Hi everyone, it's Lauren and this is the first video in a series that I'm doing
on the plays of William Shakespeare. I'm going to be looking at Shakespeare in
context, Shakespeare in performance and giving some tips and advice on how to
read Shakespeare and also doing some separate videos really analyzing
some of his plays, so if there's any requests that you have, any specific
parts of Shakespeare or certain plays that you want me to focus on, let me know
in the comments below and today's video is just going to be a really brief
really brand-new overview, sort of a Shakespeare 1010 for people who maybe who are
interested in learning a little bit more about Shakespeare but don't really have any
experience or have had really bad experiences in school. Starting from the
very beginning, Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-Upon-Avon which is a
small town in the middle of England. He was married there, he had three children
and then sometime later left them all behind to move down to London to pursue
his career as an actor and playwright. He was part of a group of players called
the Lord Chamberlain's Men and they performed in several different theatres
in London, they also toured the country, until about 15 99 when they opened their
own theater - The Globe, a replica of which is in London which you can go and what
plays in today, and this was an open-air theatre. The stage is covered, so the actors
stay dry but if it rains all of the audience standing in the pit below get
wet
Although Shakespeare's language is very poetic and I do enjoy reading his plays
his plays weren't really written to be read they are written to be performed so
understanding the context in which they performed really helps you understand
what's going on in the plays and Shakespeare's motivation for some of the things
that he's doing. So we can roughly divided Shakespeare's plays into about two
areas, the first area is when he's performing under the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I and plays of this time tend to be historical plays which
are really fashionable and also a lot of comedies are written at this time. It's
important to remember with the history plays in particular that these are not
being written from a position of objectivity because Queen Elizabeth is a
Tudor monarch and she is the current reigning monarch, and there is a lot of
Tudor propaganda which turns up in some of these plays that Shakespeare's writing
particularly Richard III
Quick English history lesson here! Richard III was the king before Elizabeth's
grandfather, Henry VII and he was killed in battle during a time
called the Wars of the Roses and since he was killed and basically usurped
by Henry VII, it was really important for the Tudors to depict
him as a terrible cruel and evil king which he is depicted as in 'Richard III'
The second part of Shakespeare's career takes place under the reign of King
James I who is a Stuart king and his group of players, the Lord
Chamberlain's Men is changed to become the King's Men and they have a much
closer relationship with the monarch and there is a change in the type of plays
that he's producing at this point, they're not so much comedies and really literal
historical tragedies. They're a little bit more complex such as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear
and The Winter's Tale, they are all written in this period. We also notice some
themes which are probably appealing more to King James's taste, who was really
obsessed with magic and witchcraft and those sorts of things appear in Macbeth
and The Tempest. At this point the King's Men are also given a theatre to perform in
during the winter months because you can imagine in The Globe being open air can
only be performed in summer, it would be too cold in the winter otherwise, but
performing plays indoors is actually kind of a new and interesting concept
and allows the players to try out some different techniques with special
effects. It means that they can make the stage dark for the first time, they've
never been able to do that before and the use of candlelight is very interesting
and important and comes back in lots of Jacobean plays. Now we come to the part
which a lot of people seem to struggle with with Shakespeare and that is the
language itself. So firstly you have to remember that these plays were written
400 years ago and language and certain words, certain meanings is very different
to how we speak now. Not only that, you've got to imagine that these players are
performing these words, performing these speeches in front of audiences who don't
have very much set, there's not very much special special effects as we know
them today, people might be standing in the cold for hours on end to see these
plays and the key isn't just a tell a good story is also to capture the imagination
of the audience and also maybe explain stuff that can't be portrayed them
visually. For example with plays like Henry V you can't have a massive
battlefield on the stage, it just isn't possible and they
can't do it justice to the audience so they have to use their words, they
have to use the language to really evoke the atmosphere. So this descriptive
poetry that he uses can get a little bit flowery and to a modern audience seemed to
get a little bit off topic, but you've got to perhaps put yourselves in the shoes of
the audience who are listening to these passages.Shakespeare also uses a lot
of myth, a lot of stories that his audience would have been really familiar with in
the way that these days we might watch a lot of World War II films or read some
books which are fairytale retellings because those stories are sort of in our
collective consciousness and Shakespeare uses stories of recent history such as
the Wars of the Roses which were not really long ago for his audience and he
also uses allusions and comparisons to characters in Greek and Roman mythology
and well-known folktales because these are stories that his audiences would
have been really aware of and it's just a metaphorical way of setting the scene
and explaining and the emotions and motivations of the characters. And this
is why I would really advocate listening to Shakespeare being read aloud, by
someone else or reading and out to yourself or watching an adaptation of
one of his plays either on stage or film. Not only can the language itself be
a little bit tricky at times but also the structure I think people can find
alienating. So Shakespeare uses two different types of structure depending
on who's speaking
and depending on the nature of the speech or the scene. He uses prose for
more colloquial chatter when people are talking to each other, being funny or
when characters are of a lower status and then he uses verse for his epic
grand speeches and often when characters are of noble blood. Now the verses,
although it doesn't often rhyme, it does sometimes, and they are written in
iambic pentameter. Now I'm sure you've heard that phrase before I'm sure it was
banged over your head at school, and it really is very simple, so breaking it
down, a penetameter is basically a set of five pairs of syllables we know that
pent (pentagon) is five, it's five sets of two syllables which means actually the
whole sentence itself is ten syllables but it's more like ONE and TWO and THREE
and FOUR and FIVE
that is a penetameter. Iambic pentameter flips the rhythm of that on
its head a little bit and it means that the stress is always on the second
syllable rather than the first
so rather than ONE andTWO and THREE and FOUR and FIVE
it's more like da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM To BE or NOTto BE that IS the QUEStion
that his iambic pentameter. Simple! Another reason I think it's a really
good idea to watch a production or an adaptation of Shakespeare's plays is the
way that his place have been written down and preserved there aren't a lot of
stage directions in there which can make a reader perhaps imagine the characters
just standing on stage and giving a really long monologue and that there's
not much going on, and you really need a director to bring this stuff to life
When these plays were written, the actors didn't get a whole play as you would
these days, they literally got their parts written down just with the last
line of the person speaking before them so that they knew their cue so that when
they heard that line they knew that that was then their turn to speak
so there wasn't really a play as such which existed in one form for the actors
to work from
so the stage directions and what was going on would have just been happening
while the play was being rehearsed and they haven't all been written down
However there are actually a lot of visual jokes in Shakespeare and gestures
which you can see in people's words they're reacting to, but it's not obvious
that that's what other characters are doing so if you are new to Shakespeare I
think it really helps having someone who deeply understands that text bring it to
life before your eyes and it just helps with the comprehension
for example there's a scene in As You Like It where Rosalind walks on stage
and says 'Well this is the Forest of Arden' and that's just a line when you
read it down because she's saying 'oh we're in the forest', but if you saw her
on stage in a blank and empty wooden state and she goes 'Wwell this is the
Forest of Arden!'
that's actually quite funny (if you're actually a professional actor and not me)
and that's quite a funny visual joke for the audience but it's something that you
wouldn't get on a first read. So I hope that has whetted your appetite somewhat
and given you a little bit of background into who Shakespeare was and
how and why he was writing these plays. Like I said I'm going to be doing some
small videos really focusing on a couple of his plays, perhaps ones that you're
studying at
school maybe Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet and really going through the language
of them, so if there are any that you would really particularly like me to
make a video on please let me know
make sure that your subscribed to get all of the videos in this series and I will
see you next time, bye!