(soft music) - [Lolita] I think what happens to you as a kid, no matter what era you are living in, drives you, absolutely drives you as the fundamental reason that you are who you are.

(soft music) (children laughing) - [Narrator] William Shakespeare's childhood was scarred by tragedy.

(soft music) When he was just 14, his younger sister died of plague.

His father, John Shakespeare, the successful glove maker who'd risen to become mayor of Stratford, was exposed for illegal business deals and was forced to resign.

(soft music) The Shakespeare family lost everything.

(soft music) - Seeing his dad fail.

I mean, there's a certain thing, isn't it?

I remember the first, and possibly the only time I saw my own .. It was shocking because I don't know, I mean, seeing a parent cry is really shocking, but seeing your dad cry is a big deal because it shows that they're fallible and they're able to be defeated and fail and feel things that you just don't want these gods in your life to feel.

And to see John angry, humiliated, cast aside, to be a kid growing up next to that parent, you feel it, even if you can't locate what it is.

And I think that's often the driving force of many people, let alone artists where we go, "I'm not gonna be that, I'm gonna be the opposite of that."

(soft music) Of course, the irony is you often go smack bang into it, don't you?

(soft music) (upbeat music) (crowd chattering) - [Narrator] The plays Shakespeare left us are not only works of genius, but they also provide a collection of clues as to who he was, the struggles he faced, and the forces that drove him.

- He was living in a time where everybody was just swimming in mock sets and you know, violence and it was charged.

(gun shots) - That narrative of Shakespeare striding along, becoming the man he was always intended to be, could not be further from the truth.

The truth is, it was a blessing for Shakespeare simply survi.. (upbeat music) - Now with the help of historians, experts, and actors, we're going to piece together the puzzle and tell the life story of William Shakespeare.

(upbeat music) - You cannot shrug your way through it, it's too big.

(upbeat music) - [Juliet] It's a story of ambition, showmanship and tragedy.

(all clapping) How glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon, became the greatest writer who ever lived.

(upbeat music) - He doesn't restrict himself talking about human frailty.

He's saying, look at yourself and look at the damage that is done.

(upbeat music) - It's his understanding of everything, of love, of anger, of jealousy, of rage, melancholy.

Who did it better?

Who's ever done it better?

I wish I'd met him.

Oh, I wish I'd met him.

(soft music) (audience clapping) - [Juliet] In 1595, William Shakespeare is on top of the world.

A few years earlier, he arrived in London, a broke nobody.

Now he's the most famous playwright in England, as a shareholder in the capital's most popular theatre company, his annual income could reach 80 pounds, placing him firmly in the upper middle classes.

He's able to send money back to his family in Stratford, his wife Anne, his daughters Judith and Susanna at his son Hamlet.

Family's there, family's safe, they're okay, nothing to worry about there.

Maybe as now, when we get a bit successful, we go, "I'll take a bit time out.

I'll get that work life balance and I'll go home a bit more."

Of course, it never works like that, does it?

Because if you are working at that level, it demands more and more and more.

(soft music) - [Juliet] Shakespeare remains in the Capital.

He's focused on his writing, but also fulfilling a lifelong ambition.

He wants the status of being part of the gentlemanly class, so he applies for his own coat of arms.

This is his design with his spear mirroring his upward rise.

(soft music) - I think William applies for a coat of arms for very personal and emotional reasons.

It's not simply because he's a social climber.

I think what he wants to do is revivify his father's desire and dream to be a gentleman.

(soft music) - [Juliet] With it, Shakespeare hopes his family's reputation will be restored.

(soft music) - At this point, William has a son, Hamnet.

You can tell from his writing, he's very interested in lineage and how things get handed down and how ancestry works.

So it's clear that by being a gentleman, having your own coat of arms, you are going to be demanding the respect that you feel you deserve, but also you hand that down to your children.

(soft music) (crowd chattering) - [Juliet] But just as Shakespeare has success, he can see that life is getting harder for his fellow Londoners.

(men grunting) - A year or so has passed since plague has ravaged London, the landscape has changed completely.

- [Juliet] Plague has been followed by failed harvests, famine and rebellion.

Every day, Shakespeare sees the English hungry and desperate.

- William is an intelligent artist and an intelligent businessman, and he recognises that in hard times, where the world is full of pain and difficulty, and they need to be given pleasure.

They need taking away from their wretched lives.

(soft music) - [Juliet] And so with his newest play, Shakespeare transports his audience from their grim urban reality to a surreal fantasy forest world.

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Oberon, the king of the fairies has a rah with his queen and throws their fantastical world into turmoil.

(soft music) - Ill met by Moonlight proud Tetania.

- What, jealous Oberon?

Fairies skip hence, I have forsworn his bed and company.

- Tarry, rash wanton, I'm not I thy Lord?

- Then I must be thy lady.

- I'm not good at analysing it at all.

If you couldn't say this about the king of the Queen of fairies, having a tricky relationship.

And she says that long, long, long speech, which I could say to you now, these are the ridges of jealousy.

"And never, since the middle summer's spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By pavèd fountain, or by rushy brook, Or in the beachèd margent of the sea, to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport."

God, it's wonderful, wonderful language.

(soft music) - It's the first play that he writes that's not taken from a previous source.

(soft music) (crowd laughing) It's about a deep tradition within England of a fairy world, half believed in or more.

And of the kind of darker side to the mischievous forces that surround us.

- Sleep Thou and I will wind thee in my arms.

- "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

It was enormously transgressive.

Perhaps the most famous scene it is.

We shouldn't be scared to say it is a bit of dirty sex between the queen of the fairy and a man who's also a donkey.

It's an unfathomably, profound and beautiful dream, which is at the centre of this play.

I think that's an incredible thing to have done.

(audience clapping) - [Juliet] Shakespeare is London's most celebrated playwright, but it's not enough.

(upbeat music) After years of run-ins with the city authorities, he wants to make theatre respectable by building a new kind of playhouse.

(upbeat music) Indoors and bespoke with a smaller capacity of higher paying, higher class people.

(audience clapping) And he's going to do it within the city walls at Blackfriars where the upper classes live.

(upbeat music) - Williams being part of a profession which was legally associated without lowery and vagabondage and a sort of homelessness really.

The liberties plays host to all sorts of unregulated life.

Whereas, the city is much more civilised.

It's much more respectable, it's more professional.

- There were two ways to make money.

One was to pull in a lot of people, and the other was to make it an indoor theatre that played to a wealthier and more upscale crowd that would pay six times the amount.

- You can imagine the kind of excitement, reverberation, resonance, and the opportunity to play to a completely different kind of audience, in a completely different part of the city, must be a thrilling one.

(upbeat music) - [Juliet] But it's now that things start to go wrong for Shakespeare.

(upbeat music) The problems begin with his newest play.

(upbeat music) "Henrie The Fovrth" is the latest in his series of works on English history, and it tells the story of a young prince, torn between his duty as the future King Henry IV and the corrupting pleasures of London life.

- He wants to bring history to life, not just as the official record of kings and courts and battles.

His instinct is that history might not really be living there at all, that it might be living in the tavern.

- [Juliet] Shakespeare wants to make Henry IV as entertaining as possible, so he creates a character he knows Londoners will love, a member of the English gentry, who is also a drunken and a botched rogue.

- He meets people, so many people, so many different types of people.

And when he met an interesting character, he took that character and placed it inside a play and made that person speak.

He puts them in and you suddenly, there's this fizz of life that that that's created, that ignites the story and reimagines it for an Elizabethan audience.

- A good sherris sack hath a two-fold operation in it.

It ascends me into the brain and dries me there all the foolish, dull and curdy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.

The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood.

- You know he's fat, he's drunk, he's bad mannered.

He burps, he farts, he goes out whoring, he's rude to everybody, he deceives Henry IV.

(audience cheering) And yet at the same time, he's the most marvellous character.

It's not that there's a heart of gold, but there's a golden spirit.

You know, there's something, a light in him.

(audience laughing) - [Juliet] Portraying an English noble as a drunk is edgy enough, but Shakespeare goes further.

He names the character after Sir John Oldcastle, a martyr of the Puritans, England's hard line Protestant elite.

- For William to Spring Oldcastle on us is an amazing thing.

It suggests a kind of mischievous confidence, such as we haven't seen before.

(audience clapping) There is a dangerousness to it.

(audience clapping) - Well, I think Shakespeare wanted to take risks and have little pokes at people who were seen as the higher ups.

You know, the people in power.

I mean, I guess it was hard to do it overtly.

Maybe impossible sometimes to do it overtly but covertly.

I'm sure at the time a lot of the audiences would've known exactly what he was talking about and who he was getting at.

- [Juliet] But this time Shakespeare's gone too far.

He even names one of old castle's drinking buddies in the play, after another dead Puritan, Lord John Russell.

(tense music) The problem is Lord Russell's widow, the Countess Elizabeth Russell is still very much alive.

She's powerful, influential, and now furious.

(tense music) - People read different things into portraits.

Some people might say that was a mild mannered, pretty but intelligent woman, with a very elaborate costume.

And others would say that is a termagant.

Well, you may well ask What's wrong with a termagant?

What's wrong with strong-minded women?

She was an aristocrat.

She was a convinced puritan.

Everything that we know about Lady Russell suggests that she wasn't the most agreeable of characters.

(tense music) - [Juliet] And if offending the puritans wasn't bad enough, Lady Russell has also heard about Shakespeare's plan for a theatre in Blackfriars, just 120 feet from her front door.

- And so, Lady Russell got together a petition and she gathered a large number of signatures.

(tense music) These are people who are being made fun of and got the better off.

So perhaps Lady Russell didn't think too kindly of Shakespeare or of the Lord Chamberlain's men who performed Shakespeare's plays.

- [Juliet] Under pressure, even Shakespeare's patron, the Lord Chamberlain signs the petition.

- She clearly had a sharp mind, one which was capable of understanding the arguments that would work with the powers that be of the day.

(tense music) So the combination of a iron determination in her own character, of her education, and her intelligence and her connections, were just the thing to enable her to get her own way.

(audience cheering) - [Juliet] Shakespeare is forced to apologise on stage at the Rose Theatre, the apology he wrote survives today.

- "First my fear, then my curtsy last my speech pardons for Old Castle died a martyr, and this is not the man."

I think the tone of the apology is quite tongue in cheek.

This is a bit of a you know, a bit galling for him to have to apologise for something he's written.

(upbeat music) I think he apologises with the least grovelling you could possibly get away with.

- [Juliet] Shakespeare has to change the names of Henry IV's offending characters.

Russell becomes Bardolph and Oldcastle becomes to Sir John Falstaff.

(audience cheering) (hammer clanging) (upbeat music) But now comes a real hammer blow.

Lady Russell's petition is officially endorsed by the Privy Council.

Shakespeare's new Blackfriars theatre is shut down before it can even open.

- The loss of Blackfriars put the company in an extremely precarious position.

The stakes were incredibly high for William at this moment.

He had so much invested in the success of this venture.

(soft music) - [Juliet] Shakespeare's ambition for an upmarket theatre within London City Walls is dead.

For all his popularity, it's a stark reminder to the upper classes, he's still a common playwright.

He remains determined, however, to build a playhouse in his own vision.

So his company sets about building a new theatre in the only place that will have them, on the South Bank of the River Thames in London's roughest neighbourhood.

(soft music) - Bankside, you know, it really was a stew in the sense that there was bear baiting pits there.

There was dog fighting, a lot of brothels.

You know, it's not gentile, it's not middle class, it's not nice.

But he has no choice.

(soft music) At that point it seems like opening a theatre within of the jurisdiction of the city is something that he would never be able to do.

(soft music) - [Juliet] At the end of summer, Shakespeare receives news from home in Stratford, his son Hamnet lies ill.

(soft music) (Hamnet coughing) (wind blowing) (sad music) - The horrendous weight of the grief of losing a child must have been.

I can't really imagine.

(soft music) Actually, sometimes historians do make out that people in the past felt less grief because they had more children and experienced death more frequently.

That isn't my understanding of it at all.

(soft music) - [Juliet] It's around this time in a play called King John, that Shakespeare creates the character of a mother, mourning the loss of her son.

- "Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts.

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form."

And gosh, that idea of stuffing out a vacant garment with grief, makes me well up every time, it's so powerful.

William clearly, clearly deeply feels the loss of his son.

- You can think you're writing your own story, but actually life is a different course for you to follow.

And actually we all just are, we have no control really over the things that interrupt us in our lives.

(soft music) - [Juliet] The funeral over, Shakespeare receives notice.

His coat of arms has been awarded.

He's now a gentleman.

(soft music) - There is a time where ambition, if not stopped, are questioned.

You know, was it worth it?

Why I'm doing this?

My son is dead.

(soft music) - Imagine how William feels.

He has worked so hard to improve his social status, to improve the standing of his family, the safety that they can be in.

And now he has no son to hand this on to, and that the Shakespeare name won't continue any further.

(soft music) (rain pattering) (soft music) - When Hamlet dies, Anne would've had complicated feelings towards her husband.

(soft music) Everywhere she goes, Hamnet's memories would have been there.

(soft music) And of course, she is the one who has to live with the g.. of not only her own self, but that of her children.

(soft music) No doubt she really misses William at this point, and she definitely would not have imagined that this is what life would be like when she agrees for William to go away and follow his career.

(soft music) (bell ringing) (coins clanging) (soft music) - [Juliet] In the three years after his son's death, Shakespeare writes play after play, including some of his biggest comedies.

"Much adoe about Nothing" and "As you Like it".

- The thing with literature and with writing is that it takes you away, takes you to somewhere else.

And the fact that Shakespeare wrote so much after his son died must have something to do with that.

(soft music) - I think when something really challenging happens in your life, the last thing you want to write is that challenge, because you haven't processed it yet.

(soft music) - Grief can make everything meaningless, but that also is something that can set you free.

(soft music) He's so driven.

You know why?

Why is he writing all and this pace?

That's something he wants to get at, but he can't.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - [Juliet] By spring 1599, work is completed on Shakespeare's new Bankside theatre with a capacity of 3000, this is the biggest theatre ever built in London.

And the only one built by players, four players.

Its motto is "All the world's a playhouse".

(upbeat music) - He calls it the Globe.

It's his world, and it can encompass all the world.

And that's an amazing thing to have done.

It suggests creative confidence, which verges owner actually is kind of world conquering arrogance.

(upbeat music) - [Juliet] Shakespeare needs a play to open his new theatre, but this time it won't be a comedy or about English history.

He's going to write something darker, a play that reflects the national mood.

- One of Shakespeare's greatest gifts was his ability to feel the anxieties that were circulating.

At this moment, he's taking the stuff of daily life and infusing his plays with it.

'Cause at this point in 1599, Shakespeare's confidence took that great lurch forward.

(soft music) - [Juliet] For years, Shakespeare has been a regular at the court of Elizabeth I, he's had a ringside seat to see how real power works.

And now he's witnessing a political crisis.

(tense music) - In the spring of 1599, reports start arriving in London and at court of a new massive Spanish armada, to be joined with soldiers coming over to the continent to sail up the Thames and sack London.

This was a grave threat.

- [Juliet] But worse for Elizabeth is the threat she faces from within.

After decades as Monarch, she's now old and unpopular with no child to succeed her and refusing to name an alternative heir.

She's losing her grip on power.

- Shakespeare is often at court.

So he's seeing and hearing for himself what a complete nest of vipers this place has become.

The queen is ageing.

Very soon people know she's gonna die.

She's 67, most people are dead by 50.

And so, there's a massive interest in who is going to take over from her.

(soft music) - Reports are circulating of assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth.

Queen Elizabeth has to face the threat of assassination.

- There would've been rumours, there would've been whispers.

People are jostling for position.

It's a very strange and dangerous time.

- And so Shakespeare starts to write what will be one of his most cynical and dispiriting plays about politics.

- But he can't write directly about Elizabeth, that's treason, and might get him killed.

(upbeat music) So instead of Elizabeth in England, Shakespeare sets his story in ancient Rome.

(upbeat music) The play called "Julius Caesar" tells the story of a Roman dictator assassinated by his own inner circle and the battle for political control that follows.

(tense music) - People say, you know, leaders in politics should read "Machiavelli".

I've never read "Machiavelli".

I think you might be better reading Shakespeare because he's talking about the dilemmas you face.

He's talking about the human frailties that make leaders bad people as well as good people.

He's talking about the results and the unintended consequences of events that people set in motion as a result of envy, revenge, pride, or whatever other sin that they're guilty of.

Initially, it's about the dangers of tyranny, which I think Shakespeare would detest.

It becomes about the consequences of assassination.

(tense music) - [Juliet] In an effecting Oscar winning Hollywood adaptation, Julius Caesar is killed by a gang of conspirators, one of them Brutus hesitates, torn between a noble idea of ending Caesar's tyranny and his own morality.

- Et tu Brute?

Then fall, Caesar.

(tense music) - Brutus, I mean, he's a leader of those conspirators 'cause they're working towards an end that he believes in.

He realises that Caesar's gone too far and he says it's gotta be stopped.

(tense music) He's very straightforward, he's very simple.

In many ways, he's the conscience of the play.

He does say that thing about let's not murder him, but let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods.

So there's a sort of hyperbolic kind of thing about what he feels that should happen and do it in a honourable and noble way, and it's not, it's ugly.

And that's what he never quite gets, Brutus.

He never sees the ugliness of it.

(crowd chanting) - [Juliet] A battle for control breaks out between the conspirators led by Brutus and their opponents led by a rival Senator, Mark Antony.

As an angry crowd of Romans gather, Brutus gives a speech to justify the assassination.

(crowd chanting) It's here that two of Hollywood's greatest actors demonstrate Shakespeare's mastery of his craft as they contrast two styles of writing, prose and verse.

- Hear me for my cause, and be silent that you may hear.

Believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour that you may believe.

Censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses that you may the better judge.

- His speech you would think would be inverse, but it's not, it's in prose.

You do have to understand the relationship between iamic, the dum, dee dum, dee dum, dee dum, and straight prose.

It's prosaic and it doesn't serve.

It doesn't serve him.

- [Juliet] Brutus had spoken in prose, but Shakespeare writes, Mark Antony's speech inverse exemplified in a commanding Oscar nominated performance by Marlon Brando.

- Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

- I don't think we're in any doubt Shakespeare's comparing Brutus with Antony by putting the speeches so close together.

And it's an astonishing set of words because the first Brutus is in prose and it's actually far more, if you like, clinical, and the second is in poetry, which is to inspire.

And as people say of politics, you run for government in poetry, but you govern in prose.

- The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest- For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men.

- Antony is forced at the start of his speech to look as if he's supporting the assassins rather than supporting Caesar.

And so he starts using these words, honourable and ambition.

And he both, he uses both of them in an ironic way and then in a sarcastic way.

- Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.

- By repeating it, and by the way he repeats it, he makes it clear that that's not what he believes.

- Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious and sure he is an honourable man.

- What Antony is showing is the secret of what is true success in Oratory.

That you've got to take your opponent's arguments and then you've gotta somehow find a way of demolishing them.

And what Mark Antony is doing by irony, and then I think by, if you like satire, is by taking the argument that Brutus has put, that we have to deal with Caesar because of his ambition and actually saying to people, well, what's wrong with ambition if it's going to actually do some good for you the people?

And then saying, well before that, saying honourable, you know, that's a great term.

But actually by the time he's finished using it, people think, well, is Brutus really honourable?

Or is he actually as guilty of some of the sins that he's attributing to Caesar?

- Mark Antony's speech is pure holcomb.

It is pure Holcomb, but it works.

- He has left them you unto yours forever.

- [Juliet] Brando's invigorating performance illustrates how Mark Antony's words inspire the Roman people to his cause.

- [Juliet] He was a Caesar when comes such another?

(crowd cheering) - And then it's as if the whole thing disintegrates almost as if you see the world crumbling to pieces.

- Again, he based things on the reality around him, but there's also the questioning that's there in him.

And that's what you've got to find.

You've gotta find what is he questioning?

What is the values he's questioning?

Why do men do this?

- In the end, nothing is really resolved and everybody loses out.

It's about people who try to tear up the existing order, snd everything that flows from that is disastrous.

There is no winner in this.

And you just see civil war being the result of Brutus actions.

So however public spirited he was, what Shakespeare, I think is asking you to see, well, is it justified given the disorder, the Civil war, the chaos, the strife, and the deaths of all the leading characters except Antony?

(audience cheering) - [Juliet] "Julius Caesar" is a hit.

(audience cheering) The play's themes of power and succession are aimed directly at those in Elizabeth's court.

And one courtier is taking a particular interest in Shakespeare, the Earl of Essex, a dangerous nobleman with his own designs on power.

(tense music) - Essex was someone who was very popular to the public, who had been a military hero, done dramatic things, was clearly handsome and clearly liked by the queen.

But he didn't know his boundaries.

He pushed the boundaries too far.

- [Juliet] Essex had once been a fixture at court, he was the queen's favourite.

And there were even rumours, they were lovers.

But Essex has crossed the line.

Sent by the queen to crush rebellion in Ireland, Essex disobeyed her orders by securing a truce and later daring to argue with the queen.

Essex drew his sword.

(tense music) - If you think about Essex, he's pushed his luck.

He comes back from Ireland without permission to do so.

He goes marching into the queen's bedroom before she's put her wig on or put her makeup on, he starts dissing her.

He goes around dishing out Knight hoods without asking anyone for permission.

(upbeat music) This is someone who's very dangerous to you.

If you are the queen's chief minister, you are worried about this man.

What is he going to do next?

So the queen's advisors have got him outta the palace.

And so he's looking for ways that he can get back into the game.

How does he actually make himself relevant?

(soft music) - [Juliet] On the 5th of February, 1601, Shakespeare's company receive a visitor, one of Essex's men, with a dangerous proposition.

- They asked Williams's company to perform a play that is somewhat out of date.

(soft music) - [Juliet] Richard II, the story of a weak English monarch deposed by a strong, more capable noble.

(soft music) - It is a huge risk for Shakespeare and his company to put Richard II on at this point, but he's also rather too senior a nobleman to refuse.

- [Juliet] Two days later, Richard II is performed for a full house at the Globe.

Essex is sending a clear message.

He is a power to be reckoned with.

Shakespeare is now in the middle of a very dangerous game.

(audience clapping) (crowd chattering) - I am sure he woke up the next morning and said, "What the ....?"

Or it's Elizabeth an equivalent.

(crowd chattering) - [Juliet] Essex and 200 armed men march on the city of London, to confront and overthrow Elizabeth's inner circle.

London is plunged into chaos.

(crowd chanting) - William wakes up.

Essex is starting a rebellion.

Nominally not against the queen, but against her advisors, but he is rallying the people of the city to his cause.

(upbeat music) Essex is a hugely popular heroic figure.

And so he's expecting the city to rise up in arms with him and to basically get rid of the queen's councillors.

Some would say he's even trying to get rid of her and become the next king.

(upbeat music) - Elizabeth and her advisors get out very quickly, the notion, anyone who thinks it's a good idea to be on Essex's team will be considered guilty of treason and punished immediately.

And the punishment was very, very extreme.

I mean, it wasn't just being killed.

(door banging) You were hung.

You were pulled down before you were dead.

You were castrated, your guts were cut outta you while you were still alive and displayed to the audience.

It's not something and you are caught and put on the outside of the city.

(dramatic music) - [Juliet] Essex is caught.

The few remaining rebels arrested and imprisoned.

(tense music) Word soon passes to the Privy Council that Shakespeare staged the seditious play Richard II on the eve of the rebellion.

(tense music) - William and his company are in an extremely dangerous position.

He's obviously keenly aware that writers have had their hands cut off.

They've been imprisoned, they've been tortured for potentially le.. (tense music) - [Juliet] On the 25th of February, Essex is beheaded.

(tense music) It takes three strokes of the axe to sever his neck.

The executioner holds the head a loft saying, "God save the queen".

(tense music) And it's believed that Shakespeare and his troop are summoned to perform "Richard II" for the Queen.

(tense music) - Imagine the atmosphere at court and William is there playing the same part, he was playing on the day before the rebellion.

(tense music) And to watch the monarch.

And she would only have been a few feet in front of him, to watch her steely gaze as she viewed this performance of the play that was put on.

- It would not have been a stretch to have them all sent to prison and the company shut down.

(tense music) - Are you contented to resign the crown?

I give this heavy weight from off my head and this unwieldy sceptre from my hand.

(tense music) - [Juliet] Elizabeth decides to take no further action.

Shakespeare is off the hook this time.

(dog barking) (soft music) At the end of the summer, that same year William receives news that his father has died.

(soft music) - I think William must feel, you know, an extraordinary mixture of feelings as a bereaved son and even more terribly a bereaved father.

He's thinking about inheritance, he's thinking about fathers and sons.

And of course he's thinking about unworldly communications between the dead and the living.

(soft music) - [Juliet] It's around this time, Shakespeare completes work on the most personal play he's ever written.

He calls it "Hamlet".

(soft music) - [Ghost] I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.

(soft music) - [Juliet] As the play begins, it seems Shakespeare has written a simple revenge story.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is visited by the ghost of his murdered father, the king.

In his 1948 film, Lawrence Olivier plays Hamlet as terrorised and overcome by grief as he agrees to avenge his father's death.

- [Ghost] Revenge is foul and most unnatural murder.

- Murder.

- Murder most foul as in the best it is.

But is most foul, strange and unnatural.

- Haste me to know't.

- Hamlet's father is the one who wants the son to vindicate that forceful personality and to step into himself is called Hamlet, after all.

And Hamlet, the prince, you know, he becomes something completely different.

(soft music) - [Juliet] But after accepting the task his father's ghost has given him, Hamlet finds himself unable to act.

- What's great about the play is that you were presented with almost a straightforward revenge tragedy.

And in the middle of this Shakespeare places a modern Elizabethan man who's a thinker, who's an intellect, who has a deep moral conscience.

- [Juliet] Until now, revenge tragedies have been defined by a hero bent on vengeance.

But with Hamlet, Shakespeare does something radical, writing not about what a character does, but about how he feels.

Lawrence Olivier expresses Hamlet's tension in the scene where he has the opportunity to kill his father's murderer, but then is filled with doubt and hesitates.

- {Hamlet Voiceover] And so he goes to heaven.

And so am I revenged.

That would be thought on.

A villain kills my father, and, for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven.

- The best time to kill Claudius was when he was praying.

So therefore, you could kill him then.

But of course, Hamlet gives him the benefit of the doubt.

And that's what Hamlet does throughout.

He questions and he questions himself more than anybody else.

- Just recognising how weird a kind of hero Hamlet is, is really important, because Hamlet comes before us saying, "I don't know why I'm not doing this."

He's abject in his own failure to fulfil the play form that Shakespeare has written him into.

He's hopelessly miscast as a revenging hero.

- Did Hamlet like his father?

Now, that's a question which is well worth asking because we never asked that question.

We assume that he does, but what if he didn't?

You know?

And yet he's haunted by this ghost.. And then he says, "The spirit that I've seen, maybe the devil and the devil has a power to assum.. and perhaps outta my weakness and my melancholy abuses me to damn me."

And again, I think that reflects on Shakespeare position with his own family.

(soft music) - I think in Hamlet, you very much see Shakespeare analysing and almost torturing himself over the role of fathers and sons, and what they owe each other and the obligations and the emotional connections.

I wonder also if there's quite a lot of guilt in there.

- It's no coincidence that Hamlet is one of his greatest plays, and maybe one of the most painful plays for him to write.

Because it is so personal.

- It mixes ideas of depression with ideas of looking at the grand scheme of things in terms of the shape of a person's life.

Hamlet questions, God, the existence of God, whether God is right or not.

Hamlet questions his sanity, questions his relationship to his mother, his father, family duty.

Why are we alive?

Why do we have to go through this?

Why do I have to go through this?

There's huge doubt there.

And he sits the audience in the middle of it and says, why?

(soft music) - [Juliet] Unsure whether he should fulfil his father's wishes, and lost in grief and confusion, Hamlet, in one of Shakespeare's most iconic scenes, contemplate suicide, exemplified in an effecting Oscar winning performance by one of the world's leading Shakespearean actors.

- [Hamlet] To be or not to be.

That is the question.

- Knowing that it was basically, what's the point?

I found that really engaging with those words, really moving.

I'd get to the end of the speech and I'd find it really quite upsett.. (waves crashing) - Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them?

- There's pain in the play.

There's a lot of pain.

But in that sense of loss comes a new understanding of who you are.

(soft music) - [Juliet] In the play's finale, Hamlet having fulfilled his father's request for vengeance, is stabbed by a poisoned sword.

Olivier's dark adaptation builds to an emotional climax, His hamlet makes his peace with death.

calmly asking his friend Horatio to preserve his memory.

- If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile And in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain.

To tell my story.

The rest is silence.

(soft music) - There's something about Hamlet's negativity that is weirdly and unexpectedly positive.

He does not become the royal king.

He doesn't father a family.

He doesn't establish a dynasty, and yet those negatives seem to open up space for another kind of life.

(soft music) Hamlet has an amazing phrase, which is, "The interim is mine."

Which suggests that that's where life is.

Not when you come and do your big thing, but actually in all the rest of it, that's where your life really unfolds.

That's where there is space for life.

And I think what we see there is Shakespeare's insistence that all that assertion what we think makes character, what we think makes a man, may actually be beside the point.

It may be the quality of life that's irreducible to achievement, that's irreducible to heroic actions and so forth.

That's what we care about, that's what we love.

That's what we mourn for.

That's where life perhaps really is.

(soft music) (upbeat music) - The gun powder plot, it was a terrorist threat and a religious war.

(upbeat music) - Nobody in England was as proximate to the Catholic plot as Shakespeare was.

This was a grave threat.

(upbeat music) - No one, sure what's gonna happen.

There's a great deal of fear and uncertainty.

He's about to go much deeper, much darker.

- There's nothing more horrible than losing that which you most love dear.

It's like the art and his life.

They kind of move like that.

(upbeat music)