William Braford is most well known today as the man who served as the second governor of Plymouth Colony, leaving Europe for Virginia in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. Prior to this infamous voyage, Bradford was an Englishman whose life overlapped that of William Shakespeare, having been born in Yorkshire, England, when Shakespeare was 26 years old. There’s no evidence to suggest Shakespeare knew Bradford personally, but the life of William Bradford shines a light on a huge aspect of Shakespeare’s life: the presence and subsequent response to religious extremism in England. Queen Elizabeth restored Protestantism to England in 1559, along with requirements that everyone attend Protestant Church services. Many religious groups refused, moving to underground church services that were decidedly illegal in England. One of the people who attended such services was a young William Bradford. Relations with religious groups in England remained a tense tightwire act across two monarchs of Shakespeare’s life, a situation we can see reflected in Shakespeare’s Puritan character named Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The character is publicly humiliated while simultaneously painted as someone with whom we can sympathize. The duality of the character itself is a powerful reflection of the sentiments of England at the start of the 17th century. Efforts like the publication of the King James Bible in 1609 attempted to find a common ground with the Puritans, but peace could not be found, with arrests of religious dissenters increasing under James I and leading ultimately to groups like Bradford and the Pilgrims, leaving England entirely in the early 1600s. Here today to help us explore the life of William Bradford, explain the distinction between Puritans and Pilgrims, as well as the reality of religious extremists like the Anabaptists and Scottish Presbyterians, going on in England during Shakespeare’s lifetime is our guests, and direct descendants of William Bradford himself, David and Aaron Bradford.

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