The Liberal Arts & Shakespeare

When I studied Shakespeare years ago I came up with a theory, and it has been blown out of the water. Historians have found out a lot about Shakespeare’s life, but not everything. We can read about where he was born and where he went to school. We read about whom he married and his theatrical company. But there is this mysterious gap. Between having a couple of kids and showing up in London as a playwright, there are seven years that have been nick-named the “lost years” because no one knows where he was or what he was doing.
So I figured all academia must be pretty dense. I read a bunch of plays and knew exactly where he must have been. He was in Italy. He always placed plays in Italy. His themes were so often pulled from Italy. He must have been in Italy.

After I solved that little problem for myself I continued on with my life without giving it a second thought. I fell in love with theater and acting. I decided that a performance is a great way to communicate ideas and I decided to go into film. Then I found out about the liberal arts and started studying them. And then I realized something: my old conclusion was probably wrong. Shakespeare didn’t need to go to Italy to get the stuff he put in his plays. There are good reasons for him to have been using that subject material without a tourist trip being the reason. How did I figure this out? I was introduced to the same subject material.
Shakespeare lived near the beginning of the age of reason. There was a revival of thinking. Where had a lot of thinking been done before this age? Well, ancient Greece was one, and Italy started building on their tradition. As this reason traveled northwest across Europe, there were definite traces of Greece and Italy mixed in the thinking.

I realized what this means. Shakespeare had a liberal arts education. He didn’t go to a school on being a playwright to become the most famous of all playwrights. He studied the classics and learned about human nature. He must have read books like Plutarch’s Lives and The Odyssey. He had a store of subject material that he had internalized and then was able to produce plays that could speak to the low life of the pits and the nobility in the balcony, and continue to entertain a couple of hundred years later. If you want to create classics, it’s a good idea to study classics.