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"Life's but a walking shadow,
"a poor player.
"That struts and frets his hour upon the stage."
"And then is heard no more."
"It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury."
"Signifying nothing."
Despite being arguably the most famous writer of all time,
William Shakespeare is still a widely misunderstood figure.
Today, Shakespeare is often viewed
as the property of the cultural elite
and his work is often approached out of obligation rather than desire.
And yet Shakespeare's plays
were written first and foremost to entertain audiences of all kinds,
they are full of humour, slapstick, and clever word play
- and have a deep simpathy for ordinary people
and the heartache, beauty, joy, and pain of human life.
They are also hugely popular all over the world
and have been translated into more than 100 languages.
Shakespeare has had more impact on the English language and culture
than any other writer.
And it all started with one book,
assembled by two of his friends and colleagues,
and published in 1623,
seven years after Shakespeare's death.
Without this book, we may have lost so much of his work
- as 18 out of the 36 plays included in the first folio
had never been published before,
including Julia Caesar, The Tempest, and Macbeth.
If it were not for this book,
Shakespeare might be considered just another Elizabethan writer.
Many of his plays are about Kings or nobility,
but Shakespeare always wrote about the human being beneath the crown.
Likewise, he would not want to be seen as a one-of-a-kind "genius",
but instead he would want us to try and understand him as a man,
a person with feelings, flaws and contradictions.
Just as his character, Richard II wishes, when he says:
"throw away respect, tradition, form and ceremonious duty."
"For you have but mistook me all this while."
"I live with bread like you,
"feel want,
"taste grief, need friends,
"subjected.
"How can you say to me I am a King."
"All the world's a stage,
"And all the men and women merely players;
"They have their exits and their entrances;
"and one man in his time plays many parts."
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon,
then a small unexceptional town.
William went to a grammar school
where he learned Classics like Ovid and Plutarch,
whose work he would later draw upon in his plays.
Unlike other dramatists of his time,
Shakespeare did not attend University.
In 1582 William married a farmer's daughter called Anne Hathaway.
He was only 18 on his wedding day while Anne was 26
- she was also pregnant with their first child.
The couple had three children together,
a daughter called Susanna, and then twins Judith and Hamnet.
His family would remain in Stratford
while he moved to London to pursue his dreams.
And by 1592 Shakespeare was a well-known actor on the London stage.
Shakespeare co-founded his Theatre Company
"The Lord Chamberlain's men"
which would later be called "The King's Men", in 1594,
and began writing plays for them to perform.
At first he wrote history plays and comedies.
The London audience flocked to the history plays
of which there are ten that cover English history
from the 12th to the 16th century.
In the same way Shakespeare's comedies
have some dark themes and tragic situations,
and the tragedies have some comic moments,
the Shakespeare history plays
are not just about history with a capital H.
"Is this a dagger which I see before me?"
They are first and foremost human dramas.
In fact they are the source
of some of Shakespeare's most memorable characters,
including the flamboyant, camp, verbose, and vain Richard II.
"With mine own tears I wash away my balm."
"With mine own hands, I give away my crown.
"With mine own tongue deny my sacred state."
The fiery and impetuous young Knight Hotspur
"Yea, on his part I'll empty all these veins,
"and shed my dear blood drop by drop on the dust."
"But I will lift the downtrodden Mortimer
"as high in the air as this unthankful king."
or the conniving machiavellian Richard III,
a power hungry character
whose hunchbacked form symbolised his crooked morality:
"Now is the winter of our discontent
"made glorious summer by this son of York."
The histories are as much about people, their lives, relationships, and feelings,
than they are about the story of a nation.
Shakespeare was primarily a storyteller
and like popular entertainment today,
the plays sometimes deviate from historical facts
for the purpose of dramatic effect.
Richard III was not the villain Shakespeare made him out to be,
but it suited Tudor propaganda
- as did Shakespeare's version of "The War of the Roses",
and in Richard II he has the King
the same age as his wife Isabella of Valois,
whereas the real Richard II was 29 when he married the 7-year-old Isabella.
After the early histories and comedies,
Shakespeare started to move towards tragedies.
The period follows the death of Shakespeare's 11-year-old son Hamnet,
(the twin of Judith) who died in 1596,
which must have been on Shakespeare's mind
when writing the late comedy "Twelfth Night",
a play about Viola and Sebastian,
twins who were separated during a wild storm
but are eventually reunited.
We can only imagine how Shakespeare desperately wished
his own twins could also be reunited.
Then five years later in 1601,
his beloved father John Shakespeare also passed away,
and around this time we get one of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet,
about a son grieving for his father.
"I am thy father's spirit,
"doomed for a certain term to walk the night."
It begins with Hamlet's declaration
that he is experiencing a grief that he cannot express.
The entire play sees Hamlet trying to verbalise
what is going on inside his head,
or,as he says,
"he must unpack his heart with words".
As a character, Hamlet is seen as a a turning point
towards a new level of psychological and emotional realism in theatre,
and its themes such as indecision and inaction,
the corrupting influence of power,
and the complexities of the human psyche,
continue to resonate with modern audiences.
This work was a revelation, and after Hamlet,
Shakespeare entered a great middle period of his career,
in which he wrote some of his most monumental and powerful tragic plays,
including King Lear and Othello.
Othello has been described
as "the most painfully exciting and most terrible of these tragedies".
It has an explosive and melodramatic plot,
as well as a particularly grandiose and musical poetry.
The story tells of a racial outsider turned military hero,
who is tricked by the evil Iago,
and ends up being eaten alive
by what is referred to as "the green-eyed monster of jealousy",
and killing his wife Desdemona.
The tragic Othello kills himself,
in order to take responsibility for killing Desdemona,
and in his dying soliloquy recognizes
that it is his pursuit of love that has led to his undoing.
"Then must you speak of one
"that loved not wisely but too well,
"Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,
"perplexed i the extreme..."
At the start of the Elizabethan period, theatres were not popular,
and actors were seen as little more than beggars
and writers earned even less than actors.
But by the end of it, theatre was thriving,
as was Shakespeare.
It became mass market entertainment:
a fast-moving money-making business,
and Shakespeare was one of its biggest successes,
earning more money from his work than virtually all of his contemporaries.
Theatre was popular with all classes.
The "Lord's rooms" were the best seats,
and despite seeing the back of the actor's heads,
they were able to hear every word of the play
above the noise of the audience.
The galleries had wooden seats but were covered in case it rained.
The poor known as the "Groundlings",
paid a penny to stand very close to the action on stage.
During the height of summer, the Groundlings were also referred to
as "the stinkards" for obvious reasons.
They ate, drank, cheered and booed during the performances,
and demanded the play had to entertain them
- and Shakespeare did entertain them,
using themes that had broad appeal
- love, death, ambition, power, and fate.
Mixing clever word play and intellectual jokes
with crude innuendos, low humour and slapstick.
"This is old Ninny's tomb?"
Contrary to what many people think,
Shakespeare had a very commercial side.
He was a theatreowning businessman,
and he wrote to entertain audiences and to earn money.
As he suggested in the epilogue of his late play The Tempest,
he wanted to give audiences a good time
he wanted to please people.
"Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill
"or else my project fails, which was to please."
In this fast-paced marketplace,
the trend was not for writing new plays from scratch,
instead the norm was for playwrights to adapt stories
that were already well known.
Before Shakespeare wrote his plays,
there already existed a play identical to Hamlet,
and one that was actually called "King Leir",
both of which were written by Thomas Kidd.
The "Winters Tale" takes its plot from a popular book at the time Pandosto,
while Romeo and Juliet was already well known in England
from Arthur Brook's poem,
which tells the exact same story.
But it is what Shakespeare does with his sources
that makes him Shakespeare.
For example, in the earlier version of the Romeo and Juliet story,
whenJuliet kisses Romeo after he has died,
his mouth is described as being "cold as stone",
whereas in Shakespeare's play,
Juliet kisses the mouth of Romeo and says:
"Thy lips are warm."
This ingenious, but tiny change,
emphasises that Romeo has just died seconds before Juliet wakes up,
making the kiss both more tragic,
as well as more intimate and sensual,
as Juliet feels with her lips Romeo's dwindling body heat.
Many of Shakespeare's plays have sources from classical history
— like Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus,
"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" —
while another major source for Shakespeare
was a volume of English History called "Holinshead's Chronicles".
Whereas now we might feel
that we don't want the plot "spoiled" for us,
most of Shakespeare's audiences knew how the story would end up.
In the case of Romeo and Juliet,
we are told in the prologue exactly what will happen:
"A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life."
Shakespeare asks you, as the audience,
to submerge yourselves in the "imagined world" fully,
as in the Winter's Tale
before a statue of Leontes' dead wife Hermione comes to life,
Shakespeare says to his audiences:
"It is required you do awake your faith".
In other words, suspend your disbelief.
The first folio organised Shakespeare's plays into three categories:
Comedies, Histories and Tragedies.
But within those categories there is always a cross fertilisation
of seriousness and triviality,
darkness and light.
It is the breadth of feelings expressed in Shakespeare's plays
that is so astonishing,
and in his works we can always see
his willingness to embrace the contradictory aspects of life.
In some of Shakespeare's greatest works such as King Lear
he creates scenes of unbelievable tenderness and love
as well as the darkest depths of despair and rage.
Or in Twelfth Night, when a very funny prank
which has the audience in stitches
quickly turns to intense psychological manipulation,
ending with a dark promise from Malvolio:
"I'l be revenged..."
"on the whole pack of you."
In Titus Andronicus,
Shakespeare expertly weaves gore and black humour,
as when the main character Titus serves Tamora,
her own dead sons baked into a pie!
It is so gory and violent,
that it almost becomes perversely comic
through the use of insane melodrama.
"Why, there they are, both baked in this pie."
"Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
"Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred."
"'tis true, 'tis true!
"Witness my knife's sharp point."
Indeed, the bounds of the comic and tragic genre
were being tested in Elizabethan theatre
and Shakespeare was at the forefront of this theatrical revolution.
Pioneering, particularly in his later plays,
the genre of "tragi-comedy",
Shakespeare's tragi- comic way of looking at the world,
is best demonstrated in the Winter's Tale,
a play where the good-hearted man Antigonus,
is mauled to death by a bear,
a fundamentally tragic event,
which becomes simultaneously comic
when a man in a bear costume chases Antigonus across the stage.
It is also an opportunity for Shakespeare to give us a rare stage Direction:
"Exit pursued by a bear".
This tragi-comic death is followed immediately
by the discovery of a newborn child.
It is a classic Shakespearean moment,
in which despair and hope rub shoulders,
and tragedy switches suddenly into the hopefulness of comedy.
In a noisy open air theatre, with so many distractions,
Shakespeare was a master at keeping the audience engaged,
and his plays show us the truth again and again
- that life can be both silly and sorrowful,
tragic and comic at the same time.
On New Year's Eve in 1607, Shakespeare's brother Edmund died,
followed by Shakespeare's nephew only a few months later.
Both deaths occurred during a significant outbreak of he plague in London,
when Shakespeare returned to Stratford-upon-Avon to write.
Shakespeare's daughter Susanna, married the same year,
and was soon pregnant with his first grandchild.
This tumultuous year with its sad deaths and happy announcements,
precipitated a surprising change in Shakespeare's career.
It was around this time he turned to magic.
"If this be magic let it be an art.
"Lawful as eating."
His final four works:
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and the Tempest,
all drew on magic.
They are sentimental works with characters looking for a way to return home,
and be reunited with their loved ones.
In much the same way, Shakespeare had, when he returned to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Shakespeare died in 1616, aged 52.
Despite the seeming suddenness of the playwright's death,
his later plays - written years earlier -
appear to be the work of a writer
oddly aware of the imminence of his own passing.
In his final solo authored play, "The Tempest",
the protagonist Prospero, here played by a woman,
is aware that he is approaching the end of his life,
and plans to return home to die.
"And thence retire me to my Milan,
"where every third thought
"shall be my grave."
And in "The Winter's Tale",
a world weary Camillo also makes plans to go home to die.
"It is fifteen years since I saw my country.
"Though I have for the most part been aired abroad,
"I desire to lay my bones there."
And Shakespeare's bones were laid "there"
- in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon,
once a small, unremarkable town.
Now, thanks to him,
one of the most visited places on the planet.
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