To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio compiling Shakespeare’s dramas, we spoke to eight experts about what his plays reveal about themes including love, death, power and money
Titus 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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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