From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,

the Folgers director. This podcast is called The Story of My Life from Year to Year. Every April

in celebration of Shakespeare's birthday, the Folger invites an eminent scholar to deliver a lecture on Shakespeare.

2014 marked Shakespeare's 450th birthday, and the talk was on a topic perfectly suited for such an auspicious anniversary.

What exactly do we know about Shakespeare? Most scholars acknowledge that the answer is, not as much

as we would like, about as much as we know for other middle-class Englishmen of his time.

The speaker, Brian Cummings, anniversary professor of English at the University of York,

included a fascinating glimpse of where precisely that paltry amount

of information comes from, its impact on our understanding of Shakespeare, and how much any

of that matters in the end when looking at the life of someone who spent his career making

things up. Brian was kind enough to come back into a studio at his university to talk more about this with Rebecca Shear.

So Brian, we don't really have a whole lot of facts about Shakespeare's life. What effect did that have on his biography?

Well, in a way, there's two different kinds of story here. There's the story of Shakespeare's life, and then there's a quite separate story

of the telling of Shakespeare's life. And the telling of Shakespeare's life didn't really get

going until a long time after Shakespeare died. So in a way, it was a question of the biography

trying to catch up with the life and only being able to do so after the event, by which time there was nobody

around anymore that could remember Shakespeare or tell the stories that people wanted to hear,

which didn't, of course, stopped them from trying to find people who could tell stories anyway,

but it meant that there is this basic lack of fit between the original life itself and the way that the story of that life has been told.

So doesn't that kind of create a problem for getting anything that might be considered authentic?

It's extremely difficult to get something that might be considered authentic.

If you wanted to make a list, a sort of inventory of facts about Shakespeare's life, I've done it.

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