William Shakespeare(Or Shakspere or Shakespear)

The world’s most famous playwriter WAAAAZ UP!!!!

Shakespeare Facts• Born in…

1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon .

• Elizabethan eraEngland’s Golden Age 1558-1603

• 1589-1616– 38 plays, – 154 sonnets

OMG! That’s a lot of plays

Famous Plays• 1594-95, (Romeo and Juliet) • 1595-96 (A Midsummer

Night's Dream ) • 1598-99, (Much Ado about

Nothing) • 1599-1600, (As You Like It) • 1600-01, (Hamlet) • 1601-02 (Twelfth Night) • 1604-05, (Othello) • 1605-06, (King Lear) • 1606, (Macbeth) • 1611-12, (The Tempest)

Four types of plays:1. Tragedies (e.g. Hamlet)2. Comedies (e.g. Twelfth night)3. Historic Plays (e.g. Henry VIII)4. Fairy Tale plays (e.g. The

tempest)

Shakespeare’s sonnets• Published 1609 • Love for the ”Dark Lady”• Grieves his son• Bisexual undertones?

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,Which like two spirits do suggest me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill"

Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet rules!

•14 lines 4-4-2

•Rhymes 1-3, 2-4

•10 Syllables

Theatres at the time• Plays were big- Entertainment for all

kinds of people.• Money to be made!

– Constant demand for new material.

• Rivalry between the Theatres’ playhouses was enormous.

• In 1591 the growing popularity of theatres led to a law closing all theatres on Thursdays so that various industries would not be neglected.

• 1642- Cromwell closed all theatres• The Globe- Shakespeare’s ”own”

theatre.

The Globe

But was he really that great?• His work?• Oxfordians find it suspicious that the

original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays have not survived.

• Stratfordians contra anti-Stratfordians • Anti no1- John Thomas Looney

Hi! I’m (a) looney!

Hi! I’m (a) looney!

Extra material- Shakespeare in 8 minutes

Assignment-Love letter

• http://www.julietclub.com/index_en.asp