Learn about William Shakespeare's early boyhood and path to London to become a playwright and actor
Learn about William Shakespeare's early boyhood and path to London to become a playwright and actor
This film recounts the life of Shakespeare from his early boyhood through his productive years as a playwright and actor in London. It is a 1955 production of Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Transcript
[Music in]
CHORUS: [from "Henry V"] O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!
[Music]
CARTMAN: Give you good morrow, Master John.
[Bells ringing]
NARRATOR: He was born sometime in April, 1564.
The parish register records the baptismal date -- 26th of April -- but the birthdate is not known, nor is there any further record concerning William Shakespeare until fully eighteen years later.
[Music]
NARRATOR: Stratford-upon-Avon, in the late 16th century, was a thriving Warwickshire market-town of perhaps two thousand people.
Its fairs and weekly market-days . . . were events of some importance to Warwickshire farmers and to Stratford merchants. Among these was John Shakespeare, the former high Bailiff, or Mayor of Stratford . . . and a dealer in wool and fine leathers.
Market-day brought excitement and vigor to the town, but it was ever much the same. For the order of things was fixed and unhurried in 16th century England. Shadows of the Middle Ages still fell long across Warwickshire fields, and across the minds of Warwickshire men.
For the sons of substantial Stratford men there was the free grammar school. But the lessons were mostly Latin, and dull; the discipline severe.
SCHOOL MASTER: Young Master Shakespeare. Tardy once again, I see. ". . . as God hath sanctified the rod and correction, to cure the evils of their conditions, to drive out that folly which is bound up in their hearts, to save them from hell, to give them wisdom; so (the rod) is to be used as God's instrument."
NARRATOR: But for schoolboys away from their books, there were summer days and the River Avon.
GERTRUDE'S VOICE: There is a willow grows aslant a brook.
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
SONNET: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
HAMLET'S VOICE: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS VOICE: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
NARRATOR: And for a Warwickshire lad already more than half in love with words, there was something more:
[Music]
NARRATOR: Bag and baggage, with clowns and trumpets, their cart full of props -- the Players had come to town.
NARRATOR: Deemed by many as little better than rogues and vagabonds, they were "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time." They would act this night in the great Guild Hall, bringing to Stratford the wonders of the world abroad -- of a nation awakening to the glories of its past:
PLAYER KING: Why then, with one voice, and like true English hearts, with me throw up your caps, and for England cry, "Saint George!"
[Trumpet, applause]
NARRATOR: On the 28th of November, 1582, two Warwickshire farmers posted a bond of 40 pounds at the Consistory Court in Worcester. Sealed and signed, this bond guaranteed that Will Shakespeare -- then 18 -- should marry no one but
FARMER'S VOICE: Anne Hathaway of Stratford in the Diocese of Worcester, maiden.
It is not known for certain in which church of the Diocese the wedding took place. And there is still another mystery: On the day before the Warwickshire farmers pledged their forty pounds, a marriage license had been issued to young Will Shakespeare and a certain Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. But of this "other Anne" little more is known.
Anne Hathaway was twenty-six, eight years older than her husband. In May, following their marriage in November, a daughter, Susanna, was born. There is little more to be known of these long years. Early in 1585, however, the first child was followed by twins: "Hamnet and Judith, son and daughter to William Shakespeare" were baptized in Holy Trinity.
But as for the young man himself -- was he apprentice to his father's trade? Was he writing at this time? We do not know. These are "the hidden years."
[Trumpet]
NARRATOR: London, in the year 1592, was at the very center of a new spirit abroad in the land: the spirit of the Renaissance. A splendid city of mansion and hovel cramped within medieval walls. A terrifying city of the Plague.
[Music, vocals]
A city of music -- and of laughter:
[Laughter]
NARRATOR: In a new theatre built in Shoreditch -- in the courtyard of inns -- a young actor, Richard Burbage, and his company of Players, have the citizens of London doubled with laughter. But it is not broad comedy alone which enchants both Prince and commoner: it is poetry:
BURBAGE AS ROMEO: He jests at scars that never felt a wound. But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise. . .
NARRATOR: Workmen on holiday -- merchant and apprentice -- elegant gentleman and his lady: how London doth pour out her citizens, for Will Shakespeare has the city by its ears [applause].
[Trumpets]
MASTER OF THE REVELS: To William Kempe, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, for two several comedies or interludes shewed by them before Her Majesty the Queen . . .
JOHN OF GAUNT: This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
This England,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
YORK'S VOICE [offstage]: The king is come: deal mildly with his youth; For young hot colts being raged do rage the more.
RICHARD'S VOICE: What comfort, man? How is't with aged. . .?
NARRATOR: The early years are lost to us, but we know that by the winter of 1596, William Shakespeare had become the wonder of the Elizabethan stage.
[Horse galloping; knocking]
SHAKESPEARE: How is he, Anne?
ANNE: He died, Will.
NARRATOR: His only son, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven.
SHAKESPEARE: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words . . .
ANNE: Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
NARRATOR: With the tragic record of his son's death, we find references once again to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
In October of 1597, a deed recorded the purchase of New Place, largest and finest house in Stratford. His playwrighting and acting . . . particularly his acting -- were bringing him considerable wealth. But he was never to have another son to whom he could pass on the name Shakespeare.
[Trumpet]
VOICE OF CHORUS: . . . Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?
NARRATOR: The vasty fields of France and much more indeed were to be crammed within the splendid theater newly built across the River Thames. And William Shakespeare's life in London was now that of his theater, his fellow actors, his plays. His theater -- the great Globe -- concerned daily with props and rehearsals, with conferences between leading actor and playwright, with costume fittings for skilled boy players who enacted the women's roles: a bustle of activity among a fellowship of actors to whom Will Shakespeare's latest play was the thing. Richard Burbage was more than ever the idol of London, creating on the stage of the Globe Shakespeare's greatest characters. Shakespeare himself was a working actor -- Adam in "As You Like It," the Ghost in "Hamlet," the leading role in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humor."
BURBAGE: Trippingly.
SHAKESPEARE: What--?
BURBAGE: Trippingly on the tongue. You mouth the words.
NARRATOR: Whatever his merits as an actor -- he was certainly the Company's leading dramatist. He found his plots everywhere -- in old Italian novels, Holinshed's chronicles, forgotten dramas -- whatever fell to his magic hand.
From Plutarch's pages, "Julius Caesar," in which the noble Brutus comes to terms with his destiny:
BRUTUS: Our legions are brim full;
Our cause is ripe. The enemy increases every day.
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
CASSIUS: Then, with your will, go on;
We'll along ourselves, and meet them at Philippi.
NARRATOR: From an old play by Thomas Kyd, and an older legend, the "Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
KING: "Now the King drinks to Hamlet."
Come, begin:
And you the judges bear a wary eye.
HAMLET: Come on, Sir.
LAERTES: Come, my lord.
[Duel scene]
HAMLET: One.
LAERTES: No.
HAMLET: Judgment.
OSRIC: A hit, a very palpable hit.
LAERTES: Well, again then.
KING: Stay; give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine; Here's to thy health.
HAMLET: I'll play this bout first; set it by awhile. Count!
NARRATOR: "Hamlet," "Othello," "Lear," "Macbeth" . . . "the greatest monuments of human misery and despair in the literature of the world." How to account for these? The years had passed. His father was dead. There is the mystery of a certain Dark Lady -- "the woman colour'd ill" of "The Sonnets." There are beyond these few "facts," the despairing words of Macbeth:
MACBETH: Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
NARRATOR: For more than 20 years his working day world was that of the theater.
DUKE: If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it . . .
MACDUFF: . . . behold where stands the usurper's cursed head!
CLITUS: Fly, my lord, fly!
CHORUS: Fly, fly, fly!
PRINCE OF MOROCCO: Lead me to the caskets, to try my fortune.
HAMLET: Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest,
JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear . . .
CASSIUS: There is my dagger -- strike, as thou didst at Caesar!
NARRATOR: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, our bending author hath pursued the story, in little room confining mighty men.
By 1610, at the age of forty-six, he was back in Stratford. He owned farmlands in the parish of Old Stratford and Welcombe.
[Thunder]
His eldest daughter, Susanna, was living nearby. She had made a good marriage. Her husband was Dr. John Hall, a well-known physician . . .
Dr. Hall was working on a book: "Select Observations on English Bodies." His learned conversation must have been of interest to his father-in-law, who in his plays had written much of "baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers."
His wife, Anne, was still living, as was his youngest daughter, Judith, twin to Hamnet, the son who had died at eleven.
London -- and the great Globe -- must have seemed far away. And yet we know that his retirement from the life of the theater must have been gradual, and it is certain that he sent -- or took himself -- at least three more plays to his fellows at the Globe. Plays which were as calm and serene as his tragedies had been troubled and somber. "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest."
On June 29, 1613, during a performance of "Henry VIII," the Globe Theater burned to the ground.
On the 25th of March, 1616, he executed his will. After providing for his family, he remembered his fellow-actors in London.
SHAKESPEARE: Item, I give and bequeath to my fellows, John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, 26 shillings and 8 pence apiece to buy them rings.
NARRATOR: Rings to remember Will Shakespeare by.
BURBAGE'S VOICE: Our revels now are ended.
These are actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this
insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.
[Music up and out]
CHORUS: [from "Henry V"] O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!
[Music]
CARTMAN: Give you good morrow, Master John.
[Bells ringing]
NARRATOR: He was born sometime in April, 1564.
The parish register records the baptismal date -- 26th of April -- but the birthdate is not known, nor is there any further record concerning William Shakespeare until fully eighteen years later.
[Music]
NARRATOR: Stratford-upon-Avon, in the late 16th century, was a thriving Warwickshire market-town of perhaps two thousand people.
Its fairs and weekly market-days . . . were events of some importance to Warwickshire farmers and to Stratford merchants. Among these was John Shakespeare, the former high Bailiff, or Mayor of Stratford . . . and a dealer in wool and fine leathers.
Market-day brought excitement and vigor to the town, but it was ever much the same. For the order of things was fixed and unhurried in 16th century England. Shadows of the Middle Ages still fell long across Warwickshire fields, and across the minds of Warwickshire men.
For the sons of substantial Stratford men there was the free grammar school. But the lessons were mostly Latin, and dull; the discipline severe.
SCHOOL MASTER: Young Master Shakespeare. Tardy once again, I see. ". . . as God hath sanctified the rod and correction, to cure the evils of their conditions, to drive out that folly which is bound up in their hearts, to save them from hell, to give them wisdom; so (the rod) is to be used as God's instrument."
NARRATOR: But for schoolboys away from their books, there were summer days and the River Avon.
GERTRUDE'S VOICE: There is a willow grows aslant a brook.
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
SONNET: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
HAMLET'S VOICE: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS VOICE: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
NARRATOR: And for a Warwickshire lad already more than half in love with words, there was something more:
[Music]
NARRATOR: Bag and baggage, with clowns and trumpets, their cart full of props -- the Players had come to town.
NARRATOR: Deemed by many as little better than rogues and vagabonds, they were "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time." They would act this night in the great Guild Hall, bringing to Stratford the wonders of the world abroad -- of a nation awakening to the glories of its past:
PLAYER KING: Why then, with one voice, and like true English hearts, with me throw up your caps, and for England cry, "Saint George!"
[Trumpet, applause]
NARRATOR: On the 28th of November, 1582, two Warwickshire farmers posted a bond of 40 pounds at the Consistory Court in Worcester. Sealed and signed, this bond guaranteed that Will Shakespeare -- then 18 -- should marry no one but
FARMER'S VOICE: Anne Hathaway of Stratford in the Diocese of Worcester, maiden.
It is not known for certain in which church of the Diocese the wedding took place. And there is still another mystery: On the day before the Warwickshire farmers pledged their forty pounds, a marriage license had been issued to young Will Shakespeare and a certain Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. But of this "other Anne" little more is known.
Anne Hathaway was twenty-six, eight years older than her husband. In May, following their marriage in November, a daughter, Susanna, was born. There is little more to be known of these long years. Early in 1585, however, the first child was followed by twins: "Hamnet and Judith, son and daughter to William Shakespeare" were baptized in Holy Trinity.
But as for the young man himself -- was he apprentice to his father's trade? Was he writing at this time? We do not know. These are "the hidden years."
[Trumpet]
NARRATOR: London, in the year 1592, was at the very center of a new spirit abroad in the land: the spirit of the Renaissance. A splendid city of mansion and hovel cramped within medieval walls. A terrifying city of the Plague.
[Music, vocals]
A city of music -- and of laughter:
[Laughter]
NARRATOR: In a new theatre built in Shoreditch -- in the courtyard of inns -- a young actor, Richard Burbage, and his company of Players, have the citizens of London doubled with laughter. But it is not broad comedy alone which enchants both Prince and commoner: it is poetry:
BURBAGE AS ROMEO: He jests at scars that never felt a wound. But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise. . .
NARRATOR: Workmen on holiday -- merchant and apprentice -- elegant gentleman and his lady: how London doth pour out her citizens, for Will Shakespeare has the city by its ears [applause].
[Trumpets]
MASTER OF THE REVELS: To William Kempe, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, for two several comedies or interludes shewed by them before Her Majesty the Queen . . .
JOHN OF GAUNT: This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise.
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
This England,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
YORK'S VOICE [offstage]: The king is come: deal mildly with his youth; For young hot colts being raged do rage the more.
RICHARD'S VOICE: What comfort, man? How is't with aged. . .?
NARRATOR: The early years are lost to us, but we know that by the winter of 1596, William Shakespeare had become the wonder of the Elizabethan stage.
[Horse galloping; knocking]
SHAKESPEARE: How is he, Anne?
ANNE: He died, Will.
NARRATOR: His only son, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven.
SHAKESPEARE: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words . . .
ANNE: Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
NARRATOR: With the tragic record of his son's death, we find references once again to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.
In October of 1597, a deed recorded the purchase of New Place, largest and finest house in Stratford. His playwrighting and acting . . . particularly his acting -- were bringing him considerable wealth. But he was never to have another son to whom he could pass on the name Shakespeare.
[Trumpet]
VOICE OF CHORUS: . . . Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?
NARRATOR: The vasty fields of France and much more indeed were to be crammed within the splendid theater newly built across the River Thames. And William Shakespeare's life in London was now that of his theater, his fellow actors, his plays. His theater -- the great Globe -- concerned daily with props and rehearsals, with conferences between leading actor and playwright, with costume fittings for skilled boy players who enacted the women's roles: a bustle of activity among a fellowship of actors to whom Will Shakespeare's latest play was the thing. Richard Burbage was more than ever the idol of London, creating on the stage of the Globe Shakespeare's greatest characters. Shakespeare himself was a working actor -- Adam in "As You Like It," the Ghost in "Hamlet," the leading role in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humor."
BURBAGE: Trippingly.
SHAKESPEARE: What--?
BURBAGE: Trippingly on the tongue. You mouth the words.
NARRATOR: Whatever his merits as an actor -- he was certainly the Company's leading dramatist. He found his plots everywhere -- in old Italian novels, Holinshed's chronicles, forgotten dramas -- whatever fell to his magic hand.
From Plutarch's pages, "Julius Caesar," in which the noble Brutus comes to terms with his destiny:
BRUTUS: Our legions are brim full;
Our cause is ripe. The enemy increases every day.
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
CASSIUS: Then, with your will, go on;
We'll along ourselves, and meet them at Philippi.
NARRATOR: From an old play by Thomas Kyd, and an older legend, the "Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
KING: "Now the King drinks to Hamlet."
Come, begin:
And you the judges bear a wary eye.
HAMLET: Come on, Sir.
LAERTES: Come, my lord.
[Duel scene]
HAMLET: One.
LAERTES: No.
HAMLET: Judgment.
OSRIC: A hit, a very palpable hit.
LAERTES: Well, again then.
KING: Stay; give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine; Here's to thy health.
HAMLET: I'll play this bout first; set it by awhile. Count!
NARRATOR: "Hamlet," "Othello," "Lear," "Macbeth" . . . "the greatest monuments of human misery and despair in the literature of the world." How to account for these? The years had passed. His father was dead. There is the mystery of a certain Dark Lady -- "the woman colour'd ill" of "The Sonnets." There are beyond these few "facts," the despairing words of Macbeth:
MACBETH: Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
NARRATOR: For more than 20 years his working day world was that of the theater.
DUKE: If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it . . .
MACDUFF: . . . behold where stands the usurper's cursed head!
CLITUS: Fly, my lord, fly!
CHORUS: Fly, fly, fly!
PRINCE OF MOROCCO: Lead me to the caskets, to try my fortune.
HAMLET: Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest,
JULIET: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear . . .
CASSIUS: There is my dagger -- strike, as thou didst at Caesar!
NARRATOR: Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, our bending author hath pursued the story, in little room confining mighty men.
By 1610, at the age of forty-six, he was back in Stratford. He owned farmlands in the parish of Old Stratford and Welcombe.
[Thunder]
His eldest daughter, Susanna, was living nearby. She had made a good marriage. Her husband was Dr. John Hall, a well-known physician . . .
Dr. Hall was working on a book: "Select Observations on English Bodies." His learned conversation must have been of interest to his father-in-law, who in his plays had written much of "baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers."
His wife, Anne, was still living, as was his youngest daughter, Judith, twin to Hamnet, the son who had died at eleven.
London -- and the great Globe -- must have seemed far away. And yet we know that his retirement from the life of the theater must have been gradual, and it is certain that he sent -- or took himself -- at least three more plays to his fellows at the Globe. Plays which were as calm and serene as his tragedies had been troubled and somber. "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest."
On June 29, 1613, during a performance of "Henry VIII," the Globe Theater burned to the ground.
On the 25th of March, 1616, he executed his will. After providing for his family, he remembered his fellow-actors in London.
SHAKESPEARE: Item, I give and bequeath to my fellows, John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, 26 shillings and 8 pence apiece to buy them rings.
NARRATOR: Rings to remember Will Shakespeare by.
BURBAGE'S VOICE: Our revels now are ended.
These are actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this
insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
is rounded with a sleep.
[Music up and out]