Shakespeare's times

The Sonnet : The Sonnet

The mirror of lifeThe development of drama : The mirror of lifeThe development of drama Entertainments were usual in medieval towns and villages People were more trained in listening than in reading, to group life than to privacy Playwrights were inspired by: popular sources Folk traditions Older plays Ballads Sermons. From the tradition of Mystery and Morality Plays came the mingling of comedy and tragedy Drama was the main form of Elizabethan art

Slide 3 : INFLUENCES AND SOURCES Humanism: Italian translations and Commedia dell’Arte Niccolò Machiavelli for: Horrors Unnatural crime Vices and corruption The Machiavellic Prince Greek theatre: public, nationalistic theatre Seneca for his: division of the play into five acts tragical and bloody incidents taste for revenge good rhetoric out of conflicting emotions and passions

Playhouses and acting companies : Playhouses and acting companies

Slide 5 : 1576 James Burbage built the first permanent theatre (the Theatre) in Shoreditch, outside the walls of the city. They had no stable home before and they were used to act: - in the halls of noblemen’s houses - in one of the Queen’s palaces - in the Inns of Court - Town Halls - Inn Yards - Everywhere they could erect a stage and attract a crowd

Theatres’ structure and shape : Theatres’ structure and shape They were circular or octagonal Three roofed galleries Yard for poorer standing spectators Apron Stage Shadow or roof Tiring house, at the rear of the stage, for the actors to change their attire Inner stage concealed by a curtain. For discoveries and concealments Upper stage, hidden by a curtain. Usually for musicians The Swan by De Witt, 1596

Theatres’ structure and shape : Theatres’ structure and shape They were circular or octagonal Three roofed galleries Yard for poorer standing spectators (‘groundlings’) Apron Stage Shadow or roof Tiring house, at the rear of the stage, for the actors to change their attire Inner stage concealed by a curtain. For discoveries and concealments Upper stage, hidden by a curtain. Usually for musicians The Globe now Prestigious seats

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Slide 10 : The theatre Inner and Apron Stages Heavens

Slide 11 : Open-air Playhouses in Shoreditch: The Theatre, The Curtain, The Fortune, The Boar’s Head, The Red Bull Open-air Playhouses in Southwark: The Rose, The Swan, The Globe, Newington Butts, The Hope Hall Playhouses: The Blackfriars, The Salisbury Court, The Cockpit, Paul’s

Slide 12 : No scenery the exact locality of the scene was unimportant. When necessary it was shown in the dialogue. A simple property or garment was enough: chairs for indoors; riding boots for a messenger; a king in armour for a battle field; a lantern to indicate it was night Plays were acted in the daylight no lightning, sound effects or any realistic effect direct appeal to the emotions and imagination of the spectators 3. Common experience actors/audience. No curtain to divide and the apron came forward into the yard. Soliloquy was so no artificial - as it is now - but a normal way for communicating thoughts and intentions. No need for the actor to shout, the greatest subtlety of voice, gestures and expression was possible 4. The Action was continuous with no long breaks

William Shakespeare1564 - 1616 : William Shakespeare1564 - 1616 Born in Stratford upon Avon in April 1564, 23 or 26 The eldest of 8 children His father had some financial problems His mother Mary Arden came from a higher social level than his father He attended the local grammar school When 18 he married Anne Hathaway, 26, pregnant 1584 he left for London under a charge of deer-poaching maybe Probably an actor in the beginning 1593 London theatres close for the plague Private patron Earl of Southampton Sonnets

William Shakespeare1564 - 1616 : William Shakespeare1564 - 1616 When the theatres reopen, he became a shareholder and main playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the most successful company of actors in London 1599 Globe Theatre In the end he retired in Stratford where he died at the age of 52 Seven years after his death the First Folio containing 36 of his plays was published

Slide 15 : YEAR HISTOR.DRAMAS COMEDIES TRAGEDIES 1592 Henry VI The Comedy of Errors The two gentlemen of Verona 1593 Richard III Love’s Labour’s Lost Titus Andronicus 1593/94 The Taming of the Shrew 1594 King John 1595 Richard II A Midsummer night’s Romeo and Juliet dream 1596 The Merchant of Venice 1597 Henry IV 1598 Much Ado about Nothing 1599 Julius Caesar As you like it Henry V The Merry Wives of Windsor 1601 Twelfth Night Hamlet 1602 Troilus and Cressida All’s Well that Ends Well 1604 Measure for Measure Othello 1605 King Lear 1606 Macbeth Anthony and Cleopatra 1607 Timon of Athens

Slide 16 : YEAR HISTOR.DRAMAS COMEDIES TRAGEDIES 1608 Pericles 1609 1610 Coriolanus 1611 Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest 1613 Henry VIII

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 Sources Four versions: two in-quartos (1603-1605), one in-folio (1623) and a German version in 1710 The current version comes from the in-folio with some integrations fro the in-quartos Hamlet’s history is told in Saxo Grammaticus’ Historia Danica (1200) where we can find Hamlet’s melancholy and in Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques where other features then used by Shakespeare can be found Pre-Shakespearian Hamlet: Ur-Hamlet, which was played in London in 1589, probably by Thomas Kyd Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 Themes Claudius: Machiavellic prince Delay Hamlet’s melancholy Three sons: Hamlet Laertes Fortinbras three different reactions to revenge their fathers’ deaths The play within the play Real and pretended madness Monologues Cruelty Two women: Gertrude and Ophelia

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’ ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away’ ‘The rest is silence’

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 Critical interpretations Goethe: Hamlet is pure and noble but unable to fulfil his task Schlegel and Coleridge: Hamlet is the tragedy of a weak will, his eternal thinking kills the action

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 The Canonization For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsy, or my gout, My five grey hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout, With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his Honour, or his Grace, Or the King's real, or his stamped face Contemplate, what you will, approve, So you will let me love. Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd? Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill Add one more to the plaguy bill? Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still Litigious men, which quarrels move, Though she and I do love. Call us what you will, we are made such by love; Call her one, me another fly, We are tapers too, and at our own cost die, And we in us find th' eagle and the dove. The phoenix riddle hath more wit By us; we two being one, are it. So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, And by these hymns all shall approve Us canoniz'd for love; And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love Made one another's hermitage; You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes (So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize) Countries, towns, courts: beg from above A pattern of your love!" -- John Donne

Hamlet 1601 : Hamlet 1601 ART OF EUROPE John Donne - The Good Morrow I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den? 'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee. And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown; Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest, Where can we find two better hemispheres Without sharp north, without declining west? Whatever dies was not mixed equally; If our two loves be one, or thou and I Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.