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Welcome To Shakespeare's England - Lessons - Tes Teach

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Shakespeare's World - Timelines.tv History of Britain A08.Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter - David T.

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Shakespeare is England's most celebrated dramatist and poet. His works have been translated into 80 languages, including Star Trek's Klingon. He helped shape the English we use today, introducing up to 300 words and dozens of well-known phrases.
His plays are known around the world for their universal themes and insight into the human condition. Yet much about the playwright is a mystery. Historians don't know his date of birth, where he was educated or how he spent seven years of his life.

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William Shakespeare: The life and legacy of England's bard

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Shakespeare is England's most celebrated dramatist and poet. His works have been translated into 80 languages, including Star Trek's Klingon. He helped shape the English we use today, introducing up to 300 words and dozens of well-known phrases. His plays are known around the world for their universal themes and insight into the human condition.

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Warm Bodies is Romeo and Juliet and Zombies, only better.pdf

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Shakespeare Uncovered combines history, biography, iconic performances, new analysis, and the personal passions of its celebrated hosts to tell the stories behind the stories of Shakespeare's greatest plays. The Series 2 resources (A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello) were created in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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In Shakespeare's time, a stage wasn't just one type of space; plays had to be versatile. The same play might be produced in an outdoor playhouse, an indoor theater, a royal palace-or, for a company on tour, the courtyard of an inn.

In any of these settings, men and boys played all the characters, male and female; acting in Renaissance England was an exclusively male profession. Audiences had their favorite performers, looked forward to hearing music with the productions, and relished the luxurious costumes of the leading characters. The stage itself was relatively bare. For the most part, playwrights used vivid words instead of scenery to picture the scene onstage.

Playhouses and the Globe | Theaters and Palaces | Audience Experiences | Actors, Costumes, and Staging | Stage and Screen after Shakespeare

In 1576, when Shakespeare was still a 12-year-old in Stratford, James Burbage built the Theatre just outside London. The Theatre was among the first playhouses in England since Roman times. Like the many other playhouses that followed, it was a multi-sided structure with a central, uncovered "yard" surrounded by three tiers of covered seating and a bare, raised stage at one end of the yard. Spectators could pay for seating at multiple price levels; those with the cheapest tickets simply stood for the length of the plays.

Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was one of several to perform at the Theatre, appearing there by about 1594. A few years later, the Burbages lost their lease on the Theatre site and began construction of a new, larger playhouse, the Globe, just south of the Thames. To pay for it, they shared the lease with the five partners (called actor-sharers) in the Lord Chamberlain's company, including Shakespeare.

The Globe, which opened in 1599, became the playhouse where audiences first saw some of Shakespeare's best-known plays. In 1613, it burned to the ground when the roof caught fire during a performance of Shakespeare's . A new, second Globe was quickly built on the same site, opening in 1614.

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In Shakespeare's time, a stage wasn't just one type of space; plays had to be versatile. The same play might be produced in an outdoor playhouse, an indoor theater, a royal palace-or, for a company on tour, the courtyard of an inn.

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A guide through the stage history of Romeo and Juliet from Shakespeare's time to the present day.

The Play

As the title page of the play's 1597 edition tells us, Romeo and Juliet was a popular success in its day: '...it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely'. Shakespeare designed it to be played in daylight on the simple thrust stage of an Elizabethan playhouse, where the rear balcony provided Juliet's bedroom window and a trapdoor in the stage was her tomb. No scenery and few props allowed the action to move swiftly and the audience to focus on the language. Music and costume added to the effect.

Shakespeare wrote his plays with the strengths and talents of his fellow players in mind. His gifted boy players took the female roles and Shakespeare must have had great faith in the youth playing the important role of Juliet. We know that Peter, the Nurse's comic servant, was played by the popular comedian Will Kemp and the male tragic lead must have been played by the expert wielder of both sword and poetry, Richard Burbage.

Romeo and Juliet (1973), directed by Terry Hands. Romeo (Timothy Dalton) cradling Juliet's (Estelle Kohler) body, believing her to be dead.

After the Restoration

The play had a brief run on the London stage immediately after the restoration of Charles II when, in 1662, the actor-manager William Davenant presented it at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Much greater success was won by Thomas Otway's adaptation in 1679, which was the only version of the play to be seen on stage for about 70 years. Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius set the action in ancient Rome, renaming the lovers Marius and Lavinia. It responded to the crisis over the English throne by placing greater emphasis on the political issues of state within the play.

In 1744, Theophilus Cibber played Romeo in a version closer to the original that retained some of Otway's additions, such as Juliet waking before Romeo dies. Bits of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona were also thrown in for good measure. This production boasted the unusual casting of father and daughter in the title roles - he in his early forties, she just 14. Judging by contemporary comments, this did not go down too well with audiences.

Garrick's success

David Garrick's Romeo and Juliet, staged at Drury Lane in 1748, was a much greater success. Garrick removed many of Shakespeare's bawdy jokes and sexual references, reducing Mercutio's role and simplifying that of Juliet. Responding to his audience's taste, he kept the tear-jerking sentimentality of the lovers' final embraces. This version of the play became the standard text for the stage over the next century.

When Spranger Barry, Garrick's Romeo, decamped with his Juliet (Susannah Cibber) to a rival production in Covent Garden, Garrick himself took on the role at Drury Lane. Barry was more praised as an ardent lover while Garrick was felt to be better suited to the tragic aspects of the role. Audiences could have their cake and eat it too by enjoying Barry at Covent Garden for the first half of the play before heading off to Drury Lane to see Garrick die tragically in the second. As one contemporary female theatregoer put it: "Had I been Garrick's Juliet - so impassioned was he, I should have expected that he would have come up to me on the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry's Romeo - so tender and seductive was he, I should certainly have jumped down to him!" The two productions remained regularly in the repertoire of both theatres (albeit with changes of cast) until the turn of the century.

Into the 19th century

Throughout the 19th century, the role of Juliet was seen as an important marker of a young actress's claim to fame. Eliza O'Neill, Helen Faucit and Fanny Kemble all won praise in the part. In the mid-19th century, actresses were also allowed a crack at the male lead, showing how Romeo was seen to lack masculinity. The most successful of these female Romeos was the American Charlotte Cushman, who, partnered by her sister, Susan, was a huge hit.

In 1882, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry took the lead roles in a celebrated production at the Lyceum, which delighted the audience with its lavishly Italianate settings, processions and crowd scenes. The most jaw-dropping sequence saw Romeo slew Paris in the churchyard before carrying his corpse down a flight of stairs where, by virtue of a seemingly miraculous scene change, he was revealed in the gloom of a Gothic crypt. At the end of the century, the management of the Lyceum was taken over by Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was highly praised as a graceful and romantic Romeo in his own production of the play.

Romeo (David Tennant) falls in love with Juliet (Alexandra Gilbreath) at the Capulets' ball.

The 1900s

The play remained very popular throughout the twentieth century. In the first decade of the century, William Poel led the Elizabethan Stage Society in its traditional staging of several of Shakespeare's plays, with a simple thrust stage for fast-paced fluid action. The pace and panache of John Gielgud's Romeo and Juliet in 1935 at the New Theatre made the critics take note and admire the simple Italian Renaissance setting and the excellence of the performances. Peggy Aschroft played Juliet and Edith Evans the Nurse - both to great acclaim - but it was the alternating of the roles of Romeo and Mercutio by Gielgud and Laurence Olivier that really fascinated the audience. Recalling the rivalry between Barry and Garrick, Gielgud gained more praise for his poetic Romeo, while Olivier's Mercutio was admired for his virile energy.

In an influential production at the Old Vic in 1960, Franco Zeffirelli used his Italian background to create a breathtakingly real atmosphere of Italian street life. The curtain rose to reveal the housewives of Verona shaking their newly-washed sheets out from their balconies over young people chatting, flirting and fighting. Their naturalistic style was wholly new to London audiences. The lovers were played by the young actors John Stride and Judi Dench.

For more on RSC stagings, see the Romeo and Juliet Timeline.

Musicals

The story of Romeo and Juliet has inspired many musical responses by composers such as Bellini, Berlioz, Gounod and Tchaikovsky. Kenneth MacMillan choreographed a ballet to Prokofiev's music and this was premiered at Covent Garden in 1964, with Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in the title roles. Since then, it has become a much-loved part of the ballet repertoire. Leonard Bernstein's 1957 West Side Story (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) was a hugely successful musical version updated to 1950s' New York, where the feud was fought out between the street gangs of the Sharks and the Jets. It was filmed in 1961.

Films

There have been many film versions of the play. Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer were rather too mature in years for their casting as the lovers in George Cukor's 1936 film. The young and beautiful actors, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, were much more appropriately cast in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film, shot on location in the sun-drenched piazzas of Italy. Baz Luhrmann came up with an exciting contemporary style for his film in 1996, with the young actors Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading roles.

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Stage history | Romeo and Juliet | Royal Shakespeare Company

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A guide through the stage history of Romeo and Juliet from Shakespeare's time to the present day. As the title page of the play's 1597 edition tells us, Romeo and Juliet was a popular success in its day: '...it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely'.

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Editor's Note: This year, as we did a year ago to mark Shakespeare's birthday, we are featuring a conversation between a poet who is also a Renaissance scholar (Brett Foster) and a theater director who also has extensive experience as an actor (Mark Lewis).
Brett: Mark, I have been on the lookout, after the pleasures of our exchange last year around Shakespeare's birthday, for that next book that we could profitably discuss together to mark the same occasion. We needed something new that engaged with both your and my respective disciplines in theater (both acting and directing) and literary scholarship. Stanley Wells' Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh fits this description very nicely.

Mark: I am thankful once again, Brett, to wish our friend William the happiest of birthdays by drawing attention to this new book about him.

I was taken with Wells' new volume, in which he offers a series of meticulously researched essays identifying the actors he considers to be the greatest ever to act in Shakespeare's plays. It is a thrill to follow the line of those whom my Shakespeare teacher Eloise Watt might refer to as great "inheritors of the text," stretching forward from members of Shakespeare's own Company and ending (in a time frame that some might find a premature foreclosure) with Kenneth Branagh and Simon Russell Beale, born in 1960 and 1961 respectively. It's especially fun to consider the careers of actors who were (or are) contemporaries, and to see how their careers, personalities, and acting styles interplay with one another.

Brett: Yes, and to see how the actors variously interplay with their dramatic and poetic source, Shakespeare himself, the writer of their scripts. At one point Wells quotes James Agate's rationale for the same plays being ever watchable and rewatchable for the playgoer. Agate speaks of the "two-fold joy of one fine talent super-imposed upon another." That is, we love to watch a fine actor in partnership with the literary genius who provides the material there to be shaped into an individual performance, a more fully human dimension compared to what we find on the page, however dazzling those findings.

And yes, even my less expert awareness of the acting world led me to wonder about Wells' "premature foreclosure" (as you deftly call it), ending with Branagh and Beale. Though he is timely enough to nod toward Branagh's recent return to the Shakespearean stage, in the title role of a Macbeth which was performed in a church in England and then in The Armory for its New York run. (The show was in production when Wells was writing.) Coverage-wise, however, where is Mark Rylance? It takes a certain obstinacy to leave him off a present-day list of great Shakespearean actors, though perhaps Rylance's uniqueness is not to Wells' taste.

Mark: Of course there are limitations to any such list, and Wells' version is no exception. Are we really to believe that there are no living actors of Shakespeare under the age of 50 to be considered great? I too, Brett, was struck particularly by the omission of Mark Rylance, whose leadership and performances at London's Globe Theater have been magnificent and widely heralded for decades.

Perhaps a clue to this particular choice lies in some of the criteria Wells lists in his introduction. He seems enamored by the conscious manipulation of the actor's voice and body in ways that most modern practitioners of the craft would perhaps consider overstated. It is one thing to say, as Olivier did, that he owed some of his great success to that fact that his eyes were shallowly set, enabling them to be "read" at the back of very large houses, and quite another to say, as Wells does, that "actors must be able to control their facial muscles so that they can register changes of expression, sometimes in large spaces, conveying through physical means a sense of what is going on in the character's mind." Well, yes, in a way-but overt and conscious changes of facial expression (or for that matter changes of pose) are not any longer widely held as an earmark of great acting. An actor like Rylance, whose vocal instrument is reedy and whose line readings are often subtle, might have fallen off Wells' list for just that reason.

Similarly, I will betray here my own prejudice by saying that there just have to have been great American Shakespeareans since, well, Edwin Booth, who died in 1893. (He is the most recent of the three Americans to make Wells' list). I readily acknowledge that the American theater has not supported the development of great Shakespearean acting in the way the British theater has, and the numbers are certainly nowhere near comparable. But I might offer John Barrymore, Orson Welles, Stacy Keach, and Kevin Kline as examples of names to at least consider for inclusion.

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Editor's Note: This year, as we did a year ago to mark Shakespeare's birthday, we are featuring a conversation between a poet who is also a Renaissance scholar (Brett Foster) and a theater director who also has extensive experience as an actor (Mark Lewis).

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Continuing my series on Shakespeare's sources - this week we take a look at Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare 'borrowed' the plot of Romeo and Juliet from a story that was already traditional in many European countries and had recently been re-told in a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke. Although Brooke's poem was very similar to Shakespeare's play in terms of plot and character, its moral tone was very different. Brooke explains in his introduction to the poem that he presents it as a moral tale intended to warn the readers of the dangers of passionate love. Brooke tells his readers.
To this end is this tragical matter written, to describe unto thee a couple of unfortunate lovers, thrilling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authority and advice of parents and friends, conferring their principal councils with drunken gossips and superstitious friars, attempting all adventures of peril for satisfying of their wicked lusts and abusing the honorable name of lawful marriage. Thus I publish it such as it is to raise [in the reader] a hateful loathing of all such filthy business. [emended and edited for brevity and modern readership]
You might like to ask yourselves whether there is any sense in which Shakespeare's play might be intended to encourage a loathing of the 'filthy business' of love and passion or whether Shakespeare seems to celebrate, rather than condemn, young love.

Just to give you an idea of how similar Brooke's poem and Shakespeare's play are, here is the balcony scene from Brooke's poem - this is what Juliet says to Romeo. Think about how similar or different it is to Shakespeare's version.
In few unfeigned words, your hidden mind unfold
That as I see your pleasant face you heart I may behold
For if you do intend my honor to defile:
In error shall you wander still as you have done this while,
But if your thought be chase, and have on virtue ground,
If wedlock be the end and mark which your desire have found:
Obedience set aside, unto my parents due:
The quarrel that did long ago between our households grow,
Both me and mine I will all whole to you betake:
And following you where so you go, My father's house forsake.
Here is Shakespeare's version of the same speech from Juliet

Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed.
If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I'll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

You can see a clear parallel in the concerns about Romeo's honorable intentions and in the idea of Juliet following Romeo 'where so you go' or 'throughout the world'. But whilst some passages like this are similar in content and even imagery there are also significant differences. For instance in Brooke's poem Romeo is tongue tied when he first meets Juliet (a tongue tied character is not so suitable for a stage play so Shakespeare makes his Romeo eloquent. Shakespeare also fleshes out the characters of the nurse and the friar and he compacts the action into just a few days rather than spanning several months which of course raises the stakes and makes the play even more dramatic.

So it was in fact partly from a moral tale that Shakespeare crafted his famous celebration of love.

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Shakespeare's Sources - Romeo and Juliet - Blogging Shakespeare

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Continuing my series on Shakespeare's sources - this week we take a look at Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare 'borrowed' the plot of Romeo and Juliet from a story that was already traditional in many European countries and had recently been re-told in a long narrative poem by Arthur Brooke.

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This article explores the perception of Shakespeare as 'original'

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shakespeare's schooling where shakespeare went to school stratford school shakespeare

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Shakespeare's School Days: What Did Shakespeare Read in Grade School?

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Learn about Shakespeare's education in a Stratford primary school, from your trusted Shakespeare source.

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west side story stage history of shakespeare's romeo and juliet

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The History of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: From its First Production to Luhrmann's Stylish Movie

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Romeo and Juliet's fascinating stage history, from Shakespeare Online.

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History of the Shakespeare authorship question - Wikipedia

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Note: In compliance with the accepted terminology used within the Shakespeare authorship question, this article uses the term "Stratfordian" to refer to the position that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the primary author of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him.