From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folchers director.

This podcast is called Betwixt Tavern and Tavern. While the scholarship around Shakespeare's works is voluminous,

we're always eager to learn more about Shakespeare's life, especially the life he lived as a working

man in the London theatre. There is such an intense hunger to know more about Shakespeare himself

that when something new recently turned up, it generated considerable excitement, especially since

this particular item seemed to link Shakespeare with another man acknowledged as a great

writer in English literature, Jeffrey Chaucer. As you'll hear, a discovery was made by University

of Wisconsin History Professor Martha Carlin that seemed to place Shakespeare, along with

several other prominent members of the Elizabethan Literatiati, together drinking at the Tabard Inn,

the roadhouse made famous in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales two centuries earlier.

The story, which leans on a little-known manuscript and an ancient piece of graffiti, is intriguing to say the least.

She tells the story now to interviewer Rebecca Shear.

I want to start with this discovery you made.

What was it you found?

And then tell us where you found it.

Well, it was a very lucky discovery

of an unpublished manuscript.

And the discovery that is of the most fun is a discovery of a

reference to Shakespeare and his circle that had never been really known about or published.

And it is a small anecdote, somebody writing probably in the early 1640s. And what survives are 27 loose pages

concerning mostly London or its southern suburb, which is called Southark. And the

antiquities in Southark included the Tabard Inn, which was famous in the 17th century and in Shakespeare's Day and earlier because it was the place where Jeffrey Chaucer had set the opening of his famous Canterbury Tales.

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