10. William Shakespeare

10. William Shakespeare

profile: Common themes, gender, populism, use of villain/tragic hero, Macbeth

state: A General Overview of Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

historical/social/literary context – 16th 17th century, renaissance – flourished art, centre of attention is a human, individual, revives ancient times

- historical context – Venice one of the merchant cities, wealthy place, was Shakespeare ever in Venice? Setting accurate

- Elizabethan era – Tudor architecture – highly supportive of Shakespeare

- Globe and Elizabethan theatre – Globe was round with stage in the centre, inspired by ancient architecture, it burned down, partly open, he wanted for all the classes to have access

- galleries for upper class, ground for lower classes

- actors – entrance/exit – sometimes they started in the galleries then go to the stage – more lively

- why he is considered the biggest figure in E literature? New words, phrases, idioms, fixed expressions – around 2 000

- combine comedy and tragedy

- use of tragic hero – no matter how hard he tries he cannot escape from his fate

- multitude of his work – 37 plays, more than 100 sonnets

• audience – the audience in a theatre of Elizabethan times was quite different from what it was today (all social classes would be present from the aristocracy to the urban poor)

• bastards – being illegitimate was a big thing in those days (in King Lear one of the main villains is Edward, a bastard, who questions whether human qualities are the result of parentage, destiny or choice and thereby questions the hereditary class system as it was at the time)

• comedies – some Shakespearian comedies were what we would see as a comedy today, plays such as Comedy of Errors were farcical and played for laughs but the main definition of a comedy was that it ended with a wedding, no matter what went on before while tragedies end with a death or deaths of main characters (so the Merchant of Venice is quite dark but a comedy while Othello has funny scenes but is a tragedy)

Development of the English Language

• Shakespeare’s vocabulary was over 30,000 words- considerably more than a highly educated English speaker today

• the first dictionary makers such as Samuel Johnson turned to Shakespeare while compiling their dictionaries so he is credited with coining over 2300 words and phrases

• these include many compound words such as bloodthirsty or inside-out or the creation of expressions out of existing words, adding suffixes or prefixes, changing word cases and so on

• eloquent (výmluvný) – he was very good at expressing himself, Shakespeare was not always the first to say what he said- even the plots of his plays were often borrowed- but he found ways to bring universal human experiences to life and make them seem new

• euphemism (indirect expression that replace words or phrases)

• Shakespeare seldom swore in his plays which was uncommon at the time but he was inventive with sexual references and insults often using euphemisms – see the rings in Merchant of Venice or the Porters speech in Macbeth