Mary arden shakespeare biography movie

Shakespeare’s Mother: The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman was partly a biography of a specific woman – Mary Arden, the mother of William Shakespeare. But there’s not really enough surviving detail about her life to get the full picture from, so the gaps were filled in with more general information about the sorts of lives women (and men) of the time lead.

The presenter, Michael Wood, did a good job of stitching the two sorts of information into a coherent whole, so it didn’t feel disjointed or patchy.

Mary Arden is an interesting person to look at the life of, not just because of whose mother she is, but also because of when she lived and what sort of person she was.

She lived through a time of great change – she was born around 1537 near the start of the English Reformation, and died in James VI & I’s reign having lived through the whole of the Tudor changes of religion. It’s easy to forget that these changes all took place within a life