Episode Details

The man who mapped modern psychology with his pen had to carve a curse on his own grave to stop the sexton from tossing his bones into a charnel house. This episode sets aside centuries of romantic myth to follow the documentary record: birth in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 to a glove maker and Mary Arden, a grammar school drilling boys to argue both sides of any question, a hasty marriage at 18 to a pregnant 26-year-old, and a seven-year gap in the record before he resurfaces in London in 1592 being insulted in print by a university-educated rival.

We look at his business model as a sharer in his playing company, the construction of an open-air theater on the Thames in 1599, the later candlelit indoor venue, and the real estate and agricultural tithes he bought back home. The episode traces the evolution of his writing from Tudor-friendly histories to the Roman assassination play that put a debating mind on stage, the dark tragedies that located ruin inside human psychology, and the late romances of reconciliation. We cover plague closures totaling more than 60 months between 1603 and 1610, his unusual retirement, his 1616 death, the second-best bed in his will, the extinction of his bloodline by 1670, and the First Folio that saved half his plays.

• Why the University Wits sneered at an upstart without a degree, and what that jealousy revealed
• Equity ownership, vertical integration and the financial independence that enabled artistic risk
• How an intimate candlelit room changed the kind of acting and writing that was possible
• The bequest to his wife: petty insult or intimate gesture involving the marital bed
• No diaries, no letters: religion, sexuality and the sonnets as a mirror for every generation