Today, The Winsors and TheGrandma have met William Shakespeare, thegreatestwriter in the English language,and probably, the most universal one.Together, they have been talking aboutEnglish grammar with the StateVerbs and Too/Enough. It has been a midwinternight's dreamcome true.
William Shakespeare(bapt. 26 April 1564–23 April 1616)was an English playwright,poet and actor. He is widely regarded asthe greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often calledEngland's national poet and theBard of Avon (or simplythe Bard).
His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses,
some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every
major living language and are performed more often than those of any
other playwright.
Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.
At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three
children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585
and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer,
and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
later known as the King's Men.
At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's
private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation
about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his
religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him were written
by others.
Shakespeare produced
most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were
primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best
works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until
1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's
plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his
lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow
actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio,
a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that
included 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben
Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: not of an age, but for all time.
Shakespeare was
the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover
(glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary
Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon,
where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown,
but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. This
date, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has
proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616. He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52. He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in perfect health. No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died.
The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with WilliamShakespeare.
It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company,
the Lord Chamberlain's Men, on land owned by Thomas Brend and inherited
by his son, Nicholas Brend and grandson Sir Matthew Brend, and was
destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613.
A second Globe Theatre was built on the same site by June 1614 and closed by an Ordinance issued on 6 September 1642.
A modern reconstruction of the Globe, named Shakespeare's Globe, opened in 1997 approximately 230 m from the site of the original theatre. From 1909, the current Gielgud Theatre was called Globe Theatre, until it was renamed, in honour of John Gielgud, in 1994.
Examination of old property records has identified the plot of land occupied by the Globe
as extending from the west side of modern-day Southwark Bridge Road
eastwards as far as Porter Street and from Park Street southwards as far
as the back of Gatehouse Square.
However,
the precise location of the building remained unknown until a small
part of the foundations, including one original pier base, was
discovered in 1989 by the Department of Greater London Archaeology, now
Museum of London Archaeology, beneath the car park at the rear of Anchor
Terrace on Park Street. The shape of the foundations is now replicated
on the surface. As the majority of the foundations lies beneath 67-70
Anchor Terrace, a listed building, no further excavations have been
permitted.
The Globe was owned by actors who were also shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
Two of the six Globe
shareholders, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert Burbage, owned
double shares of the whole, or 25% each; the other four men,
Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and Thomas Pope, owned a
single share, or 12.5%.
Originally
William Kempe was intended to be the seventh partner, but he sold out
his share to the four minority sharers, leaving them with more than the
originally planned 10%. These initial proportions changed over time as
new sharers were added. Shakespeare's share diminished from 1/8 to 1/14,
or roughly 7%, over the course of his career.
The Globe was built in 1599 using timber from an earlier theatre, TheTheatre,
which had been built by Richard Burbage's father, James Burbage, in
Shoreditch in 1576. The Burbages originally had a 21-year lease of the
site on which the theatre was built, but owned the building outright.
However, the landlord, Giles Allen, claimed that the building had become
his with the expiry of the lease.
On
28 December 1598, while Allen was celebrating Christmas at his country
home, carpenter Peter Street, supported by the players and their
friends, dismantled The Theatre beam by beam and transported it to
Street's waterfront warehouse near Bridewell. With the onset of more
favourable weather in the following spring, the material was ferried
over the Thames to reconstruct it as The Globe on some marshy gardens to the south of Maiden Lane, Southwark.
While only a hundred yards from the congested shore of the Thames,
the piece of land was situated close by an area of farmland and open
fields. It was poorly drained and, notwithstanding its distance from the
river, was liable to flooding at times of particularly high tide; a wharf, a bank, of raised earth with timber revetments had to be created to carry the building above the flood level.
The new theatre was larger than the building it replaced, with the older timbers being reused as part of the new structure; the Globe was not merely the old Theatre newly set up at Bankside.
It was probably completed by the summer of 1599, possibly in time for the opening production of Henry V and its famous reference to the performance crammed within a wooden O.
Dover Wilson, however, defers the opening date until September 1599, taking the wooden O reference to be disparaging and thus unlikely to be used in theGlobe's inaugural staging. He suggests that a Swiss tourist's account of a performance of Julius Caesar witnessed on 21 September 1599 describes the more likely first production.
The first performance for which a firm record remains was Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour -with its first scene welcoming the gracious and kind spectators- at the end of the year.
On 29 June 1613, the Globe Theatre went up in flames during a performance of Henry VIII.
A theatrical cannon, set off during the performance, misfired, igniting
the wooden beams and thatching. According to one of the few surviving
documents of the event, no one was hurt except a man whose burning
breeches were put out with a bottle of ale. It was rebuilt in the
following year.
Like all the other theatres in London, the Globe was closed down by thePuritans in 1642.
It was pulled down in 1644-45; the commonly cited document dating the
act to 15 April 1644 has been identified as a probable forgery -to make
room for tenements.
A modern reconstruction of the theatre, named Shakespeare's Globe, opened in 1997, with a production of Henry V.
It is an academic approximation of the original design, based on
available evidence of the 1599 and 1614 buildings, and is located
approximately 230 m from the site of the original theatre.
The Globe's actual dimensions are unknown,
but its shape and size can be approximated from scholarly inquiry over
the last two centuries. The evidence suggests that it was a
three-storey, open-air amphitheatre approximately 30 m in diameter that
could house up to 3,000 spectators.
The Globe
is shown as round in Wenceslas Hollar's sketch of the building, later
incorporated into his etched Long View of London from Bankside in 1647.
However, in 1988–89, the uncovering of a small part of the Globe's foundation suggested that it was a polygon of 20 sides.
At
the base of the stage, there was an area called the pit, (or, harking
back to the old inn-yards, yard) where, for a penny, people (the groundlings) would stand on the rush-strewn earthen floor to watch the performance.
During the excavation of the Globe
in 1989 a layer of nutshells was found, pressed into the dirt flooring
to form a new surface layer. Vertically around the yard were three
levels of stadium-style seats, which were more expensive than standing
room. A rectangular stage platform, also known as an apron stage, thrust
out into the middle of the open-air yard.
The
stage measured approximately 13.1 m in width, 8.2 m in depth and was
raised about 1.5 m off the ground. On this stage, there was a trap door
for use by performers to enter from the cellarage area beneath the stage.
The
back wall of the stage had two or three doors on the main level, with a
curtained inner stage in the centre, although not all scholars agree
about the existence of this supposed inner below, and a balcony above it.
The doors entered into the tiring house,
a backstage area, where the actors dressed and awaited their entrances.
The floors above may have been used as storage for costumes and props
and management offices.
The balcony housed the musicians and could also be used for scenes requiring an upper space, such as the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Rush matting covered the stage, although this may only have been used if the setting of the play demanded it.
Large
columns on either side of the stage supported a roof over the rear
portion of the stage. The ceiling under this roof was called the heavens,
and was painted with clouds and the sky. A trap door in the heavens
enabled performers to descend using some form of rope and harness. The
stage was set in the south-east corner of the building, to be in shade
during afternoon performances in summer.
The name of the Globe supposedly alludes to the Latin tag totus mundus agit histrionem, in turn derived from quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem -because all the world is a playground- from Petronius, which had wide circulation in England in the Burbages' time. Totus mundus agit histrionem was, according to this explanation, therefore adopted as the theatre's motto.
Another allusion, familiar to the contemporary theatre-goer, would have been to Teatrum Mundi, a meditation by the twelfth-century classicist and philosopher John of Salisbury, in his Policraticus,
book three. In either case, there would have been a familiar
understanding of the classical derivation without the adoption of a
formal motto.
It seems likely that the link between the supposed motto and the Globe was made only later, originating with the industrious early Shakespeare
biographer William Oldys, who claimed as his source a private
manuscript to which he once had access. This was repeated in good faith
by his literary executor George Steevens, but the tale is now thought suspicious.
Today, The Fosters & The Grandmahave been reading one of themost universal authors of all time, WilliamShakespeare,whose sonnets were published on adaylike today in 1609.
Shakespeare's sonnets are poems written byWilliam Shakespeare on a variety of themes.When discussing or referring to Shakespeare'ssonnets,it is almost always a reference to the 154sonnets that were first published all together in aquarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
Shakespeare's
sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that
swept through the Renaissance from Petrarch in 14th-century Italy and
was finally introduced in 16th-century England by Thomas Wyatt and was
given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains by Henry Howard.
With few exceptions, Shakespeare's sonnets observe the stylistic form of the English sonnet-therhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre. But Shakespeare's sonnets introduce such significant departures of content that they seem to be rebelling against well-worn 200-year-old traditions.
Instead
of expressing worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet
unobtainable female love-object, as Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney
had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man. He also introduces the Dark Lady, who is no goddess.
Shakespeare explores themes
such as lust, homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony in ways
that may challenge, but which also open new terrain for the sonnet
form.
The primary source of Shakespeare's sonnets is a quarto published in 1609 titled Shake-speare's Sonnets.
It contains 154 sonnets, which are followed by the long poem A Lover's Complaint.
Thirteen copies of the quarto have survived in fairly good shape from
the 1609 edition, which is the only edition; there were no other
printings. There is evidence in a note on the title page of one of the
extant copies that the great Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn bought a
copy in June 1609 for one shilling.
The sonnets cover such themes
as the passage of time, love, infidelity, jealousy, beauty and
mortality. The first 126 are addressed to a young man; the last 28 are
either addressed to, or refer to, a woman. Sonnets 138 and 144 had
previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim.
The title of the quarto, Shake-speare's Sonnets,
is consistent with the entry in the Stationer Register. The title
appears in upper case lettering on the title page, where it is followed
by the phrase Neuer before Imprinted.
The
title also appears every time the quarto is opened. That the author’s
name in a possessive form is part of the title sets it apart from all
other sonnet collections of the time, except for one -Sir Philip
Sidney's posthumous 1591 publication that is titled, Syr. P.S. his
Astrophel and Stella, which is considered one of Shakespeare's most important models.
Sidney's title may have inspired Shakespeare, particularly if the W.H. of Shakespeare's dedication is Sidney's nephew and heir, William Herbert. The idea that the persona referred to as the speaker of the Shakespeare's sonnets might be Shakespeare
himself, is aggressively repudiated by scholars; however, the title of
the quarto does seem to encourage that kind of speculation.
The
first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are
addressed to the young man -urging him to marry and have children in
order to immortalize his beauty by passing it to the next generation.
Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the young man; brood upon
loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticize the
young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for
the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two
sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the little love-god Cupid.
The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609.
Whether Thorpe used an authorized manuscript from Shakespeare
or an unauthorized copy is unknown. George Eld printed the quarto, and
the run was divided between the booksellers William Aspley and John
Wright.
The sonnets are almost all constructed of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet.
The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter, the metre used in Shakespeare's plays.
The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets, orEnglish sonnets, or Elizabethan sonnets. Often, at the end of the third quatrain occurs the volta (turn), where the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a turn of thought.
There
are a few exceptions: Sonnets 99, 126, and 145. Number 99 has fifteen
lines. Number 126 consists of six couplets, and two blank lines marked
with italic brackets; 145 is in iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. In
one other variation on the standard structure, found for example in
sonnet 29, the rhyme scheme is changed by repeating the second (B) rhyme
of quatrain one as the second (F) rhyme of quatrain three.
Apart from rhyme, and considering only the arrangement of ideas, and the placement of the volta, a number of sonnets maintain the two-part organization of the Italian sonnet. In that case the term octave and sestet
are commonly used to refer to the sonnet’s first eight lines followed
by the remaining six lines. There are other line-groupings as well, as Shakespeare finds inventive ways with the content of the fourteen line poems.
When
analysed as characters, the subjects of the sonnets are usually
referred to as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The
speaker expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and -if
reading the sonnets in chronological order as published- later has an
affair with the Dark Lady, then so does the Fair Youth.
Current
linguistic analysis and historical evidence suggests, however, that the
sonnets to the Dark Lady were composed first (around 1591–95), the
procreation sonnets next, and the later sonnets to the Fair Youth last
(1597–1603).
It
is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or
autobiographical; scholars who find the sonnets to be autobiographical
have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals.
In his plays, Shakespeare himself seemed to be a satiric critic of sonnets -the allusions to them are often scornful. Then Shakespeare
went on to create one of the longest sonnet-sequences of his era, a
sequence that took some sharp turns away from the tradition.
The
critical focus has turned instead, through New Criticism and by
scholars such as Stephen Booth and Helen Vendler, to the text itself,
which is studied and appreciated linguistically as a highly complex structure of language and ideas.
There are sonnets written by Shakespeare
that occur in his plays. They differ from the 154 sonnets published in
the 1609, because they may lack the deep introspection, for example, and
they are written to serve the needs of a performance, exposition or
narrative.
Today, The Fosters & TheGrandma have been reading The Tempest,a play written by WilliamShakespeare that was premiered at WhitehallPalace in London in 1611.
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare,probably
written in 1610-1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that he
wrote alone.
After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea
during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where
Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his
daughter Miranda, and his two servants: Caliban, a savage monster
figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit.
The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, andfamily. In Act IV, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-a-play, and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language.
Although The Tempest is listed in the First Folio as the first of Shakespeare'scomedies,
it deals with both tragic and comic themes, and modern criticism has
created a category of romance for this and others of Shakespeare's late plays.
The Tempest has been put to varied interpretations, from those that see it as a fable of art and creation, with Prospero representing Shakespeare, and Prospero's renunciation of magic signaling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, to interpretations that consider it an allegory of Europeans colonizing foreign lands.
It is not known for certain exactly when The Tempest
was written, but evidence supports the idea that it was probably
composed sometime between late 1610 to mid-1611. It is considered one of
the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone. Evidence supports
composition perhaps occurring before, after, or at the same time as The Winter's Tale. Edward Blount entered The Tempest into the Stationers' Register on 8 November 1623. It was one of 16 Shakespeare plays that Blount registered on that date.
There is no obvious single origin for the plot of The Tempest; it appears to have been created with several sources contributing, chiefly William Strachey's Letter to an Excellent Lady. Since source scholarship began in the eighteenth century, researchers have suggested passages from Naufragium (The Shipwreck), one of the colloquies in Erasmus's Colloquia Familiaria (1518), and Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Peter Martyr's De orbo novo (1530).
The Tempestmay take its overall structure from traditional Italian commedia dell'arte, which sometimes featured a magus and his daughter, their supernatural attendants, and a number of rustics. The commedia
often featured a clown known as Arlecchino (or his predecessor, Zanni)
and his partner Brighella, who bear a striking resemblance to Stephano
and Trinculo; a lecherous Neapolitan hunchback who corresponds to
Caliban; and the clever and beautiful Isabella, whose wealthy and
manipulative father, Pantalone, constantly seeks a suitor for her, thus
mirroring the relationship between Miranda and Prospero.
The Tempestfirst appeared in print in 1623 in the collection of 36 of Shakespeare's plays entitled, Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies; Published according to the True and Original Copies, which is known as the First Folio. The plays, including The Tempest, were gathered and edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell.
Today, The Fosters & The Grandma have been enjoying WilliamShakespeare's Othello, the tragedy that was performed for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London, in November 1604.
Othello or The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor ofVeniceis atragedy written by WilliamShakespeare,
probably in 1603, set in thecontemporary Ottoman-Venetian War
(1570–1573)fought for the control of the Island of Cyprus, since1489 apossession of the Venetian Republic. The portcityof Famagusta finally fell to theOttomans in 1571after a
protracted siege. The story revolves around twocharacters, Othello and Iago.
Othello
is a military commander of Moorish racewho was serving as general of
the Venetian armyin defense of Cyprus against invasion by OttomanTurks.
He
has recently married Desdemona, a beautiful and wealthy Venetian lady
much younger than himself, against the wishes of her father. Iago is Othello'smalevolent
ensign, who maliciously stokes his master's jealousy until the usually
Stoic Moor kills his beloved wife in a fit of blind rage.
Due to its enduring themes of passion, jealousy and race, Othello is still topical and popular and is widely performed, with numerous adaptations.
Othello is an adaptation of the Italian writer Cinthio's tale Un Capitano Moro, "A Moorish Captain" from his Gli Hecatommithi (1565), a collection of one hundred tales in the style of Boccaccio's Decameron.
No English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime,and verbal echoes in Othello are closer to the Italian original than to Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508.
It also resembles an incident described in the earlier tale of The Three Apples, one of the stories narrated in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights).
Desdemona is the only named character in Cinthio's tale, with his few other characters identified only as the Moor, the Squadron Leader, the Ensign, and the Ensign's Wife (corresponding to the play's Othello, Cassio, Iago and Emilia).
Cinthio
drew a moral (which he placed in the mouth of Desdemona) that it is
unwise for European women to marry the temperamental men of other
nations. Cinthio's tale has been described as a partly racist warning about the dangers of miscegenation.
While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing Othello, he departed from it in some details. Brabantio, Roderigo, and several minor characters are not found in Cinthio, for example, and Shakespeare's Emilia takes part in the handkerchief mischief while her counterpart in Cinthio does not.
Unlike in Othello, in Cinthio, the Ensign (the play's Iago) lusts after Desdemona and is spurred to revenge when she rejects him. Shakespeare's
opening scenes are unique to his tragedy, as is the tender scene
between Emilia and Desdemona as the lady prepares for bed. Shakespeare's
most striking departure from Cinthio is the manner of his heroine's death.
In Shakespeare, Othello suffocates Desdemona, but in Cinthio, the Moor commissions the Ensign to bludgeon his wife to death with a sand-filled stocking. Cinthio describes each gruesome blow, and, when the lady is dead, the Ensign and the Moor
place her lifeless body upon her bed, smash her skull, and cause the
cracked ceiling above the bed to collapse upon her, giving the
impression its falling rafters caused her death.
In Cinthio, the two murderers escape detection. The Moor then misses Desdemona greatly, and comes to loathe the sight of the Ensign. He demotes him, and refuses to have him in his company. The Ensign then seeks revenge by disclosing to the Squadron Leader the Moor's involvement in Desdemona's death. The two depart Cyprus for Venice, and denounce the Moor
to the Venetian Seigniory; he is arrested, taken to Venice, and
tortured. He refuses to admit his guilt and is condemned to exile.
Desdemona's relatives eventually find and kill him. The Ensign,
however, continues to escape detection in Desdemona's death, but engages
in other crimes while in Venice. He is arrested and dies after being
tortured. Cinthio's Ensign's Wife (the play's, Emilia), survives her husband's death to tell her story.
Cinthio's Moor is the model for Shakespeare's Othello,
but some researchers believe the poet also took inspiration from the
several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England circa
1600.
Another
possible source was the Description of Africa by Leo Africanus. The
book was an enormous success in Europe, and was translated into many
other languages, remaining a definitive reference work for decades, and
to some degree, centuries, afterwards.
An English translation by John Pory appeared in 1600 under the title AGeographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More... in which form Shakespeare may have seen it and reworked hints in creating the character of Othello.
While
supplying the source of the plot, the book offered nothing of the sense
of place of Venice or Cyprus. For knowledge of this, Shakespeare may have used Gasparo Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, in Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation.
Othello
possesses an unusually detailed performance record. The first certainly
known performance occurred on 1 November 1604, at Whitehall Palace in
London, being mentioned in a Revels account on Hallamas Day, being the first of Nouembar, 1604, when the Kings Maiesties plaiers performed A Play in the Banketinge house at Whit Hall Called The Moor of Venis. The play is there attributed to Shaxberd.
Subsequent performances took place on Monday, 30 April 1610 at the Globe Theatre, and at Oxford in September 1610.
On 22 November 1629, and on 6 May 1635, it played at the Blackfriars Theatre. Othello
was also one of the twenty plays performed by the King's Men during the
winter of 1612, in celebration of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and
Frederick V, Elector Palatine.
Othello as a literary character has appeared in many representations within popular culture over several centuries.
There also have been over a dozen film adaptations of Othello.
Today, The Grandma has read Hamlet, one of the most incredible plays written by WilliamShakespeare.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet is a tragedy written by WilliamShakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play with 30,557 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts PrinceHamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet'sfather in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others.
It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the RoyalShakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon
since 1879. It has inspired many other writers -from Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch- and has
been described as the world's most filmed story afterCinderella.
The story of Shakespeare's Hamlet was derived from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by the 16th-century scholar François deBelleforest.
Shakespeare may also
have drawn on an earlier Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet,
though some scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later
revising it to create the version of Hamlet we now have. He almost
certainly wrote his version of the title role for his fellow actor,
Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time.
In the 400
years since its inception, the role has been performed by numerous
highly acclaimed actors in each successive century.
Three different early versions of the play are extant: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604); and the First Folio
(F1, 1623). Each version includes lines and entire scenes missing from
the others. The play's structure and depth of characterisation have
inspired much critical scrutiny.
One
such example is the centuries-old debate about Hamlet's hesitation to
kill his uncle, which some see as merely a plot device to prolong the
action but which others argue is a dramatisation of the complex
philosophical and ethical issues that surround cold-blooded murder,
calculated revenge, and thwarted desire.
More recently,
psychoanalytic critics have examined Hamlet's unconscious desires, while
feminist critics have re-evaluated and attempted to rehabilitate the
often-maligned characters of Ophelia and Gertrude.
Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative, cautions the New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards. The earliest date estimate relies on Hamlet'sfrequent allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, itself dated to mid-1599.
The latest date estimate is based on an entry, of 26 July 1602, in the Register of the Stationers' Company, indicating that Hamlet was latelie Acted by the Lo: Chamberleyne his servantes.
From
the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid
dramatisation of melancholy and insanity, leading to a procession of mad
courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama.
Much of Hamlet's language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier.This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language.
Written
at a time of religious upheaval and in the wake of the English
Reformation, the play is alternately Catholic or piously medieval and
Protestant or consciously modern.
Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist, existentialist, and sceptical. For example, he expresses a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Sigmund Freud's thoughts regarding Hamlet were first published in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), as a footnote to a discussion of Sophocles'tragedy, Oedipus Rex, all of which is part of his consideration of the causes of neurosis.
Freud does
not offer over-all interpretations of the plays, but uses the two
tragedies to illustrate and corroborate his psychological theories,
which are based on his treatments of his patients and on his studies.
Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature.
Today, The Grandma has read WilliamShakespeare's Richard III.Richard III (2 October 1452-22 August 1485) was King of England from 1483 until his death at the Battle of Bosworth Field.He was the last king of the House ofYork and the last of the Plantagenetdynasty. His defeat at Bosworth Field,the last decisive battle of the Warsof theRoses, marked the end of the MiddleAges in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III,one of WilliamShakespeare's history plays.
When his brother King Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named LordProtector of the realm for Edward's
eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward's
coronation on 22 June 1483; but, before the young king could be
crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore
invalid, making their children officially illegitimate and barring them
from inheriting the throne.
On 25 June, an assembly of Lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect and proclaimed Richard the rightful king. The following day, Richard III began his reign, and he was crowned on 6 July 1483.
The young princes, Edward and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that the boys had been murdered on Richard's orders.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. The first, in October 1483, was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham; but the revolt collapsed.
In August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, led a second rebellion. Henry Tudor landed in southern Wales with a small contingent of French troops and marched through his birthplace, Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's force engaged Richard's army and defeated it at the Battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. Richard was slain in the conflict, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
After the battle, Richard's corpse was taken to Leicester and buried without pomp. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were lost for more than five centuries, believed to have been thrown into the River Soar.
In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on a city council car park on the site once occupied by GreyfriarsPriory Church.
The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III
as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports
of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of
two matrilineal descendants of Richard III's eldest sister, Anne of York. Richard's remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Richard III is a historical play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written around 1593. It depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England. The play is grouped among the histories in the First Folio and is most often classified as such. Occasionally, however, as in the quarto edition, it is termed a tragedy. Richard III concludes Shakespeare's first tetralogy, also containing Henry VI parts 1–3.
It is the second longest play in the canon after Hamlet and is the longest of the First Folio, whose version of Hamlet
is shorter than its Quarto counterpart. The play is often abridged; for
example, certain peripheral characters are removed entirely. In such
instances, extra lines are often invented or added from elsewhere in the
sequence to establish the nature of characters' relationships.
A further reason for abridgment is that Shakespeare assumed that his audiences would be familiar with his Henry VI plays and frequently made indirect references to events in them, such as Richard's murder of Henry VI or the defeat of Henry's queen, Margaret.
Richard III is believed to be one of Shakespeare's earlier plays, preceded only by the three parts of Henry VI and perhaps Titus Andronicus and a handful of comedies. It is believed to have been written c. 1592–1594. Although Richard III was entered into the Register of the Stationers' Company on 20 October 1597 by the bookseller AndrewWise, who published the first Quarto (Q1) later that year, with printing done by Valentine Simmes, Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, which cannot have been written much later than 1592, Marlowe died in 1593, is thought to have been influenced by it. A second Quarto (Q2) followed in 1598, printed by Thomas Creede for Andrew Wise, containing an attribution to Shakespeare on its title page. Q3 appeared in 1602, Q4 in 1605, Q5 in 1612, and Q6 in 1622, the frequency attesting to its popularity. The First Folio version followed in 1623.
One of the central themes of Richard III is the idea of fate, especially as it is seen through the tension between free will and fatalism in Richard's actions and speech, as well as the reactions to him by other characters. There is no doubt that Shakespeare drew heavily on Sir Thomas More's account of Richard III
as a criminal and tyrant as inspiration for his own rendering. This
influence, especially as it relates to the role of divine punishment in Richard's rule of England, reaches its height in the voice of Margaret.
Amongst
other our secular businesses and cures, our principal intent and
fervent desire is to see virtue and cleanness of living to be advanced,
increased, and multiplied, and vices and all other things repugnant to
virtue, provoking the high indignation and fearful displeasure of God,
to be repressed and annulled.
Today, The Fosters and TheGrandma have continue celebrating Saint George's week,and have talked about William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language, and probably, the most universal one, who died on Saint George's Day, four centuries and eight years ago.
William Shakespeare(bapt. 26 April 1564–23 April 1616)was an English playwright,poet and actor. He is widely regarded asthe greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often calledEngland's national poet and theBard of Avon (or simplythe Bard).
His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men.
At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: not of an age, but for all time.
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. This date, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616. He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52. He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in perfect health. No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died.
Today, The Grandma has been reading The Tempest,a play written by WilliamShakespeare that was premiered at WhitehallPalace in London on a day like today in 1611.
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare,probably written in 1610-1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that he wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants: Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit.
The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, andfamily. In Act IV, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-a-play, and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language.
Although The Tempest is listed in the First Folio as the first of Shakespeare'scomedies, it deals with both tragic and comic themes, and modern criticism has created a category of romance for this and others of Shakespeare's late plays.
The Tempest has been put to varied interpretations, from those that see it as a fable of art and creation, with Prospero representing Shakespeare, and Prospero's renunciation of magic signaling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, to interpretations that consider it an allegory of Europeans colonizing foreign lands.
It is not known for certain exactly when The Tempest was written, but evidence supports the idea that it was probably composed sometime between late 1610 to mid-1611. It is considered one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone. Evidence supports composition perhaps occurring before, after, or at the same time as The Winter's Tale. Edward Blount entered The Tempest into the Stationers' Register on 8 November 1623. It was one of 16 Shakespeare plays that Blount registered on that date.
There is no obvious single origin for the plot of The Tempest; it appears to have been created with several sources contributing, chiefly William Strachey's Letter to an Excellent Lady. Since source scholarship began in the eighteenth century, researchers have suggested passages from Naufragium (The Shipwreck), one of the colloquies in Erasmus's Colloquia Familiaria (1518), and Richard Eden's 1555 translation of Peter Martyr's De orbo novo (1530).
The Tempestmay take its overall structure from traditional Italian commedia dell'arte, which sometimes featured a magus and his daughter, their supernatural attendants, and a number of rustics. The commedia often featured a clown known as Arlecchino (or his predecessor, Zanni) and his partner Brighella, who bear a striking resemblance to Stephano and Trinculo; a lecherous Neapolitan hunchback who corresponds to Caliban; and the clever and beautiful Isabella, whose wealthy and manipulative father, Pantalone, constantly seeks a suitor for her, thus mirroring the relationship between Miranda and Prospero.
The Tempestfirst appeared in print in 1623 in the collection of 36 of Shakespeare's plays entitled, Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies; Published according to the True and Original Copies, which is known as the First Folio. The plays, including The Tempest, were gathered and edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell.
Today, The Grandma has watched somefilmsinterpreted by one of her favouriteactresses, JudiDench.
Dame Judith Olivia Dench (born 9December 1934) is an English actress.
She made her professional debut in1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years, she performed in several of Shakespeare's plays, in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet,Juliet in Romeo andJuliet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.Although most of Dench's
work during this period was in theatre, she also branched into film
work and won a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer. She drew rave
reviews for her leading role in the musical Cabaret. She has also received critical acclaim for her work on television starring in the hit BBC sitcom As Time Goes By from 1992–2005.
Over the next two decades, Dench established herself as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National TheatreCompany and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She received critical acclaim for her work on television during this period, in the series A Fine Romance (1981–1984) and As Time Goes By
(1992–2005), in both of which she held starring roles. Her film
appearances were infrequent, and included supporting roles in major
films, such as A Room with a View (1986), before she rose to international fame as M in GoldenEye (1995), a role she continued to play in James Bond films until her final appearance in Skyfall (2012).
A seven-time Academy Award nominee, Dench won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare inLove (1998); her other Oscar-nominated roles were in Mrs Brown (1997), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006) and Philomena (2013).
She
has also received many other accolades for her acting in theatre, film,
and television; her other competitive awards include six British
Academy Film Awards, four BAFTA TV Awards, seven Olivier Awards, two
Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award.
She has also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2001, and the Special
Olivier Award in 2004. In June 2011, she received a fellowship from the
British Film Institute (BFI).
Dench was born in Heworth, York.
Her mother, Eleanora Olive, was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her father,
Reginald Arthur Dench (1897–1964), a doctor, was born in Dorset,
England, and later moved to Dublin, where he was brought up. He met Dench's mother while he was studying medicine at Trinity College, Dublin.
Dench attended the Mount School, a Quaker independent secondary school in York, and became a Quaker.
Through her parents, Dench
had regular contact with the theatre. Her father, a physician, was also
the GP for the York theatre, and her mother was its wardrobe mistress.
Actors often stayed in the Dench household. During these years, JudiDench
was involved on a non-professional basis in the first three productions
of the modern revival of the York Mystery Plays in 1951, 1954 and 1957.
In the third production she played the role of the Virgin Mary,
performed on a fixed stage in the Museum Gardens.
Though
she initially trained as a set designer, she became interested in drama
school as her brother Jeff attended the Central School of Speech and
Drama. She applied and was accepted by the School, then based at the
Royal Albert Hall, London, where she was a classmate of Vanessa Redgrave, graduating and being awarded four acting prizes, including the Gold Medal as Outstanding Student.
In September 1957, she made her first professional stage appearance with the Old Vic Company, at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool, as Ophelia in Hamlet. According to the reviewer for London Evening Standard, Dench had talent which will be shown to better advantage when she acquires some technique to go with it.
Dench then made her London debut in the same production at the Old Vic. She remained a member of the company for four seasons, 1957–1961, her roles including Katherine in Henry V in 1958 (which was also her New York City debut) and Juliet in Romeo andJuliet in 1960, both directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli.
She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in December 1961, playing Anya in The Cherry Orchard at the Aldwych Theatre in London and made her Stratford-upon-Avon debut in April 1962 as Isabella in Measure for Measure.
She subsequently spent seasons in repertory both with the Playhouse in
Nottingham from January 1963, (including a West African tour as Lady
Macbeth for the British Council) and with the Playhouse Company in Oxford from April 1964.
In 1964, Dench appeared on television as Valentine Wannop in Theatre 625's adaptation of Parade's End, shown in three episodes. That same year, she made her film debut in The Third Secret, before featuring in a small role in the Sherlock Holmes thriller A Study in Terror
(1965) with her Nottingham Playhouse colleague John Neville. She
performed again on BBC's Theatre 365 in 1966, as Terry in the four-part
series Talking to a Stranger, for which she won a BAFTA for Best Actress.
After the long period between James Bond films Licence to Kill (1989) and GoldenEye (1995), the producers brought in Dench to take over as the role of M, James Bond's boss. The character was reportedly modeled on Dame Stella Rimington, the real-life head of MI5 between 1992 and 1996; Dench becamethe first woman to portray M,
succeeding Robert Brown. The seventeenth spy film in the series and the
first to star Pierce Brosnan as the fictional MI6 officer, GoldenEye
marked the first Bond film made after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War, which provided the plot's back story
Dench, in her role as M, was the only cast member carried through from the Brosnan films to appear in Casino Royale (2006), Martin Campbell's reboot of the James Bond
film series, starring Daniel Craig in his debut performance as the
fictional MI6 agent. The thriller received largely positive critical
response, with reviewers highlighting Craig's performance and the
reinvention of the character of Bond.
Dench
was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the
1970 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British
Empire (DBE) in the 1988 New Year Honours. She was appointed Member of
the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2005 Birthday Honours.
Dench
is the Patron and President of the alumni foundation of Drama Studio
London and a Vice-president of wildlife conservation NGO Fauna and Flora
International. She has participated multiple times in the Explorers
against Extinction wildlife conservation fundraiser Sketch For Survival,
in which celebrity artists join prominent wildlife artists in sketching
wildlife as best as they can in 26 minutes, and the results are
auctioned off.
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