Shakespeare's Theater (video)

0:00The Theory of Money and Credit

0:30We've got a vast internet audience out there, I assume, so we'll try to stay on top here. Welcome back to our second session, we're going to talk about Shakespeare and Ludwig von Mises. I want to begin with a quotation from a woman named Janet McKeer. This is from a Chicago magazine, a YouTube this called City Talk. It's a May 25th, 2001 article by Jean Walden-Wolff and Janet McKeer, an activist appearing in a Shakespeare play in the Chicago area.

1:17And in this interview, we learn, uh, the athletes have never been keen on doing big Hollywood movies. Ludwig says, quote, all things are about making money, and I don't find that terribly interesting. Today in our world, art has to be commercial. That's a really sad point of view. If Shakespeare had to be commercial, he wouldn't have written the things he did. And there's a piece of Mises. It just shows you how deeply ingrained this cultural myth of the ice hockey artist in our culture is. Shakespeare was a fully commercial artist working in a fully commercial theater. And indeed he's given aid for my whole case.

2:05If you want to say that great commercial art is possible, you just have to point to Shakespeare. He's closed the way we can all go home right now. Shakespeare's the greatest writer who ever lived, he's probably the greatest artist who ever lived, and he worked in a commercial environment. If that was possible, there can't be anything fundamentally wrong with a commercial basis for art. So I'm going to stop here, but let's try to explicate that, and my own this afternoon is to show that, yes, that's the operator of the commercial environment, and I want to show that much of the season was because of that and not in spite of that.

2:59That is, you could say, yes, Shakespeare worked in a commercial environment, but he overcame it, and in a certain sense, that is true, and I am certainly not going to say that a commercial environment produced Shakespeare, because there was only one Shakespeare, and if you could credit his achievements to commerce, then there should have been a whole bunch of Shakespeare running around in the day, and there were certainly people who were trying to be Shakespeare, or trying to be Shakespeare.

3:59and much of the left-wing program for art is to steal the artist from competition. Oh, how horrible the competitive marketplace is. You see, it's the same argument they make in basic economics. Competition is bad. And if you could only eliminate the competitive aspects of culture, you would have so much better a culture. Well, it is true that nobody likes competition. This year it's probably got antsy about Marlow and Ben Johnson at the time, and everyone sort of bleeds about eliminating the competition, but the answer is that's not healthy. It's not healthy in basic economics. It's not healthy, I'm going to argue, in culture as well. Just as in basic economics, competition is healthy for culture. It keeps people on their toes. It keeps their best This is one of the peaks of World Llama, and it's a great example of that.

5:06So let's talk about the cultural environment that Shakespeare worked in. Renaissance theatre, I think it was a Ludwig von Mises theatre, a Jacobean theatre, that's in two periods under Queen Elizabeth I and James I. This is one of the peaks of World Llama, probably the greatest body of fanatic work that is working at that time. And it was a largely commercial operation. In fact, it's interesting, this is a good example of the fundamental thing I was talking about this morning,

6:20Company, and thank goodness there's no government-spanning agency if there was a sign of money for this that they probably would not have given it to take here. So what he had to oppose was an already established commercial theater world in London, which would predicate on on the fact that London by that time, 1580s, was one of the largest cities in Europe, was a great commercial center already, therefore had generated surplus wealth so that people could spend money on something as frivolous as entertainment.

7:08and again in Stratford where Shakespeare grew up, people weren't going to spend their hard-earned money on a play, at least not maybe once a year, but in one day you had a situation where there was enough economic wealth so people could go to the theater regularly. Now, it took entrepreneurs to figure that out, the government didn't build the theater, even the aristocrats didn't build the theater, there had been already a kind of position of acting groups appearing at aristocratic colleges,

8:21And some of you may have seen the replica of the globe that we now have in London. These were large theaters. They expanded between 2000 and maybe 3000 people including students and founded. The first theater was built by a man named Burby. His son went on to become statesman in 1980 after Mr. Burby. So it took, typically, a foresighted entrepreneur to see that there was an economic opportunity here, that if you invested the money, rather large sums of money in those days, to build one of these theaters, you could get enough people to come to it to justify your investment.

9:14The greatest expense was in building a theater. The Elizabethan theaters were out for it. They didn't have scenery in our modern sense. They did have rather elaborate costuming and that cost money, although in many cases, and here an element of the aristocratic space in this picture, the theaters were often connected with a neighbor, and also as part of that connection, they got kind of top-off aristocratic outfits so they could dress off in robes and look like queens and queens without really buying stuff, but they were kind of just an easy hand-me-down from their aristocratic occasions.

10:06Anyway, it was by Elizabethan standards, by Renaissance standards, the theater business was rather heavily capitalized by major investments, and in fact, the theater companies were among the first joint stock companies. They actually have shareholders, Shakespeare eventually became a shareholder in the theater company he was involved in, so he got a percentage of the growth, he got a really good holiday deal on his plate. So there really was quite an economic underpinning to these theories. Again, if England hadn't, if London hadn't had that leap to a certain stage of economic prosperity at this point, nothing would have been possible.

11:01Basically the theaters were a commercial operation. They were open to the general public and that means basically the middle class and the lower classes don't have fully active records on the people that attend these plays, but it's just that we get indications that professional lawyers, students who have gone to the theater a lot and often provide legal advice to the theater companies are often getting in trouble, but the daily working men would go to the theater and I believe the price was about a penny, which was an hour's wage then, and it's kind of curious how the basic entertainment has stayed at about minimum wage.

11:54If you think of what a movie ticket costs now, it's roughly one hour's wage, and the budget, in case you see it, is roughly one hour's wage for the average person. and the few, in other words, appeal to a broad spectrum of the populace of London. They were all built initially outside the city limits of London. Whether this was fast-flowing metropolis now, it was then a rather small, walled, still medieval city. actually correspond to what called the city in London now, you know, London is a geography, it's the finance of this region, what called the city roughly correspond, you can still see the old walls at some point.

12:54And the theaters were built outside the city limits because the civic authorities were not too thrilled with theater. Some of the London authorities were relatively middle class, some with certain sympathies, and so they, many of them, subscribe to the certain objections to the theater that involved too much sex, and it was corrupting women, dressed up as women and so on. and so the theaters couldn't get licenses within the city limits of London and moreover they wanted to build the theaters outside the jurisdiction of the city fathers of London and they also tended to have some aristocratic protections and here's where the situation gets a little complicated you can't call the Ludwig von Mises theater too commercial because there was an element of patronage All the punitive companies were attacked by some prominent aristocrats at court.

14:06For example, Shakespeare's company was allegedly the Lord Chamberlain's men, their representative court was the Lord Chamberlain. Later, they became the punitive men, and James I came to the throne in 1604, so it was the most successful company, and they've got the highest average, also the world's average, and that's, I don't want to minimize that. Patriotism was so important to them when the civic authorities threatened to close down the theaters, it's a few of them, it was very important to have a patient at court who could defend you. Appearances at court were very important to Shakespeare's company and the other company.

14:57That is, yes, they performed in the public theater and got a substantial portion of income from that. But a command performance at the court was still a big deal. It was financially rewarding. You often could make more than one performance. at the court that we could from there in the whole run of a play at the public theater. It was very prestigious. We've seen this in the 20s at some of Shakespeare's plays, in the 20s, where they will make a big view on how they have performed before his majesty at a live hall on such and such occasion. So, this is an example of what I was talking about this morning, that we can't always separate the world of patients from the world of the market, they won't work together, but still fundamentally, the plays were oriented towards a commercial theater, and we could see that in what Shakespeare appealed to in the plays.

16:07Now, it's interesting just to go, just try to think of the status of the period and the status of playwright of the General Van and of Shakespeare's own state. There's a lot of retro, that there's retroactive thinking going on. We saw that in a quote from this woman saying that, you know, Shakespeare wouldn't have written what he did if he was commercial. Now, we no longer think of Shakespeare as commercial. As a matter of fact, he's still quite successful commercialized as a number of movies are shown. But now, we think of Shakespeare as viral. And this is a kind of optical illusion, a trick of perspective, and it's something I'll be coming back to again and again.

16:53Now, Shakespeare is one of our quintessential images of high culture. But he was absolutely the pop culture of his day. the most popular playwright of the day and no one was standing around the Elizabethan period saying, oh, we need to go see Shakespeare, that's our culture. Why was this lowered to dark then? And what's interesting is if you look at the contemporary reactions to the plays, To the theater in general, even the fakes here, is that this was vulgar, out-cultured stuff. There were tremendous attacks on the theater during fakes' lifetime, largely coming from the puritan wing,

18:16The theory was very contentious, and basically you drop the complaint about fake theater in his day that you get about first movies, then television and now video games. That is what people said, what they say about any good art form at the beginning, that there was brutal sexual violence in it, and people in this book illusioned for reality. and the cookies, plates, and cherries, they couldn't distinguish between what they saw on the stage and what was real. Again, you see this in Play-Doh Republic, it was attacked on a theme of drama, you can see it today in attacks on video games. It's one consistent point throughout the history of culture.

19:01And whatever culture is the most popular and has the most impact, there are people who are going to complain about it. Now, I don't want to go too far on this. There were people that recognized Shakespeare's genius in his day. Shakespeare began writing probably in the late 1580s, certainly in style by the 1590s. In 1598, a man named Samuel Hewitt was saying in print that this guy Shakespeare is as good as the ancients, that his tragedies are as good as the ancient Greek and Roman tragedies, his comedies are as good as Paulus's parents and so on.

19:49So people who were in his days recognized this man's genius. That doesn't mean, you know, that he wasn't severely criticized in general in the field of psychology and space theory of psychology, sometimes by his fellow playwrights who complained he wasn't educated. He was famously called an upstart crow in one contemporary critique because the other playwrights were jealous of him. So it's a good example of what happens when we compare the past with the present. Today, Shakespeare in a way has been changed for us.

20:36He's become a classic. He's taught in schools. There's something almost museum-like in our attitude towards him. We know he's a great playwright. We know he's a great playwright ever. So we tell him some facts, but there are many people who if they saw a Shakespeare play and didn't know a Shakespeare version would complain bitterly again about the unending, very gross in his comedies and sometimes even in his tragedies as in Hamlet, or again the incredible violence. I mean, what video game has more people shot up at the end than Hamlet, percentage-wise? And so, you know, basically, we've come to terms with Shakespeare, and we suddenly forget that in his own day, He had a real powerful charge to him that frightened bank people and was near even more general.

21:41And it's very typical if you oversee the whole period of one lesson about the transformation of pop culture into high culture. The number of plays that survived from Shakespeare's time is in the hundreds, I believe. We have 37 or 38 plays by Shakespeare, during his lifetime about 200 plays total, including his 19 of his that were printed in his lifetime were printed. and other plays that have been found since, I don't know the exact figure, but probably about 300, 250 to 300 plays survived from the whole period, let's say roughly from 1580, 1530, I think a lot of plays, or very few of them are read today, and they unquestionably represent the tick-tock of Life Center, that most of the plays from the time are as long as early episodes of My Three Sons.

22:58I mean, you know, when you look at the history of television, it is staggering how much has been produced, and unfortunately, much of it has been preserved, and we have to live with it in the naked night and TV land. Now, you know, mercilessly, most of the plays, probably the majority of the plays have been lost. They were maybe produced once and then disappeared. This is true of Greek tragedy as well. I really don't have time to talk much about Greek tragedy, but it's estimated that about a thousand tragedies were produced in Athens during the record excensory when Athens was producing drama.

23:47Of those 1,033 players that survived,

23:54seven by F to the seven by Sanctification 19 by Euripides. And, you know, when we look back at Greek drama, we justify the look of it as one of the peaks of dramatic creation, probably the two greatest periods of dramatic creation,

24:40There were survived victims, there was drugs being discussed, and people went out of the way to praise them, but, you know, there was undoubtedly a Quentin Tarantino of the Scythian drama, there was undoubtedly an Oliver Stone of the Scythian drama, and mercilessly we just fared those words, but they were there, and if we saw them, we would probably speak less of Greek tragedy, or at least have a more balanced view, With Ludwig's and Jacqueline's drama, we have the advantage that almost all of Shakespeare's plays are preserved, thank heaven. There's indications that maybe one or two of special play called Cardinal were lost.

25:26But, you know, the world was starting to preserve those. We have wonderful dramas by Kirsten Marlow, Ben Johnson. You can keep going down the ranks and you get some excellent plays by Thomas Middleton, by Paul Turner, by John Ford, you know, Ludwig Mises and John, well, Jacobin and John Ford, that's a film-maker, Ludwig Mises and Jacobin and John Ford is much more violent than the guys who wrote The Searchers. But, you know, it's an impressive body of a theorist, And so we begin to see the way any real culture is tiered in terms of quality, that, you know, in this case, we have the subpoena figure of safety standing above it all, then we have some still giant figures like Marlon Francis and some electric figures, and then it sort of, it spreads out and there's some pretty bad Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas, comedies And again, you don't have that kind of material for meat tragedy, but when we look at the Brahman's age, it starts to look more like the culture of our time, like the history of

26:51cinema, for example, where again you have some Titanic users in the 20th century, people and then, you know, you get down, down the ranks and, you know, what I'm getting at is any true culture, we are a Ludwig culture, is based on a pyramid of darkness. I think basically a lot of lousy stuff is turned out, the vast proportion of such a tiny culture is lousy and you need that range of work in order to produce the great achievements of any period. When people complain about commercial culture today, they have only the craft to point them.

27:39Thousands of bad movies have been made, thousands of bad television shows are being shown at any given moment as you speak. as he speaks, but there are a piece of quality, and the problem we have is when people compare the average work of commercial culture today with the piece of the past, which is now thought of as non-commercial, but in fact were part of the commercial culture in their day, and I mean, you realize in fact that the same environment that produced Shakespeare in his for his day, you know, he's producing the great movies, the great television shows of our day, that is, you need a very competitive marketplace.

28:28Again, I don't have time to talk about Greek drama, but it is interesting that even though it's here for Athenian theatre commercials, but it was competitive. was a civic institution and specifically designed as competition. These great dramas we read today, Esquisse of Orsaya, Sophocles of Antigone and the Oedipus Tyrants and so on, these were all part of quote literally a competitive system. And so even though that fever wasn't commercial, it had a very strong competitive element built into it and the dramas were written for civic dramatic competition. Elizabethan England didn't have quite that system, but it was a very competitive environment.

29:18And what I'm saying is the planes were better for that reason. Competition spurred innovation, it spurred creativity, it kept people from settling into comfortable rucks. Now, the reason the association theater was so competitive is it was so entrepreneurial. There was some barrier to entry that needed enough money to create, build a theater, and outfit it, and hire actors, and hire playwrights, and so on. But, you know, if you could raise the money, you could enter the business, especially since it was a kind of friends business.

30:05Again, it was a very unregulated marketplace. They built computers specifically outside the city limits so that they were in unregulated zones. So how commercial the Ludwig von Mises Theater was, particularly in the South Bank area where the Grove was eventually built more safely than much of it's clear, I mean that was the center for theater, bare-bathing folks at houses of prostitution in the state to this day. One of the fun activities was concentrated in this one area outside the city. Ironically, the land was under the control of the Bishop of Lucca, I believe, and therefore the city couldn't be because it was a search territory.

30:57But the, bear baiting was this wonderful sport, it wasn't the equivalent of bullfighting, they would tie a bear to a stake and stick dogs on it, and people would bet on who won, the dog or the bear. We can have a head start and get a movie of it. But, and I don't need to explain, but the numbers of people after years,

31:52of the World's Fastest Building. So, very competitive, there were usually about three major theater companies in England during Shakespeare's lifetime, and again, they were very competitive, they were always looking for new talent, and that's one of the keys to Shakespeare's life story and to the story of the whole world. The theater attracted talent because it was a world that rewarded talent at a time where talent wasn't all that rewarded throughout society. I mean, Shakespeare's world was emerging from what we call feudalism, an era when most people were born into the state of life that they were going to spend in.

32:47Most people in state years, lifetimes, stayed in the social ranks, economic ranks they were born in. If your father was a blacksmith, you became a blacksmith. That's why we have the name Smith, both found in our language. Many of our names are referred to the occupation, the name Cooper, for example, for example, why he put wheels together, the big tailors, I mean, the speculative world was not a world of great economic and social mobility, it was more so than it even had been, but one of the key routes to upward mobility in his day was the theater.

33:36And you can see that this has attracted a lot of people from the university. There is now people who go to university and end up unemployable as a result. Now, in some cases, yeah, you see the Ludwig van Mises age was a great age. The doctors, the lawyers, Shakespeare's play was like that.

34:31Hollywood has been for a lot of the 20th century and what television has come to mean. I remember I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. I was class of 66. I remember there was one kid in our class who wanted to go to Hollywood. And we thought this was the craziest idea we'd heard of. This was the Kennedy era. You know, you went to Harvard because you wanted to become president or become your advisor president. But there was this one kid that wanted to be president. and so on. His name was Tim Hunter, actually, and he set on to make the movie, including a movie called Text and a movie called River's Edge. I'm sorry. But I remember we saw some strange things. And then I remember I stayed at Harvard. I was a professor there for a while.

35:17And people were, by the 19th century, people were interested in going into psychology. And we thought that was the absolutely stupidest idea we'd ever heard of. Well, we know Conan O'Brien was a couple of spots down in the classes that the entire system would think about to go over and take over television, comedy, and so on. And I remember one of the late 70s, a student called Zednick was writing a little comedy he went on to write news on and some other things for business. And still, at any given point, and this is young people. uh... while your life will make money, you know, they know where the money is coming from and where it is coming from, in culture uh...you know, as today we see it to be video games and talking about that at the end of the week but it's interesting one of the things that could do the rides in the world was the theater and you can see the pattern again and again

36:15uh... Chris Romolo, the famous graduate, I think, Ben Johnson is a famous graduate It is interesting that most of the other playwrights in Shakespeare's day were university graduates. And as I said, they actually speak for the whole of the game's end. They didn't have a university education. But, you know, he proved them wrong. And there's even some indications in his early plays, you know, he was trying to show off that he actually was well educated, particularly in writing. in Latin. Among his earlier plays is about comedy errors, that's an indication of politicians' Latin flavor. The next one, we've got Titus Andronikus, which is very much in the mold of Hispanic infradity.

37:04He's showing that he knows the Latin models, and that's where I think he was sensitive to the fact that he hadn't gone to university. But he was pursuing a course that an intelligent young man in his day would commuter in London then with life in the fast lane, as Hollywood has been for so many people in the 20th century. and the financial rewards were pretty substantial, especially for someone who didn't have connections with court and really didn't have many other opportunities.

37:51The nice thing about the theater was, then and now, it wasn't about talent. You know, if you could act well and bring in the audiences, you were in great shape. If you could write and play with people like you, you were in great shape. It's hard to translate finances into modern terms, but I think the figures are roughly like this, that a playwright could be paid five pounds for writing a play when he could live for a year on ten pounds. And it was like, you know, you could get a lot of money in real terms for writing a play. You don't quote me exactly on those figures, but, you know, it would be like getting $50,000 for a split panel.

38:38I know it sounds ridiculous, because the monetary and the nominal amount is so low, but you can find instructions for that. for that. But the playwrights were well rewarded, and of course in Shakespeare's case, he became a shareholder in the theater company. He was so important to his success that they let him buy into the company and stuff. I believe he was the only playwright who was a shareholder in one of the companies. So he had a real financial stake and became a very wealthy man. I mean, basically, he was from a lower middle class family.

39:24The fortunes of the family went up and down. Father was the effective mayor of Stalford. At one point, the Ben Suffolk business reversed, but he loaded so much money to buy a venture that second-dickens out is Bradford, a local L.A. land is Bradford and invested in some London property, as well, so, again, it's hard to translate this into modern terms, but he became, he was quite successful financially on every indication that he wanted, wanted to be. Now, again, it's hard for us to look after the status of writers in that day because we, again, we projected back this idea that here's a great writer's face here and everybody must have been aware of him as a great writer, but a better way to think about it is that playwrights These presentations, they have more or less the status of screenwriters today.

40:34Most people are unaware of who the screenwriters of movies are. I mean, most of them know who the screenwriters are and who the movie was, or the Wizard of Oz. You know, some of them say they know it was Orpheus, or he was also the director. But most people are now aware of who the screenwriter is, and you almost never can sell a film on the basis of who the screenwriter is. The films are very far-oriented. You know, people want to go see the latest Brad Pitt movie, or the latest Angela Azul, or the Joey movie. They don't want to see the latest, you know, esthahad, especially at the program.

41:24I mean, it's a pre-period, for example, esthahad was hot, and, you know, you occasionally see, you know, stories are told on shows, you occasionally see from the producers who brought you American Pie II, I don't even want to set an institute as anybody is, but you know, maybe Bill Borkheimer, let's say, a Bill Borkheimer professor, but you know, basically we sell films on the start, and that probably was two and a half years ago, that the actors were the most famous, the two most famous, two of the most famous actors were then Edwin Allen,

43:04and Re-Understanding of Fakes and Bulls, and he makes the plan, he closes it up, of when Fakes' plays were first published, his name didn't even appear on the title page in the early 1590s, they were just, you know, saying the faginies of Richard III or whatever, at a certain point in the 1590s, they stopped putting his name on the title page, as if they realized he's marketable, Fakes is marketable, And it does seem, Ernest, this book is revolutionary because the arguments that Shakespeare's plays were intended to be printed, you know, the common view is that Shakespeare had no interest in public figures' plays and that he was just lucky that we happened to have some texts that were illegally printed and then were published in his first folio in 1620, I think, as friends.

44:02Ernst says this is just a statement of some kind. He comes up with a very elaborate argument that Shakespeare's theatre company had a project especially branding Shakespeare. You know, you could write this, Stephen King. You could sell a movie on his Stephen King name. So,

44:54that by 1600 people were thinking, oh, I hear Shakespeare has a new play at the Globe. It's called In the Year. Let's go to see it. A fellow is going to do it. Now, again, we can't prove this. We don't have contemporary analysis of children, but a lot of the evidence shows that people were beginning to notice Shakespeare's name in a way that they weren't noticing other names. and the Postal Service and Christian Wallows. And then Ben Johnson comes along. Peter the Great guy starts both including his own plays, and his name is bigger than the title of the play. And so it's an interesting moment, very important moment in literary history, when the author of the play starts to emerge as important.

45:43Saffron's family, we were very much obsessed with the notion, again, And again, the similar solitary genius, remember, sitting up at the attic, writing a play. Kim, most English-American plays were much more like clean plays in that they had multiple authors. This feels unusual in that he seemed to have written most of his plays himself, by himself. I actually find many of them maybe, some of them may be collaborations, increasingly people find the hand of Thomas Middleton and he's best, and they just find it laughing, it's always been clear that Bixby has collaborated with John Fletcher towards the end of his career here on a political key noble achievement, The long time was not a science, in terms of its canon, its history was clear, it wasn't totally biomed, but now increasingly it's admitted, the complete shapes, their addition, etc., and the state's DNA is combined on MEA.

46:50This was a more common pattern, just the way there was no movie with a single screen right after. And in fact, the movies you see up there on the screen are attractive to the people who actually wrote the films. In fact, it's a huge deal of negotiations. Who gets green credit for a film? And, you know, Casablanca, which maybe we'll talk about in a little bit. Well, a local line writers have been identified with that script, and more people keep coming out of the liberal economy. They wrote from the beginning of the 15th century. Well, that's the way safety of theater works. There's every indication, for example, that the safety of theater has a script author.

47:43You know, there are people in the Hollywood movies, a lot of them, but if they bring in somebody who's good at ending or good at happening, Here's another interesting point about divisive labor that enters into culture in ways, you know, it's not supposed to. For the image of, I said this morning that the forward of culture would only be possible because of divisive labor. But even within our, we are so entranced by this theory of the single community that we don't realize of Labor is a principle. In Hollywood, there were a certain joke on this, and you've got a film, and it's sort of swinging, and it's just buying, and the studio decides this needs to be built, and they bring a solid film, but he's known as a joker, he wouldn't want him writing the whole film.

48:46We can't do it, but what is the center of that is getting just the right flow, so to speak. But someone else is perfect at writing index, perfect for getting in the middle, but knows how to aim the film, or writing is a very specialized art in Hollywood. And then, again, we don't have the kind of records that will tell us this in detail, but there's these few occasions that all start, like, with Marlowe's Dr. Fauci. It's almost certain that that play we have is not completely by Marlowe, and I think some guy was wanting to add drugs to it. Probably guy named Samuel Owen. And you know, every indication we have is that the way these plays were written was more the way films were written than the way we think of plays being written.

50:10The genius of one author's vision got corrupted, and in the case of Marlowe's, Dr. Faucius seems to be the post, with how many themes do not seem to be written on the level of installation of the great Friedrich theme, but that, on the other hand, may be just a poem, as they say in a very ancient Bible point, which sees how many styles are in a poem, it had a great debate about Dr. Faucius's view that probably seems rooted or improved, but I want to suggest that you see the two options are there. Sometimes the collaborative nature of the players may have messed them up. Sometimes it may have improved them. So again, Shakespeare was so talented that it seemed that he could get away with writing pretty much the whole plays and stuff.

51:05and so on. But that was very unusual. And many of the players we know to be collaborations by key, sometimes key, authors. And again, they were not necessarily the worst for that. Let's say, you know, Shakespeare's day, big stuff, you know, he was pretty far over. He needed to see comedy scenes in it. They didn't have to bring in Samuel Rowley to fill out Shakespeare, you know, he had the right comedy, he could write comedy. So, what I, I used Use the analogy for Hollywood so that we can see that this was a more complicated system of Renaissance playwriting and theater in general, and one that could in many ways lead to what makes the play great.

51:55Here's another example of how Shakespeare was working in a kind of active commercial theater environment. Bixby was himself an actor, we know that. He was the rock, the star of the company. There's no hard evidence that there were legends that say he played Hamlet's father as a ghost, that Mises played the character, Mises was an out-of-it-it, if you like it. He was a big player, maybe a character actor. He's not a star the way Ludwig was. Oh, we know something about his theater company and he worked with it.

52:40A good indication is a matter of comedy. We know the two principal comedians that Shakespeare worked with. The first was a man named Will Kemp and the second was a man named Robert Arden. Will Kemp was the comic lead in the first half of 60s Korea in the 50s and 90s, and probably created roles like Bill Berry, not to do about nothing, Lance Block, Goebel, and Mr. Bennet, and so on. and we can improve from this and from independent evidence that Hampton is good at dancing, the biblical sense is good at dancing, he's good at dance, he's a good dancer, and the evidence is his great little comic dialogue with himself, he can talk to himself, and Shakespeare wrote parts for this guy, you can see that the comic parts in general companies are written with clamped in mind.

53:55Again, in typical Hollywood fashion, that society was too big to save his company. He could go off on his own and start his own company with just a big star. And he was able to prove himself on this day. I mean, he actually did okay. But he was then replaced by a man named Robert Armand, who was evidently very funny, but a different kind of humor. We have a good voice, we can sing, and it takes a little bit of a shift from writing in parts for clowns to writing in parts for fiends. and, uh, touch phones, uh, in, uh, 12 nights, or excuse me, touch phones as you like, it's fest days, uh, in 12 nights, and above all, it's noon, it's evening, uh, and, you know, this is also a major change in what safety is doing dramatically,

55:23and the State World Bank. Well, it doesn't make safety a less of a genius, because, you know, there were other people in the theater company, they weren't allowed to see real. And they weren't coming up with brilliant ideas to see real. It still took safety to do it. Nevertheless, you can see they were working as a man in the field of the world with certain constraints, just as, you know, John Ford, the 21st century one, you know, he knew the Actors. He had this acting company that John Wayne was going to be in the film, that Will Baum was going to be in the film. He had these character actors and he always was creating parts for them. And it's one of the reasons his films are so great is that Ford had a great working relationship with his actors. He knew he could write parts for them. It was They played them perfectly, that you know, when we wanted the sidekick and the fine,

56:21it was way too scared or too vulnerable. Well, I think it takes me a little bit more similar than I would think. And again, the fact that he worked in a political field in Barney meant that he made decision decisions not on what we would call purely aesthetic grounds. He couldn't say, I have to have a, you know, I have to have a funeral in two years, Let's go out and holler at some of the computers. No, it's probably worked the other way. I've got Robert Armand here. He was so great in As You Like It. He was so great in Trump Now. What can I do for him? I'm going to write him a part like, you know, you've never seen before. It'll have incredible pathos. You know, I want to prove accident of series of streets, but the result is one of the greatest, well, probably the greatest drama ever written and one of the greatest folks to be in that drama.

57:14of Drama. So this is particularly for, you know, in the abstract, the people who are content with commercial theater would say, what use is having the actors you're working with dictate the kind of parts you write your plays? And Shakespeare would say, I don't know what I'm doing, even though I can live with this. You know, it's interesting, It was always, I'm saying, has bearing on the famous question of Shakespeare's Orchid Fist. I hesitate to believe it's not, but I'm sure someone will, and I'll say it's always, you know, there are all these crazy theories that Shakespeare wouldn't write, his plays, and one of the prominent candidates is of the Earl of Ulster, of the World to Plays, and Bruce Pellgrant, who's a great friend of Ludwig's too, whom I've met here.

58:09He and I have a very bookish esteem, and we've been standing where we've been making a review of his book, you know, the early Shakespeare, I think, and playing it in the middle of Oxford, World to Plays. I bring it up because the issue actually reflects this anti-coversial prejudice. And the argument against states here having written these plays is how could this lower middle class kids from rural classrooms who never went to a university write these great plays? It must have been an aristocrat.

58:55I had a great, I had a great fun with the children, the children of Eugen Bastiat because his argument was so class-based that a middle-class figure could have written something only an aristocrat could have written as well about aristocrats. I think you say we had a pretty similar stage of letters, and then the miracle of all miracles happens. Thoughts of action came to my defense. Roman letters to the Lutheran standard say, I don't know much about the real faith here, but I know one thing. He was an actor. and the man who wrote these plays was an actor, and he really was brilliant, very learned, scholarly, and really insightful.

59:44Well, the whole charge was, how could some ignorant actor have written these plays instead of this well-educated Earl of Oxford, this Mr. Grant? And Heskey said, you know, the one thing you can tell from these plays, and he said, And so, you know, Heston had this idea that, you know, safety grew out of poverty, you know, that if you wanted to choose one profession for the guy who worked these players, everyone would always say, he must have been a lawyer, he must have been a doctor, he must have been this, he must have been that. You know, Heston really cut to it all and said, you know what, he must have been an actor. He knows so well how to write talks for actors. And so, you know, Heston had this idea that, you know,

1:00:58was an aristocrat, and Stakefield was the one and only, we could say, majorly that argument, but everyone, you've got to play almost everyone, let me say that, in some low-middle-fife audience. Ben Johnson's father was a bricklayer, the kid was a business man, Stakefield's father was a blood maker, and Marlowe's part of, is also a, was a fademan, I don't think he's generally, the part that you see, is that these playwrights of this time were on the move. In fact, when you go through the history of art, whether it's painting, music, literature, there were very few of us in class who could achieve anything in the arts.

1:01:46Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Israel Kirzner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Joseph Salerno, Walter Block, Lew Rockwell, Roger Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Frederic Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Carl Menger, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, And so, I mean, again, even I think this great commemorative of those two origins and the other he even wrote in place, we can actually reinterpret the light of wrong faith here. That the logic of the situation indeed dictates that a young kid from Stratford would be brought here to produce this phenomena, someone very ambitious, trying to make something out of the spout of the world.

1:02:45in the World. Well, I don't want to over-express this too much, the positive aspect of the commercial characters that take place here. So let me qualify it, and again, one of the things I'm doing over today and tomorrow is suggesting how the coverage and commercial systems blend, overlap, sometimes the intentions sometimes reinforce each other. There are in the world. Significant signs, let's face it, was not entirely comfortable with commercial theater. You know, in the words of the Godfather, you know, this is the life he showed. I think he understood that this is what he pursued, and he pursued it very successfully.

1:03:34But I think he had doubts, and we see this in many ways. The one thing, he did seek out patronage at a number of points in his career, as if he was just asking the orders for the other course in life, that is, it does appear that he was born in the theater, but the plagues was a problem in those days, and when plagues broke out in London, they often shut down the theaters, sometimes, I believe for as long as a year and a half, In the 1690s, when Shakespeare was not able to write plays, he wrote so great. Super elegant, Melissa Elizabethan Postman, Nathan McLeese, Venus and Adonis, two extremely rooted, high-culture poems with references to Ovid and obviously the Roman antiquity, they were exactly what people thought of as ludicrous in those days.

1:04:47Plays were not thought of as words. Again, it was thought of roughly the way people think of TV tricks now. It was through the author's word, an instinctive laugh, the reason to think that Shakespeare wrote that his name would not become immortal if he simply wrote play. As I said, when he started writing play, they didn't even put his name on the thumbnail. So there were signs that he was considering the author's route, it was a great part, of writing poetry dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. are very well through the upcoming World War, maybe the fourth day of the year of efforts against one of the most prominent young nobles.

1:05:42The dedication to folks in the way that owns the Renaissance efforts to get things done can be, you do not know what sucking up can be if you haven't read Dedication to a Renaissance Nobles. and, you know, it's obvious Shakespeare was trying to get a position in Southampton's core, but there's some indication that Southampton did open out, as there's points that are explained, he brought things to see Shakespeare's company as a career of Southampton, as a career of ethics, and so on. So, it does seem that he was keeping his options open, trying to open up the options of German patronage from a prominent global.

1:06:34And, as I said, the career of Stakefield's company was not entirely divorced from aristocratic or, eventually, more open-ended. And in fact, the gold field was built in 1698-99. In the early 1600s, we had, the company opened up an email field, the Blackfriars. We had a more upscale clientele. We could charge more and generally attract a more aristocratic audience. We see this pattern in general in the period that there was not a simple divorce between the commercial commuters and the kind of risk record.

1:07:27This is even clearer in Ben Johnson's career, Johnson, who wrote for Penn, thanks to the company, thanks to a duo, actually, that known Johnson's colleagues, their peers who defected at many points. But Johnson eventually made the bulk of his money writing core cognates for James I. and then there was a, if you could be successful at court, there weren't, you got these nice lump sum payments and eventually Johnson got a pay-free for the fee, so again, Johnson's typical role is going on is people pursue all their options, The book is now, people will work in the commercial world of art, but also seek out government grants and sometimes patronage as well, so it's interesting when you look at the previous 20th century artists, they'll take money wherever they can get it, but in, so in Shakespeare's case, as well, there seemed to be signs that he was looking to get patronage when he could, but there are signs to me that he was uncomfortable,

1:10:12The doctor was tough on him and dealing with the political world was a strain for him. All the compromises involved, all the having to work with other theorists and with the owners of the company, well, he was a co-owner, but the manager of the company working with the actors, this was difficult. I know the oddest thing about Big Beers, he retires probably 1610, 1611, goes back to Stratford, You know, at the peak of his powers, he still runs things like the Tempest. There's no sign of any feebleness in his powers. It does seem that this has put away enough money and owned enough land.

1:11:01He said, I don't need this anymore. My own personal theory is that he went home to prepare an edition of his parties. This is a very controversial idea. Again, the most common view is that the picture is utterly different from the publication, so I cannot believe that. I can't believe that if I didn't see it here, I wouldn't want it to be preserved, and as good as healthy as it could be. And I'm glad to say, finally, some scholars are coming around to the same view, earn or make the points, are standing well for folks of all time, points to some interesting facts that in Shakespeare's role, there are three legacies, one for Richard Gervais, one for John Hedges, and one for Henry Campbell, Hedges and Campbell went on to publish Shakespeare's plays in the same space, of the First Folio of 1643.

1:12:00And we had Shakespeare's plays in a lot of bad thoughts, but better than we might have hoped. And my guess is, and other scholars now support this, is that Shakespeare was talking to these friends about publishing his work, or maybe even preparing the idea that if he died, they would finish the project.

1:13:25with the world of the commercial theater. I'm not claiming that. Again, the people that see problems with the commercial character of theater are like, undoubtedly, Shakespeare had to do things that he didn't want to. It's interesting to example, a couple of his plays have panoramic titles, I do like it. Profile is somehow what you want. As you state to your son and daughter, okay, this is what you want, here it is. He's written The Merchant of Venice, which is an unusually dark comedy, an unusually complex one, one which borders on tragedy and some feel has a strong side to it.

1:14:15Maybe didn't go well, Jason says, but actually his writing is as you like it, what you do about nothing, as if he's saying, you know, my comedy is too serious for you, I can write this little stuff for you, or, you know, soil is encrusted on it, my gift is a bomb, some kind of real experiment that never succeeded, you know, When you look at the conversation between Hamlet and the players, you see that they're very into the whole business of QA companies and their rivalry, and he's got a wonderful rivalry, he was the first coach from all, he was Ben Johnson, Ben Johnson was always taking clock shots at Shakespeare, his Roman players weren't Roman enough, and claiming that he made mistakes in his play, and so on, and so, it was a very competitive environment, and Shakespeare operated in, and my guess is, yes, it was a strain on him, and yet, at times, he felt affected into doing things that he might not have wanted to do.

1:15:34You know, there's this famous legend that Queen Elizabeth liked the character of Falstaff so much that she wanted to see him in love, and thanks to her had the right, the very wise, you know, it's almost like when poor Arthur Condor had a kill-off,

1:16:27I also think he was a better playwright for it. He knew the theater company he was writing for and he knew his audience.

1:17:13What doesn't explain the genius, you know, if this explains the genius, then the plans of Thomas Becker ought to be a lot better than they are, not that the filmmakers motivated all that bad, but I'm going to start talking about a necessary knowledge of people's conditions. And we do think, however, that the whole world states they're operating was uplifting by this, by this competitive pressure. We really see what it is to have the City of London with, you know, in any given world, probably three major theater companies where everyone's competing for the public attention, for the public money.

1:18:05Money, it energized two or three generations of writers, and they all looked at each other up and don't seem really interested at all. You know, there's a tendency among most professors to study the influence of other dramatists on Shakespeare. Well, it's an even more fascinating question to raise the question of Shakespeare's influence on the Contemporary, because, you know, it was like, you know, a great Hollywood director. People see a John Ford Western, and then someone else can do a Western much better than he could have, if there hadn't been the example of John Polk, or Hitchcock's influence on thrillers.

1:18:55One thing that happens in this kind of intense competitive environment is people do imitate each other, and thanks to it, you probably do learn something from Marlow, for example, the very sound of his white bird is inherited from Marlow, but he went beyond Marlow, but in general, when we look at this period, maybe the absolute truth, it's a drama, The Theory of Money and Credit

1:19:55under the word possible. You will see it hinges on a Shakespeare-based opera, you know, ladies and gentlemen. But, you know, I mean, in some ways, what's interesting is how a commercial environment can lift all boats. That the richness of the stage has to do precisely with the fact that the exact pattern you get in a commercial theater of People, in the painting, following the lead on the certain things that make the theater look like the modern world of connecting, for example, people. So, I think you're right, Henry the First, part one, and you're right, Henry the Fourth, part two.

1:20:40Now, it's very possible that the two plays, I think, are the same time. and at the beginning of, you know, like the three parts of War of the Rings or the Pirates of the Caribbean sequence now, but it is interesting that you find the same phenomenon that one thing is teased and then everyone starts entertaining it. Harmless helps kick off a sequence of revenge strategies in the Jacobian period These are commercial principles. Some people think it's by Middleton. Some people think it's by Sheryl Turner. There's no name on it, so it's a good example. We don't even know who wrote it, but it's called a revenge strategy. It's made up of a lot of things.

1:21:40It's marvelous to me to think what a sort of second wave, which leads to any other sort of first wave, but a second wave, rather than a six-year time, Paul Hammond was about. And in the metaphysical distance of human nature, it's about a rock-and-soccer revenge strategy with everybody dead at the end. That's what, whoever wrote that play, Paul Hammond. And it's a pretty good play. It's actually, you can see it's safe. It's a really exciting play. It's a great moment. It's a very dramatic turn. So this is what I'm talking about when I say that commercial theater is quite valuable.

1:22:54or the talk at a university where Salerno was playing no matter what play he wrote, whether he would have gone through the effort to turn out two plays a year. You know, very specific, people think he had a contract with more famous women to do some two plays a year, but that's what we see in a pattern. So we basically think, I try to think as well, writing a fellow and seeing it in a mirror. in one year, that's quite the way it works out. I mean, that's a big achievement. And, you know, if you have a contract to do it, would you have done it? We'd like to think yes. But, you know, few of us in Shakespeare love the money.

1:23:43You know, the nature of the deadline, the fact that there's money dependent upon meeting the demands of Demand for the company and the public, sometimes you need that. I think if you're going to be a sowing professor of creative writing at Oxford, who knows, you might have said, well, you know, we can, we can wait to produce these works. So I'm not in any way trying to demean Shakespeare by suggesting What I'm trying to do is actually uplift the notes of commerce in our minds, that doing something to make money, to please the public, is not an immobile activity, and again, every indication we have is that Stakedeer was a fully commercial artist, and if that's so, it doesn't take Stakedeer down, it doesn't take it down, it doesn't take it down.

1:25:17Yes, I mean, it's very operatic, to put it in a fact, and it is interesting that the Ben's reception molded for the tagline opera and... Well, I've got to put it up, Carl wants to do it, and I think there's a few of them who do it, especially one of the five people who want to do it. Yeah. There's the first one who wants to do it. Yes, yeah, I mean there's a... There's probably one of those favorite authors. There's a famous passage about climate of Athens and gold that Marx quotes.

1:26:03And, uh, Fakir was extremely famous in Germany in the 19th century. And the German translations of Fakir by Fagel and Peat are among the finest translations of anything ever done. They're simply magnificent. They're accurate and they're beautiful. and so Shakespeare, almost as long as Germany doesn't exist, I just want to say, in Germany, in Frankfurt, and I can testify to this, and so the world takes me south to the 19th century Germany than it was in the 19th century England, it was a big deal, and so Marx, who very much, Marx to me is a German Romanticist, he grew up in the world of German Romanticism and his vision is utopian in the way that German Romanticism was, he claimed it was anti-utopian and scientific, but that makes it a little bit more utopian, so Marx, you know, he really is the dissipationist, and Literary Intellectual, so, I mean, you know, one of the good points about a book that he writes, Shakespeare, they're all often for the wrong reason, but it has the, you know, there's a,

1:27:25there's plainly, as it would be embodied most in scholarship on Shakespeare, it takes off from the fact that the great man, well, Shakespeare and therefore, Even in the Soviet Union, there were actually some very good marksman courses in place here in the 1930s. Yes?

1:28:16Ben Brompton, for example, for all his privilege on Shakespeare, knew he was a much greater artist, that's one of the reasons he scribbled about it. And of course, in the poem that's perpetuated for so long, he says it was not a good omen for such a long time. I know both of you have been talking about, and it was important to realize that Shakespeare was regarded as essentially a pop culture figure, But what's also true is that already there's not people who will begin to realize who he is, again, it's fact of years, already in 1590, it's imperium to the ancient dramatists, so it's not simple, I mean, you know, his reputation is complex as a beginner, but you're right, the Beaumont inspector, who was originally an exceptional commercial artist, were more popular on the 17th century stage than Shakespeare, Johnson, not so than Shakespeare, but rather affected, and it was interesting that he was polarized, except for the third interregnum, something of a continuity in order to produce throughout the 17th, 18th century, but yes, when Shakespeare, by the end of the 18th century, was starting to be held up

1:29:43as this genius who can be totally divorced from his origin, above all, in commercial theater work. People are beginning to get that wasn't commercial theater. He's starting to be thought of as the lead figure of high culture and then the romantic. He becomes the great image of the perfect creator and, you know, he is. I mean, he's a great genius. I think it overridden, and again, you can see his differences from the other playwrights that he didn't really help in most cases, he could write the plays all by himself.

1:30:28So he does increasingly get pocketed, so that ultimately he's rejected that kind of quote by the glad woman, that 60-year-old woman that lit in the flames and did, you know, if you were the commercial theater, you would have completely forgotten his origin. Yes? How about you go, one time, about the political climate response that you've been giving popular times over the years, and what you believe to be a global and moral community that's productive, and especially the form that I was in was that it was kind of, although I'm sure it was productive, I'm not exactly sure.

1:31:15I've heard some people say some pretty nasty things about them, but I'll say to you, it's that from the point of view, it's a phenomenon. I mean, it has some kind of power, what we

1:32:09My very, very distant reaction to it is, isn't it just the world of the English public school, is a study of public schools, and it's difficult but so weird and it's not too many things, but as far as I can go, it's just like any public school find that I've ever seen in anyone. So, I'll be talking about something I know nothing about. One more question? I was very intrigued about the very deep connection between the two, essentially, nature and correlation between the two. Those are one of the critical parts of the argument that I'm sitting in, arriving on.

1:32:58Well, I mean, you know, I, I hold this place because this is so sensitive. But I will say this, what, what's so strong in correlation is content for the mob, and the mob is portrayed very much as a theater audience. And I suspect that Shakespeare has a profound identification with that moment. Coiling this reluctance to expose himself naked to the ground probably gives us insight into the way Shakespeare felt when he got up on the stage. I mean, many actors will tell you this, that they are in private, very private people.

1:33:43Not Carlson, a classic example, but he was very shy at the time. But when he was on the screen, he lit up. And, you know, he was just a congeniality, but a drag. He was a great line. Comparative is the most important thing with both of you. If you can fake that, you can fake anything.

1:34:32is that I get the greatest human genius who's ever written and he's got to get up in front of this crowd of groundlings and perform for them knowing that they don't have a clue what his great stuff is about and what, you know, this is the life he shows, you know, this is how he earns his money and he did it, he did it for 20 years and sent out play after play for these people and by and large they were mostly successful Walter Kaufman had this great line about Shakespeare. He knew how to give his pearls the air of the sky before passing them before this line.

1:35:17Hoppe was the only German who could say stuff like that about Shakespeare. And I think it's a real insight that he knew how to succeed in the political community. and I just felt that it was part of him that balked at it and hated it and Ben Rhodes in his relatively new book, I think it's 2003, takes place all the time, the first person I think to come up with a theory that thanks to his love for it as a way of getting away from the London theater, one of his real paradoxes in his life, which seems to be that he left his life, his children, his whole home behind, spent 20 years in London, and then came back to Stratford. Well, it turns out, if you look at the record, there are a lot of things that play Shakespeare in Stratford.

1:36:02There are these lawsuits, you know, buying a new house, building it, rebuilding it, and so on. And these things are fakes too. So he tells Shakespeare, the first commuter artist, that he needed the sanctuary at Stratford to get away from the London people. And he even proposes the amazing thing that Shakespeare wrote his plays in Stratford. And he says, how the hell did he live and play in the hustle and bustle of London? And it's just clear to say, it was about a four or five day journey from London to Stratholme, but he has this idea that Shakespeare needed that retreat. He needed to be able to participate himself between London and the London theater world, and somehow this private world. Oh, we have no proof for that. But it's a fascinating theory. And again, if you try to get into the mind of this, you know, being one of a kind, The Theory of Money and Credit

1:37:20I'm going home to Stratford, I'm going to put them into books and read that theory a little behind me. So, and again, that's my gut reaction, but I think, you know, if you look at certain moments, you can see it in a comic where someone is so embarrassed to be played before a crowd,

1:38:15and we'll talk about it a bit afterwards. We can, you know, be a little more informal. We can go to the internet audience. We'll be out there watching us as we do it. But I thought we were trying to have a movie every night at 7. Tomorrow night will be on the day, which we'll fit in with what we're doing on classical music. And then Wednesday, I'm going to show us just the closest film and prepare for what we're doing on Thursday. And then Thursday night, the high point, to prepare us for Friday morning's lecture, we'll rock. and the next episode of The Simpsons and the next episode of The M's Files and we'll see what truly great commercial art can do.