COVID Shakespeare

  Timon of Athens – “ Men shut their doors against a setting sun.” Shakespeare probably worked quickly to produce ‘Timon of Athens’. He hadn't produced many plays over the last year and now that he was settled back in London with his properties in the country making a fair sum for him, he probably started in earnest. Since the relative success of 'Hamlet', 'King Lear' and 'Macbeth'he wanted to experiment and stretch the limits of tragedy. Once again, he looked around him to see what aspects of contemporary life struck him. His company were desperate to get the opportunity to perform before the new king but the queues outside St James's Palace seemed to stretch for hours with sycophants of all sorts from nobles to painters and poets. This probably gave him the idea behind 'Timon of Athens'.  Shakespeare probably went back to his lodgings in Blackfriars and took out his Plutarch and probably happened upon Timon of Athens. The real Timon was a philo...

  Macbeth – “ So foul and fair a day I have not seen." Late on the night of November 4 th , 1605, as the wind picked up outside his window, Shakespeare probably put down his 1599 copy the ‘Discovery of Witchcraft, and Daemonologie’ wriiten by the new king James I. The weather outside was foul and well suited to a bit of reading on witches. He then probably downed the last of the mulled wine in the goblet beside his bed before he lifted the brass candle snuffer and put out the candle. Early the next morning, Shakespeare was probably awoken by a loud knock on the door of his large room at his Silver Street lodgings which he rented from Christopher Mountjoy (a French Huguenot and a wigmaker by trade). The news had started to spread that a plot to blow up the houses of parliament had been foiled the night before and a certain Guy Fawkes had been arrested. The early visitor was probably one of Mountjoy’s apprentices, a young provincial boy from Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire...