Simon Schama's Shakespeare - Season 1

Simon Schama's Shakespeare - Season 1

Season 1

Network
DatesJun 22, 2012 - Jun 29, 2012

Episodes

This England
Season 1Episode 160 min

This England

Simon Schama argues that it is impossible to understand how Shakespeare came to belong 'to all time' without understanding just how much he was of his time. Schama explores how, in his history plays, Shakespeare created a vision of England that still rings true today. Against the backdrop of the Reformation, Shakespeare began to dramatize English history and the English character in a new and unprecedented way. From his first blockbuster, Henry VI, he made sure that his England was not just a place where King and Queens strutted and preened, but where ordinary Englishmen and women took centre stage. It was inclusive vision that Shakespeare expanded upon in his masterpiece - Henry IV - a play which presents England in glorious technicolour: kings and pickpockets, country squires and common prostitutes, corrupt knights and ragged soldiers. And at the centre of it all is the outsized figure of Sir John Falstaff - a character that transfixed Elizabethan audiences and still moves us today. Falstaff is Shakespeare's most stupendous creation; an outsized dream of Englishness who embodies more purely the essence of English irreverence, generosity and wit.

Jun 22, 2012
Hollow Crowns
Season 1Episode 260 min

Hollow Crowns

Simon Schama explores Shakespeare’s attitude to the other great subject of his day - Kingship. He asks how far Shakespeare’s most profound tragedies, including Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, were inspired by his own experience of writing for the courts of Elizabeth and James I.
Jun 29, 2012

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