William Shakespeare
This weekend, Joy surprised me with a very special Easter treat - tickets to the theatre!
We rarely get an evening out together, so we were both very excited to see Shakespeare's comedy play, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I'll be the first to admit that I experienced blind panic during the first five minutes though. I sat there thinking I have no idea what these people are talking about - which is likely what a lot of people are afraid of when thinking of watching a Shakespeare play, or indeed, listening to an old time radio performance of a Shakespearean play.
However, I'm pleased to say, once I'd overcome the initial panic, the performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream was superb - absolutely terrific in fact - and it gave myself and Joy a reminder of what a literary genius William Shakespeare really was.
What surprised me the most was how funny it was - that the comedy of 400 years ago could still be relative today.
We've been talking about his works ever since, and I didn't realise at the time, but it is over four hundred years since William Shakespeare passed away, aged 52.
So, I decided to look up a little more information about his life. However, it turns out that even though he was one of the greatest writers of the 16th century, with his poems, sonnets and plays being performed the world over, very little is actually known about his personal life - other than official records of important moments throughout his life, such as his birth, marriage, and his grave in the grounds of a Stratford-upon-Avon church in England.
Beyond that, the rest is a bit of a mystery... When he was 18, he was married to Anne Hathaway, who was 26 years old and already pregnant with their first child. Their twins Hamnet and Judith arrived next and were christened in February 1585.
In the years ahead, his wife and the children lived apart from Shakespeare, who worked and resided in London due to his theater career, until sometime after 1611, when he retired to Stratford to spend his remaining days with his wife.
One remarkable fact I read and wanted to share with you, is the role Shakespeare played in the transformation of the English language. Many words and phrases were first written down in his plays. For instance:-
'Elbow room' (King John), 'heart of gold' (Henry V), 'tower of strength' (Richard III) and 'Wild-goose chase' (Romeo and Juliet) - are just a handful of the many well-known English phrases that we've learned from Shakespeare and use in our day to day lives more than 400 years later.
In 1590, the early modern English language was less than 100 years old. Dictionaries had not been written, and many documents were still in Latin. William Shakespeare contributed over 3,000 words to the English language because he was the first author to write them down.
To commemorate his writings, I searched through the old time radio archives for any of his plays - and it turns out that they were pretty popular in the golden age of radio!
Click here to see which shows I have put together.
If you've never really given any of Shakespeare's works a thought, I urge you to give them a try. You'll perhaps experience the same panic that I did - but once you overcome that, the stories really are fabulous!
Happy listening my friends,
