Incertainties The King & the Playwright: A Jacobean History


Incertainties

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On a chilly Boxing Day night four centuries ago,

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the nation's leading theatre company was about to stage a new play

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for a new, powerful patron.

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England's recently crowned King James I.

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The play's author was William Shakespeare,

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and the play was Measure for Measure.

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I love the people, but I do not like to stage me to their eyes.

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Set in a dark world of vice and corruption,

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led by an elusive ruler,

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it was a play the Elizabethan Shakespeare could never have written.

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I've spent most of my life absorbed in Shakespeare

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and the world he inhabited.

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A few years ago, I wrote a book called 1599,

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the year that culminated in Hamlet.

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A book that contributed to the idea that Shakespeare was

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fundamentally an Elizabethan writer.

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But finishing that book made me think about what came later.

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The dozen or so plays,

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many of Shakespeare's greatest,

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that he wrote after Elizabeth died.

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Shakespeare's Jacobean plays are dark, complex, and ambiguous,

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and offer a unique window into the troubled decade of upheaval,

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plots, and often violent social change.

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A decade presided over by the brilliant but flawed King James.

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A decade of uncertainty and anxiety...

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..that stimulated unprecedented creativity in theatre,

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in art, in music.

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A decade that gave us the King James Bible,

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the Union Jack, and November the 5th.

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A Jacobean decade

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that challenged the nation's greatest dramatist

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to find a new voice,

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the voice of Shakespeare in the reign of King James.

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It is late March, 1603,

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London is in the grip of fear and anxiety.

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England's much-loved Queen Elizabeth is dying.

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Childless, she has no heir,

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and the Tudors, the nation's ruling family for over 100 years,

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will die with her.

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The country has veered violently between Catholicism

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and Protestantism during the last 70 years.

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Will a new monarch bring another change of religion?

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More bloodshed and strife?

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Living then in the heart of the city,

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England's foremost dramatist, William Shakespeare,

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captures the mood in his sonnet.

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Those uncertainties might yet bring the nation to violence.

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Shakespeare was moving through a city battening down before the coming storm.

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The authorities had called up 4,000 troops,

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an astounding number, given a population of 200,000.

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No-one, Shakespeare included,

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had ever lived through anything like this.

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Shakespeare had already written over 20 plays

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during the last decade or so.

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Many of them performed at the theatre across the Thames

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that he owned and ran with his company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men,

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the Globe.

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Year-round, rain or shine, it played seven days a week,

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packing up to 3,000 theatre-hungry Londoners into every show.

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Fuelled by Shakespeare, and a dozen other major writers,

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theatre had become the popular medium of the age.

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The pulsing heartbeat of the times.

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Played out on the stages of no fewer than eight London theatres.

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From Southwark, where Shakespeare's Globe

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jostled with the Rose and the Swan on Bankside,

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to Blackfriars, and St Paul's in the city,

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where children's companies were famed for their satires.

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From the Boar's Head in the East End,

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to the more boisterous Curtain and Fortune in the North.

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As many as 10,000 people a day watched the anxieties, hopes,

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and scandals of the times played out on a London stage.

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But in that late March of 1603, all those stages were silent.

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The playhouses closed on the orders of a government

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nervous of civil unrest

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while the Queen lay dying,

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and the succession remained in doubt.

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You could say that Shakespeare himself had helped fuel the atmosphere of tension and anxiety

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that had led to the closing of theatres.

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He had, after all, spent much of his career

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writing plays about regime change and its often bloody consequences.

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Audiences had stood here spellbound, watching Bolingbroke depose Richard II,

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and Richard III eliminate a host of rivals

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who stood between him and the Crown.

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They had seen Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, die,

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and Fortinbras, a foreign Prince from the north,

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swoop down and seize the throne.

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England now seemed hurtling toward a similar fate.

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The next great act in that drama of spring 1603

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opened on Cheapside, the city's main thoroughfare,

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in the early hours of March 24th.

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An expectant crowd gathered, Shakespeare among them perhaps,

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for he lived just a few hundred yards away.

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They hushed as England's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, arrived.

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He had news.

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Elizabeth, England's Queen for 45 years,

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and the last of the great Tudor line, was dead.

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Her crown, he announced, had passed to her cousin,

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a foreign king - Scotland's King James...

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..already on his way south to claim his new kingdom.

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But questions and uncertainties were on every mind.

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Raised a Protestant, but with a Catholic mother and wife,

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where would James stand on religion?

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And how would he rule his unfamiliar new kingdom?

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Forgive the prop, it's visual shorthand news.

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But there were no newspapers in Shakespeare's day,

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there was only gossip and theatre.

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And with the theatres closed, it was only gossip.

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The English knew very little about the King of Scots,

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so the country was awash with talk about who had met or seen the King

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on his journey south.

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A troubling rumour came from Newark in Lincolnshire -

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a thief had been caught, working the crowd gathered to see the new King.

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James decided to execute him on the spot without trial.

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He probably thought this was a crowdpleasing gesture,

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but in England, this wasn't how things were done.

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This was another troubling uncertainty.

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Would England's foreign king ever truly understand basic English values?

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It was a key scene in this drama of uncertainty and regime change.

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An unpredictable king, fond of grand gestures,

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taking a personal hand in the law.

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James too, as his biographer Pauline Croft told me,

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was forming powerful first impressions.

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As he comes south, he's very impressed, indeed overwhelmed,

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by the wealth of the English nobility.

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That is quite clear. And that he stays in

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the two great Cecil houses -

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at Burley House and at Tybalt -

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he's living in a style that, as King of Scots, he had never encountered.

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So, one of the key points, I think,

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is that James assumes from the beginning the enormous, inexhaustible wealth of England,

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and doesn't realise that what he had seen was the very, very top level

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of the wealthiest of the nobility.

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James was a complex, contradictory figure.

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On the one hand, he was an admired intellectual,

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one of the most published authors of his day,

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who had written on subjects as diverse as theology and politics.

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He produced a celebrated treatise on witchcraft, Demonology,

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a book Shakespeare would turn to when he wrote Macbeth,

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and one of the earliest polemics on the dangers of smoking.

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On the other hand, he was extravagant with money,

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obsessed with hunting, and awkward with almost everyone he met.

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A man of ideas, he was,

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a man of charisma, he was not.

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James doesn't like crowds, he doesn't like public acclaim,

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he is worried about assassination.

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He is concerned that they don't really love him.

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He lacks that instinctive feel for the popular mood,

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and that's something that you can't teach.

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For all his faults though, James hit the ground running,

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initiating a big political shake-up.

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There was bad news for Shakespeare & Company.

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Their patron, the Lord Chamberlain, lost his job.

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And in one of James's first legal proclamations

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was another bombshell.

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Among new rules to protect the Sabbath,

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a ban on Sunday theatre.

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The best playing day of the week.

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It was a sop, no doubt, to England's radical Protestants,

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the theatre-hating Puritans.

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But the King also had a surprise up his sleeve.

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Just a week after banning playing on the Sabbath

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came another declaration about the theatre, this time naming names.

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William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustin Phillips,

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John Heminges, Henry Condell, Robert Armin,

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these were the names of the Chamberlain's Men,

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the best players in the land, Shakespeare's company.

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The document goes on to say that from now on,

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they would be the King's Players, authorised to perform at court,

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at the King's pleasure, at the Globe,

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and anywhere in the land.

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It must have come as a total surprise, they were made men.

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And from now on, Shakespeare would be known as the King's Man.

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For Shakespeare, it was a transformative moment.

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He was now a royal servant - the first playwright ever to become one.

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The prestige and security he subsequently enjoyed

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would change literary history.

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As for the King, having his own troupe of players

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was one more luxury that he'd never been able to enjoy in Scotland,

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a land with no theatres at all.

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So, King and King's Man stood on the verge of new futures.

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The one, looking forward to reopening the Globe,

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the other, to a splendid coronation in Westminster Abbey.

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But both events would be delayed for many months,

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because fate and disease intervened.

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London had been visited by plague before.

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But the outbreak of summer 1603 was severe.

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Theatres presented a high risk of infection,

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and they remained closed

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as the death toll rose from 1,000 a week in July

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to more than 3,000 a week by September.

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By the time it was over, 30,000 Londoners would be dead.

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The horrors of plague were yet another source of uncertainty.

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No-one could figure out what caused it.

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For some, it was the alignment of the stars,

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for others, the poisoned air.

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Some were convinced that dogs spread the disease,

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so they were rounded up and slaughtered.

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The Puritans were more certain.

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For them, it was a judgement from God.

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For what?

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Sin, and what could be more sinful than theatre?

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Sympathies with Puritan views held sway in the city

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and kept it a playhouse-free zone.

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But outside the walls, beyond the reach of London's authorities,

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were the suburbs.

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None so sinful as Southwark,

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home to the Globe.

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Southwark was a wild suburb,

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home to pleasures of all sorts.

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The number of inns, 400 in all, was spectacular.

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That's one pub for every 50 inhabitants.

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The area was so synonymous with prostitutes that playwright

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Thomas Dekker called them suburb sinners.

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What, with the inns and brothels and playhouses,

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petty criminals, actors, and prostitutes,

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it's no wonder that for the Puritans,

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Southwark was the very definition of Jacobean sinfulness.

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By December, the plague had subsided

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and Shakespeare and company got the call,

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ordered to Hampton Court to provide for the King's Christmas pleasure.

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But James had work on his mind too

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and had summoned another very different group at the same time.

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The Puritans.

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Among them, the theologically rigourous John Reynolds,

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no doubt appalled to find himself cheek by jowl with the Players.

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That Christmas, the King's Men had only old favourites to offer

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at Hampton Court's Great Hall.

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Shakespeare had written little of late,

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still finding his footing in this new Jacobean world.

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Between late December and early February,

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20 plays were staged in this room.

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Eight of them by Shakespeare's company.

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A fourfold increase in what had been expected of them by Queen Elizabeth.

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Unfortunately, nobody had the wisdom to record the names of these plays,

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but my best guess is they were classics like Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV.

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While the evenings were rich in theatre,

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the real drama at Hampton Court that season was taking place by day.

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At the heart of that daytime drama was a theology conference

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that soon turned into a clash of royal power and puritan ideology.

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Shakespeare took it all in.

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Inspiration for the new play

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that may already have been forming in his mind.

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Court gossip Dudley Carleton wryly noted the amusing contrast

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between the richly garbed players and the severe Puritans

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here at Hampton Court that Christmas season.

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The Puritans were keen on learning once and for all

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where King James stood on religion,

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and were hoping to get him to purge the church of Catholic practices.

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King James could debate theology with the best of them

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and easily outmatched, and often bullied, the dispute-loving Puritans.

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He had no intention of delivering their anti-Catholic agenda,

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but instead, mollified them with an offer to his liking.

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What he offered was a new translation of the Scriptures,

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a new text, for newly Protestant times,

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purged of Catholic language.

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In the seven years in the making, would bear his name,

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and rank as one of the great achievements of the Jacobean moment,

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the King James Bible.

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It was enough to get the Puritans on his side.

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But James's power shake-up was creating enemies too.

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A new scene in this real-life drama of regime change

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was soon playing itself out in the Great Hall at Winchester.

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Some powerful English nobles, displaced by Scots,

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brought into government by the King, were plotting James's overthrow.

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The conspirators were a mix of disgruntled Catholics

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and even more disgruntled, and now disempowered, noblemen,

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who had failed to find favour with the new regime.

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Chief among them was the great Elizabethan hero

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Sir Walter Raleigh.

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The dashing, talented Raleigh was found out.

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He and his co-conspirators were rounded up, tried,

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and condemned to death.

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But the day of execution gave the King a chance

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to show that it wasn't just the King's Man who had a talent for high drama.

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Dudley Carleton was there

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and watched the condemned men mount the scaffold,

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noting that it was a foul day, fit for such tragic performance.

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Carleton records how all the actors were gathered together on stage,

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as at the end of a play.

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Then, at the very last moment,

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a man pushes through the crowd, one of King James's favourites, a Scot.

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He approaches the scaffold and addresses the offenders,

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reminding them of the heinousness of their crimes,

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to which they assented.

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Then, he pulls out a document and declares, "Behold,

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"the mercy of your sovereign,

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"who, of himself, has sent a countermand hither,

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"and given you your lives."

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It was a moment of spectacular theatre.

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Here was a King playing with ideas of punishment and reprieve.

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Searching for the limits of his own power,

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and finding the measure of his own performance.

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Shakespeare was taking all this in.

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And when the King's Men presented their next season at court,

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during the Christmas holidays of 1604,

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the law was something of a theme.

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A theme captured in one of the most extraordinary manuscripts

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to survive from the time.

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This is it, the Revels book, 1604 to 1605, Christmas at court.

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If there were one document I wish I could own

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that survives from Shakespeare's day,

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this is it, there's nothing like it.

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It gives you an incredible snapshot

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of performance at court that Christmas.

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The names of the playing company,

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the names of the playwrights, the names of the plays,

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performed on successive nights before King James.

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Here they are, all of the classics of the Elizabethan stage.

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Merry Wives of Windsor, Love's Labours Lost, Henry V,

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Merchant of Venice

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and, by order of the King, Merchant of Venice again,

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perhaps because he loved that play's exploration of justice and mercy.

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And here, among all these great Elizabethan hits,

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Shakespeare's first great Jacobean masterpiece, Measure for Measure.

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I love the people, but do not like to stage me to their eyes,

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though it do well, but I do not one issue around their loud applause

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and Aves vehement.

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With its crowd-shy leader, Measure for Measure

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seethes with the political and religious tensions

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of James's regime.

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Echoing the spring of 1603,

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the play begins at a moment of regime change.

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As the Duke of Vienna, out of the blue,

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hands all his powers to his bemused deputy, Angelo.

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To the hopeful execution do I leave you of your commission.

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Yet, give leave, my lord, that we may bring you something on the way.

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My haste may not admit it, nor need you, on my non,

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I have to do with any scruple.

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Your scope is as mine own,

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so to enforce or qualify the laws as to your soul seems good.

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Give me your hand.

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I love the people, but do not like to stage me to their eyes,

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though it do well, I do not relish well the loud applause

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and Aves vehement.

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Nor do I think the man of safe discretion who does affect it.

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The crowd-disliking Duke, like James, is elusive.

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The heavens give safety to your purposes.

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I thank you.

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Even his departure is a fiction.

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Fare you well.

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Disguising himself as a friar,

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he spends the rest of the play spying on his city,

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a city populated by prostitutes, pimps, and thieves,

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that reeks of Southwark.

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Brothel owner Mistress Overdone

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even moans that the plague has been bad for business.

0:26:070:26:11

It's a world that a Duke has lost control of.

0:26:120:26:15

He's very clear, he says what he is doing,

0:26:180:26:21

that's what's extraordinary about it.

0:26:210:26:22

He's very open about what he's doing. He, you know...

0:26:220:26:25

the place is decaying

0:26:250:26:27

and he needs to get someone to sort it out,

0:26:270:26:31

but he doesn't want his name attached to it,

0:26:310:26:34

and he doesn't really like being a public figure.

0:26:340:26:36

I think he feels himself removed from the people,

0:26:360:26:39

and therefore, he needs to see what's happening

0:26:390:26:42

in order to understand it, in order to improve himself as a leader.

0:26:420:26:46

I mean, it's not one million miles away from...

0:26:460:26:48

what's that reality telly programme where the, you know...

0:26:480:26:51

Undercover Boss, it's kind of what he does.

0:26:510:26:54

And, to me, it's a play about, at the heart of it,

0:26:540:26:57

it's a play about leadership, and what leading a nation means.

0:26:570:27:02

The new regime of Angelo gets off to a flying start.

0:27:040:27:08

He condemns a young man, Claudio,

0:27:080:27:11

to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant.

0:27:110:27:15

The kind of crime that the old regime had let slip.

0:27:150:27:19

When Claudio's sister, Isabella, about to become a nun,

0:27:210:27:25

comes to plead for his life,

0:27:250:27:27

Angelo is every bit the tough guy.

0:27:270:27:29

-He must die tomorrow.

-Tomorrow?

0:27:310:27:34

Oh, that's sudden!

0:27:340:27:37

Spare him, spare him.

0:27:370:27:41

He's not prepared for death,

0:27:410:27:43

even for our kitchens, we kill the fowl of season,

0:27:430:27:45

shall we serve heaven with less respect than we do minister to our gross selves?

0:27:450:27:49

Good, good, my lord, bethink you.

0:27:490:27:52

Who is it that have died for this offence?

0:27:520:27:55

There's many have committed it.

0:27:550:27:57

The law hath not been dead, though it hath slept.

0:27:570:28:01

Those many have not dared to do that evil,

0:28:010:28:04

if the first that did the edict infringe

0:28:040:28:07

had answered for his deed.

0:28:070:28:09

Now, 'tis awake.

0:28:090:28:11

Yet show some pity.

0:28:110:28:14

I show it most of all when I show justice.

0:28:140:28:16

The scene turns brilliantly from illegal debate,

0:28:160:28:20

one that James would surely have loved,

0:28:200:28:23

almost into satire,

0:28:230:28:24

as the straightlaced puritan is suddenly overcome by Isabella's charms.

0:28:240:28:30

Go to your bosom, knock there.

0:28:300:28:34

And ask your heart what it doth know that's like my brother's fault.

0:28:360:28:39

If it confess a natural guiltiness such as is his,

0:28:390:28:43

let it not sound a thought upon your tongue against my brother's life.

0:28:430:28:47

When they meet again, Angelo has an indecent proposal for the nun-to-be.

0:28:550:29:01

Sleep with me, and your brother gets off.

0:29:010:29:04

But the spying Duke fixes it all.

0:29:050:29:08

A head trick saved Claudio's life.

0:29:100:29:13

Angelo gets his comeuppance,

0:29:130:29:15

and the Duke scatters pardons like James at Winchester.

0:29:150:29:20

Shakespeare, though, delivers a twist at the end,

0:29:240:29:27

with the Duke offering Isabella what she does not want,

0:29:270:29:32

marriage.

0:29:320:29:34

For me, the unsettled and unpredictable world

0:29:380:29:41

of Measure for Measure

0:29:410:29:42

perfectly captures the tone of James's England,

0:29:420:29:46

where the character of the King and his reign remained elusive.

0:29:470:29:51

Shakespeare had never before grappled

0:29:510:29:54

with such a constellation of social and religious issues,

0:29:540:29:59

where justice is easily confused with mercy,

0:29:590:30:03

and neat resolutions no longer seemed possible.

0:30:030:30:07

Jacobean England was no police state.

0:30:150:30:18

But taking on contemporary politics was dangerous.

0:30:190:30:23

Setting Measure for Measure in distant Vienna

0:30:230:30:26

was enough to keep Shakespeare out of trouble.

0:30:260:30:30

But others were less careful.

0:30:300:30:32

In 1605, Shakespeare's great rival, Ben Jonson,

0:30:360:30:39

and fellow playwright George Chapman,

0:30:390:30:42

found themselves imprisoned,

0:30:420:30:44

under the unpleasant threat of having their ears and noses slit.

0:30:440:30:49

A former bricklayer, Jonson was no stranger to trouble.

0:30:540:30:58

He'd narrowly escaped the gallows

0:30:580:31:00

when he killed a fellow actor in a duel,

0:31:000:31:03

and was jailed for his play the Isle of Dogs,

0:31:030:31:06

probably for satirising Queen Elizabeth.

0:31:060:31:08

The offending piece this time was Eastward Hoe,

0:31:130:31:16

performed by one of London's children's companies.

0:31:160:31:19

It was a city comedy, a genre Jonson had pioneered.

0:31:240:31:28

Sharp, satirical, the genre was meant to be edgy.

0:31:280:31:34

But the anti-Scots jokes in Eastward Hoe had crossed the line.

0:31:340:31:39

I'm holding in my hand an exceedingly rare volume,

0:31:410:31:44

one of only two surviving copies

0:31:440:31:46

of the earliest printing of Eastward Hoe.

0:31:460:31:49

It contains scandalous words that landed its authors in prison.

0:31:490:31:54

They had gone too far,

0:31:550:31:57

mocking their Scottish King's countrymen,

0:31:570:32:00

wishing they'd go back to where they came from,

0:32:000:32:03

or even better, set sail for the Americas.

0:32:030:32:07

I'll read one of the offending passages,

0:32:080:32:11

a classic piece of English xenophobia.

0:32:110:32:14

"And for my part, and what 100,000 of them were there,

0:32:150:32:19

"for we are all one countrymen now, you know,

0:32:190:32:22

"and we should find ten times more comfort of them there

0:32:220:32:25

"than we do here."

0:32:250:32:27

This is another copy of

0:32:290:32:31

Eastward Hoe, printed soon after.

0:32:310:32:34

It looks almost identical,

0:32:340:32:37

but the words that I just read

0:32:370:32:39

are mysteriously missing.

0:32:390:32:41

Jacobean censorship in action.

0:32:420:32:45

Airbrushing was not a 20th-century phenomenon.

0:32:450:32:48

Jonson was released, Chapman too, ears and noses intact.

0:32:510:32:56

But it would not be Jonson's last brush with the authorities.

0:32:560:33:01

His city comedies, often set in London in the present,

0:33:040:33:08

could be dangerously topical.

0:33:080:33:10

Much riskier territory

0:33:100:33:12

than the work of his more politically savvy rival, Shakespeare.

0:33:120:33:16

And the King's Man had another advantage.

0:33:160:33:22

He was an inside man, a servant of the court,

0:33:220:33:26

able, at times, to observe James at close quarters.

0:33:260:33:29

As he did in 1604,

0:33:310:33:33

at an event captured in one of the treasures of the National Portrait Gallery.

0:33:330:33:38

These Spanish negotiators and their English counterparts

0:33:400:33:45

had just signed an historic peace treaty,

0:33:450:33:49

bringing to an end England's long war with Spain.

0:33:490:33:53

What I love most about this painting is what's missing -

0:33:570:34:01

the man they are all turning to face,

0:34:010:34:04

King James himself.

0:34:040:34:06

And behind him, his entourage,

0:34:060:34:09

which included Shakespeare and the King's Men.

0:34:090:34:12

As grooms of the chamber, they were officially the King's servants,

0:34:130:34:18

issued four yards of red cloth for their livery,

0:34:180:34:20

and expected to show up on demand,

0:34:200:34:23

and not just to perform plays.

0:34:230:34:25

They were there in August 1604,

0:34:260:34:29

summoned to Somerset House

0:34:290:34:31

to fill out an underweight English delegation at these peace talks.

0:34:310:34:36

Bad timing, since this was peak season

0:34:360:34:39

for summer performances at the outdoor Globe.

0:34:390:34:42

Who better though than actors to stand around looking important?

0:34:420:34:47

So, for 18 days, Shakespeare and his fellows did just that,

0:34:470:34:51

and were paid a mere pittance for their services.

0:34:510:34:54

For Shakespeare though, this was a rare opportunity

0:34:550:34:59

to see the workings of power and diplomacy up close,

0:34:590:35:02

to be witness to history.

0:35:020:35:04

James had left the lengthy negotiations to others,

0:35:060:35:10

spending most of his time out hunting.

0:35:100:35:14

But when he returned for the treaty signing,

0:35:140:35:16

he had a chance to indulge in another favourite pastime -

0:35:160:35:21

extravagance.

0:35:210:35:22

This extraordinary object,

0:35:250:35:28

the Royal Gold Cup,

0:35:280:35:30

is one of the great treasures of the British Museum.

0:35:300:35:33

But it's a miracle that it's in Britain at all

0:35:340:35:37

because, in 1604,

0:35:370:35:39

as a gift from one of the departing Spanish negotiators,

0:35:390:35:43

King James gave it away.

0:35:430:35:45

Dora, tell me about this amazing object.

0:35:480:35:51

Well, this is one of the finest

0:35:510:35:53

pieces of a Parisian goldsmiths's work

0:35:530:35:55

of the late middle ages to have survived anywhere.

0:35:550:35:57

Enamelled in basse-taille enamelling,

0:35:570:35:59

with these amazing scenes

0:35:590:36:01

from the life of St Agnes,

0:36:010:36:02

who was a holy virgin.

0:36:020:36:04

It's incredibly pure gold,

0:36:040:36:07

and it's heavy.

0:36:070:36:09

So just in terms of bullion, imagine the weight of that cup in your hand,

0:36:090:36:14

and just guess at its value for yourself.

0:36:140:36:17

Around the stem has been added this wonderful collar

0:36:170:36:21

with the enamelled roses of the Tudor dynasty,

0:36:210:36:24

and we think that that was probably added

0:36:240:36:26

early in the reign of Henry VIII.

0:36:260:36:28

So, even though this object was made in 1370, 1380,

0:36:280:36:31

it was already very old by the time Henry VIII altered it.

0:36:310:36:34

It shows that it still had significance to the Tudor kings.

0:36:340:36:38

Why would anyone give away something like this?

0:36:380:36:41

I mean, there are a lot of treasures in England,

0:36:410:36:44

James could have given away a lot of things, why this?

0:36:440:36:47

Well, I don't know if James thought of it as anything more than

0:36:470:36:50

a very expensive lump of gold, as a piece of bullion.

0:36:500:36:54

I'm not sure he would have seen anything more in it than that.

0:36:540:36:57

But we know that the Duke of Medina saw much more in it.

0:36:570:37:00

He thought that it was one of the great royal treasures,

0:37:000:37:05

that it had ancestral value to the English kings.

0:37:050:37:08

I can't think of any other object that carries the weight of significance

0:37:080:37:12

that this one does for Shakespeare's world.

0:37:120:37:14

For James though,

0:37:180:37:19

it was just another piece of England's inexhaustible wealth.

0:37:190:37:23

He had always been extravagant,

0:37:240:37:26

and by 1605, his debts were a heady four times those of the late Queen.

0:37:260:37:32

His Privy Council wrote him a stiff letter expressing their concern.

0:37:350:37:40

In an extraordinary speech to Parliament,

0:37:410:37:44

James admitted that his first three years on the throne

0:37:440:37:47

had been, to him, as Christmas.

0:37:470:37:50

James would have been well advised

0:37:520:37:54

to take more Privy Council instruction.

0:37:540:37:56

And also, the fact that they never managed to get across to him

0:37:560:38:00

that the financial resources of the English monarchy

0:38:000:38:02

were much more limited than he thought.

0:38:020:38:05

The problem is, James has no idea what he's giving away.

0:38:050:38:09

He gives away far too much.

0:38:090:38:11

He gives it in an ill thought-out fashion,

0:38:110:38:14

rewarding favourites lavishly,

0:38:140:38:17

not rewarding hard-serving Privy Councillors.

0:38:170:38:21

So, it's not so much the largesse in itself,

0:38:210:38:24

as the, um, the lack of sense about distributing it.

0:38:240:38:29

Shakespeare was never crudely topical,

0:38:330:38:35

but was always alert to the tensions around him.

0:38:350:38:40

And his next play featured the destruction of a spendthrift rich man,

0:38:400:38:46

Timon of Athens.

0:38:460:38:49

"Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,

0:38:530:38:57

"since riches point to misery and contempt?"

0:38:570:39:01

Timon of Athens is Shakespeare's coldest, bleakest play.

0:39:080:39:13

Its subject is money,

0:39:130:39:15

and the greed and corruption that flow from it.

0:39:150:39:18

The play is set in ancient Athens,

0:39:180:39:21

but when Timon rails against what he calls,

0:39:210:39:23

"the coward and lascivious town",

0:39:230:39:26

everyone at the Globe theatre would have recognised

0:39:260:39:29

that Shakespeare was describing their own money-obsessed London.

0:39:290:39:34

The play begins in a moment of high commerce,

0:39:420:39:45

with a jeweller, a painter, and a poet all discussing their art and business,

0:39:450:39:50

and how easy it is to extract cash

0:39:500:39:52

from the town's wealthiest patron, Timon.

0:39:520:39:57

But Timon's deep pockets, like England's, were not bottomless.

0:40:000:40:04

In crisis, he calls on his friends.

0:40:050:40:08

They rebuff him. Timon flees the city in despair.

0:40:080:40:13

Timon has long been a neglected play,

0:40:160:40:19

little read, rarely staged,

0:40:190:40:22

but there was one 19th-century critic who saw its brilliance -

0:40:220:40:27

Karl Marx.

0:40:270:40:29

His favourite quotation, "Gold? Yellow, glittering gold,

0:40:290:40:34

"this can make black, white,

0:40:340:40:37

"foul, fair,

0:40:370:40:39

"wrong, right."

0:40:390:40:41

The high price of living in a money-driven world

0:40:440:40:47

is made all too clear by the end of the play.

0:40:470:40:51

Timon turns his back on the world,

0:40:520:40:54

flees to the woods outside of Athens

0:40:540:40:57

and, eventually, kills himself.

0:40:570:41:00

He leaves behind a bitter suicide note, which reads,

0:41:000:41:05

"Here lie I, Timon, who all living men did hate."

0:41:050:41:10

Still finding his footing in these ambiguous times,

0:41:180:41:22

Timon was a bold experiment for Shakespeare,

0:41:220:41:26

his own dark version of a genre not his own -

0:41:260:41:30

city comedy.

0:41:300:41:32

But instead of a comical tale set in London in the present,

0:41:350:41:38

Shakespeare locates Timon in ancient Greece,

0:41:380:41:41

and gives it a tragic ending.

0:41:410:41:43

Shaking his audience up at every turn.

0:41:430:41:46

City comedies are about the intersection

0:41:520:41:55

of social mobility and money.

0:41:550:41:57

These are plays that mock the greedy

0:41:570:42:00

yet, at the same time, celebrate Londoners' pursuit of wealth.

0:42:000:42:05

'Timon of Athens' is a very Shakespearean take on the genre.

0:42:050:42:09

But to pull it off,

0:42:090:42:11

Shakespeare had to do something he had not done in a very long while -

0:42:110:42:15

collaborate with another writer.

0:42:150:42:18

Thomas Middleton fitted the bill.

0:42:210:42:23

Flush with recent city comedy successes,

0:42:230:42:27

the younger writer had the knack of the new genre.

0:42:270:42:31

Timon's a difficult play, not often performed,

0:42:360:42:40

but I was lucky enough to see a production here at the Globe,

0:42:400:42:43

directed by Lucy Bailey.

0:42:430:42:46

When I first started studying and teaching this play,

0:42:470:42:51

no-one talked about collaboration and Shakespeare working

0:42:510:42:55

with a writer of city comedies, Thomas Middleton.

0:42:550:42:59

Did you feel, at various points, two hands in this play,

0:42:590:43:02

or two consciousnesses involved in the creating of it?

0:43:020:43:05

-Yes, I think almost black and white moments.

-Really?

0:43:050:43:08

Literally, you'd hit a moment and you'd know it was Middleton.

0:43:080:43:11

When the writing switched to more character satire,

0:43:110:43:14

small-time character satire of the immediate, say, senators,

0:43:140:43:17

portraying them almost in a Ben Jonsonian way,

0:43:170:43:20

that, I would feel, wasn't Shakespeare.

0:43:200:43:22

It feels to me within the play that the interests vary.

0:43:220:43:25

Timon, the extraordinary journey of this man, is Shakespeare.

0:43:250:43:29

The mercantile London, the satire of that world, is Middleton.

0:43:290:43:32

Why was he wanting to collaborate?

0:43:320:43:34

Does he just feel that he needed someone

0:43:340:43:37

who had Middleton's way of capturing these greedy people

0:43:370:43:40

in a better way than he would,

0:43:400:43:42

in a faster, more cartoony way than he could?

0:43:420:43:44

Lucy's production had extraordinary timing,

0:43:470:43:51

coinciding with the global economic meltdown of 2008.

0:43:510:43:56

How were you able to harness what was going on in the world outside

0:43:590:44:03

and bring it into a production of this play here at the Globe?

0:44:030:44:08

It wasn't very difficult.

0:44:080:44:10

It was easy to look around you and see parallels

0:44:100:44:14

to what we were exploring in terms of Timon's excess of spending

0:44:140:44:19

and the kind of blindness that he was showing in that spending.

0:44:190:44:23

He was not aware that he was already bankrupt.

0:44:230:44:26

A key moment for us,

0:44:260:44:28

myself and the designer were travelling to the Globe

0:44:280:44:31

and we were going through London Bridge and up on this billboard,

0:44:310:44:35

it had these vultures picking and nipping at all these gold coins.

0:44:350:44:39

It was advertising a credit card, a gold card.

0:44:390:44:41

It didn't get it that this was actually a sick image.

0:44:410:44:46

That was a perfect symbol of that time

0:44:460:44:48

for this society and where it was going.

0:44:480:44:51

And how Timon went, "That's it!"

0:44:510:44:54

We used the idea of the vulture absolutely in our play.

0:44:540:44:57

In fact, we dressed our people sort of subliminally.

0:44:570:45:00

They were all vultures.

0:45:000:45:02

If you looked closely, they all had feathers.

0:45:020:45:04

And, of course, we put our actors above the audience

0:45:040:45:07

and they behaved as vultures that would finally feed off Timon.

0:45:070:45:11

Gold in Timon is destructive and pernicious.

0:45:170:45:21

For James though, its glittering surface

0:45:220:45:26

offered a perfect opportunity for self-expression.

0:45:260:45:29

The coins he minted gave a unique insight into his vision

0:45:330:45:36

of the Stuart brand and of the policies he planned to pursue.

0:45:360:45:40

I'm holding in my hand a sovereign minted in 1603.

0:45:440:45:48

A high value 20 shilling coin,

0:45:480:45:51

the first James had issued after coming to the throne.

0:45:510:45:54

He describes himself here predictably

0:45:540:45:58

as King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland.

0:45:580:46:01

A year later, a second sovereign was produced.

0:46:010:46:04

Superficially, the same in weight and size and value,

0:46:050:46:09

but this one came with a very different message.

0:46:090:46:12

Here, England and Scotland are gone,

0:46:120:46:16

replaced by a new political identity.

0:46:160:46:19

Mag Britt. Magna Britannia. Great Britain.

0:46:190:46:25

It's a familiar notion today,

0:46:250:46:28

but for Shakespeare and his contemporaries,

0:46:280:46:31

this would have been a bold, radical suggestion.

0:46:310:46:34

In case anyone missed the message on the back,

0:46:340:46:38

James, quoting from Ezekiel, declares,

0:46:380:46:41

"Faciam eos in gentum unam."

0:46:410:46:44

"And I will make thee one nation."

0:46:440:46:47

This was James's big idea.

0:46:470:46:50

The union of Scotland and England.

0:46:500:46:54

The coin soon became known as the 'Unite'.

0:46:540:46:59

But when he pitched the idea to Parliament,

0:46:590:47:03

the reaction was bewilderment.

0:47:030:47:06

What the English wanted now was stability, not more uncertainty.

0:47:060:47:11

Maybe this was James's curse.

0:47:130:47:15

A brilliant man with great ideas, but poor timing.

0:47:150:47:20

King James felt that he embodied in himself

0:47:210:47:25

the successful union of the two nations.

0:47:250:47:29

But hardly anybody else felt that way.

0:47:290:47:31

It's hard to know who hated the idea more - the Scots or the English.

0:47:310:47:35

Queen Elizabeth and her Tudor forebears

0:47:350:47:38

had done so much to foster a sense of England's exclusiveness.

0:47:380:47:42

Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights had only reinforced that

0:47:420:47:46

in their history plays.

0:47:460:47:48

King James's idea flew in the face of all this and showed once again

0:47:480:47:53

how poorly he had read the desires of his subjects.

0:47:530:47:57

The union agenda created something unexpected and unwanted -

0:47:570:48:03

an identity crisis.

0:48:030:48:05

These new tensions and anxieties were great territory for a dramatist

0:48:070:48:11

and a new play was soon forming in Shakespeare's mind.

0:48:110:48:16

Early in the autumn of 1605, he set out along a familiar route.

0:48:230:48:29

From his lodgings on Silver Street near the Roman wall,

0:48:320:48:36

he walked down Noble Street,

0:48:360:48:39

emerging soon on to the city's main commercial thoroughfare, Cheapside.

0:48:390:48:45

He turned west at St Anne's,

0:48:450:48:48

south along St Martin's Lane,

0:48:480:48:52

then west again towards Newgate Market.

0:48:520:48:57

There were bookstalls here in Shakespeare's day

0:49:020:49:05

in front of Christ Church.

0:49:050:49:07

A budding Newgate Market on my right.

0:49:070:49:10

It was here, browsing at John Wright's shop,

0:49:100:49:13

that Shakespeare came upon an unexpected find.

0:49:130:49:17

An old, anonymous play from the 1590s, never printed before.

0:49:170:49:22

It's from this moment that we can trace

0:49:220:49:26

the creation of Shakespeare's greatest Jacobean play -

0:49:260:49:29

'King Lear'.

0:49:290:49:31

"O Lear, Lear, Lear!

0:49:340:49:37

"Beat at this gate that let thy folly in

0:49:370:49:41

"and thy dear judgement out."

0:49:410:49:44

'King Lear' goes to the heart of the national angst

0:49:500:49:53

created by James's union agenda.

0:49:530:49:56

But as always, Shakespeare comes in from an oblique angle.

0:50:000:50:05

The play begins in a united Britain that's about to be divided.

0:50:070:50:14

A map before him, Lear splits his kingdom between his three daughters,

0:50:160:50:21

but demands a show of love from each.

0:50:210:50:25

His youngest, Cordelia, will not submit and is banished.

0:50:250:50:31

So begins Lear's dissent into a hell of regret and betrayal.

0:50:310:50:38

Detested kite!

0:50:390:50:41

Thou liest.

0:50:410:50:42

My train are men of choice and rarest parts

0:50:420:50:46

that in the most exact regards support the worships of their name.

0:50:460:50:50

O most small fault, how ugly didst thou in Cordelia show,

0:50:500:50:54

which like an engine wrench'd my frame of nature from the fix'd place,

0:50:540:50:59

drew from my heart all love and added to the gall.

0:50:590:51:04

O Lear, Lear, Lear!

0:51:040:51:07

Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in and thy dear judgment out.

0:51:070:51:13

Go, go, my people.

0:51:130:51:16

The King is soon driven out of the world of courts and palaces

0:51:190:51:23

on to a primal windswept heath where he keeps company with a madman.

0:51:230:51:31

Lear's eyes are opened to the suffering of the poor.

0:51:310:51:34

"I have taken too little care of this," he says,

0:51:350:51:40

while he tries to comfort his blinded friend, Gloucester.

0:51:400:51:44

All this at a time when an unloved James

0:51:460:51:50

was keeping perpetual Christmas,

0:51:500:51:52

in hiding away from his people in extravagant self-indulgence.

0:51:520:51:57

Only Shakespeare could have been so bold.

0:52:000:52:03

Shakespeare, as a rule, did not invent the plots to his plays.

0:52:050:52:10

He found them in the works of other writers,

0:52:100:52:14

in which he discovered the aesthetic potential

0:52:140:52:18

and the political resonance that was lacking in them.

0:52:180:52:21

These are the ingredients that went into the making of King Lear

0:52:230:52:28

and we can imagine them spread out in front of Shakespeare

0:52:280:52:32

as he was at work on the play.

0:52:320:52:34

The immediate stimulus for his new play was clearly this volume.

0:52:340:52:38

A copy of that old, anonymous play he had recently picked up

0:52:380:52:43

at John Wright's shop opposite Christ Church.

0:52:430:52:48

Its title? 'The True Chronicle History Of King Lear'.

0:52:480:52:54

Shakespeare, turning through the opening pages of this play,

0:52:540:52:58

discovering how clumsily its anonymous author had handled

0:52:580:53:03

the love test that King Lear put his daughters through,

0:53:030:53:06

realised how much more he could do with this play.

0:53:060:53:10

But it did not stop there.

0:53:100:53:12

Shakespeare needed a subplot to the play,

0:53:120:53:14

and he needed some atmosphere and texture.

0:53:140:53:17

He found both of these

0:53:170:53:19

in two of the great Elizabethan works of his predecessors.

0:53:190:53:23

'The Faerie Queen' by Edmund Spenser,

0:53:230:53:26

which talks about the death of Cordelia.

0:53:260:53:29

And Sidney's 'Arcadia', another extraordinary Elizabethan work,

0:53:290:53:33

in which she found the subplot of Gloucester

0:53:330:53:37

and his sons, Edgar and Edmund.

0:53:370:53:39

Shakespeare searched not only for history or subplots

0:53:390:53:43

or philosophical richness,

0:53:430:53:46

he also tried to find the sounds and the words

0:53:460:53:49

that would feed into his play,

0:53:490:53:51

and he found some of them in a really unusual source.

0:53:510:53:55

Harsnett's 'Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures'.

0:53:550:54:01

A strange book that describes how Jesuit missionaries

0:54:010:54:05

had tried to persuade young English men and women

0:54:050:54:08

they were possessed by devils.

0:54:080:54:10

Shakespeare, in reading or re-reading this text,

0:54:100:54:13

came upon the names of devils that go right into King Lear,

0:54:130:54:18

in the speech that Edgar gives

0:54:180:54:20

when feigning daemonic possession himself.

0:54:200:54:23

Modu, Maho, Hoberdidance and Flibbertigibbet.

0:54:250:54:32

There's one more thing that testifies

0:54:340:54:37

to Shakespeare's brilliance as a creative artist...

0:54:370:54:41

..which brings us back to that foundation text,

0:54:420:54:45

'The Chronicle History of King Lear'.

0:54:450:54:47

This play, as every theatregoer who had seen it knew,

0:54:470:54:51

ends on a happy note, with Lear restored to his throne

0:54:510:54:57

and to his loving daughter, Cordelia.

0:54:570:55:00

He takes that ending and crushes it,

0:55:000:55:04

turning comedy into the darkest of tragedies imaginable.

0:55:040:55:08

Howl!

0:55:120:55:14

Howl!

0:55:190:55:20

Howl!

0:55:250:55:26

O, you are men of stones.

0:55:290:55:31

Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them,

0:55:320:55:36

so that heaven's vault should crack.

0:55:360:55:38

She's gone forever.

0:55:430:55:45

The sight of King Lear with Cordelia in his arms howling with grief

0:55:570:56:02

is one of the most haunting images in all of Shakespeare.

0:56:020:56:06

By the end of the play, the tally of dead bodies is extraordinary,

0:56:070:56:11

even by Shakespearean standards.

0:56:110:56:14

The King himself, his three daughters, Edmund the bastard

0:56:140:56:18

and, of course, the fool.

0:56:180:56:21

It's the only Shakespearean tragedy

0:56:210:56:23

in which the characters don't head off somewhere

0:56:230:56:26

at the end of the play.

0:56:260:56:28

Hope has vanished.

0:56:280:56:31

As Kent puts it in the final lines, "All's cheerless, dark and deadly."

0:56:310:56:38

The promise of a happy ending is gone.

0:56:380:56:42

Lear speaks to a Jacobean England

0:56:520:56:55

where the uncertainties of 1603 remained unresolved.

0:56:550:57:00

Where James's unpredictable leadership and policies

0:57:000:57:05

had only added more anxieties and questions.

0:57:050:57:08

Questions that Shakespeare

0:57:100:57:12

and his fellow writers were still grappling with.

0:57:120:57:17

In three years as a King's Man,

0:57:180:57:21

Shakespeare had been on an extraordinary journey.

0:57:210:57:25

From the twisted comedy of 'Measure for Measure'

0:57:250:57:28

with its strangely absent ruler and its collision with Puritan ideology,

0:57:280:57:34

to the caustic anti-money world of 'Timon of Athens'.

0:57:340:57:38

These early ventures were flawed perhaps,

0:57:390:57:42

but in retrospect, necessary steps on the path to King Lear,

0:57:420:57:47

one of the great achievements of this Jacobean moment.

0:57:470:57:51

It had taken some time, but Shakespeare

0:57:510:57:55

and other great writers had found a new register,

0:57:550:57:58

a new tone for these new times.

0:57:580:58:01

Times that threatened to grow darker still.

0:58:010:58:05

Next - the regime comes close to destruction in the Gunpowder Plot.

0:58:070:58:13

Shakespeare responds with his bloodiest play

0:58:130:58:18

of violent overthrow - Macbeth.

0:58:180:58:22

And old skeletons are dug up

0:58:230:58:25

as the King tries to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

0:58:250:58:31

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0:58:430:58:48

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