Shakespeare

1. Shakespeare International man of mystery

2. William Shakespeare • April 23, 1564-1616 • Greatest writer of English? • Bard of Avon • Stratford-upon-Avon • 37 or 38 plays • 154 sonnets, plus

3. Shakespeare in love? • Married Anne Hathaway

4. Early life • He was 18, she was 26 • Six months later first child born • Three children, two of which were twins • Lived with his father, successful glove maker • Next eight years “lost years” • ????????

5. Making plays in London • Early 1590’s writing plays in London • Successful as playwright, actor, and shareholder of acting company • Lord Chamberlain’s Men • The King’s Men • The Globe Theatre

6. Blackfriar’s Theater

7. Elizabethan Age • Favorite of Queen Elizabeth I • Shakespeare has strong heroines, perhaps inspired by Elizabeth • First feminist? Portrayed the virtues of strong women who achieve their goals

8. Jacobean Age • King James I cultivated and strong patron of the arts • Elevated Shakespeare’s company even higher, making the participants gentlemen

9. Success • Most popular acting company in London • Spent much of time in London away from family • Later bought second most expensive house in Stratford

10. Shakespeare’s house

11. Statue to Shakespeare

12. Monument to playwrights

13. I’m not dead yet. • Died age 52 of fever? Typhus? • "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." ~ Vicar of Holy Trinity Church

14. Oh, maybe I am. • Buried in Holy Trinity Church

15. Will’s last will • Left his wife his “second-best bed” • Hmm… • Gave daughters, friends and relatives everything else, which wasn’t all that much • If he was so successful and famous, where did all his money go? • Did not arrange to have his plays printed or mention them in his will

16. Signatures • WillmShakp • William Shaksper • WmShakspe • William Shakspere • WillmShakspere • By me William Shakspeare

17. Jonson’s praise • This figure that thou here seest put,It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,Wherein the graver had a strifeWith Nature, to outdo the life:Oh, could he but have drawn his witAs well in brass, as he has hitHis face, the print would then surpassAll that was ever writ in brass;But since he cannot, reader, lookNot on his picture, but his book. • Ben Jonson, Lines on a Picture of Shakespeare.

18. Humanism • Morality plays religious themes • Shakespeare explores human, not divine dilemmas • Shakespeare’s religious tolerance: “wonderful philosophical impartiality” ~Coleridge • Humanism: human experience as a way of knowing self, nature, or God • Value to each individual human life • Villains have sympathy

19. Humanism • No simplistic moral or theological narratives • Explores emotions and moral choices faced by secular men in extreme circumstances • Renaissance: arts, sciences, Greek and Roman culture • Rapidly expanding knowledge and extraordinary artistic production • Artistic and moral movement

20. Shakespeare’s Plays Comedies • All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Cymbeline, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale Tragedies • Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus Histories • 1,2, and 3 Henry VI, 1 and 2 Henry IV, King John, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II, Richard III

21. Theatre in London • London 200,000 people 1590’s: high mortality, crime, unsanitary conditions, crowding • Young men from countryside, like Shakespeare • Pickpockets, prostitutes, commoners, gentlemen, foreign fashions, theater red-light district • Most important cultural form English Renaissance • Sophisticated audience, novelty, variety, complexity

22. Theatres • Playwrights in demand • Birth of modern theater • Daytime performances: open-air, rain or shine, rowdy • Social classes mix freely • Poor: yard front of stage, penny • Richer: seats, higher up cost more • 1609 indoor, winter, intimate, more expensive

23. Theatres • Theater more respectable • Plague decimates 1/3 to 2/3 of city’s population • Playhouses breeding grounds, often closed • Afraid of political unrest, so licensed • Companies 15 plays/month • Several thousand during Shakespeare’s time • Bare stage; new play every day, so big sets expensive, impractical

24. Theatre • Costumes main expense, language and imagination • Cannon burned down Globe in 1613, no one killed but one man’s breeches caught fire, bottle of ale doused • Trapdoors, deus ex machina, sword fights, jigs and dances • Men and boys played all roles; women forbidden because “immoral”

25. Language • Shared culture: Bible and mythology • Flexible language, no rules or standards • Shakespeare 25,000 different words • Average adult 7,000-10,000 words, 800 then • Shakespeare invented maybe 1,700 words

26. Language • Social class, personality, mood and situation • Prose or verse class or situation • Heightened emotional state or formal poetic, otherwise prose • Romeo and Juliet meet and exchange a perfect sonnet • Figurative language: metaphor, simile, personification, puns, rhythm, meter, symbolism, layers of meaning • Syntax: emphasis on which part of speech to accentuate, whatever comes last

27. Poetry • Shakespeare wrote poetry from 1592-94 when plague shut down theatres in London • Wanted to make name for himself • Poetry considered more sophisticated and gentlemanly than theatre • Narrative poetry and sonnets

28. Sonnets • Sonetto, little song • Italian, Dante, Petrarch • Earl of Surrey adapted rhyme scheme to English, known as Shakespearean sonnet • Time, Beauty, and Verse • Very popular 1590’s • Collection known as a sequence or cycle

29. Sonnets • Sonnets 1-126 to a young man • 127-152 to a dark lady • 153-154 to Cupid • About procreation and immortality in verse • Beauty also immortalized, preserved in poetry • “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”~Keats • “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”~Keats

30. Unrequited love • Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, and the idea of courtly love • Evolution of feeling and thought toward the beloved: enchanted, worshipful, confounded, disenchanted, and combative • Dark lady: eyes and hair of black • Adulterous affair ending in frustration and deception

31. Sonnets • “For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright/Who are as black as hell, as dark as night” • Young man having and affair with dark lady? • Love triangle, and then competition, rival poet • Sonnet’s formal structure challenged to create within constraints • Sound, meaning, and image combine

32. Sonnets • Fourteen lines=three quatrains+one couplet • Quatrain=four lines • Couplet=two lines • Iambic pentameter=five feet • Turn=change of direction

33. How to read a sonnet: follow the train of thought, look for shifts of tone or direction • Thought, followed by example, then comparison • Layers of meaning, metaphor, words connected to each other • Couplet reveals even deeper meaning

34. Origins and Sources • Did not create stories, aside from Love’s Labor’s Lost and The Tempest • Holinshed: Chronicles of England Scotland and Ireland, 1587: plot elements, character names, and descriptions, but reshaped to suit dramatic purposes • Edward Hall: The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, 1548

35. Origins and Sources • Boccaccio: Decameron, 1353; people fleeing plague in Florence, bawdy and full of innuendo • Romances (long narrative in poetry or prose) • Seneca: tragedies of deception and revenge • Plutarch: Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

36. Origins and Sources • Ovid: Metamorphoses, poetry, mythological • Plautus: comedic drama from Greek plays; low-class characters that outwit upper-class

37. Impact of Shakespeare’s Plays • Emotional impact • Use of language to reveal or convey character • Extremes of human experience • Complexity of character, motivation, real and three dimensional • Dialogue reveals a character through his or her words, directly and indirectly • Much dialogue poetry; no people did not speak this way

38. Impact • Racy stories appealing to common person as well as educated; evolving London, cultures and classes mixing • Ben Jonson: “not of an age, but for all time” • Coat of arms “Not without merit” • Didn’t protect his plays for posterity • Half of plays printed by time of his death, rest by friends: First Folio

39. Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare? • Authorship controversy • Documents show he lived and wrote the plays • Playbills named him • Plays published after performance with his name • Shareholder in company who performed them • Other famous people wrote about him

40. Conspiracy • Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is often the correct one • Commoner, country boy, son of illiterate tradesman and mother, never went to university; must have been aristocrat • But English Renaissance and others of that time had similar backgrounds: Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Spenser

41. Bacon • Sir Francis Bacon: Renaissance man, royal court, prolific writer, philosophy, politics, scientific method • How would he have had time? • Twain a proponent

42. de Vere • Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: education, courtly knowledge of Elizabeth I, writer, poet, comedy, military, life parallels many plots of plays; died 1604, and Shakespeare did plays in 1609 and 1613 • Freud a proponent

43. Marlowe • Christopher Marlowe: anti-Stratfordians, literary professional, son of tradesman, university degree, born same year as Shakespeare, but already famous when S. came to London in 1590’s

44. Marlowe • 1593 charged with heresy as atheist and “murdered” by men in British intelligence and took up Shakespeare’s name as a cover • Marlowe was a spy, so it’s suspicious • Marlovians’ literary analysis say “fingerprint” the same • But stark differences in style and content, though Shakespeare certainly influenced by him

45. Yet more conspiracy • Sir WalterRaleigh: explorer, poet, philosopher, statesman, courtier lived until 1618, so chronology fits, never wrote a play, but did poetry • Queen Elizabeth I herself?

46. Separated at birth?You be the judge.

47. Who was Shakespeare? • So, was Shakespeare really Shakespeare? • Does it matter? • Shakespeare in a minute • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkuUADWW2A • Original pronunciation • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

48. Catholic? • Queen Elizabeth outlawed: fined, tortured and killed if conspiring • Parents Catholic, may have been hired as a tutor in a Catholic household • Hoghton’s will: instruments and costumes, mentions a William Shakeshafte • Catholics treated respectfully in his plays • No solid evidence

49. Gay? • Historians: no such concept at that time • May not have spent much time with Anne, but did have three children • Theatre traditional venue for gays • Shakespeare wrote love poetry to men • But also to women • Inconclusive

50. English Renaissance • 1485-1625 • Rebirth of civilization • Started earlier in Italy (1350-1550) • Rejected “dark ages” of Medieval Europe • Revived learning of ancient Greece and Rome • Age of Exploration • Religious and political turmoil