Name: An Introduction to Shakespeare
Uploaded: 2019-01-27T05:30:12.000Z
Duration: 9 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi everyone, it's Lauren and this is the first video in a series that I'm doing on the plays of William Shakespeare.

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

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

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

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

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

so rather than ONE andTWO and THREE and FOUR and FIVE