10. William Shakespeare

• fools

• the fool is court jester (the one character in King Lear who can get away with speaking the truth) generally its madmen or idiots are the ones who are used (along with Villains) to say the unsayable or satirise mainstream ideas (Launcelot in MoV) or Hamlet feigning (předstírající) madness

• Globe(the) Shakespeare’s theatre

The theatre in those days was partly open air and going to the theatre was something like going to a football stadium to watch a film. This meant that the challenge for Shakespeare was to cater for all the tastes of his audience. From here we get the phrase playing to the gallery, meaning to attempt to appear wonderful to all. (See populism for more examples)

• hero (tragic)

• a tragic hero is originally from Greek theatre, in Shakespeare it means a great man with a fatal flaw which leads him to his eventual destruction (Macbeth and King Lear both start as good men but ambition and pride lead them on to a path which will destroy them – Macbeth is arguably a Villain but the model holds true even for him)

• imagery

• Shakespeare is loaded with symbolism, metaphor, simile and imagery. One common strand of imagery found in more than one play is the idea of life or existence as a stage and people as actors. This was sometimes used to explore the stages of life - the young lover, the old man. In Macbeth people are “poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage” and “life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream we find the device of a play within a play- In Hamlet, the main character organizes a performance in order to provoke his uncle)

• iambic pentameter

• speech in Shakespeare tends to have a certain poetic rhythm and word stress (especially when high born characters speak)

• jealousy

• Shakespeare explored all the universal human emotions (jealousy is the driving force for King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale also Othello)

CHARACTERS

Portia – 3 caskets, game of chess, because of her father – only man who can marry her need to choose right casket will get dowry and her

- motif – highly independent, self-conscious, but capricious/virtuous father – tight by her father – resentful obedience – vnitřně odmítá ale poslušnost – inside disagrees but loves her late father (zesnulý)

- biggest heroine (hrdinka) na tu dobu – in Shakespeare, Shakespearian heroine – she outsmarts all the male characters, wicked, saves Antonio’s life – finding loop hole

Katherine (the taming of the shrew)

• The Taming of the Shrew is a play about Katherine, a woman who does not wish to be married and aggressively attacks all suitors, and how she is “tamed” is forced to accept that marriage is the best thing for her. On the one hand the play crudely asserts that women are happier when the they know their place, on another it intelligently explores male female relationships, on another it is simply played for laughs, and on yet another it could be seen, to a certain extent, to satirise the conventional contemporary male-female relationships of the time. Katherine starts out as a uncontrollable, strong, intelligent women and is literally starved and sleep deprived into accepting her place and getting married, by the end of the play she has become to believe that women can only be happier if they know their place. Is she more interesting at the start of the play? On the other hand, was her strength simply making her lonely? Is it possible for an individual to defy society? The play with a modern reading is in the end ambiguous and provokes questions not easily answered.