HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-04-02T09:40:46.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsessionhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/let-the-sky-rain-potatoes-the-hidden-meanings-behind-shakespeares-food-obsession/2026-03-25T15:30:41.000Z“There shall be no more cakes and ale”

Puritan hypocrisy

Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy.

Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”

In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper.

In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle.

As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility.

“Did he marry me to famish me?”

Balancing humours

In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It.

In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger.

• Read more | Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true?

Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable.

At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”.

Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.”

By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’.

"If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek"

National pride

In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks.

For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff.

In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.”

Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health.

“I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter”

Attitudes to immigrants

Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter.

• Read more | The simple secret that kept the ordinary Tudor diet surprisingly healthy

Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.”

That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England.

“Let the sky rain potatoes!”

Exotic aphrodisiacs

Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech.

The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater.

One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at?

Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious.

“I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since”

Witty innuendo

While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks.

For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”.

Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis.

Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.”

• Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century

The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous.

So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”?

Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue.

Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025)

This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/shakespeare-myths/2026-02-03T09:25:35.000Z1. Shakespeare was forced to leave Stratford-upon-Avon in a hurry after he was caught poaching deer at nearby Charlecote

According to legend, young William Shakespeare was hauled up before local magistrate and owner of Charlecote Park, Sir Thomas Lucy, after he was caught poaching deer on the estate.

It’s a popular tale, but is there any truth to it? “The deer-poaching story is a nice anecdote, but we don’t know if it actually happened,” says Paul Edmondson. “There is no documentary evidence of any local prosecutions for poaching during Shakespeare’s younger years, and there wasn’t even a deer park at Charlecote at this time. That doesn’t prove that Shakespeare wasn’t found poaching somewhere on the estate, though. The story dates back to at least the 1680s – within the lifetime of Sir Thomas Lucy’s great-nephews and great-nieces – so there could be a ring of truth to it somewhere.”

2. Anne Hathaway was an ‘old maid’ when she married Shakespeare

Anne Hathaway was 26 when she wed the 18-year-old William Shakespeare, but she was far from being left on the shelf, says Paul Edmondson. “Men were definitely marrying women of Anne’s age during this period – she was certainly still considered to be of marriageable age. What is unusual about their union, though, is Shakespeare’s youth. He was technically underage when they married (men came of age at 21) and had to ask his father’s permission to wed, so it was a pretty unusual set of circumstances.

“Historian Jeanne Jones has identified that between 1570 and 1630, the average age for men to marry was 26, and only three married under the age of 20 – of those three, Shakespeare was the youngest, and the only man whose wife-to-be was already pregnant.”

“Anne’s pregnancy before marriage and Shakespeare’s youth would have been something of a scandal,” continues Edmondson, “and certainly not something anyone would have planned. The marriage meant that Shakespeare was forced to give up whatever apprenticeship he had [married men were not allowed to be apprentices], so there must have been real concerns about how he would support his new family with no formal trade under his belt.”

3. William and Anne were married at his local parish church, Holy Trinity

The location of Anne and William’s marriage has frustrated centuries of biographers, and there is still no definitive answer. Several options have been put forward: an entry for the marriage licence of ‘Willelmum Shaxpere’ and ‘Annam Whateley’ at St Andrew’s Church in Temple Grafton (a village about five miles from Stratford, and four miles from Anne Hathaway’s house in Shottery) has often been cited as ‘proof’ of the marriage. Other possible locations include St Martin’s, Worcester; Luddington; and Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“I’m increasingly of the view that William and Anne married at All Saints Church in Billesley,” comments Edmondson. “It was the church that Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, chose for her second marriage, even though she had no known connections to the place – it might well be that she chose the venue because her grandparents had been married there. Billesley is also close to Wilmcote, which is where Shakespeare’s mother’s family was from. Plus, it was out of the way for a hasty marriage because Anne was already pregnant. The associated scandal would have meant the pair would likely have avoided their local church of Holy Trinity.”

4. Shakespeare abandoned his family for a new life in London, but retired back to Stratford-upon-Avon

“Nobody knows the precise reason why Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon for London,” says Edmondson. “In the absence of this information, a rags to riches, ‘Dick Whittington’ type of story has grown up around Shakespeare – that he went to find his fortune and then remained in London until his ‘retirement’, when he returned home to Stratford.

The truth is, that there were always two centres of Shakespeare’s life from around the late 1580s, when we know he was in London, until around 1612, when we know he was more or less living full-time in Stratford.

“Shakespeare bought New Place – a freehold with between 20 and 30 rooms, as the archaeology would have us believe – in 1597, and by 1598 had remodelled the front of it. The house was one of the largest in Stratford and would surely have been his pride and joy. His decision to buy and alter the house doesn’t smack of someone who wasn’t there often. New Place would have been his retreat when the London theatres closed due to plague, which they often did, and was where his wife and children were.”

In 1602, Shakespeare bought land in Stratford for the sum of £320, followed by an investment of £440 in a share of Stratford’s tithes (a form of taxes on people who worked the land, which generated an income for their owners) – actions that would also place him frequently in his home town, comments Edmondson.

“The investments Shakespeare makes in Stratford in 1602 and 1605 would have required managing and overseeing. What’s more, from 1604–12, references to Shakespeare in London are very few, which suggests he was spending more time in Stratford. When you look at the evidence, an image emerges of a man who was spending time in both places – this isn’t someone who, as it were, retired back to his hometown as Kenneth Branagh’s 2018 film, All Is True, would have us believe.”

5. Shakespeare is not the real author of the works attributed to him

Myths and conspiracy theories have swirled around the authorship of Shakespeare’s works since the 19th century. Some doubters believe Shakespeare couldn’t have been a writer because no books are mentioned in his will, while others cite his humble background as a reason why he could not have been so successful.

“Each piece of evidence points to the fact that Shakespeare did author the works rather than didn’t,” says Edmondson. “Books tended not to be mentioned in wills at this time; they were listed in inventories. And we don’t have an inventory for Shakespeare. Authorship deniers find it unlikely that someone from a humble background could have been so successful. But we see all the time that genius can arise from surprising places. Each piece of evidence that puts Shakespeare as the creator of his works needs to be contradicted before we can even consider anyone else as the possible author, and that’s something that authorship deniers simply cannot do.”

But what about collaborations? “We’ve known that Shakespeare was a collaborator since his own lifetime,” comments Edmondson. “When The Two Noble Kinsmen (written in c1613–14), was published in 1634, it was jointly attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. The History of Cardenio, a lost play known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1613, was also mentioned, posthumously, as a collaboration between them. Henry VIII, or All Is True was also written in collaboration with Fletcher, although this wasn’t realised until the 19th century. We know this because of stylistic evidence. For example, one of the stylistic ‘fingerprints’ of John Fletcher was that he used ‘ye’ rather than ‘you’. Shakespeare, on the other hand, rarely used ‘ye’, so the scenes written by Fletcher are pretty obvious.

“We also know that he collaborated with Thomas Middleton. Shakespeare tended to collaborate at the beginning and the end of his career. Particularly before 1594 when he was a jobbing playwright finding his feet in the professional theatre world. After he becomes a co-founding shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company, Shakespeare seems to have become a single author focused on writing for the benefit of that company to make money.”

6. Shakespeare invented thousands of words

Shakespeare has long been credited as the creator of thousands of words in the English language that are still in use today.

But, says Edmondson, the number of words coined by the great playwright is actually significantly fewer. A team of experts led by Professor Jonathan Culpeper from Lancaster University, launched the three-year Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language research project in 2016, which used computer technology to analyse millions of words written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The research was discussed in a 2019 BBC Four documentary, Scuffles, Swagger and Shakespeare: The Hidden Story of English, in which Culpeper suggests that the amount of neologisms (newly coined words or expressions) created by Shakespeare may not be as numerous as has been suggested in the past – probably no more than 300–400 in total.

7. Shakespeare was unhappy in his marriage

Although we will never know the true depth of feeling between the Shakespeares, William placed a great deal of trust and responsibility in Anne while he was away from home, according to Edmondson. She was mistress of New Place, managing a small staff and the household economy, as well as caring for, and arranging the education of, their three children.

“It’s long been assumed by many that the fact Shakespeare spent time in London away from his family, combined with the hasty circumstances of their marriage and a large age gap, that William and Anne had an unhappy marriage,” comments Edmondson. “But if you study Shakespeare’s Sonnets, it’s very plausible that some them are addressed to, or are about, Anne. The final couplet of Sonnet 145, for example – which was identified as referring to Anne as recently as 1971 – reads: ‘‘I hate’, from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.’

“The sonnet is written in iambic tetrameter, and not iambic pentameter, so is therefore thought to be an early poem – ‘Hateaway’ was an alternative pronunciation of Hathaway, so it could well be a marriage poem.

“Feminist scholar Germaine Greer has plausibly suggested that Sonnet 27 – which features the line ‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travail tired; But then begins a journey in my head’, followed by descriptions of a zealous pilgrimage made in his mind to his beloved – could well represent Shakespeare on tour thinking about his wife.” Much of the speculation about the Shakespeares’ marriage stems from the fact that, in his will, Shakespeare wrote: “I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture” – (‘furniture’ being the curtains and bedcover, which formed part of the complete bed).

“The bed Shakespeare is referring to is likely to have been the bed that he and Anne would have shared,” comments Edmondson. “Beds were luxury items and valuable heirlooms – the best bed would likely have been reserved for guests and probably displayed downstairs where it could be seen and admired. “Wills have never been documents about sentiment. We apply sentiment to bequests, and in our modern sensibility, when we see the term ‘second best’, we assume it to be a slight. But it’s a bequest that has been inaccurately interpreted. There are other examples in wills of the period where second-best beds were left to a spouse. Such bequests came with an understanding about residential rights for the widow, to make sure that she had somewhere to sleep within the freehold or the house of the deceased.

“The bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to his daughter, Susanna, who, with her husband John Hall, moved into New Place while Anne was still there. Anne lived at New Place for another seven years until her death in 1623.”

8. Shakespeare was wealthy because he was a playwright

“Not true,” says Edmondson. “Shakespeare was wealthy because he was a shareholder in two companies and two theatres – the Globe and the Blackfriars. People did not become wealthy from writing plays; you had to be a shareholder to earn real money.”

9. Some of Shakespeare’s wealth came from his father’s illegal wool dealings

“This, for me, is not as mythical as it might seem,” comments Edmondson. “We know that John Shakespeare made a lot of money from wool from the fines he had to pay for dealing in wool without a licence. The level of the fine depended on the amount of wool a person was dealing, and the financial turnover from that business. From the fines John was paying, we can ascertain that he was making quite a lot of money from wool. It’s also interesting to note that in 1602, the year after his father died, Shakespeare suddenly invested a large sum of money in land in Stratford-upon-Avon. Well, that money came from somewhere...”

10. Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, drowned

In 1596, William and Anne’s only son, Hamnet – twin to Judith – died at the age of 11. As was customary at the time, the cause of death was not recorded, and Hamnet was buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon on 11 August.

“Various causes of death have been suggested over the years, from drowning to plague,” says Edmondson. “But the truth is, we just don’t know.”

• Read more | Why did Maggie O'Farrell write about Shakespeare's son?

11. We don’t know what Shakespeare really looked like

Of the many images of William Shakespeare, only two portraits purport to have been created from life: the so-called Cobbe portrait of c1610 and the famous Chandos portrait – painted between 1600–10 and the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. But there are only two works of art that can be definitively identified as William Shakespeare, according to Edmondson, and both are posthumous.

“The frontispiece for the title page of Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623, features a portrait engraving of the playwright by Martin Droeshout,” he comments. “The second identifiable image of Shakespeare is the bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, which, thanks to research by Professor Lena Cowen Orlin, we now know was probably commissioned by Shakespeare himself.”

12. Shakespeare had an illegitimate son

Poet and playwright Sir William Davenant (1606–68) was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of William Shakespeare in the playwright’s own lifetime – and he may well have been, according to Edmondson. “William was of the Davenant family in Oxford with whom Shakespeare probably stayed occasionally,” he comments. “Shakespeare would no doubt have been acquainted with William’s mother, Jane, and is even said by some to have stood as young William’s godfather.”

Davenant never denied the rumours surrounding his parentage and went on to found the Duke’s Playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields after the Restoration in 1660, and was known as a theatre manager, poet and playwright, even adapting plays by Shakespeare.

13. Shakespeare died of a fever

“The earliest reference to how Shakespeare died is in the 1660s, in a notebook belonging to the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon in which he wrote that Shakespeare had had a ‘merry meeting’ with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton and had died of a fever that he had contracted,” explains Edmondson. “By the 18th century, this story had morphed into a tale that Shakespeare had been on a drinking bout around Stratford and woken up drunk beneath a tree somewhere in Warwickshire. We actually have a number of twigs at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust – donated over the centuries – that are said to be from the very tree under which Shakespeare awoke.

“It’s quite plausible that Shakespeare did die of a fever – something that could easily happen if he had drunk some infected water. Later biographers have him dying of syphilis or typhus, but we don’t actually know how he died. The vicar who noted fever as the cause of death did so after visiting Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, before she died. Who’s to say that the story didn’t come from her? It’s not impossible to accept oral history written down within 50 years of Shakespeare’s death, when his daughter was still alive.”

]]>Why did Maggie O'Farrell write about Shakespeare's son?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-maggie-ofarrell-write-hamnet-shakespeares-son/2026-01-26T12:37:41.000ZVery little is known about the only son of playwright William Shakespeare, except that he died at the age of 11. The life of young Hamnet and the effect that his premature death had on his father is reimagined by Maggie O’Farrell in an emotional departure from her previous works. Did the young boy’s death influence the bard’s later writing? And is the name of one of his most famous plays, Hamlet, a coincidence – was Shakespeare trying to tell us something?

What inspired you to focus on Hamnet Shakespeare, and how much do we actually know about his life?

We know he was born, and we know he died but apart from that, pretty much nothing. I have always been struck by how little space Hamnet was given in biographies. There's usually a paragraph about how common child mortality was in the late-16th century, but the implication was that it wasn’t that upsetting to lose a child because it happened a lot. It seemed preposterous to me because it must have been devastating to lose your only son, at age 11.

Hamnet’s mother [Anne Hathaway] has also been unfairly maligned as an older woman who tricked a younger man into marriage. I think we need to look at her with fresh eyes which is why I gave her back her actual name. Her father named her Agnes, which raises a question: why all these years do we refer to her as Anne? I wanted to write a novel that gave voice to these people who've been silenced by history.

• Read more | What happened to Shakespeare's daughters?

This is quite a departure from your previous novels. How different did you find writing this book?

When writing historically there's a lot of library-based research you can do, but the author has to inhabit the lives of these people.

For example, when writing the first chapter, I had this young boy falling on the floor. I stopped because I had no idea what the floor of a Tudor kitchen would be made of. I went to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw the flagstone Tudor floors for myself. I cultivated my own Elizabethan garden and learnt how to make traditional medicines.

In terms of the writing, it was like going back to the start of my writing career. All the metaphors and techniques you become used to don't work when you’re writing with the minds of 16th-century people.

Did knowing so little about Hamnet allow you more creative licence?

This is a fictional interpretation of what might have happened; the name Shakespeare never appears because I am taking the lives of real people who lived and breathed. No one really knows why the real Hamnet Shakespeare died.

I've also always wondered why there's no mention in Shakespeare’s works of the plague. It seems extraordinary for it to have been such an ever-present terror, killing swathes of people, yet he never reached for it when constructing his plays. I sort of answer that for myself in the novel.

]]>What happened to Shakespeare's daughters? A guide to the playwright's family life and descendantshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/the-shakespeare-family-saga/2026-01-26T12:32:00.000ZHe is one of the greatest writers of all time, and our longing to know as much as we can about him continues.

We know that William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to John and Mary Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and that he was their first child to survive past infancy. During the Elizabethan period, infant mortality was very high, and his parents had already lost two daughters before young William was born.

The exact date of his birth is unknown, but his baptismal record survives, showing that Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare (William, son of John Shakespeare) was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Holy Trinity Church on 26 April 1564. His birthday is now celebrated on 23 April, since it was common for baptisms to be held three days after a birth.

As a film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's historical novel, Hamnet, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, is released, find out more about the playwright's home life and how his family influences shaped him – plus what happened to his daughters after the story of Hamnet concludes.

William Shakespeare's birth family: who were his parents?

The story of Shakespeare’s family – one of upward social mobility – is reflected in their homes. Start in the small village of Wilmcote, three miles north of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the playwright’s mother, Mary Arden, grew up in 
a small farmhouse built around 1514 by her father, Robert.

Mary was the youngest of eight daughters by his first wife; his second, Agnes Hill, brought with her two sons and two daughters. When Robert made his will in 1556, he named young Mary as one of his two executors and left her a substantial amount of land and money, which suggests that she was 
a woman of exceptional ability.

Mary Arden married the up-and-coming glover (and later wool dealer and money-lender) John Shakespeare, probably in 1557. 
Before long they moved into his substantial double-house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, now known as Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Mary had eight children, but only six survived infancy. John gave the town loyal service, rising through the ranks from the relatively humble role of ale-taster to become alderman and, in 1568, bailiff (or mayor.) His application for a coat of arms was unsuccessful in 1576, but he was granted one 20 years later, when he was said to be worth £500 – 
a sum not to be sneezed at. He died in 1601.

In 1594 John’s eldest son, William, had become a shareholder in the troupe of players called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, based in London. Three years later William demonstrated his commitment to his home town of Stratford by buying New Place, the largest house in the borough.

Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway

In 1582, at the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway (also known as Agnes), who was already around three months pregnant with their daughter Susanna. The Hathaways – tenant farmers with 90 acres of land in the nearby village of Shottery – were acquaintances of the Shakespeares, and William may have met Anne while helping with the local harvest.

To ensure the pregnancy didn’t cause a scandal, Shakespeare had to apply to the Bishop’s Court in Worcester for permission to hold a wedding at short notice. Between 1570 and 1630 the records show that only three men in Stratford-upon-Avon were married below the age of 20 (the average age to marry was 26). Shakespeare was the only one of those whose wife was already pregnant.

William and Anne also had three children, an elder daughter, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet.

Shakespeare's family at New Place

New Place in Stratford was demolished in the 18th century but archaeological excavations carried out under the auspices of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust have added to our knowledge about the size and layout of the property. It had five gables, a courtyard, three floors, and between 20 and 30 rooms – more than enough to accommodate the entire extended family, if necessary. Indeed, Thomas Greene, Town Clerk from 1603 to 1617 and a member of the Middle Temple, who described himself as William’s cousin – the word could be flexibly used – lodged there with his family.

There would also have been ample space 
for William’s unmarried brothers, Richard, Gilbert and Edmund, of whom little is known. We do know that Edmund, 16 years younger than William, became an actor in London like his brother, had a bastard child, and died when he was only 27. He was buried in what is now Southwark Cathedral on the last day of 1607 to the sound of the ‘great bell’ – the tolling of which cost someone, probably William, £1. Gilbert, who witnessed the deed of purchase for New Place in William’s absence, worked at one time as a haberdasher in London. Of Richard we know only that he was baptised in Stratford on 11 March 1574 and buried there on 4 February 1613.

William’s sister Joan, born in 1569, married 
a hatter, William Hart, some time before 1600. They had four children: William, Mary, Thomas and Michael. Joan’s husband died in 1616 only a week before his famous brother-in-law, who left Joan life tenancy of part of the Henley Street house, along with £20 and “all his wearing apparel”. She lived there until her death in 1646 when the house, along with the adjoining dwelling, passed to her son Thomas, and then to his son, another Thomas, by the will of Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Barnard. The property, identified as the Birthplace on the earliest surviving map of the town (dated 1759), remained in the family till 1806. The line continued; John Shakespeare Hart, a chair-maker, was buried in Tewkesbury Abbey in 1800 with a memorial that mistakenly described him as “the sixth descendant from the poet Shakespeare”. Subsequent family members emigrated to Australia.

When Shakespeare died in 1616, the bulk of Shakespeare’s estate went to his daughter, Susanna, who, with her husband John Hall, moved into New Place while Anne was still there. Anne lived at New Place for another seven years until her death in 1623.

What happened to William Shakespeare's children?

Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet – the name a variant of Hamlet – died in 1596, aged only 11. Presumably, like his father, he had been a pupil at the free grammar school, though its records from this period don’t survive.

Susanna, born six months after her parents married, seems to have been an accomplished woman with a mind of her own. She was reported to the Ecclesiastical Court for refusing to take communion at Easter 1606 when, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, the authorities were especially anxious to round up possible Roman Catholic sympathisers. The case was dismissed. The following year she married the strongly Protestant physician John Hall, and her father gave her the substantial gift of 107 acres of land in Old Stratford as a marriage settlement, while apparently retaining a life interest.

In 1613 her marriage was afflicted by scandal when one John Lane claimed that Susanna had caught a sexually transmitted infection from a married hatter and haberdasher named Ralph Smith. She successfully sued Lane for defamation of character in Worcester Consistory Court. Lane, who did not turn up to defend himself, was excommunicated. These events are dramatised in Peter Whelan’s successful play The Herbal Bed (1996).

The Halls are believed to have lived in the large and handsome house on the outskirts of the town now known as Hall’s Croft, which dates from 1613 and may have been built for them; when Shakespeare died in 1616 they moved into New Place. Shakespeare left most of his property to Susanna and appointed the Halls as his executors.

Susanna lived until 1649. Her epitaph reads “Witty” – that is, intelligent – “beyond her sex, but that’s not all, / Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall.” 
In this period, education for girls lagged far behind that for boys, but there were petty schools in the town where both boys and girls could learn to read, write and do their sums. Susanna’s signature survives in the records of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, seems to have been a bit of a handful. At the age of 31, less than two months before her father died, she married Thomas Quiney, son of a prominent townsman, in Holy Trinity Church – but was excommunicated because they had not obtained the special licence required for marriage in Lent. There was reason to marry in a hurry: soon afterwards Quiney was accused of “incontinence” with Margaret Wheeler, who had been buried with their illegitimate child. He pleaded guilty. Shakespeare made changes to his will seemingly designed to protect Judith’s interests. She and Thomas went on to have three sons, all of whom died young; they called the eldest, born soon after his grandfather died, Shakespeare. Judith lived until 1662.

Shakespeare’s last direct descendant was Elizabeth, born to Susanna and John Hall in 1608. He left her most of his silver plate (easily convertible into cash if she wished). She married Thomas Nash and they lived in New Place. After he died she married John Barnard, a prosperous widower with several children, in 1649. When her mother died soon afterwards the couple moved into New Place. A staunch Royalist, Barnard was made a baronet in 1661. Later they moved back into his ancestral home, Abington Manor in Northamptonshire, an even more splendid house than New Place, where Elizabeth died childless in 1670.

So a family story that began in a modest farmhouse ended with Shakespeare’s granddaughter in a great manor house. What would Mary Arden have made of that?

Does Shakespeare have any living descendants?

Shakespeare has no direct living descendants, but there are still descendants of his sister Joan and her husband William Hart.

His childhood home on Henley Street in Stratford remains in the care of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Stanley Wells is a leading authority on Shakespeare. He is honorary president of 
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham

]]>Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/not-1066-again-should-we-ditch-our-obsession-with-dates/2025-11-19T13:00:01.000ZIn 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.”

Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.”

But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time.

Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history?

The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology.

Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history.

Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’.

Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.

But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes.

• Read more | Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong

Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past.

Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic.

Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia.

The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures.

Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events.

Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them.

Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant.

To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”.

As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories.

In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself.

• Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster

Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.”

So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments.

Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools.

• Read more | Do you know all the major periods in British history?

To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose.

History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it?

Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”.

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Shakespeare’s 'lost years': what do we know about this secretive chapter of the bard's life?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/shakespeares-lost-years-what-do-we-know-about-this-secretive-chapter-of-the-bards-life/2025-06-13T14:20:38.000ZThe idea that William Shakespeare’s life contains a stretch of “lost years” is a minor ghost that haunts popular biographies and discussion of his poems and plays. Those missing years are conventionally taken to begin in February 1585, when Shakespeare’s children – twins Judith and Hamnet – were baptised at Stratford upon Avon, and to end in September 1592, when he was described as being “an upstart Crow” in a gossipy pamphlet in London.

Between these dates, we have no reliable record that ties Shakespeare to any particular location, or reveals what he was doing. Shakespeare was 20 when his lost years began, and 28 when they ended.

Those seven-and-a-half lost years belong in a wider landscape in which we know remarkably little about the playwright. We know virtually nothing for sure about Shakespeare’s schooling, which he probably completed in 1578 or so; nor what he did until he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582.

• Listen on the podcast | What happened in Shakespeare's lost years?

This is not only the case for Shakespeare: scholars may hate to admit it, but our ignorance of so much of this period is vast. Almost 60 per cent of the 3,000 different plays written between 1570 and 1642 are lost. While some titles survive, there could be some lost plays that we have never even heard of at all. It is a safe guess, but a guess nonetheless, that plays by Shakespeare are among these wholly lost plays. We are uncertain of even the most basic things. Until the remains of the Elizabethan Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London, were discovered in 2012, theatre historians assumed that it was round; it turned out to be rectangular.

Why the lost years matter

Shakespeare’s undocumented years have a special quality: enigmatic, evocative and instructive. As those years began, Shakespeare was a young man in a provincial town who had written nothing and had few prospects. When they ended, he was celebrated enough as a playwright to be worth attacking. The lost years are exactly the period of his genesis as a writer.

What has filled those years is a series of guesses and rumours. Half a century after Shakespeare’s death, the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey began collecting anecdotes and stories about Shakespeare from people who had known him, notably the son of an actor who had been a member of Shakespeare’s company.

Aubrey recounts, in his Brief Lives – a collection of short biographies – two slightly different stories about those lost years. “This William being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting,” Aubrey wrote, “came to London I guess about 18 and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well.” Then a little later, he added: “he had been in his younger years a School-master in the Country.”

The two stories don’t quite fit together: a diligent, rural Shakespeare versus a theatrical, London one. But they establish the two main traditions of thinking about this time.

The writer and poet Nicholas Rowe prepared the first real biography of Shakespeare for his own edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1709. Rowe had apparently not read Aubrey, but he offers an expanded version of the first idea. He repeats a Stratford legend, that the young Shakespeare fell into “ill company” and poached a deer from a local gentleman. The ensuing trouble meant he had to flee to London, where he found work at a playhouse. There, suggests Rowe, “his admirable Wit, and the natural Turn of it to the Stage, soon distinguish’d him, if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent Writer”.

Read more | Did someone else write the plays of William Shakespeare? The real history that debunks the conspiracy

This is an echo, or revision, of Aubrey’s first story. Another version, which circulated in the 17th century, was that the young Shakespeare held the horses at the playhouse door.

The alternative and less thespian description of Shakespeare also pops up in the early biographies. Edmond Malone, in his great edition of the plays (1790) and the biographical essay which accompanies it, extended Rowe’s biography into a much more reliable timeline of Shakespeare’s life and works. This edition is the foundation of much later textual study, and while it is a mountain of scholarship it is not without a little sentimental speculation.

In it, Malone speculates that after leaving school, Shakespeare was “employed, while he yet remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney”. Perhaps so: it is worth noting that Malone himself had trained as a barrister.

Along with the development of Shakespeare biography, and the beginnings of careful scholarly work on the texts of the plays, came the realisation that some things were unknown. We might say that the lost years are really a sign of how much has been found; it was only once much was known, with some degree of confidence, that the idea of “lost years” emerged. In a further apparent paradox, in the early 20th century the phrase itself became less an admission of ignorance than a boast about knowledge.

Player, teacher, clerk?

Those keenest to use the phrase have been those most sure they have the answer. Arthur Acheson’s 1920 book Shakespeare’s Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 confidently uses the phrase “lost years” – and sometimes “dark years” – to refer to this specific period, but only to find them to be not so lost at all. His book discovers Shakespeare, as in Rowe, arriving early in London. E A J Honigmann’s 1985 book Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” places him back in the countryside: in Lancashire, working in the household of a Catholic family in Lancashire, perhaps as a player (actor), or a tutor. In each case, that “lost” is rhetorical.

Shakespeare the player, the teacher, the clerk: the timidity of the suggestions is revealing. There is no evidence that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in those years. But what he wasn’t tells us much about him.

Shakespeare was not at university, while so many of his contemporary playwrights were. He was not a spy, while his great rival Christopher Marlowe was, in the same period of his life.

The lost years mark him as apart and this is why they matter both as an episode and a story. They say: here is a mystery. Your attempt to solve it may reveal something only about you.

Shakespeare got there first, of course. In the middle of his play The Winter’s Tale, a character called Time enters, and addresses the audience:

Impute it not a crime

To me, or my swift passage, that I slide

O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried

Of that wide gap. 

Between the first and second halves of the play, 16 years have disappeared, and Time offers an apology that soon turns into a boast:

Of that wide gap, since it is in my power

To o’er throw law, and in one self-born hour

To plant and o’erwhelm custom.

The lost years are Shakespeare’s self-born hour. In them, he exits the world of conventional, discoverable biography, and enters the world of the theatre, of play and invention.

Daniel Swift is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University London. He is the author of The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare (2025)

]]>My history hero: Joan Armatrading chooses Charles Dickens (1812–70)https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-history-hero-joan-armatrading-chooses-charles-dickens/2025-03-03T08:30:39.000Z

In profile

Charles Dickens is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He wrote a string of bestselling books and short stories including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations, creating some of literature’s best-known characters in the process. His books are still in print, and many have been adapted for stage and screen. He is buried at London’s Westminster Abbey.

When did you first hear about Dickens?

In my childhood. I went to the local library all the time while I was growing up, reading books by Dickens, Shakespeare and Enid Blyton – the ‘classics’. I particularly loved Dickens’ use of words – it’s poetry, really – and the language that he used is the language we use today.

What kind of man was he?

These days we talk about people who are humanitarian, entrepreneurial or philanthropic, and Dickens was all of those. Being from a poor family, he had a sense of where he came from, which made him conscious of the plights and poverty of others, and he wrote about such people in his novels.

• Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Charles Dickens and his family home

I think he was also a very thoughtful man, even if he behaved selfishly at times. But that’s human nature: each of us has two sides.

What made him a hero?

Above all, his artistry – the words and the phrasing – and the incredible stories he dreamed up that have engaged so many people over the years. I write songs and music and, while I don’t find it a struggle, it’s not an easy thing to do – unless you’re a born storyteller, as he clearly was.

Moreover, his stories have lasted; they’re as powerful today as the day he wrote them. I subconsciously lean on Dickens because, though I’d never call myself a poet, I try to use words that have meaning and flow. I also admire him for all he did to help those less fortunate than himself.

What was Dickens’ finest hour?

I particularly like Hard Times, because [scenes with school board superintendent] Mr Gradgrind make me think of myself. He tells his class not to daydream – but my whole existence is about daydreaming, as was Dickens’.

It’s how you create: you have to imagine something before you can make it tangible. So many characters in Dickens’ work, like Little Dorrit, have real substance and strength, too.

Is there anything that you don’t admire about him?

The way he treated his wife, Catherine – but people have emotions and can’t always control them, as I wrote in my song ‘The Weakness in Me’. Overall, though, I think he was a good person.

• On the podcast | The dark side of Dickens

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

Only in terms of the writing, having that creative streak and making our own way in life.

If you could meet Dickens, what would you ask him?

I’d like to know to what extent the story of Little Dorrit was autobiographical.

Joan Armatrading CBE is an Ivor Novello Award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. Her new album is How Did This Happen and What Does It Now Mean

This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>My history hero: Martin Shaw chooses William Shakespeare (1564–1616)https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-history-hero-martin-shaw-chooses-william-shakespeare/2024-12-27T08:30:31.000Z

In profile

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he wrote more than 30 plays and at least 154 sonnets. Many of his plays, which include Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth and Hamlet, have been adapted for television and cinema. More than 400 years after his death, he is still widely regarded as the greatest writer and dramatist in the English language. He is buried in Stratford-upon-Avon.

When did you first hear about Shakespeare?

At school. I had a wonderful English teacher, Alan Hill, who explained Shakespeare in a very enlightened way. But I must have also had an innate ability to understand the language because, unlike some of my classmates, I never found the Bard threatening.

What kind of man was he?

Nobody knows, do they? He’s one of the great enigmas of the age. We don’t even know what he looked like – but I hope that smiling portrait with the dashing earring is the real man. He was clearly a person of extraordinary depth, perception, intellect and learning.

And I don’t for one second hold with the idea that those plays were written by somebody else, though there is evidence that some of his later plays might have had bits added.

What made him a hero?

First, nobody can touch him as a dramatist. He’s the greatest playwright of all time, and no one else manages the depth and perception of his writing. What makes Shakespeare so special is that one keeps on discovering new ways of interpreting his work.

• Quiz | How much do you know about Shakespeare's life and work?

Second is his ability to see both sides of an argument when there is a conflict or dispute, and to express both pain and pleasure. He really understood human nature, and would have made a great psychologist.

What was his finest hour?

The most concentrated, flawless outpouring from his quill is Hamlet. It just contains ‘more’ of everything, and certain lines in the play – such as the “Not a whit. We defy augury” passage in Act 5, Scene 2 – are just transcendental.

Is there anything about him that you don’t particularly admire?

Not really. Some cast doubt on the accuracy of his portrayal of Richard III, but you have to remember that he was required to show support for the Tudor cause or risk retribution.

Do you think Shakespeare still speaks to young people today?

Sadly, no. I’m afraid there’s a growing intellectual laziness in society. Perhaps Shakespeare is just not as well taught now as in my day – or perhaps I was just extremely fortunate to have had a teacher who brought him alive? On the other hand, I have seen some brilliant young actors doing Shakespeare, and that is encouraging.

• Read more | 8 places that shaped the life of William Shakespeare

What would you ask Shakespeare if you could meet him?

I’d ask if there are any more plays we don’t know about. Perhaps, with modern technology, it might be possible to look into his grave with a mini-camera, without disturbing what’s left of his remains, to see if there is anything there. It’s an intriguing thought!

Martin Shaw is an award-winning actor of stage and screen, appearing in the 1971 film version of Macbeth. He plays Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons at Theatre Royal Bath 16–25 January 2025, then on national tour (theatreroyal.org.uk)

This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Race, love & money: 8 Shakespeare plays that reveal the pasthttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/shakespeare-what-plays-reveal/2024-04-23T06:28:26.000ZTitus Andronicus and ideas of racial difference

by Rebecca Adusei

At the start of Titus Andronicus – one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, believed to have been written around 1590 – the protagonist, Roman general Titus, returns home after fighting the Goths. What then follows is a violent story of death, racism, cannibalism and mutilation.

The idea of race infuses the play entirely. Although Shakespeare presents his characters as being in two tiers – the Romans, and the people seen as ‘the other’ – even that portrayal is multifaceted. The character of Tamora, for instance, is queen of the Goths, a people repeatedly characterised in the play as barbarous. Yet she has an ability to infiltrate and move within Roman society because of her whiteness, and is chosen by the emperor Saturninus to be his wife.

Shakespeare: Past Master | A podcast series

Listen to the full versions of these conversations in our podcast series Shakespeare: Past Master, which reveals how the playwright’s works offer insights into the time in which he lived – and how the past was viewed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.

Tamora has autonomy and agency, freedoms that were not afforded to her lover, ‘Aaron the Moor’. The intercultural relationship between Tamora and Saturninus would have been more palatable to early modern audiences, because it was believed that the Goths were ancestors of the English. The idea of Tamora and Aaron together, however, may have made those audiences feel uncomfortable.

By the turn of the 17th century, black characters were commonplace on the stage. Around that time, Europeans were increasingly encountering people from sub-Saharan Africa, a development reflected in the growing numbers of black characters that appeared in dramatic works. Possibly the earliest example appears in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, written around 1587 – so pre-dates Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

The early modern theatre industry generated a lot of revenue, and playwrights such as Shakespeare and Marlowe had vested economic stakes in the industry, so they had strong motivations to include excitement and novelty in their plays.

• Read more | Shakespeare’s best (or worst) villains

One way of doing so was to feature black characters (played by white actors in blackface) to provide visual spectacle and, in some instances, as figures of fear. In Titus Andronicus, for instance, Aaron is a direct catalyst for the violence and tragedy that runs throughout the play. Shakespeare was reinforcing a particular view of black masculinity that depicted black men as aggressive and sexually driven, and in some cases as evil and sinister.

Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King’s College London, analysing depictions and characterisations of sub-Saharan Africans in early modern literature and drama

Romeo and Juliet and the experiences of youth and young love

by Sophie Duncan

It’s fascinating that Shakespeare chose to make the protagonists of this play so scandalously young, even by the standards of the 16th century. Unusually, he specifies that Juliet is not yet 14 years of age – it’s clear he wants us to take note of that point.

The story itself is an old one, though Shakespeare’s most recent source was a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke, whose Juliet is 16. However, unlike Brooke – who paints the couple as naughty, libidinous teenagers – Shakespeare ultimately views the tragic teens as victims of their families’ fatal feud.

We tend to think of the teenager as an invention of the 20th century but, even in Shakespeare’s day, parenting manuals were produced to explain the changes adolescents go through and advise how to keep teenagers on the straight and narrow. Shakespeare himself is pretty astute about teenage boys: the play explores gang warfare, and its male romantic hero is also its most violent character.

In the 20th century, Romeo and Juliet became a launchpad for discussions about the teenage experience, and that emphasis on rebelliousness and gang identity grew ever more prominent as overt teen culture developed.

The most famous adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, the musical West Side Story, was inspired by reports of teenage gang violence in New York. In general, though, Shakespeare himself appears to have been on the side of the young.

Romeo and Juliet has become a byword for the ultimate love story. Because of this, the extreme youth of its title characters is sometimes overlooked. If we focus on the fact that they’re so young, though, the story becomes less about pure romance and more a picture of teen infatuation – a kind of Elizabethan Twilight.

In many ways, it’s quite toxic, invoking seductive but unsustainable ideas of ‘us against the world’ and ‘true love hurts’. If the protagonists were older, there would be ordinary life to grapple with: Romeo would have an estate to manage, and Juliet would be running a household.

In fact, during their longest sequence together on stage, one of them is either dead or unconscious. In short, it’s a very atypical relationship that has become a curious kind of template for romance.

Sophie Duncan is a research fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford

The Merchant of Venice and the human cost of capitalism

by Emma Smith

The Elizabethan theatre was a crucible for exploring changing ideas, including those about the economy. Shakespeare focuses on such ideas in The Merchant of Venice, with its concern about what was then a hot topic – what we’d now call capitalism.

This was a moment of speculative enterprises and big profit, when the Merchant Adventurers, the Muscovy Company and the Virginia Company were exploring and exploiting the world’s resources and bringing them back to London. That’s what the merchant Antonio does in the play. As a result, he experiences a terrible moment when his fortunes are lost completely – reflecting the dangers of sea travel and the risks involved in that kind of investment.

Another fascinating, somewhat troubling and ambiguous figure is the Jewish moneylender Shylock. He helps people finance their operations or speculations, but is also despised by Antonio and his friends, who spurn him and call him a “dog”. Commercial lending was first made legal in England in 1545, when the limit for interest rates on loans was 10 per cent.

Shylock’s outsider status as a Jewish person could be read as the play’s attempt to scapegoat these emerging financial models in a single character who can be externalised and punished, but I think what Shakespeare ultimately shows is that this doesn’t work. In fact, everybody in the play is implicated in this world of borrowing, lending and paying back at interest.

Capitalism is also highlighted in the play’s romantic subplot. Most of Shakespeare’s comedies revolve around courtship, but The Merchant of Venice is much more clear-sighted about the fact that upper-class Elizabethan marriages were affairs not of the heart but of the wallet.

Bassanio describes the object of his affections, Portia, as wealthy before he even mentions her name, and borrows money from Shylock (via Antonio) to make himself appear wealthier in order to court her. He’s a kind of scammer, taking out credit to make an investment on the basis that he can ultimately win a huge reward.

Shakespeare shows how capitalism affects – and infects – emotional relationships. There isn’t a sphere of our lives that isn’t influenced by money, as Shakespeare identified, with some prescience.

Emma Smith is professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford

Macbeth and the challenges of kingship

by Paul Edmondson

Shakespeare had explored kingship in many other plays before Macbeth (c1606). We know that he was writing to please James VI and I, who, from 1603, was the patron of the King’s Men, the company for which Shakespeare was the leading playwright and in which he owned shares.

We also know that in 1605 James saw a production of Matthew Gwinne’s Tres Sibyllae (Three Sibyls), in which the title characters prophesy that the seed of Banquo – Macbeth’s ally turned ghostly nemesis – will rule forever. James traced his ancestry back to the historical Banquo, so would have been delighted that Shakespeare’s play hinted at the triumph of his ancestor’s children.

In 1599, James wrote Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gifts) – a kind of how-to-be-a-king book, which Shakespeare clearly read. (James was also interested in witchcraft, which also influenced Shakespeare’s portrayal of the three weird sisters in Macbeth.)

• On the podcast | Elizabethan witchcraft: a trial that divided a community

The book sees James differentiate between a true king and a tyrant: one acknowledges himself ordained for his people, having received from God a burden of government whereof he must be accountable, whereas the other thinks his people ordained for him are prey to his appetites. We very much see the latter in Macbeth, which also features searing references to the state of Scotland under that tyrant’s power.

Over time, productions of the play have increasingly focused on psychological realism, dramatising what it feels like to be a murderer and to be in a toxic marriage. That’s unlike early versions: for example, Sir William Davenant’s adaptation staged for Charles II, in which Macbeth is portrayed as analogous to Oliver Cromwell, and Malcolm (son of the murdered King Duncan) as Charles himself. Davenant very much used the play to present the politics of his time.

Kingship or queenship – as opposed to mere leadership – has a special meaning in Shakespeare’s plays. Whatever we feel about monarchy, I think that Macbeth will endure as a story so long as power is being tested and challenged, and that productions of Macbeth will be staged underground in oppressive regimes throughout the world, as they have in dictatorships over the centuries.

Paul Edmondson is head of research for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Henry V and the swirling currents of nationalism

by Jerry Brotton

Although the accuracy of the events depicted in Henry V is debated, it has a sound historical skeleton: the 15th-century battle of Agincourt and siege of Harfleur. But the play is, of course, drama rather than history, and Shakespeare wrote it for particular theatrical effect.

That’s most notable in the inspiring speech that’s delivered by Henry before Agincourt in 1415, featuring the much-quoted line: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” We believe that the real Henry V may well have given a rousing speech before that battle, but Shakespeare obviously took a lot of poetic licence. And, as with other historical plays, these lines speak as much to the time in which they were written as they do to the past.

Henry V (c1599) completes a cycle of history plays Shakespeare had been writing since the beginning of his career. After that point, he focused more on tragedies and comedies, so we can see the play as both a summation of his interest in English history and of his narrative of how Anglo-French rivalry culminated in Agincourt. That battle was particularly important for the Tudors, because the period saw the beginnings of a certain idea of ‘Englishness’. So Shakespeare writing about these events of a century earlier would have had a particular power.

I’ve always been struck by the way in which figures in the English and French courts in the play talk about the English identity as being mixed. A later scene underscores the central problematic question: what is Englishness, in 1415 or even in 1599? At that time, there wasn’t a sense of a ‘pure’ national identity. This wasn’t a nation state, and the play’s language is very much about absolutist sovereignty – about Tudor royal power.

At the time Shakespeare wrote Henry V, this was a disunited kingdom, at war with itself. There was infighting between the Scottish and the Welsh; the Tudors also pursued a brutal policy of colonial settlement in Ireland. So the play tells us about fractures of 1599 – which we may also recognise today.

Jerry Brotton is professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London and author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Allen Lane, 2016)

Hamlet and society’s renewed fears about mortality

by Farah Karim-Cooper

Views of death were in flux at the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, around the turn of the 17th century. Beliefs of the Catholic medieval world had been thrown into chaos by the Reformation, and that in turn had inspired a culture of questioning and doubt typified in Martin Luther’s theses, to which Hamlet alludes.

In the Middle Ages, Catholics believed that, after death, you might go to purgatory, at which point surviving loved ones would have to pay the church for your pardon, or pray for your sins to be purged away. You might then make it to heaven, or go to what Hamlet calls “the other place”: hell.

The Reformation shook that entrenched, embedded belief system, and people suddenly had to believe in something completely different, discarding ideas of purgatory, for example. Most critics agree that Shakespeare used the character of Hamlet to navigate this sense of belief chaos, and to explore doubts and questions about death rife in society at the time.

It’s interesting that Hamlet is a student in Wittenberg (now in eastern Germany), which was the birthplace of the Reformation. The Reformation encouraged inquiry and the questioning of received wisdom, and you can argue that Hamlet embodies that process.

But the preoccupation with death evident in Shakespeare’s play was also strongly influenced by 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne’s essay that begins “To study philosophy is to learn to die,” which explores the importance of keeping death in the front of your mind every day. Montaigne argued that, instead of being afraid of death, you really need to interrogate it and question it.

Although it’s hard to read Shakespeare’s biography into his plays, we can see him grappling with death in many of them. Grief was surely a concern: we can assume he experienced the worst kind of grief when his only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596. So while I don’t advise seeking the author in his plays, it’s hard to deny that death was a major preoccupation for him.

Farah Karim-Cooper is Globe professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London and director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe

Julius Caesar and the drama of politics

by Islam Issa

Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the conspiracy surrounding the grisly assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC reflects many of the big questions that gripped the playwright’s age. Indeed, the incident – widely regarded in the west as the most famous non-Biblical historical event – was already popular with Elizabethan writers. At least four other plays about Caesar had been produced in the two decades prior to Shakespeare’s, which was written c1599.

• Quiz | How much do you know about Julius Caesar?

Those who lived through the religious and political upheaval triggered by the Protestant Reformation saw parallels with the chaos of the late Roman republic. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the notion of life without a monarch would have been inconceivable. His portrayal of Caesar as a would-be king whose untimely death and lack of nominated successor plunged the Roman world into chaos would have resonated with spectators mindful of the unresolved matter of Elizabeth I’s successor.

Shakespeare’s use of anachronism in the play serves to reinforce the symmetry between ancient events and contemporary questions about the nature of power. For example, in Act 2, Scene 1, a clock chimes – perhaps to nudge his early modern audience to consider how concerns of their own time echoed those of ancient Rome.

Shakespeare was an armchair traveller. Having never left England, he was dependent on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Roman historian Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, evident in his characterisation of Brutus, the best known of Caesar’s assassins. Plutarch clearly held Brutus in high esteem, and it is this representation of a “gentle”, “noble-minded”, generally upstanding individual who appears in Julius Caesar – a conscientious figure caught between two irreconcilable positions.

Shakespeare seems to have been interested in this ambiguity, leaving the great questions of his age unanswered on stage. His England was one of polarisation and cloak-and-dagger espionage: though many people loved their queen, others were bent on overthrowing her. This treasonous current culminated in 1605 with the gunpowder plot to assassinate James VI & I, through which Shakespeare lived. Julius Caesar is, therefore, a product of its time, tacitly if not explicitly reflecting the tense political landscape of its debut.

Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University

The Tempest and reactionary views of the role of women

by Chris Laoutaris

The Tempest took the lead slot in the First Folio – possibly guided by political factors. The publication of the Folio coincided with a misogynistic injunction issued by James VI & I instructing London’s clergy to rebuke women for impropriety. Playwrights and poets followed suit, pandering to the monarch’s prejudices by using their work to moralise.

Certainly, The Tempest’s depiction of an obedient daughter who submits to her father’s total control over her marital and procreative destiny, while modestly upholding her own chastity, would have appealed to the king’s chauvinism.

A strong theme is the presentation of women as conduits for male dynastic power. Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are marooned on an island following the usurpation of the former’s dukedom by his brother. Miranda soon becomes the focus of her father’s plans to restore his bloodline to its rightful place in the world.

Conceived at a time when various European kingdoms were beginning to colonise the New World, the play also evokes imagery of virgin land and bountiful natural resources ripe for exploitation, drawing parallels between Miranda’s pure body and the enticing island she and her father inhabit.

The Tempest was produced at a time when marriage could sometimes be little more than a transaction between a woman’s father and husband, with the bride’s hand in marriage accompanied by the promise of money, land or property. Married women were referred to by the legal term covert-baron: literally, ‘covered by a husband’. On being married, a woman’s legal identity was subsumed into her husband’s.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have been familiar with poet Geoffrey Whitney’s 1586 book A Choice of Emblemes, which taught moral messages via imagery. Its depiction of a “virtuous wife” has her standing on a tortoise, covering her lips with one hand and holding a bunch of keys with the other. In essence, it denotes the permanence of home (the tortoise’s shell) and the woman’s need to consign herself to the domestic sphere in silent obedience.

The Tempest also alludes to another, unseen female presence, Sycorax – mother of the monstrous Caliban. Referred to by Prospero as a “foul witch”, Sycorax is juxtaposed with Miranda’s idealised womanhood, symbolising a dangerous, even demonic self-sufficient femininity. Prospero describes her son as the product of an unholy sexual union with the devil, presenting Caliban as a grotesque figure who is a living testament to his mother’s warped sense of womanhood.

Chris Laoutaris is associate professor at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon

This article first appeared in the January 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Why was King James VI and I obsessed with witch hunts?https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/shakespeares-macbeth-and-king-jamess-witch-hunts/2024-04-09T08:57:15.000ZA holocaust of their time, historians have long attempted to explain why and how the European witch craze that spread around Europe between the 15th and 18th century took such rapid and enduring hold.

One of the most active centres of witch-hunting was Scotland, where up to 4,000 people were put to the flames. This was striking for such a small country, and was more than double the execution rate in England. The ferocity of the Scottish persecutions can be attributed to royal witch-hunter James VI and I.

James’s obsession with witchcraft can be traced back to his childhood. The violent death of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to have inspired a dark fascination with magic. “His Highness told me her death was visible in Scotland before it did really happen,” related Sir John Harington many years later, being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air”.

Two years after Mary’s execution, another dramatic event deepened James’s growing obsession with magic and witchcraft. In 1589 he was betrothed to Anne of Denmark, but she almost lost her life in a violent tempest when she set sail across the North Sea to meet her new husband. In an uncharacteristic show of chivalry, James resolved to sail across to Denmark and collect her in person. But on their return voyage the royal fleet was battered by more storms and one of the ships was lost. James immediately placed the blame on witches, claiming that they must have cast evil spells upon his fleet.

As soon as he reached Scottish shores, James ordered a witch-hunt on a scale never seen before. No fewer than 70 suspects were rounded up in the coastal Scottish town of North Berwick on suspicion of raising a storm to destroy James and his new bride. Most of the suspects soon confessed – under torture – to concocting a host of bizarre and gruesome spells and rituals in order to whip up the storm. They included binding the severed genitalia and limbs of a dead man to the legs of a cat and then tossing it into the waves, whereupon “there did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seen”.

On another occasion, Satan himself was said to have appeared to the witches and “promised to raise a mist, and cast the king into England, for which purpose he threw into the sea a thing like a foot-ball”. They were swiftly convicted and put to death.

• Read more | Witches in the dock: 10 of Britain’s most infamous witch trials

As soon as the North Berwick trials had ended, James commissioned Newes from Scotland, a pamphlet that relayed the whole saga in scandalised language aimed at intensifying popular fear of witches. But he did not stop there. With all the passion of a religious zealot, James set about convincing his subjects of the evil that lay in their midst.

King James VI and I's Daemonologie

In 1597 James became the only monarch in history to publish a treatise on witchcraft: Daemonologie (literally, ‘the science of demons’) was the result of painstaking and meticulous work on James’s part and must have taken years to complete. As well as to convince the doubters of the existence of witchcraft, the purpose of Daemonologie was to inspire those who persecuted witches with new vigour and determination. James described witchcraft as “high treason against God”, which meant that all manner of horrors were justified in wringing confessions from the accused.

The fact that the treatise had been written by a king made it enormously influential. It is no coincidence that cases of witchcraft multiplied at an alarming rate in his kingdom thereafter.

Upon the death of Elizabeth I in March 1603 with no direct heirs, her throne passed to James. When he travelled south to take ownership of his new kingdom, the king of Scots was dismayed to find that his English subjects were far from sharing his witch-hunting fervour. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the number of witchcraft trials and executions in England had declined significantly. There was also a growing scepticism about the existence of witches.

This was anathema to the new king, who was determined to drown out all dissenting voices within his new kingdom. During the first year of his reign, Daemonologie was reprinted twice. This prompted a rash of similar pamphlets aimed at whipping up popular fear of witches. As part of a state-controlled printing industry, they became one of the most valuable means by which James and his government could manipulate public opinion.

But these publications were just the tip of the iceberg as far as James’s crusade against witches was concerned. In his view, the English law was by no means strict enough in prosecuting the crime. Barely a year after his accession, James therefore ordered that the Elizabethan statute on witchcraft be replaced by a much harsher version. Until now, those who practised witchcraft were severely punished only if they were found to have committed murder or other injuries through their devilish arts. However, James wanted the practice of any form of magic to be severely punished, regardless of whether it had caused harm to others.

The Witchcraft Act of 1604

The Witchcraft Act of 1604 made hanging mandatory for a first offence of witchcraft, even if the accused had not committed murder. And if the suspected witch was found to have the devil’s mark on their body, this was enough to condemn them to death. The act stipulated: “If any person or persons... shall use practise or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose... [they] shall suffer pains of death”.

James’s determination to stamp out witchcraft in all forms was brutally apparent: “All manner of practise, use or exercise of witchcraft, enchantment, charm or sorcery should be from henceforth utterly avoided, abolished, and taken away.”

James’s new subjects were eager to curry favour with him by echoing his hatred of witches. In the same year that the new Witchcraft Act was passed, Christopher Marlowe’s dark morality play, The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, was published. This had first been performed in around 1588, five years before the playwright’s death, and was one of the most shocking portrayals of witchcraft ever to be performed. Audiences were so aghast at the horrors that unfolded before them on stage that some claimed to have been driven mad by it, and on occasion real devils were said to have appeared on stage, “to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators”.

As well as terrifying people into avoiding any dabbling with necromancy, the play also intensified their hatred and fear of witches. It can have been no coincidence that it was published in the very year that James I began his crusade against witchcraft in England.

Other playwrights were quick to follow suit. Ben Jonson devised a number of masques for the entertainment of the king and his court. The ‘antimasque’ to his Masque of Queens included the presentation of a group of witches who represented “the opposites to good fame”.

The playwright had clearly done a great deal of research, for he referenced a range of current and classical demonological works as his sources. He set out detailed instructions for the staging of the antimasque, describing the entering on stage of 11 witches “some with rats on their head; some on their shoulders; others with ointment pots at their girdles; all… making a confused noise, with strange gestures”. One of their number was “naked armed, bare-footed, her frock tucked, her hair knotted, and folded with vipers; in her hand a torch made of a dead man’s arm, lighted; girded with a snake”.

How Shakespeare's Macbeth was influenced by King James's witch hunts

But the most famous of all the literary works inspired by witchcraft, winning widespread acclaim in its day and ever since, was William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Deliberately short in length (James was known to have little patience for sitting through long plays), it is significant that the occasion of its inaugural performance was a visit by Queen Anne’s brother, the king of Denmark, in 1606, given that it was James’s voyage to his wife’s native land that had prompted his obsession with witchcraft.

Shakespeare wove in several references to this voyage in the play, such as when the First Witch claims that she set sail in a sieve, just as one of the North Berwick witches was accused of doing. The line “Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” almost certainly alluded to James’s near-death experience in 1589.

All the leaders of the English judiciary would have been present at this important state occasion, and this was exactly the sort of play that would inspire within them the same witch-hunting fervour as their royal master. The drama centred around Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who murdered King Duncan to seize the throne of Scotland after three witches prophesied Macbeth’s succession.

Whether the witches thus caused the overthrow of the natural succession or merely brought out Macbeth’s inherent evil was left to the audience’s imagination. Either way, the play both confirmed and introduced new elements to the stereotypical view of a witch, with her spells, familiars and inherent evil. It also spawned two of the most-quoted lines in English literary history:

“Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

Macbeth instilled fear among those watching that witchcraft was not just a satanic confederacy, but a conspiracy against the state. The latter notion was all too readily accepted in England at this time because the play was performed just a few months after one of the most notorious conspiracies in history: the gunpowder plot.

Within the space of three short years, England had been catapulted from the ‘golden age’ of the Virgin Queen into one of the darkest and most dangerous periods of its history.

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2016

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