All the world’s a stage
As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7
William Shakespeare occupies a special place in history. No other writer has enjoyed the same success and prolonged reverence as the Bard of Avon. He has entertained us for over four centuries, given us a wealth of cultural references and inspired countless adaptations and interpretations of his work.
He may have been catering to the tastes of his audiences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London but his plays and poems are still known and enjoyed today, and not just in England but around the globe. Shakespeare tapped into something that crosses cultural and linguistic borders. The setting and the century – ancient Egypt, a medieval battlefield in France or an enchanted island somewhere in Renaissance Europe – may not be easy to relate to, but his themes of love, hatred, jealousy and bereavement certainly are.
The Bard drew from a vast world of history, literature, imagination and everyday experience to produce plays that make us laugh, cry, gasp and think. His ability to take simple ideas and weave into them such complexity of detail and depth of character made his plays stand out among those of his contemporaries. His eye for detail has convinced many that he must have been a scholar of such varied fields as law and medicine, as well as spending time travelling on ships and soaking up the atmosphere of Italy.
We have no proof that he did any of these things. His ability to absorb information, thread it into plays and present it in such a beautiful way has perhaps fooled us into thinking he had a more detailed knowledge and varied experience of life than he really did. However, two subjects he was undoubtedly an expert in, having experienced both at close quarters, was life and death in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
Shakespeare understood death in a way that perhaps we don’t today. The playwright lived in a time when lives were often short and death was a social event. He may have understood little about the science of the process of death but he knew what it looked, sounded and smelled like. Today death is sanitised, screened off and seldom talked about. Often the detail is hidden from us completely. People living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries visited the sick and dying and were personally involved in caring for friends and relatives in their last moments. They also witnessed public executions, saw street brawls and lived in constant fear of visitations from the plague.
With limited effective medical treatments available, the grim reality of death, from even the most trivial of illnesses and infections, was well known, up close and in detail. Death was a familiar feature of everyday life – ‘To die is as common as to live’ (Edward III) – and Shakespeare didn’t shy away from describing it. Death was simply part of the richness of life that he wrote about so brilliantly. Spectacular deaths, noble deaths, tragic deaths and even mundane deaths are all included in his plays, sometimes in astonishing detail. This book will explore them all.