SOCIETY OF YOUNG NIGERIAN WRITERS
READING SHKESPEARE PROJECT
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS
Shakespeare's
plays are a canon of approximately 39
dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare.
The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy,
history,
or comedy—is
a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being
among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around
the world. The plays have been translated into every major living
language.
Many
of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until
1623, when the posthumous First
Folio was published. The traditional
division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the
categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some
of these plays "problem plays" that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely
break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.
When
Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1570s or early 1580s,
dramatists writing for London's new commercial playhouses (such as The
Curtain) were combining two strands of
dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis.
Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays.
These plays, celebrating piety
generally, use personified
moral attributes to urge or instruct the protagonist to choose the virtuous life over Evil. The characters and
plot situations are largely symbolic rather than realistic. As a child,
Shakespeare would likely have seen this type of play (along with, perhaps, mystery
plays and miracle
plays).
The
other strand of dramatic tradition was classical
aesthetic theory. This theory was derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England,
however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and
practitioners. At the universities, plays were staged in a more academic form
as Roman
closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum,
but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action.
Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum and were taught in
editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.
Theatre and stage setup
Archaeological
excavations on the foundations of the Rose
and the Globe
in the late twentieth century showed that all London English Renaissance theatres were built around similar general plans. Despite individual
differences, the public theatres were three stories high and built around an
open space at the center. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded
effect, three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open center into
which jutted the stage—essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the
audience, only the rear being restricted for the entrances and exits of the
actors and seating for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could be
used as a balcony, as in Romeo
and Juliet, or as a position for a character
to harangue a crowd, as in Julius Caesar.
Usually
built of timber, lath and plaster and with thatched roofs, the early theatres
were vulnerable to fire, and gradually were replaced (when necessary) with
stronger structures. When the Globe burned down in June 1613, it was rebuilt
with a tile roof.
A
different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre,
which came into regular use on a long term basis in 1599. The Blackfriars was
small in comparison to the earlier theatres, and roofed rather than open to the
sky; it resembled a modern theatre in ways that its predecessors did not.
Elizabethan Shakespeare
For
Shakespeare, as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were,
moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University
Wits on the London stage. By the late
16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance
took hold, and playwrights like Thomas
Kyd and Christopher Marlowe
revolutionized theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with
classical theory to produce a new secular form. The new drama combined the
rhetorical complexity of the academic play with the bawdy energy of the
moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and
less concerned with simple allegory. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare
continued these artistic strategies, creating plays that not only resonated on
an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic
elements of what it means to be human. What Marlowe and Kyd did for tragedy, John
Lyly and George
Peele, among others, did for comedy: they
offered models of witty dialogue, romantic action, and exotic, often pastoral
location that formed the basis of Shakespeare's comedic mode throughout his
career.
Shakespeare's
Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as
Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models.
He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on
high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other
respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of
moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are
loosely unified by a theme or character. In this respect, they reflect clearly
the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine.
Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint
than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his
attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than
Marlowe's. By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus
had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet.
In
comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy
of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new
comedy closely. Shakespeare's other
Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic
intrigue (a secondary feature in Latin new comedy) the main plot element; even
this romantic plot is sometimes given less attention than witty dialogue,
deceit, and jests. The "reform of manners," which Horace considered
the main function of comedy, survives in such episodes as the gulling of Malvolio.
Jacobean Shakespeare
Shakespeare
reached maturity as a dramatist at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and in the
first years of the reign of James.
In these years, he responded to a deep shift in popular tastes, both in subject
matter and approach. At the turn of the decade, he responded to the vogue for
dramatic satire initiated by the boy
players at Blackfriars
and St. Paul's.
At the end of the decade, he seems to have attempted to capitalise on the new
fashion for tragicomedy,
even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularised the genre in England.
The
influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston
and Ben
Jonson is seen not only in the problem
plays, which dramatise intractable human problems of greed and lust, but also
in the darker tone of the Jacobean tragedies. The Marlovian, heroic mode of the
Elizabethan tragedies is gone, replaced by a darker vision of heroic natures
caught in environments of pervasive corruption. As a sharer in both the Globe
and in the King's Men, Shakespeare never wrote for the boys' companies;
however, his early Jacobean work is markedly influenced by the techniques of the
new, satiric dramatists. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.
Shakespeare's
final plays hark back to his Elizabethan comedies in their use of romantic
situation and incident. In these plays, however, the sombre elements that are
largely glossed over in the earlier plays are brought to the fore and often
rendered dramatically vivid. This change is related to the success of
tragicomedies such as Philaster,
although the uncertainty of dates makes the nature and direction of the
influence unclear. From the evidence of the title-page to The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual
analysis it is believed by some editors that
Shakespeare ended his career in collaboration with Fletcher, who succeeded him
as house playwright for the King's Men. These last plays resemble Fletcher's
tragicomedies in their attempt to find a comedic mode capable of dramatising
more serious events than had his earlier comedies.
Style
During
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "drama became the ideal means to capture and
convey the diverse interests of the time." Stories of various genres were
enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor
and illiterate. Later on, he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not
long before the start of the Thirty Years' War.
His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks
of both periods.[18] His style changed not only in accordance with his own
tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the
audiences for whom he wrote.
While
many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote a large proportion of his plays and
poems in iambic pentameter.
In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added
punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even
stronger. He and many dramatists of this period used the form of blank
verse extensively in character dialogue,
thus heightening poetic effects.
To
end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet to give a sense of conclusion, or completion. A typical
example is provided in Macbeth:
as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock),
he says,
Hear
it not Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
Shakespeare's
writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay in which double
entendres and rhetorical flourishes are
repeatedly used. Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays.
Although a large amount of his comical talent is evident in his comedies, some
of the most entertaining scenes and characters are found in tragedies such as Hamlet and histories such as Henry
IV, Part 1. Shakespeare's humour was largely
influenced by Plautus.
Soliloquies in plays
Shakespeare's
plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so
the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict.
In
his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh defines
the convention of a Shakespearean soliloquy in early modern drama. He argues
that when a person on the stage speaks to himself or herself, they are
characters in a fiction speaking in character; this is an occasion of
self-address. Furthermore, Hirsh points out that Shakespearean soliloquies and "asides" are audible in the fiction of the play, bound to be
overheard by any other character in the scene unless certain elements confirm
that the speech is protected. Therefore, a Renaissance playgoer who was
familiar with this dramatic convention would have been alert to Hamlet's expectation that his soliloquy be overheard by the other
characters in the scene. Moreover, Hirsh asserts that in soliloquies in other
Shakespearean plays, the speaker is entirely in character within the play's
fiction. Saying that addressing the audience was outmoded by the time
Shakespeare was alive, he "acknowledges few occasions when a Shakespearean
speech might involve the audience in recognising the simultaneous reality of
the stage and the world the stage is representing." Other than 29 speeches
delivered by choruses or characters who revert to that condition as epilogues
"Hirsh recognises only three instances of audience address in
Shakespeare's plays, 'all in very early comedies, in which audience address is
introduced specifically to ridicule the practice as antiquated and
amateurish.'"
Source material of the plays
As
was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of
other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His
dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which
playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular
stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There
were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the
dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. For example, King
Lear is probably an adaptation of an
older play, King Leir,
and the Henriad probably derived from The Famous Victories
of Henry V. There is speculation that Hamlet (c. 1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the
so-called Ur-Hamlet),
but the number of lost plays from this time period makes it impossible to
determine that relationship with certainty. (The Ur-Hamlet may in fact
have been Shakespeare's, and was just an earlier and subsequently discarded
version.) For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two
principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel
Lives (from the 1579 English translation
by Sir Thomas North), and the English history
plays are indebted to Raphael
Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles. This
structure did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which
no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The
Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays,
however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces.
While
there is much dispute about the exact chronology of
Shakespeare plays, the plays tend to fall into three
main stylistic groupings. The first major grouping of his plays begins with his
histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be
adaptations of other playwrights' works and employed blank verse and little
variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave
London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed
couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue. These elements showed
up in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost all of the plays written
after the plague hit London are comedies, perhaps reflecting the public's
desire at the time for light-hearted fare. Other comedies from Shakespeare
during this period include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As
You Like It.
The
middle grouping of Shakespeare's plays begins in 1599 with Julius Caesar. For the next few years, Shakespeare
would produce his most famous dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King
Lear.
The plays during this period are in many ways the darkest of Shakespeare's
career and address issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power and egoism.
The
final grouping of plays, called Shakespeare's late romances, include Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline,
The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.
The romances are so called because they bear similarities to medieval romance literature. Among the features of these plays are a redemptive
plotline with a happy ending, and magic and other fantastic elements.
Canonical plays
Except
where noted, the plays below are listed, for the thirty-six plays included in
the First Folio
of 1623, according to the order in which they appear there, with two plays that
were not included (Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen) being added at the end of the list of comedies and Edward III
at the end of the list of histories.
|
Histories
|
|
Tragedies
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Note: Plays marked with LR are now commonly referred
to as the "late romances". Plays marked with PP are sometimes
referred to as the "problem plays". The three plays marked with FF
were not included in the First Folio.
Dramatic collaborations
Main article: Shakespeare's collaborations
Like
most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone, and a
number of his plays were collaborative, although the exact number is open to
debate. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble
Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for
Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial and are dependent on
linguistic analysis by modern scholars.
- Cardenio, either a lost play or one that survives only in later adaptation Double Falsehood; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
- Cymbeline, in which the Yale edition suggests that there was a collaborator; some scenes (Act III scene 7 and Act V scene 2) may strike the reader as un-Shakespearean compared with others.
- Edward III, of which Brian Vickers' recent analysis concluded that the play was 40% Shakespeare and 60% Thomas Kyd.
- Henry VI, Part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
- Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.
- Macbeth, Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
- Measure for Measure may have undergone a light revision by Middleton at some point after its original composition.
- Pericles, Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
- Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton; this might explain its unusual plot and unusually cynical tone.
- Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision by, George Peele.
- The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1634 and attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare; each playwright appears to have written about half of the text.
Lost plays
- Love's Labour's Won – a late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a bookseller's list both include this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
- Cardenio – attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653 (alongside a number of erroneous attributions), and often believed to have been re-worked from a subplot in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, but modern scholarship has not established with certainty whether or not Double Falshood includes fragments of Shakespeare's lost play.
Plays possibly by Shakespeare
Note: For a comprehensive account of plays possibly by
Shakespeare or in part by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare Apocrypha.
- Arden of Faversham – the middle portion of the play (scenes 4–9) may have been written by Shakespeare.
- Edmund Ironside – contains numerous words first used by Shakespeare.
- Sir Thomas More – a collaborative work by several playwrights, including Shakespeare. There is a "growing scholarly consensus" that Shakespeare was called in to re-write a contentious scene in the play and that "Hand D" in the surviving manuscript is that of Shakespeare himself.
- The Spanish Tragedy – additional passages included in the fourth quarto, including the "painter scene", are likely to have been written by him.
Shakespeare and the textual problem
Unlike
his contemporary Ben Jonson,
Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays and
produced no overall authoritative version of his plays before he died. As a
result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote is a major
concern for most modern editions.
One
of the reasons there are textual problems is that there was no copyright of
writings at the time. As a result, Shakespeare and the playing
companies he worked with did not distribute
scripts of his plays, for fear that the plays would be stolen. This led to
bootleg copies of his plays, which were often based on people trying to remember
what Shakespeare had actually written.
Textual
corruptions also stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors, or
simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First
Folio. Additionally, in an age before
standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a
different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers'
confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's
original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.
In
some cases the textual solution presents few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth
for example, scholars believe that someone (probably Thomas
Middleton) adapted and shortened the original
to produce the extant text published in the First
Folio, but that remains our only
authorised text. In others the text may have become manifestly corrupt or
unreliable (Pericles or Timon
of Athens) but no competing version exists.
The modern editor can only regularise and correct erroneous readings that have
survived into the printed versions.
The
textual problem can, however, become rather complicated. Modern scholarship now
believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes
leading to two existing versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such
cases, editors must face the choice between the original first version and the
later, revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have
resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they believe to
be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide a conflated
text would run contrary to Shakespeare's intentions. In King
Lear for example, two independent
versions, each with their own textual integrity, exist in the Quarto and the
Folio versions. Shakespeare's changes here extend from the merely local to the
structural. Hence the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986 (second
edition 2005), provides two different versions of the play, each with
respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other
Shakespearean plays (Henry
IV, part 1, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello).
Performance history
During
Shakespeare's lifetime, many of his greatest plays were staged at the Globe
Theatre and the Blackfriars Theatre.
Shakespeare's fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men acted in his plays.
Among these actors were Richard
Burbage (who played the title role in the
first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, Othello,
Richard III
and King
Lear), Richard
Cowley (who played Verges in Much Ado About Nothing), William
Kempe, (who played Peter in Romeo
and Juliet and, possibly, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Henry
Condell and John
Heminges, who are most famous now for
collecting and editing the plays of Shakespeare's First
Folio (1623).
Shakespeare's
plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum
(1649–1660), when all public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. After the English Restoration,
Shakespeare's plays were performed in playhouses with elaborate scenery and
staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. During this time the texts were "reformed" and
"improved" for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly
disrespectful to posterity.
Victorian productions of Shakespeare often sought pictorial effects
in "authentic" historical costumes and sets. The staging of the
reported sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra was one spectacular example. Too often, the result was a
loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William
Poel led a reaction against this heavy
style. In a series of "Elizabethan" productions on a thrust
stage, he paid fresh attention to the
structure of the drama. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, while Edward Gordon Craig
and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the
variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today.
For
more information about the project, contact – 08072673852 or email societyofyoungnigerianwriters@gmail.com
or woleadedoyin@gmail.com
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