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  • Birthday Celebrations for the 16th Century
    2025/04/21

    In Shakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra declares “It is my birth-day:

    I had thought to have held it poor: but, since my lord Is Antony again, I will be Cleopatra.” Indicating that she was relieved to be marking the occasion in a better way. Julius Ceasar, similarly declares in Act V, “This is my birth-day; as this very day was Cassius born.” In Pericles, the First Fisherman says “he hath a fair daughter, and to-morrow is her birth-day;” (Act II). In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Marcellus talks about celebrating our Savior’s birth with singing. Other references to the day of one’s birth show up in Henry VI Part II the Earl of Suffolk talks about having a cunning old man calculate the day of his birth (Act IV), and later in that same act, Jack Cade talks about how his father was ignorant of both his birth and parentage. All of these mentions of birth days, their calculations, and their celebrations, has me wondering what exactly birthdays were like for Shakespeare’s England. We always celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday in style in around here, but would the bard have celebrated his own day of birth? To find out, we’ve invited one of the authors of the article “Debating the Birthday: Innovation and Resistance in Celebrating Children” Peter Stearns, to the show to day, to help us explore the history of marking a birthday with cakes, gifts, and a gathering of friends. Would this have occurred for Shakespeare’s lifetime? Let’s find out right now, on That Shakespeare Life.

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    17 分
  • Hall's Croft, 3D Interactive Model & AI Features
    2025/04/14

    This week, we have a special opportunity here on the show to explore the Historic home of Shakespeare’s eldest daughter, Susanna Shakespeare Hall, that has been brought to life in a beautiful digital 3Dformat thanks to a pioneering new digital archive that has created an augmented reality exhibition that lets visitors like you and me, visit and virtually walk through Susanna’s home known as Hall’s Croft, from anywhere in the world. The 3D component allows users to bring 17th-century early modern objects into their own spaces using the AR feature, while the digital archive allows users to explore 3 rooms from Hall’s Croft from the comfort of their own homes. This week we are delighted to welcome Ailsa Grant Ferguson, the lead on this digital project, back to That Shakespeare Life, to tell us about the research that went into this program, what they learned about Hall’s Croft, and about Susanna Shakespeare through their research, and to share the details on how you can explore this 3D model for yourself.


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    28 分
  • Transportation, Vehicles, and Taxi Cabs for Elizabethan England
    2025/04/07
    In Shakespeare’s plays, he talks about “Travel” or “Traveller” just under 80 times, including references that suggest people travelled by foot and by horse, the Queen Mab speech by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet talks about a wagon used for transportation, and there are references that indicate there were items which would add comfort to someone’s travel, and one reference from Comedy of Errors talks about being “stiff and weary” from long travel. We also know that in a personal connection to William Shakespeare the man, playing companies often travelled around England visiting various inns and establishments of their patrons who hired out a production, this applied to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as well. With all of this travel, it begs the question of exactly what getting around England, particularly in a large group, might have entailed. What kind of vehicles would have been traversing the cities and countryside for Shakespeare's England? Were there paved roads, dirt paths, or maybe cobblestone streets? What about rules of travelling such as stop signs, round abouts, or other kinds of travel infrastructure? Whose job was it to decide where a road would be put, and then who carried the responsibility of maintenance of the paths? Could you get a traffic ticket in Elizabethan England? Here today to help us answer these questions, including sharing with us what kind of vehicles travelled along England’s roadways in Shakespeare’s lifetime, details about what the roads were like, and the rules for travelling them, is our guest, Robert Bucholz. Get bonus episodes on Patreon

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    34 分
  • Historic Elizabethan Dice and Dice Games
    2025/03/31
    On previous episodes of That Shakespeare Life, we have talked about the numerous early modern card games that show up in Shakespeare’s plays, and even that Ferdinand and Miranda are playing the game of Chess in the Tempest. What you may be surprised to learn is that another form of early modern game playing—the game of dice—comes up over half a dozen times across Shakespeare’s works, with references to playing the game, using them to predict the future, and of course, losing at the game of dice. Dice was a huge sport for Elizabethan, and later Jacobean, England and here today to share with us about this history, what games were played, and some specifics on the history of the playing pieces themselves is Historic Games expert, Charles Knutson. Get bonus episodes on Patreon

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    24 分
  • Food Macbeth, the real Scottish King, would have eaten
    2025/03/24
    In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, there’s a famous banquet scene, with a huge food spread and of course, a few ghosts because what’s a party without a few spectres, right? This scene is fictional, but it is based on a real historical person, the real King Macbeth of Scotland, and holding banquets in a castle absolutely happened. Here today to share with us what foods would have been eaten at the real banquet of the actual Macbeth is historical chef, and host of Tasting History on YouTube, Max Miller. Get bonus episodes on Patreon

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    29 分
  • Judith Quiney Shakespeare, in her later years
    2025/03/17
    The last time we talked about Judith Quiney was to discuss her youth as the younger sister of Susanna Shakespeare, the twin of Hamnet, and the overall blacksheep of her famous family due to her husband’s excommunication and the marriage scandal causing her father, William Shakespeare, to re-write his will to exclude Judith. The details of Judith Quiney’s life are as sparse, as they are tantalizing, and historical fiction has jumped on the opportunity to try and piece together the fragments. We welcome one such writer this week, Grace Tiffany, having just completed her second book on Judith Quiney, that offers a fictionalized rendering of what was possible for Judith in the second half of hr life, where she not only far outlived her scandalous youth, but she lived far beyond the life of her famous father, dying at the old age of 77 in 1662, close to 50 years after the death of Shakespeare himself. Get bonus episodes on Patreon

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    41 分
  • Code Breaking Mary Queen of Scots Lost Cipher Letters
    2025/03/10

    In As You Like It, Orlando says “Which I take to be either a fool or a cipher.” that’s one of a dozen references to ciphers in Shakespeare’s plays, which reflects the place of ciphers as a common way to keep secrets, particularly among the elite, for Shakespeare’s lifetime. One of the most famous ciphers for Shakespeare’s lifetime was written between 1578 and 1584, while Shakespeare was just getting his career started in London as a playwright, when they were written by none other than Mary, Queen of Scots. For 19 years prior to her execution, Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in England, and during that time, she wrote extensively, including letters in code. It was known that between 1578 and 1584, just 3 years before her death, Mary wrote a series of letters in code to the French ambassador, but those letters were considered to have been lost. Surprisingly, the letters survived, but because they consist of unreadable encoded text, no one knew what they were about, and they were stored away in unrelated collections in the National Library of France, where they went unexplored, until 400 years later. In 2023, an international team of codebreakers happened to stumble upon the documents when they were looking for historical ciphers in order to crack them. They not only found Mary’s lost letters, but managed to decode them, and present the contents to the world for the first time in almost half a millennia. Lead author and Israeli computer scientist, George Lasry, is here today to tell us about the team’s efforts, the decoding process, what Mary wrote, and why it was so important for the letters to be in cipher in the first place.


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    35 分
  • Last Will and Testaments
    2025/03/03
    A “Last Will and Testament” is a document listing out the instructions for how to handle your remaining worldly goods after your death. It is an opportunity for the living to share their wishes from beyond the grave. In As You Like It, Orlando mentions this practice by saying “...give me the poor allottery my father left me by testament; with that I will go buy my fortunes.” In Julius Caesar the group cries out “The will! the testament!” Again in In Timon of Athens, the Painter says “performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it.” Obviously, Shakespeare’s making a metaphorical statement in that last use of will or testament, but the references declare a history here to documenting one’s final wishes and the process of carrying out your bequests. Here today to help us explore what wills and testaments were like for the 16-17th century, who wrote them, what they included, and taking a look at the details of Shakespeare’s own will and testament, is our guest and expert in the history of wills and testaments from the 16th all the way to the 19th centuries, Laura Sangha. Get bonus episodes on Patreon

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    53 分