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 whatch

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 plays 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!