Understanding Shakespeare

1. Understanding Shakespeare Who Was Shakespeare? & Why are His Works Significant?

2. The World in which Shakespeare Was Born • Before you really study Shakespeare’s life and plays, you need to understand the context of the historical time period in which he lived. • Like in many societies, the culture in which Shakespeare’s art thrived was vastly affected by political, social, religious, and economical attitudes, laws, and events. • As with all art, Shakespeare’s art was a direct reflection of life as he knew it.

3. British History Sets the Stage • The early 1500’s were incredibly tumultuous times in European history. • Religious, political, and social norms were evolving • The Renaissance was at its height Well known portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Younger c. 1940

4. Henry VIII • In 1509, Britain's Henry VIII became King. This was due to his older brother Arthur dying suddenly. • Arthur had been married to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain’s (of Columbus fame) daughter, Catherine of Aragon • In order to keep the established truce between England and Spain, the Pope allowed for Henry to marry his brother’s widow, Catherine. • At 17 years old, Catherine and Henry were crowned King and Queen at Westminster Abbey in June 1509. They had only been married 13 days. • Catherine continued to fail to produce a male heir to the throne. Notorious for having mistresses, Henry desired an annulment from Catherine in order to marry her lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. Catherine of Aragon

5. The Division of Church & State • Henry VIII separated from the Catholic Church, in order to have the royal marriage annulled. Catherine was banished from all royal treatment and homes, and Anne Boleyn moved in. • Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen Consort on June 1, 1533. Her daughter Elizabeth I was born September 7, 1533. • Catherine’s daughter, Mary I, was then declared an illegitimate child of Henry VIII • In the midst of this scandal, Britain would then become a part of the great Protestant Reformation, in which citizens no longer had to be Catholic, or answer ultimately to the Pope • The Church no longer “ruled over the King”

6. More Turmoil • After a few more wives, Henry VII passed away • The issue of who would be the Sovereign loomed • Henry had eventually had a son with 3rd wife, Jane Seymour, who Henry would declare was his only “true wife, as she bore me a son.” Their son, Edward VI would become King in 1547, at age 6, and officially crowned at age 10. • Henry would have had 3 more wives before his death • Edward died at age 15, and Henry VIII’s legitimate next heir, his grandniece, Lady Jane Grey became Queen. • Lady Jane would be executed for being staunchly Protestant by the first child of Henry VIII, Mary…also known as Bloody Mary…and Catholicism became the religion of England again. From top, clockwise: Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, and Mary I

7. The Elizabethan Age • Mary died at age 42 on November 17, 1558. • Her half sister, Elizabeth I (daughter of Anne Boleyn), would succeed her on the throne. • Mary had been popular early in her reign, as a reaction to her mistreatment as a child, but public support had turned on her by her death, due to her policies and marriage to Phillip of Spain. • Elizabeth would not renew relations with the Catholic Church, although having been brought up so, but was determined to establish a church suited to the needs of the English people-the Anglican Church.

8. Influence on Art and Culture • Queen Elizabeth I loved theatre, art, and culture—being a Renaissance child. • She was the biggest supporter of Shakespeare and the London theatre world • However, because of turmoil of her ancestry and the last 80 years, in 1588, she decreed that no art, theatre, or literature was to have overtly religious or political themes, on penalty of imprisonment and possible death for treason. • It is in that world that Shakespeare was to create!

9. Shakespeare’s Life • Shakespeare is renowned as the English playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in history of English literature. • Surprisingly for the world's greatest playwright, we actually know very little about Shakespeare's life. • What few details we have come from church records, land titles and the written opinions of others. • Very little is known about young Shakespeare.

10. We know that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564 & it is assumed that he was born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. We also know that in 1582 at age 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, an older women who was 26 at the time. The couple had three children, who lived beyond infancy Oldest – Susanna Twins – Judith & Hamnet Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent, not in Stratford, but in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright, but as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Sometime between 1610 and 1613, Shakespeare is thought to have retired from the stage and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616.  Only two images of Shakespeare are considered reliable likenesses: the Martin Droeshout engraving in the 1623 First Folio, and Shakespeare’s memorial bust at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The Life of Shakespeare:An Overview of What is Known

11. Martin Droeshout’s engraving in the 1623 First Folio, one of two “authentic” pictures of Shakespeare • Droeshout was a popular Flemish artist at the time • Most critics and contemporaries of Shakespeare have written that this picture is actually NOT historically accurate. • The body is disproportionate to the head and the cuff around the neck is different and larger than cuffs worn in the early 1600’s (when this engraving would have been created)

12. Shakespeare’s memorial bust at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford is the other “authentic” depiction of the Bard The only evidence that Shakespeare was publicly recognized during his life as a playwright in Stratford-upon-Avon is the newer monument overlooking his grave in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church. It is a bust depicting the Bard composing his works.  The present bust shows Shakespeare as a writer with a quill and parchment.  To the modern visitor it appears that Shakespeare was recognized as a playwright in Stratford at the time of his death.  However, the church records reveal that this particular bust was not erected until 1748.  It was commissioned by a theatrical manager named John Hall who wished to promote the tourist industry in the town.  • Above: Illustration of Shakespeare’soriginal tomb memorial from William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshirepublished  in 1665. • There is no quill or parchment; instead Shakespeare is shown with his hands on a sack.  It seems he was being depicted as a dealer in bagged commodities.  This is exactly how the records of Stratford-upon-Avon reveal that William Shakespeare made a living – as a grain merchant.   He buys sizable tracts of land, he holds large stocks of grain, and he takes action to recover debts owned for the supply of malt. 

13. Stratford Beginnings – The Early Years • Surprisingly for the world's greatest playwright, we actually know very little about Shakespeare's life. • What few details we have come from church records, land titles and the written opinions of others. Very little is known about young Shakespeare. • These are also known as the “Lost Years”

14. School Days As in other schools of the time, students began their studies at the age of four or five in the attached "petty school," and there learned to read and write in English, studying primarily the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. After 2 years in the petty school, students entered the lower grammar school, where they began the serious study of Latin grammar and Latin texts. Several Latin texts that Shakespeare used repeatedly in writing his plays and poems were texts that schoolboys memorized and recited. Latin comedies were introduced early in the lower form; in the upper form, which the boys entered at age ten or eleven, students wrote their own Latin orations and declamations, studied Latin historians and rhetoricians, and began the study of Greek using the Greek New Testament. Family Life We lack generally accepted documentation about Shakespeare's life after his schooling ended and his professional life in London began. His marriage in 1582 (at age eighteen) to Anne Hathaway and the subsequent births of his daughter Susanna (1583) and the twins Judith and Hamnet (1585) are recorded, but how he supported himself and where he lived are not known. No one knows when and why he left Stratford for the London theatrical world, nor how he rose to be the important figure in that world that he had become by the early 1590s. Early History

15. Success in London (late 1500’s) • By 1592 Shakespeare had achieved some prominence in London as both an actor and a playwright. • In that year, (1592), was published a book by the playwright Robert Greene attacking an actor who had the audacity to write blank-verse drama and who was “in his own conceit [opinion] the only Shake-scene in a country.” • Since Greene's attack includes a parody of a line from one of Shakespeare's early plays, there is little doubt that it is Shakespeare to whom he refers, a “Shake-scene” who had aroused Greene's fury by successfully competing with university-educated dramatists like Greene himself.

18. Narrative Poems It was in 1593 that Shakespeare became a published poet. In that year he published his long narrative poem “Venus and Adonis” In 1594, he followed it with “The Rape of Lucrece.” Both poems were dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, who may have become Shakespeare's patron. It seems no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote these narrative poems at a time when the theaters were closed because of the plague, a contagious epidemic disease that devastated the population of London. Theatrical Career Shakespeare left Stratford for London to make his fortune roughly fours years later. Shakespeare headed to London sometime in 1586, there already was an established community of playwrights. By 1595, Shakespeare was successful enough to be named as one of the more senior members of the Lord Chamberlain's men, an acting company that performed frequently before court. This was no small honor; this prominent theatre company later became the royal company called the King's Men, making Shakespeare an official playwright to the King of England. By 1596, Shakespeare was so successful as a playwright that his family was finally granted a Coat of Arms which amongst other things allowed Shakespeare to call himself a "gentleman". As far as historians can tell, that career spanned about twenty years. In the 1590s, he wrote his plays on English history as well as several comedies and at least two tragedies (Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet).

19. The Globe Years In 1599, Shakespeare's company built a theater for themselves across the river from London, naming it The Globe. The plays that are considered by many to be Shakespeare's major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth) were written while the company was resident in this theater, as were such comedies as Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure. Many of Shakespeare's plays were performed at court—both for Queen Elizabeth I and, after her death in 1603, for King James I—some were presented at the Inns of Court (the residences of London's legal societies), and some were doubtless performed in other towns, at the universities, and at great houses when the King's Men went on tour. Otherwise, his plays from 1599 to 1608 were, so far as we know, performed only at the Globe. Between 1608 and 1612, Shakespeare wrote several plays—among them The Winter's Tale and The Tempest—presumably for the company's new indoor Blackfriars Theatre, though the plays were performed also at The Globe and at court. Shakespeare wrote very little after 1612, the year in which he probably wrote King Henry VIII. It was at a performance of Henry VIII in 1613 that the Globe caught fire and burned to the ground

20. The Final Years • Sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare returned to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he owned a large house and considerable property. • His wife and his two daughters and their husbands lived there as well. (His son Hamnet had died in 1596.) • During his professional years in London, Shakespeare had derived income from the acting company's profits as well as from his own career as an actor, from the sale of his play manuscripts to the acting company, and, after 1599, from his shares as an owner of the Globe. • It was presumably that income, carefully invested in land and other property, which made him the wealthy man that surviving documents show him to have become.  • It is also assumed that William Shakespeare's growing wealth and reputation played some part towards inclining the crown, in 1596, to grant John Shakespeare, William's father, the coat of arms that he had so long sought. • William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616 (according to the epitaph carved under his bust in Holy Trinity Church) and was buried on April 25. Seven years after his death, his collected plays were published as Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the work now known as the First Folio.

21. An Expansive Age • The years in which Shakespeare wrote were among the most exciting in English history. • Intellectually, the discovery, translation, and printing of Greek and Roman classics were making available a set of works and worldviews that interacted complexly with Christian texts and beliefs. • The result was a questioning that provided energy for the period's amazing dramatic and literary output and that fed directly into Shakespeare's plays. The Ghost in Hamlet, for example, is wonderfully complicated in part because he is a figure from Roman tragedy—the spirit of the dead returning to seek revenge—who at the same time inhabits a Christian hell (or purgatory). • Hamlet's description of humankind reflects at one moment the Neoplatonic wonderment at mankind ("What a piece of work is a man!") and, at the next, the Christian disparagement of human sinners ("And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?").

22. Exploration and Discovery As intellectual horizons expanded, so also did geographical and cosmological horizons. New worlds—both North and South America—were explored, and in them were found human beings who lived and worshiped in ways radically different from those of Renaissance Europeans and Englishmen. The universe during these years also seemed to shift and expand. Copernicus had earlier theorized that the earth was not the center of the cosmos but revolved as a planet around the sun. Galileo's telescope, created in 1609, allowed scientists to see that Copernicus had been correct; the universe was not organized with the earth at the center, nor was it so nicely circumscribed as people had, until that time, thought. In terms of expanding horizons, the impact of these discoveries on people's beliefs—religious, scientific, and philosophical—cannot be overstated. London and Stratford London rapidly expanded and changed during the years (from the early 1590s to around 1610) that Shakespeare lived there. London—the center of England's government, its economy, its royal court, its overseas trade—was, during these years, becoming an exciting metropolis, drawing to it thousands of new citizens every year. Troubled by overcrowding, by poverty, by recurring epidemics of the plague, London was also a mecca for the wealthy and the aristocratic, and for those who sought advancement at court, or power in government or finance or trade. Heard in Shakespeare’s plays are the voices of London—the struggles for power, the fear of venereal disease, the language of buying and selling. One hears as well the voices of Stratford-upon-Avon—references to the nearby Forest of Arden, to sheep herding, to small-town gossip, to village fairs and markets. Part of the richness of Shakespeare's work is the influence felt there of the various worlds in which he lived: the world of metropolitan London, the world of small-town and rural England, the world of the theater, and the worlds of craftsmen and shepherds.

23. The “Story” of ShakespeareOr What We Know or Can Suppose • That Shakespeare inhabited the worlds of London and Stratford we know from surviving documents, as well as from the evidence of the plays and poems themselves. • From such records we can sketch the dramatist's life. • We know from his works that he was a voracious reader. • We know from legal and business documents that he was a multifaceted theater man who became a wealthy landowner. • We know a bit about his family life and a fair amount about his legal and financial dealings. • Most scholars today depend upon such evidence as they draw their picture of the world's greatest playwright.

24. Until the late eighteenth century, the William Shakespeare who lived in most biographies was the creation of legend and tradition. Stories included that Shakespeare reportedly could barely read but whose natural gifts were extraordinary, whose father was a butcher who allowed his gifted son sometimes to help in the butcher shop, where William supposedly killed calves "in a high style," making a speech for the occasion.  Another story was that Shakespeare’s Falstaff (in Henry IV, Parts I and 2) so pleased Queen Elizabeth I that she demanded a play about Falstaff in love, and demanded that it be written in fourteen days (hence, supposedly, the existence of The Merry Wives of Windsor). It was this legendary Shakespeare who reached the top of his acting career in the roles of the Ghost in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It—and who died of a fever contracted by drinking too hard at "a merry meeting" with the poets Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. This legendary Shakespeare is a rambunctious, undisciplined man, as attractively “wild" as his plays were seen by earlier generations to be. Unfortunately, there is no trace of evidence to support these wonderful stories. Early Traditions Concerning Shakespeare’s “Story” A statue of the character Falstaff at Stratford-upon-Avon

25. The Question of Authorship • Some people since the mid-19th century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. • These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them: • Queen Elizabeth I, • Sir Francis Bacon, • Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and • Christopher Marlowe. • Because these people are held in such high regard in history is a testament to how high in regard people hold Shakespeare’s plays. • However, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of William Shakespeare's life tie him undeniably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. • How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world almost four hundred years after his death is one of life's mysteries—and one that will continue to spark our imaginations as we continue to delight in his plays and poems.

26. Frequently Asked Shakespeare Questions What did Shakespeare’s son die of? We don't really know how Shakespeare's young son Hamnet died. He had a twin sister named Judith, who lived to adulthood and married, but Hamnet died at the age of eleven and a half. • Child mortality was high in the sixteenth century; there were no antibiotics and many childhood diseases might therefore prove fatal, such as scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, and even measles. • He was buried on August 11, 1596.  What is the inscription on Shakespeare’s grave? GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:BLESTE BE Ye MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES,AND CURST BE HE Yt MOVES MY BONES.

27. More Questions… How many words did Shakespeare write? According to a Shakespearean Concordance by Marvin Spevack, Shakespeare’s complete works consist of 884,647 words and 118,406 lines. How many plays did Shakespeare write? • Thirty-eight (38) is the generally accepted number, though recent claims have been made for • King Edward III and • some scholars would include part of Sir Thomas More. • Another play, Cardenio, did not survive. Counting this play, the known total is thirty-nine (39). What is Shakespeare’s earliest play? His earliest play is probably one of the three parts of King Henry VI, written between 1589–1591. What is Shakespeare’s last play? His last play is probably The Two Noble Kinsmen (about 1613), which Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher. What is Shakespeare’s longest play? Hamlet, with 4,042 lines. What is Shakespeare’s shortest play? The Comedy of Errors, with 1,787 lines.

28. How many new words did Shakespeare coin (create)? • The Oxford English Dictionary attributes all of the bold-faced words below  (and some 500 more) to Shakespeare. • “From the spectacledpedant to the schoolboy, all gentlefolk recognize Shakespeare as a fathomlessfount of coinages. The honey-tongued Bard had no rival, nor could he sate his never-endingaddiction to madcap, flowery (or foul-mouthed!) neologisms. Even time-honoredexposure cannot besmirch our amazement at the countless and useful words that lend radiance to our lackluster lives. All in a day’s work!”

29. What were the different ticket costs to go to a play in Shakespeare’s time? • Prices of admission depended on the kind of theater. Outdoor theaters like the Globe charged—in the early days—one penny ($1.66) to get in and another penny if you wanted to sit in the balconies. (A penny equals about $1.66 by today’s standards. Other equivalents are also in current US dollars.) • By the early seventeenth century, they probably charged a flat sixpence (about $10) to get in. Admission to the private indoor theaters, which catered to a more affluent audience, generally began at a basic sixpence to gain entry to the galleries. • Fancy gallants who wanted to be seen, however, could sit on the stage for two shillings ($40), and a box could be had for half-a-crown ($50). How did men cover up their beards if they played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s theater? • Usually boys played women's parts on stage, so there was no problem about beards.  In fact, Hamlet jokes with one of the actors who visit the court in Denmark: "Why, thy face is valanced since I saw thee last," meaning that the boy has reached puberty and started to grow a beard.  Since his voice would change about the same time (Hamlet says, "Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring."), that would signal the end of female roles for him.  Older men probably played female roles from time-to-time, such as comic figures like Juliet's Nurse.  In that case, they would probably shave off any beard.