If you grew up in America the details of shakespeare’s life are probably really confusing and it’s very hard to connect an extra experience history because we don’t learn English history in very much in American schools we’re not really interested in anything before 1776 so I thought i’d do the short video to place shakespeare’s life in the context of the history of America we know Shakespeare wrote about America so he was clearly interested and you’re probably interested in Shakespeare So here we go in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue he was employed by Queen fergunand by king Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain who were looking for a cheaper way to get to the Indies because India had lots and lots of spices that the Europeans couldn’t live without they also and Asia controlled all the ways to get there and charge Europeans a lot of money to go there so columbus’s idea was to go the other way around and he wound him wound up in a new continent and to say face he called the inherent evidence Indians like that really did anything Queen Isabella and King Fernandez were also famous for expelling the Jews from Spain a fact that will become important in Shakespeare’s later comedy Merchant Of Venice his most controversial play which has a Jewish Monday lender as the villain at around the same time that Columbus was Sailing for the new world back in England a Civil War had just ended between 2 Royal Houses each with a claim to the Throne of England the white rose family the house of York which used a white rose as its crest and the house of Lancaster which used a red rose as it’s crushed that’s the name the wars of the Roses The guy who won the war and became King wasn’t really a member of either house per se his name was Henry Tudor and he became King Henry VII his son was King Henry the eighth who Shakespeare would have mortalized in his last and worset play anyway Henry the eighth You probably Know that he had 6 wives 2 of whom he beheaded and who are now Immortalized in the Broadway musical King Henry had one air King Edward VII who died Young Through a tortuous series of political backstabbing breaking with the church and lots and lots of conflict England would be placed in the capable hands of his daughter Queen Elizabeth I who took the throne in 15 58 4 years later a widow baby boy was born in Stratford-upon-Avon who building and puking the nurse’s arms his name was William Shakespeare and now our story finally beginshakespeare was the third of 8 children His 2 elder siblings died possibly due to plagwe don’t know a ton about him from his boyhood years the first mention of him being a successful playwright comes in 1593 around the same time that voyages to Virginia were being started in America’s Virginia was named after Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare’s boss Because she called herself the Virgin Queen Shakespeare’s firshakespeare’s first place were very popular they were fictionalized comic book ask versions of the of the wars of the roses where some people were good and some people were bad even though history is much more complicated than that they were basically the Avengers: Endgame in the sense that the story was split into multiple parts with many famous characters played by the best actors of the day He went on to write comedy’s histories and his plays were popular enough to get for him to get invited to court to perform them in front of the Queen herself until her death at 16 0 3 where she was replaced with King James I and King james started an exposition to send mor to set up colonies in America after the Spanish and the French had been there too King James was also Scottish he was originally the king king James of Scotland but because he was sort of related to Elizabeth’s cousins he he became a king of England after her death the guy was also very terrified of witches and wrote a book about how to find witches which would eventually influence the American Salem witch trials and 1628 Shakespeare wrote some of his best work for king James Hamlet McBeth a fellow oh the done it’s and by someone counts even the king James bible Shakespeare died in 16 16 4 years later king James sent another expedition to America that would be eventually become weawhere the first puritant and the first puritan the pilgrim fathers came to Massachusetts in 1620 landing at Plymouth so you can see that shakespeare’s life kind of book ends the most important event the beginning moments of American history Shakespeare even mentioned to America in the comedy of errors and in all smell that ends well but he refers to the Indians as religious in their error referring to the fact that they are clearly spiritual people that do but worship the wrong gods to it in 2 Europeans this final play The Tempest of wasn’t by most scholars Believe was based on an account of the of the the Discovery of Bermuda and a fellow hymns and a fellow Came out wrong which has which is the only play that Shakespeare ever wrote where a Black man is the Hero was was was written around the same time that King James was thinking of expelling Black people from England and Europeans were starting to become interested in the possibility of African slavery after shakespeare’s death the transatlantic slave trade started and American started to conquer most to divide and conquer the continent of America I don’t know what Shakespeare would think of America but he did see it as an interesting exotic place but after shakespeare’s deamericans would gravitate towards Shakespeare to show how intelligent and sophisticated they were George Washington put on Shakespeare play