We don't know exactly when Shakespeare was born.
We do know that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26th, 1564.
His birthday is traditionally observed on April 23rd,
partially because that's St. George's Day,
and partially because we do know that April 23rd was the day that he died,
four hundred years ago, in 1616.
Exactly four hundred years, assuming I didn't get this video out a day late,
which I am prone to do.
Here's what happened in those last four hundred years.
[music]
In 1616, William Shakespeare was buried in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon in Holy Trinity Church.
Sometime soon after, we don't know exactly when,
a monument to Shakespeare was installed.
It contained the Latin epitaph,
"The earth buries him, the people mourn him, Olympus posesses him,"
and the pedestal was placed under him.
In 1623, Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, died on the sixth of August.
Some months later, Shakespeare's first folio was published.
The First Folio became the definitive source for all interpretations of Shakespeare that followed.
Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's fellow playwright, rival, and longtime friend,
wrote a eulogy in which he famously declared,
"He was not of an age, but for all time!"
In 1632, the Second Folio was published, with about 1700 textual changes.
King Charles I owned a copy.
King Charles I was beheaded by people who hated theater.
In 1642, twenty-nine years after burning down and being rebuilt,
Puritans closed the Globe Theatre.
Two years later, those same Puritans demolished it
in order to make room for housing.
No more Globe Theatre.
And in the year that Charles I was beheaded,
Susanna Hall, Shakespeare's oldest daughter, died that July,
survived by one daughter, Elizabeth Barnard.
Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith Quiney,
died in 1662, leaving behind no children or grandchildren.
Elizabeth Barnard would die in 1670,
and so by this point, Shakespeare had no living descendants.
Not flesh and blood ones, anyway.
1692 heard the first Shakespeare opera,
Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Well, it wasn't technically an opera, it was a masque,
and none of Shakespeare's texts was actually set to music,
but it set off Western music's long fascination with Shakespeare as a subject,
from Verdi to Tchaikovsky to Etta James to Mumford & Sons.
[Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons]
In 1725, Alexander Pope, already famous for translating The Iliad,
published an edited edition of Shakespeare.
He took parts from all the previous folios and cut them down to a single, definitive edition,
demoting certain lines to mere footnotes for being "excessively bad".
His flaws begin to get scrubbed away.
Shakespeare's pedestal gets just a bit higher.
In 1740, William Kent's monument to Shakespeare was placed in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner
next to the graves of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser.
In 1765, Samuel Johnson published The Plays of William Shakespeare,
an annotated edition providing a landmark in criticism of Shakespeare's works.
Johnson wrote in the preface,
No wonder that Shakespeare was the most quoted author in Johnson's other work,
the English goddamn dictionary.
And in 1769: a watershed.
Actor, playwright, and famed Shakespearean David Garrick
went that September to Stratford-upon-Avon.
There, for three days, David Garrick staged the Shakespeare Jubilee,
a celebration of the bicentennial of Shakespeare's birth.
He was off by five years, but who cares.
None of Shakespeare's plays were actually performed,
but Garrick did give a reading of his own poem,
where he declared,
Apparently bard used to rhyme with paired.
Anyway, from that point on, William Shakespeare would be forever known as
the Bard.
In 1789, publisher John Boydell opened the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.
Using his connections to the arts,
Boydell wanted to create a school for English historical painting
and his chosen subject was Shakespeare.
One of Boydell's collaborators was the painter George Romney,
who made this painting in 1791.
He called it "The Infant Shakespeare attended by Nature and the Passions,"
putting Shakespeare in a position usually reserved for baby frickin' Jesus.
In 1795, London exploded with excitement
when Samuel Ireland announced that his son, William Henry Ireland,
discovered a whole treasure trove of Shakespearean documents;
letters, diary entries, correspondence with the queen,
even entirely new Shakespearean plays.
All of them forgeries.
In 1841, Thomas Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History,
where he outlined his influential but problematic theory
of the Great Man Theory of history,
where history was simply the collected biographies of great men.
One of those great men?
Shakespeare, obviously.
In 1847, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust was founded,
turning Shakespeare's childhood home into a museum.
In 1852, astronomer John Herschel broke with tradition of naming celestial bodies.
Instead of naming Uranus's two largest moons after Roman deities,
he named them Titania and Oberon.
Later astronomers followed suit,
and today, twenty-four out of Uranus's twenty-seven known moons have Shakespearean names.
In 1857, Delia Bacon's the Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded was published.
In it, she named the famed Renaissance philosopher and polymath Francis Bacon
as the true author of Shakespeare's plays.
Over the years, candidates from Edward de Vere to Christopher Marlowe
to Elizabeth I herself were also nominated.
Because the greatest works of the English language
couldn't have possibly been written by a glover's son from Warrickshire.
I think I've made my views on that theory quite clear.
But Shakespeare's image didn't go away.
Statues were erected in Central Park, in London's Leicester Square,
and a huge one in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.
And as his image was preserved, so were his sounds.
Throughout the 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory
made numerous experimental audio recordings,
including this:
"To be or not to be, that is the question."
In 1890, the American Acclimation Society decided to introduce numerous European birds to America,
birds like nightingales, skylarks, and starlings,
for the sole reason that they were mentioned by Shakespeare.
It was an ecological disaster.
In 1901, another watershed.
George Bernard Shaw published a collection of his works called Three Plays for Puritans.
In it, he included a lengthy preface where he gave his thoughts on drama and Shakespeare in particular.
He'd previously caused a stir with his proclamation,
He followed up on that statement.
He pointed out how many so-called worshippers of the bard
would stage his plays with cut endings and rearranged lines,
shaping the plays as they saw fit.
Shaw diagnosed the worship of Shakespeare, begun by Jonson and Garrick,
as a symptom of greater ignorance about his works at the time
and that only in the revival of true criticism in Shaw's day
do they start to see any kind of accurate representation of his plays.
He ended his argument by exclaiming,
"So much for Bardolatry!"
Bardolotry...
Great word.
Accurate word.
Shaw really hit on something.
I mean, monuments, memorials, moons;
he gave a mocking term to Shakespeare's place in the culture.
Not that he managed to stop it, of course.
In 1912, André Calmettes and James Keane filmed a 55-minute version of Richard III.
While Shakespearean scenes had been filmed as far back as 1898,
this version could boast to be the first feature-length Shakespeare film.
In 1923, a year after its founding,
the British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast a scene from Julius Caesar,
bringing Shakespeare to the radio.
In 1929, Hollywood power couple Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks
starred in The Taming of the Shrew, the first Shakespeare talkie.
In 1932, Emily Jordan Folger, wife of the late oil magnate, Henry Clay Folger,
saw their dream of a national Shakespeare library realized
with the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.
To this day, the Folger serves as the largest Shakespeare library in the world,
as well as the publisher of the Folger Library editions of Shakespeare's works.
If you went to an American school, chances are you learned Shakespeare from these editions.
In 1938, the BBC broadcast another version of Julius Caesar,
this time on a new-fangled thing called television.
In 1961, Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company,
giving a training ground for pretty much every actor you've ever heard of
who's even, like, remotely considered Shakespearean.
Like, these are only a few.
In 1962, Joseph Papp oversaw the opening of the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
It was to be the venue for the New York Shakespeare Festival.
Papp's vision for the festival was to bring free Shakespeare to everyone.
It would later be officially renamed with its more popular moniker,
Shakespeare in the Park.
In 1970, Shakespeare appeared on the twenty pound bank note
and would stay there until 1993.
Also in 1970, American actor Sam Wanamaker started the Global Shakespeare Trust,
with the eventual aim of rebuilding the Globe Theatre to its original specifications in its original location.
Construction was completed in 1997.
In 1980, Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt published this:
Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in which he examined early-modern culture,
including Shakespeare's plays, not as immortal words of enlightenment,
but as forces shaped by the politics of their time.
His work became a key text in the New Historicist movement,
a form of criticism which preferred to examine the historical and cultural context of a given work
rather than appeal to any kind of external truth of objective aesthetic beauty.
Critics of the New Historicists cried that they were simply pushing a politically correct agenda.
They cried that taking Shakespeare out of the ether and putting him back into history
would turn him into yet another dead, white, European male.
And so Shakespeare became a front in the culture wars.
In 1996, Australian Philippe Mora directed this 58-minute version of Richard III
with the express purpose of streaming it online,
making it the first film made specifically for the internet.
In 1998, the Bardolators struck back hard
with Yale professor Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
He dismissed the New Historicists as "a school of resentment"
and he declared that, "Bardolotry, the worship of Shakespeare,
ought to be even more of a secular religion than it already is."
In his book he sneered at feminists and post-colonialists
and anyone who would dare push any kind of political agenda on--
I--I tried reading it, it's just the most obnoxiously butthurt thing ever.
His defense of Taming of the Shrew made me want to put my head through a wall, it—eugh.
In 2007, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni
published a report that they called The Vanishing Shakespeare.
After surveying seventy of America's top universities, they were shocked to find
that only fifteen of them required Shakespeare to be taught to English majors.
In their words,
But, y'know, just because those courses aren't required doesn't mean they're not taught.
Or that they're not popular, either inside or outside the classroom.
We haven't stalled the reverence for Shakespeare in the slightest.
After all, in 2012, when London hosted the Olympic games,
lines of Shakespeare introduced the ceremony.
"That when I waked, I cried to dream again!"
There are hundreds of yearly Shakespeare festivals in America alone.
IMDb gives Shakespeare over 1100 writing credits,
including for films that have yet to come out.
Shakespeare's plays have been translated into well over a hundred languages,
from French to German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Latin, Esperanto,
and of course, Klingon.
"taH pagh taHbe'!"
Shakespeare's just part of our cultural bloodstream.
He can be seen everywhere and he is quoted by everyone.
Everyone.
"William Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, and men and women are merely players."
"But Mr. Shakespeare never met Stephen Curry."
"Curry the Closer!"
Everyone.
Shakespeare has been very, very busy in the last 400 years.
He's appeared in every artistic medium, in every walk of life, in nearly every part of the world.
After 400 years of idol worship, we are all Bardolatrous.
And we are not stopping any time soon.
Well, I mean, I'm certainly not.
Summer of Shakespeare 2016!!
Hey, thanks for watching.
I usually don't do outros like this, but I thought this was appropriate.
Given what year it is and how popular these things have been,
I am doing another Summer of Shakespeare.
This year I decided to do something a little bit different,
I'm doing seven videos, two of which are my own choice,
and the other fiver were, um, chosen by you.
My very nice patrons on my Patreon page,
very nice patrons on my Patreon page, I can say that tongue-twister.
My very nice patrons on my Patreon page nominated a bunch of titles for me to review,
and I set up a Twitter poll and the top five were chosen by you.
I should start the series like, late May-ish and going through to August,
so I am looking forward to getting to that.
So, what's the traditional sign-off,
like, share, subscribe, donate to the Patreon if you want to, uh, [stammering]
Yay!
[sigh] Uh, god, I should never improvise.