English poet, dramatist, and actor,he is often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. His plays have had an enduring presence on stage and film, and have spawned countless adaptations across multiple genres and cultures.

W. SHAKESPEARE

• 1564: he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, one of eight children.

His father worked as a glove-maker, but he also became an important figure in the town of Stratford and was awarded a coat of arms in 1596. His mother was responsible for his early education which included the Bible as well as fables and fairy tales!

• 1571: at grammar school the demanding curriculum included Latin, both written and spoken (!), and drama.2

W. SHAKESPEAREHe probably left school at fourteen to undertake an apprenticeship which was cut short when he was 18.

• 1582: he married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six and pregnant with theirfirst child.

Their first daughter, Susanna, was born six months after their marriage, and they wouldgo on to have twins Judith and Hamnet a fewyears later. Hamnet died when he was just 11 years old.

1585-1592: these are known as “The Lost Years” since we know nothing about them. 3

W. SHAKESPEARE 1592: his reputation was established in

London by that year.

During this time he wrote his earliest plays, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Titus Andronicus.

1593-94: his first printed works were

two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, who had become his patron.

He also became a founding member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors.

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W. SHAKESPEAREShakespeare was the company's regular dramatist, producing on average two plays a year, for almost twenty years. He remained with the company for the rest of his career, during which time it evolved into The King’s Men underthe patronage of King James I (from 1603).

1597: his success made him considerably wealthy,and he was able to purchase New Place, the largest house in the borough of Stratford- upon-Avon, which gave him and his family an impressive social status.

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W. SHAKESPEARE

1599: he and his business partners built their own theater on the southbank of the Thames River, which they called the Globe Theatre.

1605: he purchased leases of real estate near Stratford which doubled in value. These investments gave him the time to write his plays uninterrupted

1616: Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April at the age of 52. He is buried in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity. 6

THE GLOBE THEATRE Opened in 1599, The Globe became the playhouse where

audiences first saw some of Shakespeare's best-known plays: it was built by the Burbage brothers just south of the Thames with the help of actor-sharers in the Lord Chamberlain’s company like Shakespeare himself.

It was a a multi-sided structure with a central, uncovered yard or “pit” surrounded by three tiers of covered seating and a bare, raised stage at one end of the yard. There were no curtains and props were few in number.

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ACTORS & AUDIENCE Talented though with very little

training, good at dancing, singing and fencing, often required to play more than one part in the same play, Elizabethan actors were the superstars of the age! Women were not allowed to act so young boys played female roles.

The audience of Elizabethan theatre was varied: there were commoners, merchants, aristocracy and nobility, and seating prices varied accordingly. Those with the cheapest tickets simply stood for the length of the plays and were known as groundlings.

In 1613, The Globe burned to the ground when the roof caught fire during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. A new Globe was quickly built on the same site and opened in 1614.8

HIS WORKS Both an actor and a playwright, altogether Shakespeare’s

works include 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a variety of other poems.

No original manuscripts of his plays areknown to exist today. It is actually thanks to a group of actors from his company that we have about half of the plays at all. They collected them for publication after his death.

These writings were brought together in what is known as the First Folio ('Folio’ refers to the size of the paper used)which contained 36 plays, but none of his poetry.

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FROM HIS EARLY PLAYS… His first plays were mostly histories.

❑ Henry VI (Parts I, II and III), Richard II and Henry Vdramatize the destructive results of weak or corruptrulers and have been interpreted by drama historians as his way of justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty.

He also wrote several comedies during his early period.

❑ the whimsical A Midsummer Night's Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice, the witty Much Ado About Nothing and the charming As You Like It and Twelfth Night 10

…TO HIS LATER ONES. It was after 1600 that he wrote the tragedies.

❑ In Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth but also in the earlier Romeo and Juliet his characters present

➢ vivid impressions of human temperament that are timeless and universal;

➢ moral failures which often drive the twists and turns of his plots, destroying the hero and those he loves.

In his final period he wrote several tragicomedies.

❑ Though graver in tone than the comedies Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest all end with reconciliation and forgiveness.

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HIS THEMES Shakespeare’s works proceed through a staggering range

of human emotions and focus on human relationships.

His plays give us the greatest sense of

❑ the value of human life (e.g. Macbeth explores ambition mad enough to kill a father figure who stands in the way);

❑ how people live (e.g. in Hamlet the responsibility of avenging a heinous crime mingles with the difficulty of finding the right course of action);

❑ how people love (e.g. Othello centres on sexual jealousy in marriage);

❑ the importance of human relationships(e.g. King Lear is about aging, generation-al conflict, and feelings of ingratitude). 12

HIS SOURCES…

Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays: he used old stories, as in Hamlet, recent well-known ones, as in Romeo and Juliet, or little-known ones, as in Othello, or remote and legendary history, as in King Lear and Macbeth. Why?

He was probably too busy for prolonged study. He had to read what books he could, when he needed them. His enormous vocabulary could only be derived from a mind of great celerity, responding to the literary as well as the spoken language.

This fact was already apparent in his own time, so…13

… and HIS ORIGINALITY!

… what was original in his dramatic art?

❑ He developed characters from brief suggestions in his source and created entirely new ones.

❑ He rearranged the plot with a view to more-effectivecontrasts of character, climaxes, and conclusions.

❑ He introduced a wider philosophical outlook.

❑ He intensified the dialogue and used a higher level of imaginative writing.

In short he transformed the older work altogether!14

HIS STYLE Shakespeare’s early plays were written in the

conventional style of the day: however, he was very innovative, gradually

adapting the traditional style to his own purposes;

creating a freer flow of words;

using more run-on lines, uneven pauses and stops.

He made extensive use of blank verse, a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, although there are passages in all the plays that deviate from the norm and are composed of other forms of poetry and/or simple prose.

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THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (c. 1596–97)

The Merchant of Venice belongs to a category of plays called problem plays which, despite some very dark moments, end happily for most characters. It uses adouble plot structure to contrast a tale of romantic wooing with one that comes close to tragedy.

Though the title refers to Antonio, a rich merchant ready to puthis whole fortune and himself at risk for his friend Bassanio, the character we end up admiring and cheering is Portia, one of Shakespeare's most intelligent and captivating heroines: disguised as a man, she triumphantly resolves the murky legal affairs of Venice when the men have all failed.

Witty, beautiful, and resourceful, she emerges as the antidote to Shylock’s malice… 16

SHYLOCK, THE JEW Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, is the most

vivid and memorable character in the play andone of Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic creations.

He is the play’s antagonist, a bloodthirsty and cruel perpetrator but at the same time a victim himself. Thus the sympathy of the reader/viewer is uneasily balanced.

As a matter of fact in one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues Shylock argues that Jews are humans and calls his quest for vengeance the product of lessons taught to him by the cruelty of Christian citizens of Venice. We are definitely given food for thought…

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He [Antonio]hath disgraced me….…and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hathnot a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed withthe same food, hurt with the same weapons, subjectto the same diseases, healed by the same means,warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, asa Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poisonus, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we notrevenge? If we are like you in the rest, we willresemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christianwrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be byChristian example? Why, revenge. The villany youteach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but Iwill better the instruction. 18

Shylock’s monologue (Act 3, Sc. 1)

HAMLET (c. 1599–1601)

Hamlet is a revenge tragedy which features

❑ a protagonist charged with the responsibilityof avenging a heinous crime against his family;

❑ a cunning antagonist;

❑ the appearance of the ghost of the murdered person;

❑ the feigning of madness to throw off the villain’s suspicions;

❑ a “play within the play” as a means of testing the villain.

Yet Shakespeare’s protagonist is unique in the genre in his moral qualms, and most of all in his finding a way to carry out his dread command without becoming a cold-blooded murderer. 19

HAMLET, the CHARACTER His utterances are often despondent, relent-

lessly honest, and philosophically profound.

❖He ponders the nature of friendship, memory,romantic attachment, filial love, sensuous enslavement, corrupting habits (drinking, sexual lust), and almost every phase of human experience.

It has often been said that Hamlet suffers from melancholia and that his flaw is his tragic inability to act.

❖A more plausible reading of the play argues that finding the right course of action is highly problematic for him and for everyone. 20

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural

shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the

rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may

come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns

of time,

Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's

contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels

bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after

death,

The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us

all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and

moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action. 21

Hamlet’s monologue (Act 3, Sc. 1)

HIS SONNETS: FORM, THEMES… When Shakespeare experienced a pause in his theatrical

career about 1592–94, the plague having closed down much theatrical activity, he wrote poems: the result was a sonnet sequence of 154 sonnets nearly all of which are written in iambic pentameter, divided into 3 quatrains and a final couplet. The predominant rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.

The sequence tells of strong attachment, of jealousy, of grief at separation, of joy at being together and sharing beautiful experiences, as well as the passing of time and mortality. 22

… & ADDRESSEES. The sonnets are addressed to two people:

a “fair youth”, probably his patron, the 3rd

Earl of Southampton, in the first part of thesequence (1 -126), where the emphasis is on the importance of poetry as a way of eternizing human achievement and of creating a lastingmemory for the poet himself as appropriate to a friendship between a poet of modest social station and a friend who is better-born;

a mysterious “dark lady” (127-154), whose introduction coincides with a narrative of painful and destructive jealousy: the spiritual love of the first part is replaced by physical love.

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A visual & musical presentation

General introduction

Sonnet XVIII is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets, mainly due to the opening line which every romantic knows off by heart!

It is also one of the most straightforward in language and intent: its theme is the loveliness of a friend or lover whose beauty will never be dimmed since poetry has the power to keep him or her alive for ever, defying even death.

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The sonnet set to music

In 2001 David Gilmour, vocalist and guitarist of Pink Floyd, set the sonnet to music: he chose a simple piano arrangement and recorded the song on The Astoria, his century-old houseboat on the River Thames at Hampton which he transformed into a breath-taking recording studio.

The music piece transforms the poem and sheds new light on it: the sheer beauty of the melodygives the sonnet a new life and allows it to live on forever…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Osse7w9fs26

1st stanzaShall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

2nd stanza Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

3rd stanza

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

Final couplet

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

CONTENT The poet starts the praise of his friend or lover without

ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of him or her into that of a perfect being.

In the octave the person is first compared to summer but the vagaries of the English summer weather are called up again and again to underline his/her superiority : life is not an easy passage through Time for most, if not all people. Random events can radically alter who we are, and we are all subject to Time's effects… Not so that special person.

From line 9 the poet ensures that the person’s beauty, metaphorically an eternal summer, will be preserved forever in the poet's immortal lines. 31

LITERARY DEVICES Shakespeare uses the whole range of literary devices

available:

❑ assonances (e.g. rough/buds, shake/May)

❑ repetitions (e.g. fair from fair, summer, sometime)

❑ alliterations (e.g. hot/heaven)

❑ internal rhyme (e.g. sometime/declines)

❑ end rhyme (see the rhyme scheme)

and concludes with those two final lines which are harmony itself, with the 6/4 caesura in line 13 and a 4/6 caesura in line 14, the comma sorting out the syntax and leaving everything in perfect balance!

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A visual presentation

General introduction

Sonnet CXXX is a parody of the conventional love sonnet, made popular by Petrarch and, in England by Spenser and Sidney.

The poet satirises the tradition of comparing one’s beloved to all things beautiful under the sun, and to things divine and immortal as well, deliberately using typical love poetry metaphors against themselves.

He turns the idea of female beauty on its head and offers the reader an alternative view of what it’s like to love a woman despite her shortcomings.

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1st and 2nd stanza

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red, than her lips red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

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3rd stanza & final couplet

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare.

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CONTENT This unique and startlingly honest love poem approaches

traditional themes like love, female beauty and female anatomy in a thoroughly realistic way:

❑ the first quatrain is all about the appearance of the mistress, what she isn't like;

❑ the second quatrain takes the reader a little deeper into the notion that she is not your ideal female model;

❑ the third quatrain introduces the reader to the nitty gritty reality of the mistress's voice and walk;

❑ the final couplet is a full rhyming affirmation of the speaker’s love for his mistress. His brutally candid and unconventional sonnet ends up expressing his total and consuming love for his mistress.

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LITERARY DEVICES Shakespeare ridicules an art form he himself was a

master of so once again he uses the whole range of literary devices available:

❑ assonances (e.g. hairs/her, see/cheeks)

❑ repetitions (e.g. more, red, wires as well as I and my)

❑ alliterations (e.g. roses/red, white/why)

❑ internal rhyme (e.g. my/eyes, why/wires)

❑ end rhyme (see the rhyme scheme)

and in lines 6 & 7 an anastrophe is introduced to upset the normal flow of language and bring attention to the mid-point of the sonnet.

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LEGACY: as a LINGUIST… Shakespeare was astonishingly clever with words and

images, managing to create full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. Thus his works can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England.

He is estimated to have used 20,000 words in his works, four times the average of an educated person of those times. He also introduced at least 1,700 words into the English language such as bedroom, downstairs, gossip, kissing, traditional.

He also coined phrases that we still use today like break the ice, we have seen better days, what’s done is done… 39

… & as a WRITER. Shakespeare occupies a unique position in world

literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare.

Endowed with great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power, he applied his keenness of mind to human beings and their complete range of emotions, fulfilling the prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, who wrote that Shakespeare

“was not of an age, but for all time”40