WILLIAM

SHAKESPEARE
• Shakespeare has two sides to him: one is the historical side, where he’s one of a group of
dramatists working in Elizabethan London and writing plays for an audience living in that
London at that time; the other is the poet who speaks to us today with so powerfully
contemporary a voice. (Frye, 1)
• If we study only the historical, or 1564-1616, Shakespeare, we take away all his
relevance to our own time and avoid trying to look into the greatest mystery of literature:
how someone can communicate with times and spaces and cultures so far removed
from his [or her] own (Ibid, 1).
• If we think only of Shakespeare as our contemporary, we lose one of the greatest
rewards of a liberal education, which is studying the assumptions and values of
societies quite different from ours, and seeing what they did with them. [i.e. The
Merchant of Venice]
• We have to keep the historical Shakespeare always present in our minds, to prevent us
from trying to kidnap him into our own cultural orbit, which is different from but
quite as narrow as that of Shakespeare’s first audiences (Ibid, 1).
• One of the first points to get clear about Shakespeare is that he didn’t use the drama
for anything: he entered into its conditions as they were then, and accepted them
totally [think of his poetry] (Ibid, 2).
• We have no notion what his religious or political views were, if any: his plays merely
present aspects of social life that would have been intelligible to his audience and
would have spoken to the assumptions they brought into the theatre with them (Ibid, 2).
• he had the best education anyone in his job could possibly have, acquired at the best
possible place, namely the theatre (Ibid, 3).
• The female parts […] were taken by boys.
• “Shakespeare’s audience lived in what was in many respects a more intellectually tidied-
up world than ours. Practically nobody believed that the earth was a planet revolving
around the sun: the earth was the centre of the whole cosmos, and nature was
intimately related to man” (Ibid, 3).
• Human health depended on “temperament” or “complexion”, the proportions in the
body of the four humours: blood, phlegm, bile and black bile (Ibid, 9).
• Shakespeare’s audience, first seeing Hamlet in his black clothes at a court reception,
would know that he suffered from an excess of melancholy or black bile (Ibid, 9).
• Melancholy was a physical disease as well as an emotional and mental one, and they
would also realize that when Hamlet assumes madness when already melancholy he’s
going to find it hard to know every time where the boundary is (Ibid, 9).
• The four humours were the product in the organic world of the four possible
combinations of four “principles”: hot, cold, moist, dry.
• In the inorganic world these four combinations produced the four elements [the quarrel
among the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream produced bad weather; fairies were
spirits of the elements].
• The general moral outlook of the audience would be Christian in origin(Ibid, 9).
• Highbrow critics [humanists, students of the Classics] models were to be found in Greek
or Latin literature. The “rules” derived from Classical drama prescribed a unity of action
which included a unity of setting [not switching from, say, Rome to Alexandria and back
again, as in Antony and Cleopatra]; a unity of time, not exceeding twenty-four hours
(not a chorus character coming in in the fourth act to tell you that sixteen years have gone
by, as in The Winter’s Tale); and a unity of social class. Kings and other upper-class
people belonged in tragedies, and it was a violation of decorum to introduce clowns
and fools and the like into tragedy.
• The great tragic roles were mostly taken by the actor Richard Burbage.
• There is no clinching proof [that Shakespeare has] written anything before his late
twenties or after his mid-forties.
• Shakespeare left it to two friends in his company, Heming and Condell, to gather up his
collected plays and publish them in the First Folio of 1623, 7 years after his death.
• Some plays were published during Shakespeare’s lifetime as Quartos (sheets folded
in four instead of in two like a folio). [the quality is sometimes poor: an actor’s copy, or
from memory of someone associated with the play; plays had short runs and were seldom
revived] (Ibid, 12).
• The important point is that Shakespeare himself didn’t publish these Quartos, good or
bad [no proof of his supervision].
• Shakespeare born in 1564 at Stratford
• Education at Stratford school based on Latin grammar, rhetoric and composition.
• Strolling players visited Stratford, and at Coventry he could see Mistery plays celebrated
on the Corpus Christi.
• Left school at 15, and at 18 married Anne Hathaway.
• Early marriage and obscurity.
• 1583: first daughter, Susanna.
• 1585: twins: Hamnet and Judith.
• 1592: we hear of Hamlet as being part of the London theatre (age 28). Both player and playwright.
• Kyd and Marlowe had left the stage for him.
• He produced 2 plays a year for twenty years.
• First, comedy and history (a form he perfected), then tragedy and finally romance.
• He retired early.
• His plays were preserved in what is known as the First Folio.
• Ben Jonson introduced his work.
• 1579-1592: the lost years.
• In 1681: an actor reported that he ‘had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’.
• Shakespeare may have had Catholic sympathies.
• The writings show a positive Christian understanding together with a questioning
Renaissance humanism.
• Professional life in London.
• Partner in the company of actors the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594).
• Played in the Globe (1599).
• 1603: the King’s Men.
• 1596: William’s son Hamnet died.
• 1597 moved to Stratford.
• From 1610 he spent most of his time in Stratford.
• 1616: he died.
• By 1616: half of Shakespeare’s plays had not been printed.
• In 1623: two fellow actors bought out a collected edition: 36 plays in a book of 900
double column pages in a large Folio.
• Folio: large-format book made of leaves of 14 inches x 20 inches (34 x 48 cm) folded
once to make 2 leaves (4 pages).
• In a quarto book 4 leaves (8 pages).
• In the poet’s lifetime 19 plays came out as Quartos.
• If Shakespeare’s plays had not been printed works like Macbeth and The Tempest would have been lost.
• First Folio prefaced by Ben Jonson.
• Compares Shakespeare to Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles

Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
• He wrote two plays a year between 1588-90 and 1611 (except 1592-4, bubonic plague).
• Started with comedies of love, and chronicle-plays.
• Second decade: more critical comedies, tragedies and Roman plays and four romances.
Ended his production with The Tempest.
• Some of the main questions explored in that literature:
- What is man (i.e. Hamlet), what is life for, why is life so short, what is good and bad (and who is to judge),
what is a king, what is love…? (Hamlet touches all these topics).
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=easWqy08wr8

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more

Hamlet
HAMLET

• Hamlet is still the most often produced of the plays, as well as the most widely read; and
the role of the Prince continues to be the ultimate goal to which actors aspire. [1]
• Conveys a sense of the playwright’s involvement with his own creation.
• Hamlet’s sentiments close to Shakespeare’s.
• Prince’s views of the art of acting as a faithful reflection of his author’s.
• It is most fitting that it should have been composed at almost the exact mid-point of its
author’s career as a playwright and soon after the company for which he wrote and in
which he was an actor and sharer had begun to occupy the Globe (Hibbard, 2).
• The play exists in three different forms.
• First Quarto (1603) [reported version of the abridgement version]
• Second Quarto (1604-5) [first draft]
• First Folio in 1623. [revision of this first draft with some additions]
• Hamlet must have been written and performed by 26 July 1602.
SOURCES

• The court where Hamlet unfolds is a Renaissance court.

• Setting: Denmark.
• Preoccupation with statecraft, intrigue, poisoning, lechery: keeps with the mental picture the
audience had of Italy (Hibbard, 6).
• Prince Hamlet: a student of University of Wittenberg (like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus).
• Embodiment of the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universal.
• Ophelia describes him as having: “The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue, sword”.
• Prose Edda (c. 1230)
• a collection of mythological Old Norse poems made in the 12th century (Scandinavian
myths, legends and poems compiled by Snorri Sturlason)
• Reference to Amleth (a legendary hero that appears in the Historiae Danicae of Saxo
Grammaticus) (12 century).
• The tale Saxo relates: pattern of blood revenge common in the Norse saga.
• Histoires tragiques (1570) François de Belleforest
• The Hystorie of Hamblet (1608)
• Shakespeare provides psychological depth and insight of the characters. Many changes in
his version.
• Ur-Hamlet Thomas Kyd?
DRAMA

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players. (Shakespeare, As You Like It)
• The increasing population could not read or write but did go to the theatre.
• The stage became the forum for debate, spectacle and entertainment.
• The writer took his work to an audience which might include the Queen herself and the
lowliest of her subjects.
• There is no one Shakespearean hero, but Hamlet could be seen as the epitome of the
Renaissance tragic hero.
• Shakespeare’s early plays: his heroes are historical figures (i.e. kings of England).
• Shakespeare explores in these plays character and motive more than praise for the
dynasty.
• Shakespeare moves on from his classical models (Seneca, Terence, Plautus) exploring the
human psychology: see. Harold Bloom’s: Shakespeare: the invention of the human.
• After his concern with kingship and history he started to explore new territories, i.e. the
geography of the human soul.
• Shakespeare wrote 37 plays over a period of some 24 years, as well as the most famous
sonnet collection in English and some longer poems (i.e. Venus and Adonis).
• His plays were written for its performance rather than publication (he was himself an
actor of his company).
• Shakespeare’s plays have come to us in a standard form: five acts. But this division into
acts and scenes is not always his. It took place a century later.
• He wrote the plays for performance, and there are many variations between the various
editions published in his own lifetime (usually called Quartos) and the First Folio put
together by John Heminge and Henry Condell in 1623.
• The play can be seen as a universal image of life and of the necessity of individual choice
and action.
• Medieval drama: as a means of showing God’s designs.
• Drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, a way of exploring his human qualities.
• The idea that the king, the nearest man to God, could be evil was a dangerous and
provocative idea in England in the 1590s.
• Yet this idea come to the fore in many Shakespeare’s tragedies: Richard II, Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.
JULIUS CAESAR

• Julius Caesar: tradedy which describes the previous and later moments of Julius Caesar’s death.
• It’s a tragedy constructed on the idea of persuasion (rhetoric) (Martín Cerezo, 2014).
• Brutus tries to persuade and justify why Caesar should die for the benefit of Roman’s citizens.
• The general good is the reason to kill Caesar before he is crowned:

“It must be by his death: and, for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be Crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question:”
• The fact that Caesar may become a tyrant after he is crowned is the main argument to
convince people why he will be assassinated: storytelling!

“If then that friend demand why Brutus

Rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that
I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” (3.2.21-23)
HAMLET

• “Character is destiny” Heraclitus.

• Hamlet’s multiple strata/layers: lover, detective, avenger, literary author, insane man, very
lucid…
HAMLET

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjuZq-8PUw0 to be or not to be
• Human vulnerability in Shakespeare’s plays:
Themes:
- Love in Romeo and Juliet.
- Revenge in Hamlet.
- Jealousy in Othello.
- Family rejection and madness in King Lear.
- The power of money and the vulnerability of the minority in The Merchant of Venice.
• Theatre permitted Shakespeare to create characters who embody universal themes such as
ambition, power, love, death, etc…
• These characters spoke to the audience in a recognizable language!
- The late plays (i.e. Pericles, The Tempest) are considered romances or even tragi-
comedies.
- They all end in harmony. They use the passage of time to heal the disharmony with which
the plays open.
- “A brave new world” (as Miranda describes it in The Tempest) is created out of the
turbulence of the old.
• The Tempest is seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art.
• The audience is left with a sense of magic, of the potential of humanity and the
expressive potential of the theatre as a form.
• The idea of transience, of the brevity of human life is important in Renaissance writing.
• Before the reformation: emphasis on eternity.
• Renaissance: Life of man is seen as “nasty, brutish and short”.
• In Macbeth life is described as “a walking shadow, a poor player,/That struts and frets his
hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more”.
• The stage is a metaphor of the world and human action: from magic and joy to tragedy
and despair.
• The audience is invited to share the experience rather than simply watch it from a
distance.