete Works of Shakespeare: Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor - Kenneth Muir -
Could synaesthesia help to explain creativity? He [Professor Ramachandran] started to look at artists and their influences. Many famous artists have been synaesthetic including the jazz legend Miles Davis and the painter Kandinsky ... Take for example Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s metaphors are synaesthetic. Horizon: Derek Tastes of Ear Wax, BBC 2004
This is the extraordinary tale of a peasant’s daughter who rose to wealth and status but lost it all. She survived the plague and lived through four changes of the state religion. She buried three of her children but gave birth to the world’s most famous poet. Michael Wood, Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman, BBC 2017
Her children would become haberdashers and glovers, two of them made it in the entertainment industry in London … Life expectancy then was thirty-eight. ibid.
She was born around 1535. ibid.
When Mary was twelve King Henry VIII died. ibid.
Stratford then was a small market town with maybe 1,200 people. ibid.
Wool was the mainstay of the economy. ibid.
A motion picture for every man who ever gave the back of his hand to his beloved … and for every woman who deserved it. Which takes in a lot of people! In the war between the sexes, there always comes a time for unconditional surrender. The Taming of the Shrew 1967 starring Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor & Natasha Pyne & Michael Hordern & Cyril Cusack & Alfred Lynch & Alan Webb & Victor Spinetti & Roy Holder & Mark Dignam & Bice Valori & Giancarlo Cobelli & Vernon Dobtcheff & Kenn Parry & Anthony Gardner, film’s marketing
In a parish church in the Midlands lies the tomb of our greatest ever playwright: it’s only inscription is a curse. William Shakespeare’s strange-looking grave has long been surrounded by rumour and legend. Shakespeare’s Tomb, Channel 4 2016
The story claimed that a band of trophy-hunters had broken into the grave and stolen Shakespeare’s skull. ibid.
One of the wilder rumours – that Shakespeare wasn’t even buried at Holy Trinity. ibid.
Britain’s greatest dramatist was buried not in a grand vault but in a shallow grave without so much as a coffin. ibid.
From the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford Upon Avon … and many more join together to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare Live! From the RSC, BBC 2016
William Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire market town of Stratford Upon Avon on this very day April 23rd 1564. ibid. Joseph Fiennes
The girls today in society go for classical poetry
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides
One must know Homer, and believe me, Beau
Sophocles, also Sappho-ho
Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope
Dainty Debbies will call you a dope.
But the poet of them all
Who will start ’em simply ravin’
Is the poet people call
The Bard of Stratford on Avon.
[Refrain] Brush up your Shakespeare
Start quoting him now
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from Othella
And they’ll think you're a hell of a fella
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ’er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer.
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing
What are clothes? Much ado about nussing
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Refrain]
With the wife of the British ambessida
Try a crack out of Troilus and Cressida
If she says she won’t buy it or tike it
Make her tike it, what’s more As You Like It.
If she says your behaviour is heinous
Kick her right in the Coriolanus
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Refrain]
If you can’t be a ham and do Hamlet
They will not give a damn or a damlet
Just recite an occasional sonnet
And your lap’ll have honey upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure
Let her sample your Measure for Measure
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow – Forsooth
And they’ll all kow-tow – I’ faith
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Refrain]
Better mention ‘The Merchant Of Venice’
When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace
If her virtue, at first, she defends – well
Just remind her that ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.
And if still she won’t give you a bonus
You know what Venus got from Adonis
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow – Thinkst thou?
And they’ll all kow-tow – Odds bodkins
And they’ll all kow-tow.
[Refrain]
If your goil is a Washington Heights dream
Treat the kid to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
If she then wants an all-by-herself night
Let her rest ev’ry ’leventh or ‘Twelfth Night’
If because of your heat she gets huffy
Simply play on and ‘Lay on, Macduffy!’
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow – Forsooth
And they’ll all kow-tow – Thinkst thou?
And they’ll all kow-tow – We trou’
And they’ll all kow-tow. Cole Porter, Brush Up Your Shakespeare
He’s more interesting than you’d imagine … Cunk on Shakespeare ***** BBC 2016
The plays Shakespeare wrote echoed through the ages. ibid.
Jokes hadn’t been invented back then. ibid.
In The Tempest, the story doesn’t make sense either. ibid.
Shakespeare’s greatest work – Game of Thrones. ibid.
I’m gutted he’s just died. ibid.
Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Duke, BBC 2016
‘If you think I come hither as a lion … I am a man. As other men are.’ ibid. players in the forest
What angel wakes me from my flowery bed? … Feed him with apricots, and dewberries and purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries. ibid. bird to ass
Methought I was enamoured of an ass. ibid. her to him
Shakespeare’s background was commonplace. His father, John, was a glover and wool-dealer in the small Midlands market-town of Stratford-Upon-Avon who had married Mary Arden, daughter of a prosperous farmer, in or about 1557. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, editors Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor
Shakespeare would have left school when he was about fifteen. What he did then is not known. One of the earliest legends about him, recorded by John Aubrey around 1681, is that ‘he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’. ibid.
In fact we know a lot about some of the less exciting aspects of his life, such as his business dealings and his tax debts. ibid.
In 1604 Shakespeare was lodging in north London with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy; in 1612 he was to testify in a court case relating to a marriage settlement on the daughter of the house. The records of the case provide our only transcript of words actually spoken by Shakespeare; they are not characterful. ibid.
We do not know when Shakespeare joined the theatre after his marriage, or how he was employed in the mean time. ibid.