That Shakespeare Life

Spooky season is upon us here again this October, with Halloween being celebrated at the end of the week. If your neighborhood is anything like mine, this means that there will be lines and lines of pumpkins everywhere! From jackolanterns to pumpkin spice this little orange gourd takes center stage. For Shakespeare's lifetime, the pumpkin wasn't made into a candle holder, nor anything like a jackolantern, since those didn't arrive in England until the century after Shakespeare, but what tha bard did enjoy was a pumpkin season. But what exactly did they think about pumpkins in Merry Old England? Was it considered a foreign trade item, was it native to the English shores? And did Shakespeare have pumpkin spice? There are only three references to pumpkins at all in Shakespeare's plays to provide us clues, one being In Merry WIves of Windsor, when Mistress Ford calls pumpkins "this gross watery pumpion." That doesn't sound like everyone was drenching their lives in orange squash for the Fall season, but I wanted to investigate further. Our guest this week is Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (2012), you will remember Cindy from her previous episode where she talked with us about the Great Pompion that Pumpkin figure that shows up in Shakespeare's plays, and we talked then about the import of pumpkins to England and their role in the First Thanksgiving, but this week, Cindy joins us to share a different angle on Shakespeare's pumpkins to look specifically at 17th century recipes, both for food as well as for animal care and even crafts. We'll explore how pumpkins were used for Shakespeare's England, and look at whether or not Shakespeare had a pumpkin spice Fall season.

There are dozens of references to dragons throughout Shakespeare's plays, describing them as fierce, wrathful, lonely, and of course---winged and quite large.

In Shakespeare's England, dragons were considered real creatures who roamed the Earth, and they had very specific attributes associated with them that Shakespeare takes full advantage of in his works. However, as an observer from over 400 years away from this part of his culture, you might miss some of the significance of his references without a guide into exactly what the perspective was on dragons when Shakespeare was putting them on stage.

Here to travel back with us into Tudor and early Jacobean England to explore the world of dragons and their impact on the world of men, is our guest and dragon historian, Rachel Sweeney.

Shakespeare uses the word torment more than forty times in his plays.

For modern listeners, torment often feels internal — guilt, grief, jealousy, remorse. But in Shakespeare's England, torment could also be something far more literal. It could be inflicted physically, through instruments specifically designed to extract confessions, enforce obedience, or punish those accused of crimes against the Crown.

From the gibbet — referenced in Henry IV, Part 1 alongside dead bodies — to threats of racking, scolding tongues, and even Richard Plantagenet's "strange tortures" in Henry VI, Shakespeare's works are filled with language that assumes his audience understood the machinery of punishment.

We might be tempted to dismiss these images as dramatic devices — grisly inventions suited to the stage. But the surviving artifacts housed in the collections of the Royal Armouries in London tell a different story. Torture in the 16th century was indeed brutal, but it was also astonishingly real.

This week, I'm joined by Malcolm Mercer, Curator of Tower Armouries at the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London. Together, we'll examine seven specific objects from the Armouries' collections — including devices like the Scavenger's Daughter, the gibbet, the scold's bridle, and more— that serve as surviving testaments to how individuals in Shakespeare's England could, and were, be tortured and submitted to torment for crimes against King and Country.

We begin with one of Shakespeare's most memorable fashion jokes: Malvolio in Twelfth Night, strutting in his yellow stockings. In the play, the color is comic, even ridiculous. Malvolio believes the stockings will make him attractive and impressive, but to everyone else, they make him look foolish. Shakespeare's audience would have recognized that clothing could carry meaning, and yellow was not a neutral choice.

From there, we step into the real fashion world of Jacobean England, where yellow was not confined to the stage. Among the elite, ruffs and cuffs could be starched, shaped, and even tinted with color. Saffron-yellow starch became fashionable, distinctive, and controversial. What looks to us like a decorative detail was, in Shakespeare's world, part of a highly visible culture of status, performance, and reputation.

At the center of that fashion story was Anne Turner. She was a court-connected widow, businesswoman, and companion to Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset. Turner became especially associated with saffron-yellow starch, which was used to tint fashionable ruffs and cuffs. By the time she was drawn into the Overbury murder trial, that yellow starch had become one of the details that made her notorious.

The victim in that scandal was Sir Thomas Overbury, a courtier and poet who was poisoned in the Tower of London in 1613. His death became one of the most sensational cases of Jacobean England. The murder, the trials, the pamphlets, the ballads, and the public spectacle around the case spread through the same London news culture in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

The scandal reached deep into the world of the court. Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, stood at the center of the story, with Anne Turner close beside her. What began with courtly relationships and private ambition became a public drama of poison, fashion, reputation, and execution. By the end, yellow was no longer simply comic or fashionable. In the Overbury scandal, it had become dangerous.

So as you listen to today's conversation, watch how one color moves through Shakespeare's world: from Malvolio's humiliating stockings, to fashionable saffron-starched ruffs, to Anne Turner's trial and execution. In Jacobean England, yellow could make people laugh—but it could also mark a woman for infamy.

In the decades that followed Shakepseare's death in 1616, England saw the arrival of events known as witch panics of Civil War–era Britain. It's easy to think that these witch panics and the heightened fear about witches was something that's post-Shakespeare, but the reality is that the the legal, religious, and cultural foundations were already being laid during Shakespeare's lifetime through developments such as the 1604 Witchcraft Act, King James I's ideas about demonic conspiracy, and growing fears surrounding prophecy, spirits, healing, and the Devil.

Our guest today is Marion Gibson, an expert on witches and witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the author of Witchland her latest book that explores the witch panics of Civil War–era Britain, revealing how war, religious extremism, local conflict, and earlier beliefs about witchcraft combined to turn suspicion into persecution. For today's episode, we will explore both the terrible events that followed Shakespeare's lifetime and the earlier beliefs, laws, and conflicts that set the stage for their arrival.

From witchfinders and eyewitness testimony to neighborhood quarrels and sudden reversals of reputation, Marion will help us understand how the foundations of England's later witch panics were being built while Shakespeare was still alive—and how that history can deepen our understanding of the witches and accusations we encounter in his plays

Long before fashion magazines, personal style blogs, or carefully curated social media feeds, a 16th century German accountant named Matthäus Schwarz was documenting his wardrobe in extraordinary detail.

Between 1520 and 1560, Schwarz commissioned artists to create more than 130 precise watercolor portraits of him on parchment, recording the clothing he wore at different stages of his life. The earliest images, painted by Narziss Renner, reconstructed Schwarz's appearance from infancy through his school years and apprenticeship. Over the next four decades, he continued adding portraits that captured changing fashions, important occasions, and the way he chose to present himself to the world.

The resulting manuscript, known as the Klaidungsbüchlein, or Book of Clothes, has been described as the world's first fashion book—and, in many ways, the Vogue magazine of its time.

Today, we are joined by Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, co-editors of the first English translation of Schwarz's remarkable work, to explore what this collection reveals about clothing, identity, status, and self-fashioning in the sixteenth century.

As you will know from listening to THat Shakespeare Life, there's a ruch history behind every small object from the life of William Shakespeare Whether it's clocks, clothes, pencils, or tablets, we love using the objects of Shakespeare' world to get closer to the real lives of the people who lived tehre.

WHich is why I was delighted to learn abotu Catherine Richardson's latest book titled Shakespeare's Objects where she sets out to explore 33 of these objects, all of which are mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. From beds and perfumes to handkerchiefs, clocks, lutes, torches, and spurs, the book follows these things through the world Shakespeare knew—asking who made them, who owned them, how they were used, where they came from, and what they can reveal about the people who encountered them.

Today, we are delighted to have her here on the show to share some of what she uncovered while researching the material world behind Shakespeare's plays.

Immortalised as Elsinore in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Kronborg Castle is one of the most important Renaissance castles in Northern Europe. A real castle, and historical stronghold that sits in the town of Helsingør, Denmark. Kronborg is as fascinating as it is beautiful.

Our guest this week is Laura Kiel, the Operations Coordinator at Kronborg Castle, where she plays a key role in caring for the castle's remarkable collection — from grand paintings and heavy antique cabinets to exquisite historical costumes. During her 12 years at Kronborg, Laura has also become the castle's in-house Hamlet expert, having taken part in coordinating many productions of Hamlet staged within the iconic setting of Kronborg itself.

Laura joins us today to take us inside Kronborg Castle to understand more about the history of the castle, why it was used in Shakespeare's play, and what was going on at Kronborg when Shakespeare staged his famous tragedy within it's gates.

Shakespeare's plays and poems are filled with birds—from familiar crows, swans, and sparrows to species that would have seemed rare, exotic, or unusual in Renaissance England. But these birds are more than decorative details. They carry symbolism, reflect the natural world Shakespeare knew, and reveal how people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the animals around them.

In this episode, artist and researcher Missy Dunaway joins us to explore her Birds of Shakespeare project, which documents all sixty-five bird species referenced across Shakespeare's works. We'll discover how she identified each bird, the historical sources behind her paintings, the plants and symbolism included in her compositions, and some of the most surprising birds to appear in Shakespeare's writing.

Shakespeare mentions cats over 30 times in his plays, including to talk about a gib cat, a musk-cat, cats chasing mice and even making perfume. It's obvious that cats were present for Shakespeare's lifetime, but what do these references in the plays show us about their place in society and perhaps in people's homes for Shakespeare's England? Did Shakespeare keep a pet cat, would they have been useful for fighting against plague, and what exactly did a 16th century cat look like? Here today to help answer these questions and take us through the artifacts, primary documents, and paintings that reveal the feline world of Shakespeare's England is our guest, Helen Parish.

Helen Parish is a Professor of History at the University of Reading and author of, "Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils": Witches, Familiars, and Human-Animal Interactions in the English Witch Trials"

Helen's work focuses on cats as a witch's familiar, but her research looks further into the details about how cats lived in the 16th cenutry and today she's here to help us explore cats for Shakespear's England.