DayStrider: Tales from a Time Traveler

Bonus Episode: Shakespeare 360 w/ Gary Taylor

• Truman Pastworthy

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History's most celebrated playwright isn't who you think he is. 

Forget the stuffy portrait of Shakespeare you suffered through in high school - turns out the Bard was tracking audience reactions like a Netflix algorithm, surviving political dangers that got his colleagues executed, and running Renaissance London's most savvy multimedia enterprise. Welcome to "Shakespeare 360°" – where what you learned in English class was just 37° of the full picture (that's one degree for each of his plays).

In this academic deep dive (that's actually fun!), distinguished Shakespeare scholar Professor Gary Taylor takes us backstage to reveal:

  • The most important day in Shakespeare’s career - one that changed it’s trajectory entirely
  • Why Shakespeare meticulously tracked audience laughter like a proto-Silicon Valley product manager (and how it made him rich)
  • The character name change that literally saved Shakespeare's head when his colleagues weren't so lucky
  • How AI and algorithms are helping to study every word to make sense of them all
  • The bizarre train scheduling conspiracy still trapping Shakespeare fans in Stratford-upon-Avon overnight (400 years later!)

Whether you're a literary buff, business strategist, or just someone who remembers dozing through Romeo and Juliet in 10th grade, this episode reveals why Shakespeare's works still captivate us centuries later. As Professor Taylor puts it, Shakespeare shows us that "the universe is bigger than we are... and so we'll never get bored with it."

This bonus episode features the full interview that was highlighted in the April 23rd DayStrider episode:  A Midsummer Night Mistake, with additional insights and stories that didn't make the original cut. Perfect for sharing with students, colleagues, or anyone who appreciates a deeper look at creative genius.

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Gary Taylor:

Shakespeare was interested in the money. He was a very successful commercial writer. Oh, there's no question that he and his team were all very aware of the audience. It's very dangerous in Shakespeare's lifetime. The theater is censored. Books are censored.

Truman:

welcome to shakespeare 360 the complete genius behind the bard i'm truman pastworthy from the day strider podcast and today we're gonna bend your mind to mirth and merriment everyone knows shakespeare for his poetic language and his unforgettable characters but what you learned about him in high school that was just 37 degrees of the full picture And it's missing everything that made him revolutionary. For the next half hour, we're going to give you Shakespeare 360. The savvy businessman who tracked audience reactions like a modern data analyst. The political survivor who dodged beheading while his colleagues weren't so lucky. And the multimedia entrepreneur who would have crushed it on Netflix if he were born four centuries later. Even AI algorithms are joining the hunt to crack his genius code. Are you ready to learn why Shakespeare's works stood the test of time with one of the world's foremost Shakespeare experts? Professor Gary Taylor, take it away.

Gary Taylor:

That I teach at Florida State University in the English department. And I'm the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, which is the only award in the university that's given entirely by faculty, not administrators. I've published a lot of books.

Truman:

You have. A lot of articles. A lot of articles, a lot of essays. I've read a couple of the others, yes.

Gary Taylor:

Yeah. My most influential works have been the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works and the new Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works.

Truman:

Professor Taylor's work reveals a pivotal moment that sparked Shakespeare's transformation from struggling artist to entertainment mogul.

Gary Taylor:

I know which day. Go ahead. And that's the day when Shakespeare... became a member of the Chamberlain's Men acting companies in 1594. The Chamberlain's Men was a group of mostly actors, and Shakespeare was an actor, who formed their own company. So what that means is that they were shareholders, and every one of their shareholders got a part of the profits from every performance. So this was the most important moment in Shakespeare's career because it meant that he was not just a freelance trying to sell scripts to any company that might take them, or a jobbing actor who just got whatever roles he could in whatever theater company was looking for extra actors for a particular show. He was one of the core actors of the company and also one of the shareholders of the company. And eventually, five years later, became one of the shareholders of the Globe Theatre itself.

Truman:

And each of his plays meant more money in his pocket and greater creative freedom. It's no wonder he became so prolific, turning out 37 plays spanning every conceivable genre. Comedies for the commoners who loved a bawdy joke, histories for the political-minded, and tragedies for those who created Carthus's. Shakespeare crafted something for every possible customer in his theatrical marketplace. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Those famous words from the Twelfth Night are the perfect segue to talk about Shakespeare's greatest hits. What comes to your mind as his greatest work? Are you drawn to the comedies that sparkle with wit, or the tragedies that probe the darkest corners of the human heart? Well, Professor Taylor had no hesitation as to which plays top his list.

Gary Taylor:

One would be Midsummer Night's Dream, certainly. It's a unique play. There's nothing like it by anybody else. And it's magical and funny and romantic, all of those things. And like Romeo and Juliet, it's also about sex. That's a... That's an easy one for me. King Lear is another easy one for me because I think it's just, it's the most powerful of his tragedies. And I thought that it's not just because I'm an old man myself at this point, but I thought that very, very early on in my career as a Shakespeare scholar. And for my third choice, It depends on what you will allow me to do, because my third choice would be the Henriad. The Henriad. And, you know, you could say, oh, that's more than one play. But Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part II, and Henry V are all linked together. They tell one story, and they were clearly written in that order. and Shakespeare meant them to be understood as a sequence. And so even if you put all four of those plays together, it would still be shorter than a lot of masterpieces of world literature. But if that's cheating and I have to choose just one play that everybody recognizes as a one-off, then I would say The Winter's Tale. which is a political play, but also magical. And what Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear and The Wonder's Tale have in common, part of what distinguishes Shakespeare, is that it's partly about the human relationship to the natural world. In Midsummer Night's Dream, they go off into the woods where the magic happens, In King Lear, he goes out into the storm, and in The Winter's Tale, after the tragedy that takes place, it's very much a domestic tragedy in which a man, jealous man, falsely accuses his wife of adultery, the play and the audience go out into the natural world to celebrate a harvest festival. Shakespeare's very unusual story among playwrights, but also I think among writers of all kinds, in his ability to tell stories in which not only do human beings interact with other human beings, but also human beings interact with the non-human natural world. I think that's become even more important as we've become aware of the fragility of the climate but also of the fragility of human civilization in relationship to the power of the natural world

Truman:

all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players now for shakespeare the world was a stage And that stage was also a laboratory, a place to test what worked and what didn't, with paying customers who voted with their attention and applause. Shakespeare didn't magically just know what would resonate with those audiences. He was much more practical, more empirical, and he developed a legendary understanding of what makes people laugh and cry and gasp in the darkness.

Gary Taylor:

Oh, there's no question that he and his team, the team of actors, the sharers in the company, they were all, as all professional actors are in the theater, very aware of the audience and from second to second are aware of whether or not the audience is engaged or bored. or irritated. So they're very sensitive to that. And they all, in their different ways, respond to it. So Shakespeare had a very sensitive testing machine, not just in terms of himself present on the stage and noticing the way that audiences reacted, but also the people that he worked with, the team. The acting company. And that's the basis of cases where Shakespeare seems to have added material to an original version of Apply. Wow, okay. And there is material that is not present in a later version. Sometimes that looks like it might be due to censorship. But in other cases, it might be due to just deciding that we need to speed up this scene. And, you know, Shakespeare as an artist may have insisted, well, we have to keep trying with this scene. We can do it a different way. We can try this, we can try that. He may have been very reluctant if he felt strongly that a certain scene or moment was important to the story that he wanted to tell. But certainly we would expect there to have been adjustments

Truman:

While other playwrights of his era sometimes blamed audiences for not appreciating their genius, Shakespeare took a different approach, one that helped him evolve as an artist.

Gary Taylor:

In addition to the sort of big changes that maybe they decided to add a scene here or there, or they decided to trim something because it just wasn't working. You know, if it doesn't work once and the rest of the play does, That's okay. But if it doesn't work over and over again, then the actor is going to come to him and say, look, there's nothing I can do to get the audience to like this. Can we just cut it? Can we trim it? Part of the reason that we can see that Shakespeare's works become more ambitious and more complicated over the course of his career, that's because he keeps learning. He learned from audiences.

Truman:

Whether you see him as a playwright or a data analyst with a quill, one thing's for sure, Shakespeare knew how to turn applause into profit.

Gary Taylor:

Shakespeare was interested in the money. He was a very successful commercial writer.

Truman:

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. That's very true, but the same can be said for playwrights who dare to write about crowns and the kings and queens who wore them. So far, our conversations have been about Shakespeare the businessman and Shakespeare the artist, but what about Shakespeare the survivor? In an era where saying the wrong thing could literally cost you your head, How did he manage to write politically charged material while keeping his head safely attached to his shoulders?

Gary Taylor:

But it's very dangerous in Shakespeare's lifetime. The theater is censored, books are censored, and his most important predecessor and collaborator in the English theater, Christopher Marlowe, was almost certainly politically assassinated for his pushing the boundaries. And Thomas Middleton actually wrote the most successful play of the period. People assume, I mean, Shakespeare, in terms of the totality of his career, was more successful in the theater. But the single most popular play was by Thomas Middleton called A Game of Chess. But it was shut down by the government and Middleton was thrown in jail and eventually got out of jail, but he never wrote another play. And so that's almost certainly was the condition of his being released from prison. Of course. So it's dangerous.

Truman:

Pushing boundaries meant death or jail or worse, censorship.

Gary Taylor:

What I think most people don't realize is that the texts of Henry IV and of Falstaff that we read are censored. And the play, when it was originally written, that character was not called Falstaff, which is a made-up name in the period, but Sir John Oldcastle. And Sir John Oldcastle was somebody who was considered a Protestant martyr who wanted reform of the church, and the church was very directly connected to the monarchy. So an attack on the church was considered an attack on the monarchy. When he rebelled against the church, he was publicly executed for his religious beliefs. And so to call that comic character Sir John O'Castle was considered an assault on on the the protestant history of england

Truman:

so unlike his rebellious contemporaries shakespeare played the long game here's how professor taylor put it

Gary Taylor:

so that play was published soon after it was performed unlike almost all of shakespeare's other plays and the reason it was published was to publicize uh the name sir john falstaff uh okay and to say you know so that it's not Oldcastle has nothing to do with the martyr Oldcastle. It's Falstaff, and you can laugh at him as much as you want. So one thing we learn from this is he was not like Oldcastle. He was not willing to stick to his guns and say, I'm not going to change the name and risk his life or his career.

Truman:

He wanted to keep his head on his shoulders.

Gary Taylor:

Yeah, keep his head on his shoulders. And it's good that he did because after that, he went on writing many amazing plays. That was only about halfway through his career. What's

Truman:

Past is Prologue. That quote comes from The Tempest and the main character in that play has magical powers. So I asked Professor Taylor, what if we could use our magical powers and time travel Shakespeare from the past so that he could write us a present day prologue without risk of jail time or beheading?

Gary Taylor:

I think the thing that would interest him most is democracy. Okay,

Truman:

so politics.

Gary Taylor:

Well, he was very interested in politics. He was, yes. Almost all of his plays have political elements to them. But there had been no experience, really, of democracy for more than 1500 years before his birth.

Noise:

Right.

Gary Taylor:

You know, so democracy was a political system that belonged to the ancient past rather than to his present and he was interested in the past but he had no experience of a working democracy and given his interest in politics i think that he would be very interested in that and also of course the thing about shakespeare though is that he never wrote contemporary stories His stories are all about the past. I mean, they connect with present tense audiences, but he didn't write plays about what was going on right now. And so if Netflix made him an offer, one of the things he could do would be to write a history play about Elizabeth I. He couldn't do that at the time, of course. That would have been... censored, but he knew a lot about Elizabeth I. He could do interesting things with that material. But of course, What happened after the birth of Elizabeth I, with the execution of Elizabeth's mother and Boleyn, with Henry's succession of wives, with all the people around him who he wound up executing, that's great dramatic material, but Shakespeare couldn't possibly write about it in his time. He never wrote about the present because that was way too dangerous. Writing about the past was safer.

Music:

Bye.

Truman:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Little did Hamlet know his words would perfectly describe Shakespeare's scholarship itself. For the last 50 years or so, experts have been debating who truly wrote the immortal words that we attribute to William Shakespeare. And for most of that time, they didn't have algorithms. That's right. And now we can bring AI in to improve our literary sleuthing. And Professor Taylor is at the forefront of this digital revolution.

Gary Taylor:

Now I'm working with and collaborated with people who are doing new work with AI, including former students of mine. So it's very much going to be crucial to the future of Shakespeare scholarship. But what we do know that is related to that is for at least 20 years, Shakespeare scholars have been using large databases and search engines to discover things about Shakespeare's language and to evaluate that kind of data with very sophisticated statistical protocols. One of the things that the large databases and the digital searches and statistical checking have showed us is things that we almost never pay any attention to when we're reading a poet, especially a poet who's left behind as much work as Shakespeare. And that is the little words like A and D, in, of, with, by, from, far, etc. And it turns out that human beings and the way they speak and the way they write are can be distinguished by which of those words they use most frequently or least frequently.

Truman:

So let's pause right here a moment and appreciate an old dog learning new tricks. Like me, Professor Taylor has been around the block a few times, and yet he's right at home in the digital classrooms where algorithms don't just write, they reveal. And as for those conspiracy theorists, well... Professor Taylor says the data shuts that down cold.

Gary Taylor:

It wouldn't make any difference to me if the person that we think is Shakespeare turns out to be the person that we know as the Earl of Oxford or whoever else. Having said that, I've never seen any plausible evidence at all that they were written by anybody else. The argument that Shakespeare, because he was from a small town in the English Midlands and he didn't go to a university, is exactly the same kind of prejudice.

Truman:

To thine own self be true. Now that's some great advice. And what's interesting is that each generation finds its own truth. So the Shakespeare stories that my parents connected with isn't quite the same Shakespeare that I discovered. And it definitely isn't the same Shakespeare my younger children are experiencing today. Teaching mostly the same content over several decades has given Professor Taylor a unique perspective on how each generation discovers the Bard

Gary Taylor:

anew. I learn a lot from my students. One of the things about theater is it's a present tense medium. And their present is different from mine. they don't come to this moment with the experiences that have contributed to my sense of this moment. Generational change is something that you actually witness if you teach for decades, in particular if you teach the same material for decades, and you see the difference in how students respond to the same material or do not respond.

Truman:

That's fascinating.

Gary Taylor:

That's a thing that I have consistently learned from my students, that the things about Shakespeare that interest my students in the spring of 2025 are very different from the things that interested my students in 1975. Or 1985. And those differences are partly about time, but they're also partly about place.

Truman:

And when Professor Taylor says place, he means both where you are in life and where you are when the magic of Shakespeare hits you. In fact, his own personal experience with Shakespeare changed radically when he discovered that the plays were meant to be seen and not just read.

Gary Taylor:

And so from that point on, I realized that Shakespeare was much more powerful if you didn't just read him. I mean, I still read him. I still believe in reading him. But that it was much more powerful if you understood that what Shakespeare was doing was writing poetry. a multimedia art form.

Truman:

It was intended to be performed.

Gary Taylor:

It was intended to be performed. And Shakespeare went into this business at the very beginning of the first multimedia entertainment industry in the Western world because it was a commercial business. It wasn't just an occasional event for special holidays or religious events. It was there to make money. And the way of making money was to attract as many customers as possible to these purpose-built theaters.

Truman:

And the good professor suggests there's no better purpose-built theater to catch a Shakespeare performance than in the very town where our hero was born and is buried, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Gary Taylor:

I've had the opportunity to see lots of different Shakespeare performances and And to see them live. And when I started doing this, of course, then going and getting good seats in a theater in the West End in London, or, you know, going to Stratford-upon-Avon and Having to get there on the train and having to stay overnight because they arraign the train schedules so you can't leave after the evening performances. You know, so because they have to make a living, too.

Truman:

They have to make a living. That's funny. And four centuries later, they're still selling out the Bard one overnight stay at a time. So you definitely want to add this to your theatrical bucket list. complete with the obligatory overnight stay engineered by savvy train schedulers who would have fit right in with the original Chamberlain's men. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. That quote acknowledges life's brevity. Yet Shakespeare's works have transcended that limitation, living on for centuries. And though the man himself was transient as a dream, his creations have achieved a kind of immortality that defies the sleep that rounds our little lives. I asked Professor Taylor to help me understand what it is about these works that continues to captivate us. Why do we still gather in theaters and classrooms and podcast studios to discuss words written four centuries ago? He doesn't hesitate to whip out a Shakespeare quote that describes a moment of transcendent beauty that speaks directly to our human experience.

Gary Taylor:

Age cannot wither her, nor customs stale her infinite variety. That's from Antony and Cleopatra, and it's a description of Cleopatra. And I think anybody who has been in love with the same person for a long time feels that way about them, that I don't get tired of this person. But Shakespeare is an extraordinary observer of things around him, people around him, but also of the world around him. And he expresses that in moments like this when he gives us a sense of scale. And it's a scale that is so much larger than we are. And that is, to me, and I think this is always true of Shakespeare's evocations of that kind of scale, it's not depressing that we're so small by comparison to that. It is instead exhilarating The universe is bigger than we are, and so we'll never get bored with it.

Truman:

Shakespeare gave us Hamlet's hesitation, Juliet's devotion, and Prospero's forgiveness. His quill captured the essence of love and betrayal and ambition and redemption centuries before modern entertainment has tried to do the same. Maybe that's the real time trap, the way his words still move us 400 years on. I'm Truman Pastworthy, and I hope you've enjoyed Professor Gary Taylor's insights about the original entertainment mogul, William Shakespeare. The next time you find yourself binging another season or streaming your favorite content, remember... It all started with a Glover son from a small town who changed entertainment forever.