William Shakespeare left no diary, no manuscripts and no instructions. What he left was a body of plays that his fellow actors rescued in print, a company that built its own playhouse out of a rival landlord's timbers, and a shelf of phrases so ordinary we no longer hear them as quotations. Here are the stories behind the plays, the people in them, the theater they filled, and the words.
Every tile in a Shakespeare game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Plays
nine stories
1The book that saved eighteen plays
On the tile: First Folio1623
Shakespeare died in 1616 without collecting his plays. Seven years later two friends and fellow shareholders in the King's Men, John Heminge and Henry Condell, brought thirty-six of them together in one large volume. Eighteen had never been printed anywhere before, among them Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and As You Like It. Researchers think about 750 copies were made, and 235 are known to survive. Had the two actors not bothered, half of Shakespeare would be a rumor.
In 1598 Francis Meres published a list of Shakespeare's comedies and included one nobody has ever read: Love's Labour's Won. For three and a half centuries that single mention was all anyone had. Then on the last day of 1953 a London bookseller showed an American scholar a scrap of paper that had been used to stiffen a book's binding. It was a bookseller's list from 1603, and there the play sat again, among books for sale. No copy has ever turned up.
For more than 150 years audiences did not see the King Lear that Shakespeare wrote. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote it: he cut the Fool, made a romance of Edgar and Cordelia, and let both her and Lear live. Thomas Betterton acted Tate's version, and so did David Garrick. William Charles Macready put the tragic ending back in 1834 but still left out the Fool. Only in 1838 did he restore both, and his Fool was the actress Priscilla Horton.
In 2016 Oxford University Press did something no major publishing house had done before: it credited Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare's co-author. Its New Oxford Shakespeare lists Marlowe alongside Shakespeare on all three parts of Henry VI. The edition was prepared by four scholars, among them Gary Taylor of Florida State University, and rested partly on computer analysis comparing the vocabulary of those plays with work known to be Marlowe's. Playwrights of the day often worked in teams. The surprise is how long it took to print that.
The earliest known trace of Twelfth Night is not a printed text but a notebook of gossip and sermon notes. John Manningham, a law student at the Middle Temple in London, wrote up a play he had just watched in the hall there on February 2, 1602. He compared it to The Comedy of Errors and to a Roman comedy by Plautus, then spent most of his entry on the part he liked best: the steward Malvolio, fooled by a forged letter into believing his mistress loved him.
Hamlet is the longest play Shakespeare wrote: 4,167 lines by the Folger Shakespeare edition's count. The shortest is The Comedy of Errors, which runs to 1,898 lines by the same measure, less than half as long. One is a prince who cannot bring himself to decide anything. The other is two sets of identical twins loose in the same town, sorted out before supper. Both were written by the same man for the same trade.
Many theater people refuse to say Macbeth inside a theater and call it the Scottish play instead. The story goes that a coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations and cursed the work, and that the first performance, around 1606, was riddled with disaster. The Royal Shakespeare Company tells a stranger tale on itself. In Stratford in 1948, Diana Wynyard played the sleepwalking scene with her eyes genuinely shut, walked off the edge and dropped into the pit, unhurt. The night before, the RSC says, she had called the curse ridiculous.
Act three of The Winter's Tale holds one of the most famous stage directions in Shakespeare: Exit, pursued by a bear. Antigonus has just set a baby down on a wild shore, and off he goes. Bear gardens stood a short walk from the Globe on Bankside, and audiences knew exactly what a bear looked like, which keeps the question alive: did a real one lumber onto the stage? Shakespeare's Globe says scholars now agree it did not. A rival company, the Lord Admiral's Men, owned bearskins.
In July 1609 a hurricane caught the Sea Venture, flagship of a fleet carrying supplies to Jamestown, and left her leaking badly. Days later, with the hold filling, Captain Christopher Newport steered her onto the reefs of uninhabited Bermuda, as close to shore as he could get, and all 150 aboard reached land. For ten months England assumed them dead while they built two small ships, the Patience and the Deliverance, and sailed on to Virginia. The story reached London and helped inspire The Tempest: Ariel speaks of fetching dew from the still-vex'd Bermoothes.
Shakespeare's fattest, funniest knight began life as Sir John Oldcastle. The real Oldcastle was a Lollard knight, tried and executed as a heretic and later given his own woodcut in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and his descendants were powerful. William Brooke, Lord Cobham, and his son took offense, and the name became Falstaff. Traces of the first version survive. In one early printing a speech prefix still reads Old. Prince Hal calls him my old lad of the castle. And the epilogue to Henry IV, Part 2 assures the audience that Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.
When the pianist Andre Tchaikowsky died in 1982 he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, hoping it would play Yorick. It sat in a box in a costume store for 26 years. Then in 2008, at Stratford-upon-Avon, David Tennant held it aloft in the graveyard scene for 22 performances, with the audience kept in the dark so the skull would not distract from his performance. The company needed a license from the Human Tissue Authority, because the skull was less than a hundred years old.
Uranus has 29 recognized moons, and almost all of them carry the names of Shakespeare's characters. NASA calls them the literary moons. Titania, the largest, takes her name from the fairy queen in A Midsummer Night's Dream. William Herschel spotted her in 1787, nearly two centuries before Voyager 2 photographed the fault valleys running across her surface. Oberon, Miranda and Ariel are up there too, and a couple of the names come from Alexander Pope instead.
Shakespeare took Romeo and Juliet from a long English poem by Arthur Brooke, printed in 1562, two years before Shakespeare was born. In Brooke's version Juliet is sixteen. Shakespeare moved her down. Her father says she hath not seen the change of fourteen years. Making her younger sharpens everything: the haste, the secrecy, the sense of two children outrunning the adults who are supposed to be looking after them.
No woman acted on the English professional stage until 1660. The women's parts went to boys. Near the end of Antony and Cleopatra, the queen imagines being carried to Rome and staged there by quick comedians, and shudders at the thought of seeing some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness. The boy speaking that line was doing exactly what the line describes. It is the kind of joke a company can only make about itself.
Ask which of Shakespeare's women speaks the most lines and the answer is not Lady Macbeth or Juliet. It is Rosalind of As You Like It, with 685 lines by one standard count, just ahead of Cleopatra's 678. The odd part is how she spends them. Rosalind flees into the Forest of Arden disguised as a young man called Ganymede, stays in disguise for most of the play, and coaches the man who loves her on how to court her.
The picture most people see when they hear Ophelia's name comes not from the theater but from a Victorian painting. John Everett Millais worked on it through 1851 and 1852, and his model was Elizabeth Siddall, found working in a hat shop by a painter friend, who lay in a bathtub of water in his studio. Oil lamps under the bath kept it warm until, on one occasion, they went out and Millais was too absorbed to notice. Siddall became ill. Her father made the painter pay the doctor.
Puck did not spring out of Shakespeare's head. Robin Goodfellow, nicknamed Puck, was already a household name: a sprite who would do your chores overnight and expected payment in food and milk. The Royal Shakespeare Company traces a possible mention back to a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library, in which a hobgoblin called Robin keeps soldiers awake by making noise. The earliest confirmed Robyn Godfelaws turns up in the Paston Letters in 1489.
Macbeth's witches get a visitor named Hecate, and her scenes have always felt bolted on. The clue is in the text. Where a song belongs, the printed play gives only a first line, Come away, come away, and moves straight on. The full song, words and staging together, appears in The Witch, a play by Thomas Middleton from about 1615, complete with a spirit descending in the shape of a cat. Scholars read the borrowing as a sign that another hand worked on Macbeth.
Shakespeare's company played in Shoreditch at a playhouse called the Theatre, and its landlord would not renew the lease on the ground beneath it. The lease, however, gave the players the right to the building. So in December 1598, while the landlord was out of town, they hired the carpenter Peter Streete and took the place apart beam by beam. The lumber was stored, then ferried over the Thames to Bankside, and the Globe rose out of it.
The first Globe was roofed with thatch because the company was short of money when it built. In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a prop cannon was fired on stage. It held no cannonball, only gunpowder packed down with wadding, and a piece of that wadding landed on the roof. The thatch caught. Within an hour the playhouse was on the ground. The second Globe went up on the site with a tile roof and much richer decoration.
The Globe was paid for by the people who worked in it. Six sharers of the company, Shakespeare among them, put up the money along with Cuthbert Burbage, which made the players both the landlords and their own tenants. Historians of the London playhouses count that financing among the Globe's innovations, along with its size: it was built bigger than both the Theatre it came from and the Rose beside it. A part of every penny taken at the door came back to the men on the stage.
In 1608 Shakespeare and his colleagues took over an indoor playhouse in the old Blackfriars precinct, though a long plague closure kept them out of it until about 1610. After that the King's Men had two homes: the open-air Globe in summer and the candlelit Blackfriars in winter. No other London company could afford the pair. Blackfriars held far fewer people but charged much more, and the company went on switching between the two until the playhouses closed in 1642.
For three centuries nobody could point to the Globe. Then in 1989, during work behind a terrace on Park Street in Southwark, archaeologists reached the playhouse foundations: chalk and brick walls, and the base of one of the two stair turrets that carried the audience up to the galleries. Only a fraction was uncovered. The rest lies under later buildings and stays there. The find shook what scholars thought they knew about the shape of the place.
Sam Wanamaker was an American actor whose first job, in 1936, was playing Shakespeare in a rough copy of the Globe at a world's fair in Cleveland. He later founded a trust to build a proper one in London, and it took 23 years to find land, win planning permission and raise the money. He died in 1993 with the building still under construction. The Globe was completed and opened in 1997, four years after its first performance there, which was given in German.
London has had a law against thatched buildings since the Great Fire of 1666, so the rebuilt Globe needed special permission for its roof. Thatching it took 6,000 bundles of reed from Norfolk, and the Globe says that was a year and a half's output from the reed beds that supplied it. The plaster on the walls was mixed with goat hair. Each of the two great pillars on the stage is a single oak.
In 2012 Shakespeare's Globe ran a season with one strict rule: all 37 of the plays, each performed in a different language. Companies came from around the world, and there were no surtitles, so for six weeks an audience on Bankside watched Shakespeare in languages most of them did not speak and followed the plays anyway. The season closed on June 9 with the last of the thirty-seven, the Globe's own Henry V, in English, which then ran on through the summer.
In the prologue of Henry V the Chorus apologizes for the playhouse: can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France, or cram within this wooden O the helmets of Agincourt? The shape was literal. London's open-air playhouses were round or many-sided, with a yard in the middle and galleries wrapped around it. Shakespeare's Globe today holds 1,500 people, which the theater itself says is about half the number the original held. Much of that first audience stood shoulder to shoulder in the open yard, in daylight, with the weather included.
The familiar claim is that Shakespeare coined around 1,700 words. What that number actually counts is words whose earliest surviving appearance in writing is in his works, which is not the same thing. Linguists running computer searches through millions of words of earlier English put the figure of genuine first appearances at about 500. Take hobnail. It shows up first in a text of his, but it is hard to believe a poet invented a nail. He was writing down English that people were already speaking.
When Mercutio tells Romeo his wits are running the wild-goose chase, he is not picturing a pointless errand. A wild-goose chase was a horse race. One rider took the lead and twisted and turned over whatever ground he liked, and the horse behind was bound to follow him, strung out like geese after the lead bird. Gervase Markham set out the rules in a horsemanship manual in 1593. Mercutio means his friend's wit is running a course he cannot follow.
In The Taming of the Shrew a younger sister cannot marry until the elder one does, and nobody will go near the elder. Tranio puts it to a newcomer: if you break the ice and do this feat, everyone else can follow. That is the whole of the phrase in a single line. Somebody goes first through the hard part and the rest come along behind. We now use it for the first awkward minute of a party, which is easier work.
In Julius Caesar, Casca reports on a scene in the Roman forum and admits that Cicero spoke but he could not follow: those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me. Casca means it flatly. Cicero was speaking Greek, and Casca does not have the language. The phrase has since drifted into a way of saying that anything at all is beyond you.
Cleopatra uses the phrase to apologize for a younger self. Charmian has reminded her that she once praised Julius Caesar the way she now praises Antony, and Cleopatra brushes it aside: My salad days, When I was green in judgment: cold in blood. Salad here means green, unripe, not yet knowing better. The modern sense, a golden stretch of youth worth missing, has quietly turned her meaning inside out.
Falstaff refuses to lend Pistol a penny. Pistol's answer has been borrowed ever since: Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. We use it to mean the world is full of opportunity. Pistol means something harder. He has no money, so he will take what he wants at the point of a blade. The oyster, in his version, does not open on its own.
Most people meet the line in a Sherlock Holmes story. Come, Watson, come, Holmes cries in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, the game is afoot. Shakespeare had it first. Northumberland says before the game is afoot, thou still let'st slip in Henry IV Part 1, and in Henry V the king rouses his men outside Harfleur: I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot. Both lines are hunting talk, the game being the hunted animal. Holmes kept the chase and changed the prey.
English got its favorite phrase for jealousy from a man who was busy manufacturing it. In Othello, Iago warns his commander: O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on. He has spent the whole scene planting the very suspicion he is warning against. Portia speaks of green-eyed jealousy in The Merchant of Venice too, but it was Iago who made the monster stick.
We use the phrase for someone open and unguarded. Iago says it in Othello to describe what he will never be. If his outward behavior ever matched what he actually felt, he says, then I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at: I am not what I am. Daws are jackdaws, and a heart pinned to a sleeve is bird food. The line is a promise to hide everything, and we have turned it into a compliment.