Hello, I'm Ella and I'm here today to give you a very brief introduction to
Shakespeare. Maybe you fancied reading Shakespeare
for a long time? Maybe you studied him at school and you really fancy having
another go or perhaps you're already into
Shakespeare and you'd like to have more of an overview of all of the plays?
Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays when he was alive four hundred years ago. He
wrote 37 in total - that we know about at least - and some of these plays are really
popular still today many of them are performed very regularly; people study
them and people also quote him a lot too. So, here are a few of the ones that I
feel really drawn to and I'll tell you a little bit about what the plays are
about and what I find exciting about them and maybe that'll help you to see
which ones you fancy starting first. So, this is Hamlet which is a play that
you've probably heard of and if not you probably know some of the quotes from it.
We have "to be or not to be", "what a rogue and peasant slave am I?"... a few different
quotes that are very popular still. Hamlet is a tragedy which kind of means
that everybody dies at the end. Shortly before the play begins, Hamlet's father
has died and Hamlet's mother, who is the Queen, has remarried her husband's
brother so Hamlet's uncle. So we have this situation where the court is kind
of in a state of grief but also it's celebrating a wedding which happened
very soon after a funeral so it's all a little bit strange. At the beginning
of the play, Hamlet's father who is also called Hamlet - just to be confusing -
comes to Hamlet as a ghost and he tells him that he was murdered and he was
murdered by his brother and that Hamlet has to enact revenge on his behalf and
so the rest of the play is Hamlet trying to come to terms with with his
father's death and what's happened but also trying to get his uncle to admit
what he's done and to get his mother to see what her new husband has done to her
previous husband. Yeah, as I said in the end everybody dies. A Midsummer Night's
Dream is the next one on my list. This is a much happier play it's a
comedy which as well as having various things to do with genre and structure
it's a happier play it's it's funny not all the way through there are some more
kind of serious parts but overall it's a really nice play. It begins in the court
of Athens where we see an arranged marriage taking place or the
arrangements for this marriage but the lovers aren't in love with the right
people. So they run away into the forest and while things will go a little
bit haywire; there's fairies who are enacting their own kind of mischief and
on the order of his master, Puck, who is a fairy, gives some of the lovers a love
potion and that makes them even more complicated in terms of the love
triangle so everyone's in love with the wrong person and then on top of that we
have this group of... they're kind of workmen, who are amateur performers
in this instance. They really, really want to put on a play; they're trying really
hard they don't quite understand how playing works
they haven't seen many by the look of it but they're taking it really seriously
and when it all comes together at the end when people get married we have the
fairy land or figures itself out the real world kind of figures itself out
and we have this group of amateur performers putting on this hilarious
failure of a play and it's really worth a read and a watch. There's Midsummer
Night's Dream. Give that one a go! Romeo and Juliet is another play that you've
almost definitely heard about and may well have studied at school. It's a very
famous romance: it's another tragedy; everybody dies. The
the idea behind Romeo and Juliet is there are two young people - Romeo and Juliet -
and that they fall in love but they're from different families who have been at
war with each other for a long time and so they can never really be together and
the play we see the meet, we see them fall in love, knowing the whole time that
they're from different families and it will just won't work. Very emotional, you
may well cry. Romeo and Juliet. Julius Caesar is another very popular play
slightly different one this one. We're set in Ancient Rome this time. So, we have
Julius Caesar who is a major figure in Ancient Rome and the play is about the
assassination of Caesar and what happened afterwards and what happens in
the run-up to this assassination. So, what's really interesting about this
play; it's called Julius Caesar but who you
would think to be kind of the main character - Julius Caesar - is killed off
around halfway through and so he is not present for the second half of the play
at all which might be a bit confusing but like I said what's interesting about
the play is that it actually plays around with the kind of morals around
what's happened and why it happened and what happens as a result of the
assassination. So, there's a group of conspirators who are the other powerful
people in Rome and they come together and they feel that Caesar is getting too
powerful and it would be best for the nation if he was removed and so his
former friends and colleagues decide that the best thing to do for the people
would be to assassinate Caesar but then what we see after the assassination is
we see this group of people trying to come to terms with what they've done and
also you know Rome kind of begins to fall apart
and democracy falls apart as well. So, finally, here is Henry V. This is the
last one I'm gonna talk about today. Henry V is a history play which
means that Shakespeare actually tells a historical story. He adapts stories that
existed at the time and he tells us about familiar historical figures and
this play is about King Henry V... which makes a lot of sense by the
title. It's actually the third play in a trilogy and we actually see King
Henry when he's a prince before he becomes king and that's in play is
called Henry the fourth part one and Henry the fourth part two and that's the
story of Prince Henry or Prince Howe as we know him add up with coming of age
becoming an adult and really learning how to rule. Then in Henry V
we see him at his prime, we see him during the war between England and France and
we see him winning the Battle of Agincourt. We see battle scenes we see
some really intimate court scenes as well and at the end we see him fall in
love with his then wife so it's a really good play. It's a really solid play that
one definitely worth a read.
What I love most about Shakespeare I think is the
stories themselves. It's the way that when I think about
Shakespeare play I get a really strong impression of what it's about and the
story itself and the characters that are part of that story and I think something
that always amazes me is how current all of these stories still feel and how
relatable the characters still are even though they were written so long ago and
I think that's what really appeals to a lot of people and it's also why
Shakespeare is still so popular today. If you go into the theater there is very
very often a Shakespeare play or several being staged and it's because there are
so many recognizable problems being looked at in the plays and that's partly
why we still read them and why we still study them today and why we can still
get benefit from them. Shakespeare really does different things for different
people: if you fancy one of the the plays I've told you about today then try
reading it and if you enjoy that try reading another one you could follow
similar genres so if you enjoy Hamlet; you could try King Lear, which is another
one of Shakespeare's epic tragedies that are for many people his best play. If you
enjoy reading A Midsummer Night's Dream you can try Twelfth Night which is another
kind of love triangle comedy and with shipwrecks and all kinds of things and
if you enjoy Henry V, try Richard the third or one of Shakespeare's other
history plays because he's written lots of those as well. So there are so many options
have a look at some of the blurbs of the plays online. If you see a film, try
watching that and see if you enjoyed the story and the language as well and if
you see it advertised as well go and see it live because one of my favorite
things to do is to see Shakespeare live. So, thank you very much for watching. If
you've got a favorite play, post it in the comments below, it'd be great to hear
what you think. Happy reading! Thank you very much, bye.