I`ve tried to bring Shakespeare back into the world, in the world he lived in and in our world. I`ve tried to take the traces that he left, little chicken...

I don`t think too many professors say this, but there are people who have this idea...

People have a lot of strange ideas about a lot of things, Brian. I mean, in the case of Shakespeare, he left a lot of records. He was famous in his...

Yes, 38 plays and lots of poems. Did he write everything, absolutely everything by himself alone? No, absolutely not. He collaborated on a bunch of...

He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in the Midlands in England and died in 1516 -- in 1616.

Yes.

It`s a town that was and is located on the Avon River, so it`s upon the Avon. And there was a very fancy bridge in Shakespeare`s time. The same bridge...

Well, since the 18th century, the town has been a tourist site, the major kind (ph). So there`s a lot of Shakespeare there, or at least, a lot of things...

Great. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP - AUGUST 3, 2004) MAUREEN DOWD, AUTHOR, "BUSHWORLD: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK": What I try to do with humor and with serious columns...

I didn`t, but it doesn`t surprise me because the fashioning of eloquence, first of all, in the 19th century, was very much bound up with reading Shakespeare....

Because he was the best, because he had the most astonishing, creative mastery of his medium of anyone in our language. And he was unrivaled in his...

He had astonishing natural gifts. That is to say, there are things that are difficult to explain other than they must have been genetic accidents --...

Simple people, at least in their social background. Shakespeare comes from a modest social family. One of the reasons we don`t know as much about him...

The parents had, actually -- now, I forget the actual answer, partly because the kids died in the usual way rather quickly. Six, I think. But of those,...

A perfectly good document, which is a Christening record, so he know he was christened. And the date, the birth date, April 23 birth date, is just a...

He was born in -- very good question. He was born officially into Protestantism. England had decisively become Protestant in 1559, after going -- rocking...

Yes, it`s a complicated world, though probably not more complicated than our life world, our spiritual world. It`s not so clear if, when push comes...

His mother comes from a more unequivocally Catholic family. The father`s will -- her father`s will is manifestly, from its formulas, a Catholic will....

She came to power in 1569. She died in 1603.

A lot of years.

Well, she wasn`t popular among the popes at the time -- several of them were in office during her reign -- for good reason. Her father, Henry VIII,...

Oh, I got interested in it actually back in college, or graduate school, in any case. I became interested in Sir Walter Raleigh and fascinated by that...

First memory I have of reading Shakespeare is being assigned "As You Like It" in junior high school and hating it.

"Sweet my cos, be merry!" I thought, Oh, man! I can`t deal with this. It was -- it just seemed impossibly old-fashioned and silly.

Well, I usually would say, Why don`t you rent a video? Take a look. Because the plays were certainly written -- they may have been written to be read,...

I don`t -- I mean, I`m not someone who feels compelled to make a choice, but I do prefer the plays, fundamentally, to the sonnets. I find the sonnets...

I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts.

I went to college at Yale, and then I was in England for a couple of years afterwards on a Fulbright.

No, Cambridge.

And then I went back to Yale for my graduate school.

I teach at Harvard.

I teach English literature, a lot of Shakespeare, to be sure. But from time to time, I teach other things, as well, partly in the field of the Renaissance...

I do agree with that. I think, actually, rather few people would disagree with it. Why has he lasted so long? Because he is infinitely pleasurable and...

More than people think. He didn`t go to Oxford or to Cambridge, and thereby hangs a tale. I mean, something happened in the family. He might have been...

A couple of hard days` ride in his time.

On a horse, yes. It was a long, difficult trip. I mean, it wasn`t something you did -- I mean, Shakespeare must have done it relatively regularly, but...

I want to say 80 or 90 miles, but I -- someone will call me in and correct me. I`m sure I`ve got it wrong by something or other.

He married at 18, which was probably not the best idea he ever had in his life. He married a woman who was 26 years old. And there`s -- he was a minor,...

Susanna. And the reasonable presumption is that therefore, they knew each other before they married.

A farmer`s daughter living in a town called Shottery. Her father was dead, which gave her an unusual liberty, freedom. She didn`t have brothers, either,...

Well, we don`t know exactly. It`s part of that time of his life about which the records are silent. There`s lots of speculation, including the ones...

First draft of the will doesn`t mention her, not, To my loving Anne, not, To Anne, nothing, To my wife of 34 years, zero. It doesn`t mean that she wouldn`t...

Almost the whole of their marriage. The first -- presumably, the first two years, between `18 and `20, he was around. At least, we know he was around...

We don`t know. They didn`t keep death records that specified this. We just have a death record that says the son died at the age of 11 in 1596. Could...

Well, some people say no impact. Some people say he was a cold bastard who just went on with his work because we know that in the years after the writing...

The play "Hamlet"? The play that Shakespeare had inherited -- Shakespeare tended to use what was given to him, what he could find in his voracious reading,...

Well, I think "Hamlet" is actually a watershed play. I mean, it`s hard to decide among -- with a playwright who had so many astonishing achievements,...

He did largely invent the language. I mean, he invented it usually -- he`s very cunning at telling you what the words actually mean. When Lady Macbeth...

He wrote "Hamlet" in 1601.

He had probably written -- he hadn`t written any of the great -- this is the first really -- I mean, he had written "Romeo and Juliet," that`s the one...

Lots of different ways of teaching Shakespeare. I mean, one of the pleasures of Shakespeare is there are a million different ways of getting into these...

A lot of them have politics in them. I would say, depending on how you -- how broadly you define the term. Most of the plays have some kind of politics...

Well, it was censored both by someone called the master of the rebels, who worked -- you would have to present the script to the master of the rebels,...

It`s hard to tell, of course. If it was really secret, I mean, and it`s probably the case that there are parts of it -- some secrets that we would have...

And why Karl Rove? DOWD: Well, Karl Rove I guess was early on, because Karl Rove, you know, is kind of -- they call Bush`s brain, although I don`t think...

She`s using Yago as a figure for a kind of cold, reptilian evil. Can be used that way. It`s a slightly strange analogy, only because you`d have to believe...

I plead guilty to the charge. I...

Well, I confess I wrote something about the first debate, the first presidential debate recently, that in "The Times" op-ed page that simply tried to...

Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare`s contemporary, exact contemporary, born in 1564, as Shakespeare was. From a provincial town the way Shakespeare...

That`s it. About 200, yeah. A huge city by European standards, London.

Yeah. There are -- as you say, only three cities like this in Europe. I don`t know actually whether -- whether Istanbul, what the size of that was at...

He did. He made a lot of money. And he was quite celebrated in his time. It`s hard to sort of pick out a single figure now who would be comparable,...

Cheap seats were -- if you go to the public theater, that is to say the outdoor theater, the Globe, for example, you paid a penny to get in the door....

Probably -- well, I don`t know a comparable system in which you would -- you -- although we have the -- we have the -- we`ve changed the rules in a...

No one knows for sure. The dates of these things aren`t so clear. If you really want to know the first thing that I think we have a trace of that he...

Again, these things are very, very difficult to say. Maybe the late 1580s. Could have been another play, too, could have been one of the "Henry VI"...

Oh, no, in the...

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, that`s what I say. But we don`t -- we don`t know for sure, and we don`t know for sure because they`re rather canny, these poems.

Canny in not identifying exactly whom they`re being written for, or identifying exactly what the social situation is in which they`re being written....

He did. That we do know, because almost the only documents of the kind that we have are the two dedicatory epistles that he wrote for the two narrative...

The English had -- the English had performed their act of ethnic cleansing before any other country in Europe. 1290 I think it was that they expelled...

So what happened was that Christopher Marlowe had written a very brilliant play called "The Jew of Malta," brilliant but wild and reckless, that was...

We don`t know. We have a record that says he drank a lot. His daughter was getting married, so maybe he did drink a lot, more than he should have. But...

I have.

Yes, it`s true.

A complete surprise.

Are you kidding? No. I`m delighted.

I wanted very much in this book to figure out a way of telling an audience other than the audience that I usually write for, which I am happy about,...

Thank you very much, Brian.