Great Books Explained: Shakespeare's First Folio

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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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