Introduction to Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare Today• West Side Story

• Romeo and Juliet

• Ten Things I Hate About You • The Taming of the Shrew

• The Lion King • Hamlet

Shakespeare – who was he?

• Born around 1564 and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon.

• Married Anne Hathaway in 1582• Moved to London in 1591 to become an actor• Returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1610• Died on 23 April, 1616, 52 years old

The Globe• An open-air theatre built in 1599

• The stage was simply a large platform.

• An interactive stage

• Little or no scenery

• Burnt down due to a canon misfire in 1613

• Rebuild in 1997, 230m from the original site

His works• In just 23 years, he had written

36 plays and over 150 sonnets –

using nothing but a feather quill…

• Written in Early Modern English (1500 AD-)

• Tragedies: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello…

• History plays: Henry V, Richard II, King John…

• Comedies: The Taming of a Shrew, A Midsummer

Night´s dream, Much Ado About Nothing

His works• Frequent use of metaphors, similes and symbols

- TIME FOR AN EXERCISE…

Metaphor 1: 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. (From Hamlet)

Metaphor 2: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. (From AsYou Like It)

Influence on the English language• Introduced almost 3000 words and idioms to the English

language – Accommodation, excellent, eyeball, fashionable, elbow,

majestic, lonely, hurry– ’Vanish into thin air’, 'All of a sudden‘, ‘Break the ice’, ‘Green-

eyed monster’, ‘I have not slept one wink’, ‘Love is blind’ , ‘Lie low’, ’In a pickle’

• Horrible Histories time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8zdBxlNj0A

Shakespeare´s works…

…or?

Anti-Stratfordians• Questions the authorship of the works

• Where are the original manuscripts?

• An illiterate without the necessary knowledge shown in

the works

• Only someone with an

upper class culture and

upbringing could have written

the works.

Major candidates for authorship

Sir Francis BaconPlaywritght/ Poet Christopher Marlowe

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

Even Queen Elizabeth I herself…

Stratfordians – for Shakespeare

• More is known about Shakespeare than

about most other playwrights of the period,

such as Dante and Cervantes

• The lives of commoners were not as well documented in

Elizabethan England as those of the upper class

• Shakespeare was raised in the West Midlands, and some

say that he wrote in that dialect. The Earl of Oxford,

Edward de Vere, was an East Midlander

• Similar to Mozart, Shakespeare was a savant

Is he or is he not…that is the question.

What do YOU think?

Thank you for listening!