by Rebecca Adusei<\/h4>\n
At the start of Titus Andronicus<\/em> \u2013 one of Shakespeare<\/a>\u2019s earliest plays, believed to have been written around 1590 \u2013 the protagonist, Roman general Titus, returns home after fighting the Goths. What then follows is a violent story of death, racism, cannibalism and mutilation.<\/p>\n The idea of race infuses the play entirely. Although Shakespeare presents his characters as being in two tiers \u2013 the Romans<\/a>, and the people seen as \u2018the other\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Listen to the full versions of these conversations in our podcast series Shakespeare: Past Master<\/em><\/a>, which reveals how the playwright\u2019s works offer insights into the time in which he lived \u2013 and how the past was viewed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> Tamora has autonomy and agency, freedoms that were not afforded to her lover, \u2018Aaron the Moor\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Tamburlaine<\/em>, written around 1587 \u2013 so pre-dates Shakespeare\u2019s Titus Andronicus<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King\u2019s College London, analysing depictions and characterisations of sub-Saharan Africans in early modern literature and drama<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u2013 it\u2019s clear he wants us to take note of that point.<\/p>\n The story itself is an old one, though Shakespeare\u2019s most recent source was a 1562 poem by Arthur Brooke, whose Juliet is 16. However, unlike Brooke \u2013 who paints the couple as naughty, libidinous teenagers \u2013 Shakespeare ultimately views the tragic teens as victims of their families\u2019 fatal feud.<\/p>\n We tend to think of the teenager as an invention of the 20th century but, even in Shakespeare\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In the 20th century, Romeo and Juliet<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n The most famous adaptation of Shakespeare\u2019s play, the musical West Side Story<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Romeo and Juliet<\/em> 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\u2019re so young, though, the story becomes less about pure romance and more a picture of teen infatuation \u2013 a kind of Elizabethan Twilight.<\/p>\n In many ways, it\u2019s quite toxic, invoking seductive but unsustainable ideas of \u2018us against the world\u2019 and \u2018true love hurts\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n In fact, during their longest sequence together on stage, one of them is either dead or unconscious. In short, it\u2019s a very atypical relationship that has become a curious kind of template for romance.<\/p>\n Sophie Duncan is a research fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford<\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/em>, with its concern about what was then a hot topic \u2013 what we\u2019d now call capitalism.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s resources and bringing them back to London. That\u2019s what the merchant Antonio does in the play. As a result, he experiences a terrible moment when his fortunes are lost completely \u2013 reflecting the dangers of sea travel and the risks involved in that kind of investment.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdog\u201d. Commercial lending was first made legal in England in 1545, when the limit for interest rates on loans was 10 per cent.<\/p>\n Shylock\u2019s outsider status as a Jewish person could be read as the play\u2019s 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\u2019t work. In fact, everybody in the play is implicated in this world of borrowing, lending and paying back at interest.<\/p>\n Capitalism is also highlighted in the play\u2019s romantic subplot. Most of Shakespeare\u2019s comedies revolve around courtship, but The Merchant of Venice<\/em> is much more clear-sighted about the fact that upper-class Elizabethan marriages were affairs not of the heart but of the wallet.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s a kind of scammer, taking out credit to make an investment on the basis that he can ultimately win a huge reward.<\/p>\n Shakespeare shows how capitalism affects \u2013 and infects \u2013 emotional relationships. There isn\u2019t a sphere of our lives that isn\u2019t influenced by money, as Shakespeare identified, with some prescience.<\/p>\n Emma Smith is professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford<\/strong><\/p>\n Shakespeare had explored kingship in many other plays before Macbeth<\/em> (c1606). We know that he was writing to please James VI and I<\/a>, who, from 1603, was the patron of the King\u2019s Men, the company for which Shakespeare was the leading playwright and in which he owned shares.<\/p>\n We also know that in 1605 James saw a production of Matthew Gwinne\u2019s Tres Sibyllae<\/em> (Three Sibyls<\/em>), in which the title characters prophesy that the seed of Banquo \u2013 Macbeth\u2019s ally turned ghostly nemesis \u2013 will rule forever. James traced his ancestry back to the historical Banquo, so would have been delighted that Shakespeare\u2019s play hinted at the triumph of his ancestor\u2019s children.<\/p>\n In 1599, James wrote Basilikon Doron<\/em> (The King\u2019s Gifts<\/em>) \u2013 a kind of how-to-be-a-king book, which Shakespeare clearly read. (James was also interested in witchcraft, which also influenced Shakespeare\u2019s portrayal of the three weird sisters in Macbeth<\/em>.)<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, which also features searing references to the state of Scotland under that tyrant\u2019s power.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s unlike early versions: for example, Sir William Davenant\u2019s adaptation staged for Charles II<\/a>, in which Macbeth is portrayed as analogous to Oliver Cromwell<\/a>, and Malcolm (son of the murdered King Duncan) as Charles himself. Davenant very much used the play to present the politics of his time.<\/p>\n Kingship or queenship \u2013 as opposed to mere leadership \u2013 has a special meaning in Shakespeare\u2019s plays. Whatever we feel about monarchy, I think that Macbeth<\/em> will endure as a story so long as power is being tested and challenged, and that productions of Macbeth<\/em> will be staged underground in oppressive regimes throughout the world, as they have in dictatorships over the centuries.<\/p>\n Paul Edmondson is head of research for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust<\/strong><\/p>\n Although the accuracy of the events depicted in Henry V<\/em> is debated, it has a sound historical skeleton: the 15th-century battle of Agincour<\/a>t and siege of Harfleur. But the play is, of course, drama rather than history, and Shakespeare wrote it for particular theatrical effect.<\/p>\n That\u2019s most notable in the inspiring speech that\u2019s delivered by Henry before Agincourt in 1415, featuring the much-quoted line: \u201cWe few, we happy few, we band of brothers.\u201d We believe that the real Henry V<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Henry V<\/em> (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<\/a>, because the period saw the beginnings of a certain idea of \u2018Englishness\u2019. So Shakespeare writing about these events of a century earlier would have had a particular power.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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\u2019t a sense of a \u2018pure\u2019 national identity. This wasn\u2019t a nation state, and the play\u2019s language is very much about absolutist sovereignty \u2013 about Tudor royal power.<\/p>\n At the time Shakespeare wrote Henry V<\/em>, 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 \u2013 which we may also recognise today.<\/p>\n 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)<\/strong><\/p>\n Views of death were in flux at the time Shakespeare wrote Hamlet<\/em>, around the turn of the 17th century. Beliefs of the Catholic medieval world had been thrown into chaos by the Reformation<\/a>, and that in turn had inspired a culture of questioning and doubt typified in Martin Luther\u2019s theses, to which Hamlet<\/em> alludes.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthe other place\u201d: hell.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But the preoccupation with death evident in Shakespeare\u2019s play was also strongly influenced by 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne\u2019s essay that begins \u201cTo study philosophy is to learn to die,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Although it\u2019s hard to read Shakespeare\u2019s 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\u2019t advise seeking the author in his plays, it\u2019s hard to deny that death was a major preoccupation for him.<\/p>\n Farah Karim-Cooper is Globe professor of Shakespeare studies at King\u2019s College London and director of education at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe<\/strong><\/p>\n Shakespeare\u2019s dramatisation of the conspiracy surrounding the grisly assassination of Julius Caesar<\/a> in 44 BC reflects many of the big questions that gripped the playwright\u2019s age. Indeed, the incident \u2013 widely regarded in the west as the most famous non-Biblical historical event \u2013 was already popular with Elizabethan writers. At least four other plays about Caesar had been produced in the two decades prior to Shakespeare\u2019s, which was written c1599.<\/p>\nShakespeare: Past Master | <\/em>A podcast series<\/h4>\n
![\"Shakespeare](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2024\/04\/Shakespeare-title-card-3000x3000-b6d656e.png?quality=45&resize=556,556\")
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Romeo and Juliet<\/em> and the experiences of youth and young love<\/h3>\n
by Sophie Duncan<\/h4>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2024\/03\/GettyImages-1262769661cmyk-9857ef7-e1713798848257.jpg?quality=90&resize=619%2C413\" "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>The Merchant of Venice<\/em> and the human cost of capitalism<\/h3>\n
by Emma Smith<\/h4>\n
Macbeth<\/em> and the challenges of kingship<\/h3>\n
by Paul Edmondson<\/h4>\n
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Henry V<\/em> and the swirling currents of nationalism<\/h3>\n
by Jerry Brotton<\/h4>\n
Hamlet<\/em> and society\u2019s renewed fears about mortality<\/h3>\n
by Farah Karim-Cooper<\/h4>\n
Julius Caesar<\/em> and the drama of politics<\/h3>\n
by Islam Issa<\/h4>\n
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