Transcript document

William Shakespeare
1564-1616
Stratford-upon-Avon
Will’s
Birthplace
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Anne Hathaway
• Anne was 26 and Will, 18, when they married.
• She was pregnant with their first child,
Susanna.
• Susanna was born in May 1533, six months
after the wedding.
• Twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born two
years later.
• Hamnet died of the black death when he was
eleven.
• Shakespeare’s father, John, was a prominent
glove maker and was once the mayor of
Stratford.
• Traveling acting companies visited Stratford
every year.
• The Shakespeare family must have been
disappointed when Will left his wife and
children to travel to London to become a
shiftless, vagabond actor.
Evidence of Shakespeare in
London
• Will was 28 when Robert Greene
attacked him in a newspaper editorial as
an actor and someone who dared to
write plays.
• Another critic, Henry Chettle, defended
Shakespeare as a good playwright and
an excellent actor.
Most actors were trained from
childhood
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Actors were trained stuntmen
Actors were trained swordsmen
Actors had to be dancers
Actors had to be able to play musical
instruments
• Actors need good voices
• Actors needed to be able to play several roles
in one play
• Actors needed to be able to memorize their
lines in a few days ‘ time.
• Women were not allowed to be actresses.
– All of the characters were played by males.
Female roles were played by boys whose voices
had not yet changed.
• Only the best actors performed in London;
second-rate ones joined traveling acting
companies that traveled to Germany or the
Netherlands.
• Many actors became playwrights.
• A script had to be approved by the
government.
• Queen Elizabeth did not want any unpatriotic
material in a play.
• Shakespeare always wrote as a loyal subject
and a good Englishman.
• In the play Richard II, Shakespeare wrote a
beautiful tribute to England:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered
isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise…
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea…
This blessed plot, this earth, this real, this
England…
This land of such dear souls, this dear,
dear land
• The mayor of London was always
looking for a reason to close the
theatres.
• In 1592 the plague struck London and
the mayor closed the immoral theatres
for two years. Many acting companies
went bankrupt and those that didn’t
performed in the countryside outside of
London.
• While the theatres were closed,
Shakespeare wrote poetry for the Earl
of Southampton.
– He could have become extremely rich from
writing and publishing poetry.
– As soon as the theatres re-opened in 1594,
he joined an acting company called the
Lord Chamberlain’s Men and for the rest of
his career, he wrote plays for this company.
The London literary critics could never move
past their prejudice that Shakespeare
didn’t have a university education, and
therefore, could not be a good writer.
The ordinary people loved Shakespeare’s
work.
• The Lord Chamberlain’s Men:
• Each actor was treated as an equal.
• Will Kempe was the most popular comic actor
of his time.
• Richard Burbage was the idol of the theatre
crowd.
• John Heminges was the business manager.
• Henry Condell was another actor; after
Shakespeare died, Condell and Heminges
published a complete edition of his plays to
keep his memory alive.
• The acting profession had a bad
reputation but most of the men in
Shakespeare’s company were honest
family men and highly respected
citizens.
– Most of them had large families that lived
in London.
• Like all playwrights in Elizabethan times,
Shakespeare took familiar stories and turned
them into plays.
• For example, Romeo and Juliet was inspired
by a popular poem by Arthur Brooke about
two young lovers named Romeus and Juliet.
• Shakespeare added splashes of comedy into
the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, which was a
new convention in drama.
• Shakespeare’s first play was Henry VI,
and it was an instant success.
– It was produced at the Rose Theatre on
March 3, 1592.
– The most expensive item for acting
companies were the costumes.
– There was no scenery so the actor’s lines
had to describe the scene and the
costumes had to give an illusion of far-off
times and distant places.
• Advertisements for plays were done on
printed playbills that could be attached to
posts.
• The acting company flew a silk flag on the top
turret of their play house to announce that a
play would be put on that day.
• Different colored flags indicated what kind of
play it was going to be. A black flag stood for
a tragedy, a red flag meant a history play, and
a white flag indicated a comedy.
• People began to arrive two hours before
the play began (around 2 p.m.)
– Most brought food with them to eat.
– There were no toilet facilities.
• People from all levels of society
attended plays and were seated by how
much they could afford to pay.
– Nobles sat in the highest row of the tiered
seats, and if they paid extra, they could sit
on a cushion.
• Noblewomen often wore masks to disguise
themselves.
– The middle class sat in the lower rows.
– The lower class (groundlings or stinkards)
stood on the floor between the stage and
the tiered seats.
• Elizabethan theatres held about 1,500 people
who were packed together in either seats or
stood, packed together, on the floor around
the stage.
• The Elizabethan audience was restless,
excitable, and opinionated.
– If they disapproved of a play, they threw food at
the actors. Shakespeare always gave his
audiences what they liked--excitement, lots of
deaths, bawdy comedy.
– If the audiences liked a play, the acting company
would repeat it two or three more times a season.
• The Queen never went to the public
theatres.
– Once a year, during the Christmas season,
royal performances of the best plays were
staged in a lighted hall at night.
– These productions for the Queen were
elaborate.
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Scenery was built and painted
Costumes were more elaborate.
Actors had to wear gloves
The opening play was December 26, and the
best one was performed first. The Lord
Chamberlain’s Men usually had the first play.
• Shakespeare made money as a
playwright and an actor.
– Even though London was in an economic
depression, Shakespeare was able to
purchase a coat-of-arms for his father.
– He bought his family the second largest
house in Stratford.
– He also invested his money in a new
business venture and bought a theatre.
• Shakespeare and four other actors in the Chamberlain’s
Men tore down the Rose Theatre and rebuilt it on the
south side of the Thames River.
• The new theatre was called the Globe and it became the
finest theatre in the London area.
• Hamlet was published in 1603, the year that Queen
Elizabeth died.
• King James, Elizabeth’s cousin, shared her love of the
theatre.
• King James formed a company of actors that would be
known as the King’s Men.
• The King’s favorite actor was Lawrence Fletcher, and his
second favorite actor was William Shakespeare.
• Now that the king was sponsoring an acting
company, the Master of Revels did not dare
close the theatres.
• The king began the play performances for the
royal court in November rather than waiting
for December 26.
• The plays that Shakespeare wrote during the
reign of King James were never printed in
pamphlet form since the acting company did
not need to make money from the sale of the
plays.
– Instead, Shakespeare’s plays were bound in
manuscript form and stored by the acting
company.
• Shakepeare wrote one play after he
retired and returned to Stratford.
– This play was Henry VIII
– In the first act of the play, the actors fired a
canon to signal the King’s entrance.
– No one noticed that the firing of the canon
ignited a piece of paper that then blew to
the thatched roof of the theatre and set it
on fire.
– The patrons made it out of the theatre, but
the Globe burned to the ground.
• Shakespeare invested money in building a
new theatre, but he never wrote another play.
• Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, in
Stratford and is buried inside Trinity Church.
• In his will, he left money for his fellow actors,
Heminges, Burbage, and Condell money to
purchase memorial rings to wear in his
memory.
• His plays belonged to the acting company.
• In 1622, Heminges and Condell had
Shakespeare’s plays printed in book form. A
famous writer of the Elizabethan Era, Ben
Jonson, wrote a forward for the book, and put
Shakespeare in the same category as the
ancient Greek writers. He said of
Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for
all time.”
• Thankfully, Shakespeare’s works were
preserved because just nineteen years later,
the Puritans took control of London and
closed all of the theatres.