The lectures, except Rise and Fall, include an on-screen display of portraits.

According to John Aubrey, the dramatist's father "was a butcher & I have been told heretofore by some of his neighbors, that when he killed a Calfe he would do it in a high style, and make a speech." The conjecture that John Shakspeare was a butcher has been discounted. That leaves us with the killing of the calf.

In 1836, Canon Raines recalled the old stage routine of Killing the Calf and queried, "Was this the calf that Shakespeare killed?" Killing the Calf was a pseudo-ventriloquial comedy turn for the company clown. At a predetermined moment (or in an emergency), the curtains parted and a dummy calf's head was pushed through. The clown then indulged in some banter with the "calf," "throwing" his voice for the calf's responses. When the calf became too glib, the clown produced a wooden sword and "struck its head off," the head falling to the floor. The future dramatist undoubtedly witnessed this scene on more than one occasion. It was so indelibly imprinted in his mind that years later he committed it to paper in Hamlet.

Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar: I was kill'd i' the Captial; Brutus kill'd me.

Hamlet: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.

Like that musical genius Mozart, who was entertaining potentates at age 5, the urge to create drama may have come at an early age. And one learns by imitation. It may be fantasy to imagine that young William badgered his mother until she finally gave in and made him a calf's head cut from cloth and stuffed. Around the evening fire, the youth's parents, brothers and sisters endured the Killing of the Calf in William's original and ever more elaborate version ad nauseum. The Shakespeares' relatives, neighbors, and whoever stopped by to visit were also treated to the calf's head.

Continuing the fantasy, William's reputation for Killing the Calf followed him throughout his life. The stunt was his favorite backstage prank, well known throughout the London theatre community.

But now the fantasy begins to look like reality. In his preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon, Thomas Nashe angrily cites a rival player-poet among "the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some killcow conceit." To whom but Shakespeare, the player-poet outbraving the University wits, could Nashe be referring? Otherwise, how can one make any sense of his use of the nonce term "killcow"?

[The basic idea for this piece was drawn from Alan Keen & Roger Lubbock's The Annotator. While this is a useful book--I believe it inspired and provided much information for E. A. J. Honigmann's Shakespeare 'the lost years'--I do not agree, nor does Honigmann, with its main thesis, that Shakespeare is the annotator of the Newport copy of Halle's Chronicle.]