Shakespeare’s Life

Melvyn Bragg examines what we know about the life of William Shakespeare. Charles Dickens said of the deeply enigmatic Shakespeare, “It is a great comfort…that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up”. The mystery may have been a pleasure to Dickens but for forgers, conspiracy theorists and Shakespeare scholars it is a tantalising conundrum that has exercised minds since the day the playwright died. How was the low born son of an illiterate craftsman, with a meagre education, able to write with such skill and erudition? How did a provincial man manage to become so attuned to the politics of kings? And how do we know that the plays that we have are the right plays, written by the right man and published in the form they were written?

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Katherine Duncan-Jones 4 episodes
  Professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford
• John Sutherland No other episodes
  Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College, London
• Grace Ioppolo No other episodes
  lecturer in English at the University of Reading

Related episodes

• Shakespeare’s Work
  
  11 May, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
  
  4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures
• Johnson
  
  27 Oct, 2005 820 English and Old English literatures
• Lear
  
  28 Feb, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures
• Romeo and Juliet
  
  17 Feb, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets
  
  2 Jun, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Hamlet
  
  28 Dec, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• Literature
  
  5 Jan, 2012 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
  18 Apr, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• William Hazlitt
  
  8 Apr, 2010 820 English and Old English literatures
• Marlowe
  
  7 Jul, 2005 820 English and Old English literatures
• Dickens
  
  12 Jul, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Biography
  
  22 Jun, 2000 920 Biography and genealogy
• Pope
  
  9 Nov, 2006 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Tempest
  
  14 Nov, 2013 820 English and Old English literatures
• Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets
  
  11 Oct, 2018 820 English and Old English literatures
• Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment
  
  10 Feb, 2000 830 German and related literatures
• Rudyard Kipling
  
  16 Oct, 2014 820 English and Old English literatures
• Emily Dickinson
  
  11 May, 2017 810 American literature in English

---

Programme ID: p00547ct

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547ct

Auto-category: 822.33 (Shakespeare, William)