That Shakespeare Life
319 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 17 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 49 ratingsHosted by Cassidy Cash, That Shakespeare Life takes you behind the curtain and into the real life of William Shakespeare. Get bonus episodes on Patreon
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Episodes
Ep 169: Tudor Underwear with Bess Chilver
July 12, 2021 13:00 - 29 minutes - 26.7 MBPortraits of ladies and gentlemen from the late 16th century show men and women adorned in all manner of finery, including everything from flowing gowns, to magnificent swords, and even those infamous Tudor ruff collars,but what exactly did it take to get into all those fine outfits? When Shakespeare surveyed his closet in the morning before he got dressed for the day, were there certain items he needed like an undershirt or socks? This week, we are diving into the world of early modern cloth...
Ep 168: Court with Natalie Mears
July 05, 2021 13:00 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBWhen we study court in Shakespeare history the phrase “appeared at court” or “performed at court” frequently gets used to describe what Shakespeare was doing at various points of his life. However, the overlap between “court” legally (as in, where you go for a legal trial) and the social phenomenon of Renaissance England where the monarch gathered their “court” together can make it hard to know what it means to go to court. This week we’ve set out to rectify this gap in knowledge with our gue...
Ep 167: Shareholders with Lucy Munro
June 28, 2021 13:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBWhen William Shakespeare first arrived in London sometime in the 1580s, James Burbage was already making waves in the early modern performance industry by establishing The Theater, a playhouse which the Burbages owned. After a fight with the owner of the land on which The Theater was built, the building itself would be dismantled by the Burbages and William Shakespeare who helped the Burbages clandestinely move the building timber by timber across the Thames to create the theater known as The...
Ep 166: Elizabethan Street Fighting with Casey Kaleba
June 21, 2021 13:00 - 54 minutes - 49.9 MBIn the 1950s when Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was adapted into West Side Story, popular culture in the US resonated with the gang culture and street fighting depicted on stage because the brass knuckled “rumbles” taking place on streets like those in New York City were current events of the day. Turns out, historically, these gang fights were a real issue for Shakespeare’s lifetime as well, and scenes like Mercutio and Romeo fighting in the streets of Verona, the mob that goes after Cinna ...
Ep 165: The Broom Besom with Wendy Wall
June 14, 2021 13:00 - 20 minutes - 18.6 MBIt seems even William Shakespeare had household floors to keep clean. While it likely wouldn’t have been the actual William doing the majority of the sweeping in his household, one item the bard seems to have been familiar with through his nineteen uses of the word “sweep” and one use of the word “besom” across his works is the household broom used for sweeping floors. The bard uses “broom” at least 3 times in his plays, mentioning once a broom-staff, and in The Tempest, Shakespeare calls att...
Ep 164: Iron Gall Ink with Lucas Tucker
June 07, 2021 13:00 - 23 minutes - 22 MBIn Cymbeline, Act I Scene 1 Posthumus Leonatus says “I’ll drink the words you send though ink be made of gall” and in Twelfth Night Sir Toby Belch calls attention to a particular kind of ink when he says “Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen…” in Act III Scene 2. Both of these scenes from Shakespeare’s plays are referencing the most popular kind of ink used in Shakespeare’s lifetime and that is iron gall ink. The phrase iron gall ink was a phrase used to des...
Ep 163: Crocodiles and Alligators with Spencer Weinreich
May 31, 2021 13:00 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBShakespeare mentions the word “crocodile” five times in his plays, but crocodiles not being native to England must have been introduced to the bard from outside his natural habitat there in London. The crocodile itself was well known in English literature, having been written about in association with Egypt and Africa by writers like Pliny the Elder centuries prior to Shakespeare. This particular beast was brought back to the forefront of popular imagination during Shakespeare’s lifetime, how...
Ep 162: The Grass Snake and the Basilisk with Rob Lenders
May 24, 2021 13:00 - 21 minutes - 19.5 MBIn Elizabethan England, the basilisk was a feared and hateful creature, capable of killing someone with just a glance. Of the 8 references to basilisks in Shakespeare’s plays, half of these invoke the reputation of being able to kill with a look. European bestiaries record the basilisk as a legendary serpent ruling as King of the reptiles and while the folklore far outpaces the science, recent historical studies of animals from Elizabethan England reveal that the basilisk may have been a term...
Ep 161: The Mermaid Tavern with Michelle O'Callaghan
May 17, 2021 13:00 - 39 minutes - 36 MBIn Elizabethan England on the corner of Friday Street and Bread Street was a fine dining and drinking establishment called the Mermaid Tavern. The building itself burned down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but the legend of this storied tavern lives on through the records of people like Ben Jonson and 17th century travel writer Thomas Coryat, who wrote about the Mermaid Tavern in the early 1600s, when Shakespeare was in his late 40s to early 50s, describing it as the meeting place of F...
Ep 160: Characterie and Elizabethan Short Hand with Bryan Crockett
May 10, 2021 13:00 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBIn 1588, one man named Tom Bright introduced an innovative new method for quickly writing down what you hear during a live performance, publishing a manual he called “Charactery.” A term of Bright’s own invention, Charactery is the first English version of an ancient method of shorthand dating back to the time of Cicero, that allowed anyone to pirate versions of live performance, provided they had enough patience to learn the complicated system. Bright’s innovative technology applied a compli...
Ep 159: Elizabethan Dogs with Jeff Crosby and Shelley Ann Jackson
May 03, 2021 13:00 - 31 minutes - 29.2 MBIn Elizabethan England two of the most popular forms of public entertainment were animal baiting and hunting. Bull and bear baiting happened in a dedicated arena while hunting was usually done on private lands or hunting parks where private, usually very elite, groups of people would gather for the hunt. What each of these sports has in common is they both employ use of dogs. Hunting dogs were raised meticulously with manuals from Shakespeare’s lifetime outlining the detailed husbandry invol...
Ep 158: Excavating Bull Ring Market with Steve Thomson
April 26, 2021 13:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBBull Ring market in Birmingham, England, UK was first known as Corn Cheaping because in the 12th century, which is when we have the first reference to Corn Cheaping, it was used as a corn market. Corn Cheaping had an iron ring setup on a grassy section of Corn Cheaping that was used as a bull baiting arena, where bulls who had been selected for slaughter would be tied and baited for entertainment before being processed into meat. That’s where the name Bull Ring Market comes from. Today, in th...
Ep 157: Social Order and Architecture with Matthew Johnson
April 19, 2021 13:00 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBAs students of Shakespeare’s lifetime, often we see the phrase “of certain status” to describe 16-17th century limitations on clothes, housing, and other material realities for various people. Particular if you study Elizabethan sumptuary laws, it seems like society was strictly controlled based on social status, and one’s place in society was decided at birth, with little mobility allowed. The life of people like William Shakespere, however, who in his own life was able to rise in the ranks ...
Ep 156: Rules for 17th C Hunting with Karen Kaiser Lee
April 12, 2021 13:00 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBIn Elizabethan England, the Queen is immortalized in woodcuts that show her fondness for the sport of hawking. By the time James I comes to the throne in 1603, hawking is surpassed by a form of hunting called par force where animals like dogs and horses are used to round up prey. While the practical aspect of hunting animals for meat was utilized in these hunting expeditions, arguably the primary function of going hunting was to establish yourself as a member of a higher order of social statu...
Ep 155: John Harington with Bob Cromwell
April 05, 2021 13:00 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MBThis week is Part 2 in our 2 part series on John Harington, the man who invented the first flush toilet in England. Our guest, Bob Cromwell, is back again this week to take us back to 16th century England and explore the exciting life of John Harington beyond his invention of the flush toilet. Harington was known as a literary figure, primarily for his translation of Orlando Furioso, and was a godson to Elizabeth I as well as a courtier in the royal court. Harington’s destiny was set into mot...
Ep 154: 16th C Puppets with Maureen Benfer
March 29, 2021 13:00 - 23 minutes - 21.5 MBAccording to an article on the Victoria and Albert Museum website, puppetry as an art form in Britain can be traced back over 600 years, with the first recorded puppet theater performance in London happening around 1600, when William Shakespeare was 36 years old. Medieval clergy used puppets to tell Bible stories, with one performance in 1599 at Coventry featuring a puppet version of the devil. When theaters like Shakespeare’s Globe were closed due to plague, puppet theaters were allowed to r...
Ep 153: Galloway Nag with Miriam Bibby
March 22, 2021 13:00 - 42 minutes - 39.4 MBIn Henry IV Part II, Shakespeare writes the earliest known reference to a Galloway Nag when Pistol he says “Know we not Galloway Nags?” That comes from Act II Scene 4. If you are not a 16th century Scotsman, however, the assumption that you know what a galloway nag is, or what it is suitable for Pistol in that scene, may not be as obvious as the character suggests. Turns out, in the 16th century, a Galloway nag was a highly reputable horse from the Galloway region of Scotland. The term “gallo...
Ep 152: Public Executions with Murat Öğütcü
March 15, 2021 13:00 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBWalking across London Bridge seems like a merry trip for many, or perhaps even a dismissable part of the daily commute if you live in London today, and while travel across the bridge was a normal occurrence for William Shakespeare, as well, what was decidedly different for him is that it often featured heads of executed traitors displayed on the Southgate of London Bridge. Along with severed heads on display, public hangings, disembowelment, and even burning at the stake were very much forms ...
Ep 151: The First Flush Toilet in England with Bob Cromwell
March 08, 2021 14:00 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MBSurviving archaeological items from the first English settlements at Jamestown include intact chamber pots. One of these chamber pots was part of a 2009 exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, United States. These pots were brought over to the New World by 16-17th century colonists who, at the time, used chamber pots as essential items. However, when they arrived, the colonists were surprised to discover that the natives did not have the same sanitary system as they did b...
Ep 150: London Bridge with Tony Sharp
March 01, 2021 14:00 - 30 minutes - 27.6 MBThere has been a bridge over the river Thames since the time of the Romans and the reign of Aethelred II, when the bridge was designed as a Saxon defense against the Danish. Since then, there have been at least 5 bridges either built, or repairs made to the predecessor, which have occupied the crossing of the Thames at London Bridge. The original structure we think of as the first London Bridge was located about 100 feet east of today’s London Bridge. There was a London Bridge stretched acros...
Ep 149: Mermaids with Vaughn Scribner
February 22, 2021 14:00 - 47 minutes - 43.5 MBWhen medieval cartographers drew maps of the world they included mermaids among the fantastic ocean beasts that they believed roamed the waters of foreign lands. Professional explorers like Henry Hudson in 1608, described sighting a mermaid in the NOrthern Atlantic ocean, describing how the mermaid called to the men on his ship. Philosophers, physicians, and clergymen, all described, in detail, the discovery, examination, and even display of mermaid bodies. There was a pervasive belief that m...
Ep 148: Robert Greene with Darren Freebury Jones
February 15, 2021 14:00 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBThe most memorable illustration of Robert Greene shows him dressed as an ear of corn, sitting at a desk, penning Groatsworth of Wit, his famous deathbed insult that calls William Shakespeare an “upstart crow.” That upstart crow may have gone on to eclipse Robert Greene’s fame in posterity, but for the moment in which those lines were written about the bard, Robert Greene was not only well established as a playwright in early modern England but held a arguably higher reputation in the playwrit...
Ep 147: 16th C Men's Shaving with Alun Withey
February 08, 2021 14:00 - 20 minutes - 19.1 MBShakespeare uses the word “beard” in his plays over one hundred times, and almost always as a way to indicate a man’s status, power, or authority. In Anthony and Cleopatra Caesar is referred to as “scarce bearded” as a slight against him by Cleopatra, several times the phrase “by my beard” is used in plays like Alls Well That Ends Well, as an oath, and in Henry V Gower refers to a specific style of beard being known as “the general’s cut.” Throughout the works of Shakespeare we see women swoo...
Ep 146: Early Modern Tattoos with Matt Lodder
February 01, 2021 14:00 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBWhen telling about the Battle of Hastings, William Malmesbury wrote a description of the English ancestors, the Anglo Saxons, as having “arms covered with golden bracelets, tattooed with coloured patterns.” The trend of tattooing oneself with coloured patterns seems to have fallen to the wayside by the time William Shakespeare was writing about skin used as parchment in Comedy of Errors, because tattoos were far from the everyday normative for your average English citizen in the 16th century...
Ep 145: Cleire Water with Vaughn Scribner
January 25, 2021 14:00 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MBAle was a popular drink in Shakespeare’s London, due in part to the undrinkable nature of the water from the nearby Thames River. The fear of water and superstitions about drinking it, extended well beyond England’s capital city, and extended even over the Atlantic Ocean to the colonies of Early American settlers, who coming from England, brought with them a surprising opinion about water in general. New England colonists in the early 17th century arrived with fear of what they called “cleire...
Ep 144: 16th Century Executioners with DJ Guba
January 18, 2021 14:00 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBMany famous people from history have had their lives come to an end by execution. We tell these stories with gusto, reverence, and sometimes even humor, but the person responsible for being the executioner goes largely unnoticed beyond the recognition that someone, albeit we rarely know who, had to actually be the executioner. The word “executioner” comes up in Shakespeare’s plays 17 times, twice referred to as a “common” executioner, twice mentioned in context of characters expressin...
Ep 143: 1604 Witch Trial with Todd Butler
January 11, 2021 14:00 - 33 minutes - 31 MBWhen Shakespeare was 39 years old, in 1603, King James of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth after her death, and he brought with him a famous repugnancy, and some call it outright fear, of witches during his reign. In Scotland, where James was dually King at this time, witchcraft had been considered a capital offense since 1563. The King brought this perspective to his management of witchcraft in England, as well. In 1604, just one year after his accession as King, James removed the mercy f...
Ep 142: Scanning Shakespeare's Grave with Kevin Colls
January 04, 2021 14:00 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBFamously, the grave of William Shakespeare is marked with an ominous entreaty carved on his stone that warns against disturbing his bones, declaring a curse on anyone that disturbs the dust enclosed here. Respecting Shakespeare’s wishes has meant that it was impossible to excavate the grave of the bard and explore questions like how he was buried, or even to confirm longstanding rumors about Shakespeare’s grave, including the idea that his skull was stolen by grave robbers in the 18th centur...
Ep 141: Newington Butts with Laurie Johnson
December 28, 2020 14:00 - 43 minutes - 100 MBFor centuries, theater historians have glossed over noy only the location, but actually argued over the very existence of a theater at Newington Butts. Originally established as an archery range under Henry VIII during a time when learning the sport of archery was required for all young men, the high ground at Newington Butts just outside of London proper would morph into a popular theater destination that our guest this week believes was not only a frequent destination for playing companies...
Ep 140: John Shakespeare with Bob Bearman
December 21, 2020 14:00 - 33 minutes - 76.5 MBWilliam Shakespeare’s father was a man named John Shakespeare. When you study William’s life you often hear about John Shakespeare, as many references to glove making in Shakespeare’s plays like the glover’s pairing knife in Merry Wives of Windsor come from an intimate knowledge with the glove making trade, which most assume came from William’s father John. When it comes to the life of John Shakespeare, however, the man was much more than a glover, having served also as an ale taster, alderm...
Ep 139: Christmas at Gray's Inn with Joe Stephenson
December 14, 2020 14:00 - 26 minutes - 61.7 MBIn 16th century England, Christmas time was a season of disorder, with many of the holiday celebrations centering around the idea of Misrule, role reversal, and a celebration of general chaos as part of the festivities. Which makes it surprising that the one place you would expect to find extreme order, the Inns of Court, which were essentially Law School for England’s budding lawyers, was also the establishment where Shakespeare staged a performance of Comedy of Errors on Dec 28, 1594, whic...
Ep 138: William Davenant with Ralph Goldswain
December 07, 2020 14:00 - 39 minutes - 89.9 MBDuring the century following Shakespeare’s life, the government tried to end playoing, shutting down theaters and passing orders against plays entirely. During this moment in history when it would have been easy for the legacy of William Shakespeare to die completely, one man who remembered William Shakespeare from his childhood, would champion the cause of theater, plays, and his mentor, William Shakespeare, to carry the legacy forward to survive the era of Oliver Cromwell, and potentially ...
Ep 137: Christopher Marlowe with Ros Barber
November 30, 2020 14:00 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBHistory remembers Christopher Marlowe as a contemporary of William Shakespeare that was prone to violence. Arrested multiple times for his association with fights, duels, and even murder, scholars around the world have suggested that Christopher Marlowe had a hot temper which often ran him afoul of the local authorities in London. In addition to achieving a university education and the social rank of gentleman, Marlowe is the author of some of the most powerful plays in the English Renaissan...
Ep 136: London Stone with John Clark
November 23, 2020 14:00 - 28 minutes - 26.6 MBIn William Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2, the character Jack Cade declares himself Lord Mortimer of London by striking London Stone and then sitting upon the stone to declare his royalty. While it makes a dramatic scene for a theatrical play, this story was based in actual history and the way Shakespeare tells the story tells us as modern theater goers something interesting about the Tudor opinion of the real Jack Cade that was present as Shakespeare was writing. While Shakespeare seems to b...
Ep 135: Gravestone Curses with Philip Schwyzer
November 16, 2020 15:52 - 24 minutes - 57.2 MBWhen William Shakespeare died, he left on his gravestone a formidable curse, warning anyone who dared steal his bones after death. You can see this curse today on his gravestone inside Holy Trinity Church and it reads Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebear To dig the dust enclosed here Blessed be the man who spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones. Sinister, and comical today when grave robbing seems like a far fetched idea, for the 17th century when Shakespeare ...
Ep 134: Thomas Kyd with Darren Freebury Jones
November 09, 2020 14:00 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBThe English playwright Thomas Kyd is one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who arguably has as much, if not more, influence on the development of Renaissance theater than even the bard himself. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is thought to have introduced to 16th century English theater a tragic format Shakespeare would later apply in his famous tragedy, Hamlet. Little is known about the life of Thomas Kyd, but what we do know is astonishing. He was a roommate with Christopher Marlowe, suspected of ...
Ep 133: King Leir with Mathew Morris
November 02, 2020 14:00 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBShakespeare’s play King Lear is based upon the story of the ancient British King who founded Leicester in England, written by Geoffrey Monmouth. Monmouth based his story on real elements of Leicester’s history, including the Jewry Wall and ancient roman tombs, some of which are still there in Leicester today. For the 16th century, this story was already hugely popular when Shakespeare decided to adapt it for his play version. The story was so tied up with the city of Leicester, that historia...
Ep 132: Archery in Shakespeare's England with Lyn Tribble
October 26, 2020 13:00 - 26 minutes - 18.5 MBIn the late 1590s as William Shakespeare was writing Henry V, and the famous battle scene of Agincourt, there was a cultural battle going on between the older and younger generations of men in England concerning the use of the longbow. As Shakespeare staged Henry V in 1605, he did so with the obvious absence of the very longbows that are considered responsible for the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. Similarly, Christopher Marlowe sidesteps the use of archery in his portrayal of T...
Ep 131: Rapiers with Tobias Capwell
October 19, 2020 13:00 - 49 minutes - 34 MBThe 16th century was the first time English history, and the first time in most of European history, that the average person started carrying a weapon as a matter of daily life. The rapier specifically came into fashion in England in the mid 16th century, and while it plays a prominent role in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mentions the rapier specifically over 30 times in his plays including Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the Henriad plays. The specific terminology Shakespea...
Ep 130: Sonnets with Stanley Wells
October 12, 2020 13:00 - 27 minutes - 18.7 MBHave you ever wondered why Shakespeare wrote sonnets or what purpose it served to learn iambic pentameter? Here to share with us the history of sonnets for the 16th century and explain why a playwright wrote poetry is our guest, Stanley Wells.
Ep 129: Industrious Servant with James Tink
October 05, 2020 13:00 - 27 minutes - 18.7 MBSociety in Elizabethan England is well known for being divided by class. There were workers, peasants, aristocracy, and even a kind of middle class but what was the definition of a labourer? When it comes to exploring the roles of characters like Ariel and Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest it is important to understand the 16th century mindset towards labor. Under Catholic England, the monasteries had decided they placed a higher value on the ability to commune with your thoughts and labor at...
Ep 128: Longbows with Alan Odinson
September 28, 2020 13:00 - 21 minutes - 14.9 MBFollowing its prominent use in the decisive victory of the English against the French in the Battle of Agincourt, the English longbow was a stalwart image of English patriotism well into the 1590s. Having been a favorite weapon for the famous Kings of England like Henry V, but also Edward III and Elizabeth I’s father, Henry VIII, the English longbow was a tried and true military technology that was as uniquely deadly as it was uniquely English. While it may have fallen out of favor among ...
Ep 127: Whifflers with Tracey Hill
September 21, 2020 13:00 - 22 minutes - 15.5 MBTracey Hill is here to tell us about Whifflers in 16th c England. A traditional fixture in pageants that appears in Shakespeare's Henry V.
Ep 126: Shakespeare in Parts with Tiffany Stern
September 14, 2020 13:00 - 34 minutes - 23.6 MBInside Tiffany Stern’s book titled “Shakespeare in Parts” which she co-authored with Simon Palfrey, there is a picture of a piece of paper captioned “The part of Orlando from Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso” from the 1590s. The image represents the historical reality that for Shakespeare, plays were always distributed in parts--meaning a single actor would have had a copy of what his character was supposed to say, but when he was on stage to perform those lines, he would be hearing the word...
Ep 125: University Spies with Robert Stefanek
September 07, 2020 13:00 - 36 minutes - 34 MBWhen Queen Elizabeth sought to root out Catholic uprising in her country, and to quelch potential plots against her in England, it is well known that she turned to spies and spymasters within her court to find, identify, and execute anyone who was a threat to the crown. One key method Elizabeth used to make sure the new generation of English boys supported her government and the Protestant religion was through indoctrination. What better place to teach them how to act, and how to think, than...
Ep 124: The Found Colony of Roanoke with Scott Dawson
August 31, 2020 13:00 - 27 minutes - 18.9 MBHaving been considered lost for centuries, and a huge mystery for historians, our guest today believes he has located the final resting place of the Lost Colony, and indeed, has uncovered artifacts that suggest they were never lost in the first place. Today we welcome Scott Dawson, archaeologist and author of The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island to tell the story of Roanoke Colony that so captured the imagination of Shakespeare’s England in the 1580s, as well as our own imagination into the 2...
Ep 123: Exhumation of Richard III with Mathew Morris
August 24, 2020 13:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBWithout the actual body of Richard III whose shallow grave was long lost to history centuries ago, scholars have used texts, like Shakespeare, to try and find evidence for the truth about what actually happened to Richard III. For one team of archaeologists, however, it was not enough to leave the sinister Richard III lost to history with more questions than answers. So in 2012, in conjunction with the Richard III Society, a team of ambitious archaeologists led by Mathew Morris at the Univer...
Ep 122: Richard Field with Adam Hooks
August 17, 2020 13:00 - 34 minutes - 23.8 MBWhen William Shakespeare first began his career, we see evidence in his plays as well as life decisions that he was an ambitious man, almost constantly trying to secure connections with the right people in the right places to move his reputation upwards in society. One very key way we see Shakespeare intentionally seek out forward motion for his career is by his connection to Richard Field. Field is a printer who grew up in Stratford Upon Avon, likely going to the same school as William Shak...
Ep 121: Shakespeare's French with Jennifer Nicholson
August 10, 2020 13:00 - 43 minutes - 30 MBOne of the most romantic moments from Shakespeare’s plays is when he writes Henry V stumbling his way through a French declaration of love and wedding proposal to Catherine of Valois in Shakespeare’s Henry V. It is gorgeous scene and one of my favorites, but it presents a few questions since England was strongly pro-England at this point in history, even leaning anti-French (having taken measures like banning the import of French playing cards at this time for example) so what was Shakespear...
Ep 120: Mummy Poison with Stephen Rojcewicz
August 03, 2020 13:00 - 32 minutes - 22.4 MBIn Elizabethan England, there was a strong overlap in the use of drugs as medicine and using them for magic. Real physical diseases like epilepsy or psychological conditions like the pathological jealousy we see exhibited in Shakepseare’s Othello, are all conditions that were just beginning to be fully understood by the medical community of the 16th century. One of the primary drugs used to treat epilepsy and pathological jealously was a drug called mummy, which was extracted from the bodies...