Proms Extra: Shakespeare - Sheep and Shepherds

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2016

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

References to sheep, lambs, fleeces, wool and shepherds are to be found in many of Shakespeare’s plays. From Corin in ‘As You Like It’ who describes himself as a ‘natural philosopher’ to Perdita’s saviour in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, they are key characters in the plots and reflect the importance of the wool trade in Elizabethan England. James Rebanks, talks about his life as a shepherd in Cumbria and how much – if at all – the shepherd’s life has changed over the past 400 years. He will be joined on stage by Shakespeare expert Dr Emma Smith from the University of Oxford who presented Radio 3’s Sunday documentary looking at the buyers of Shakespeare’s First Folio. The discussion is hosted by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough from Durham University who was selected as a New Generation Thinker in 2013 in the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academic broadcasters of the future.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:46.2	Hello. Shepherds have a special place in our imagination, whether they're watching their flocks by night ready to be dazzled by the angel of the Lord, or like Homer's one-eyed herdsman
0:51.6	Polyphemus, searching through the fleece of his prized
0:54.5	used to catch his arch-enemy Odysseus. They're in Shakespeare too, of course, and that's what
0:59.8	we're going to be discussing tonight in the latest of our programs exploring his betrayal of contemporary
1:05.0	working life. A tricky task, but one that I'm sure will be made easier with the help of my guests,
1:10.6	Emma Smith, who's Professor of'm sure will be made easier with the help of my guests, Emma Smith,
1:11.4	who's Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University, and the writer in Shepard, James
1:16.4	Rebanks. Emma, when Shakespeare writes about shepherds and sheep, does he do it as a man born in
1:22.4	agricultural Warwickshire or as a metropolitan Londoner? Oh, that's a fantastic opening question.
1:28.4	I think he does it as both, and that's often the answer with Shakespeare, and it's not a cop-out.
1:32.6	It's actually the source of Shakespeare's enormous kind of resonance.
1:36.9	So I think Shakespeare understands the pastoral genre, which is a very fashionable metropolitan genre.
1:42.9	It was always writing from the cities
1:45.6	with a sort of idealised, even nostalgic look at the countryside.
1:50.9	So he knows that work by contemporaries like Edmund Spencer.
1:54.0	But he must also know from Stratford
1:58.8	the importance of the actual sort of material texture of the wool trade.
2:06.9	I mean, wool is the medieval and early modern periods oil.
2:11.9	It's that important to the economy.
	...

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