He makes only one direct reference to her: "a fair vestal throned by the west" A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is a reference to her baptism at the end of Henry VIII , but that section of the play is believed to have been written by John Fletcher. It is believed that she liked the character of Falstaff so much, in Henry IV, Part One , that she asked Shakespeare to write a play that showed the character in love - this supposedly inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor.
When Elizabeth died Shakespeare wrote no elegy for her, unlike most of the poets of the day. As you can see it is not easy to determine Shakespeare's relationship to Elizabeth I. It appears that he worked for her as she demanded but there is no indication that their relationship was closer than that. Listen to Stanley Wells discuss Shakespeare's relationship with his patron the Earl of Southampton and the resulting portrait in this video, Shakespeare Found:.
Ben Jonson 's tribute to him, printed in this volume, famously praised him as: " Help keep Shakespeare's story alive. John Hall. All in all, Shakespeare earned enough to retire to his native Stratford with comfort and ease in , in addition to some degree of fame. He had purchased more land, and retired a second-generation gentleman. When he wrote his will in , he bequeathed all of his property to Susanna, traditionally thought of as his "favorite".
The most plausible explanation for this old mystery is that Shakespeare had already made arrangements for Anne to live with Susanna, and gave her the bed, because it was her favorite, to take with her to her new home. After his death, two actors who had been in The Lord Chamberlain's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell printed the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's collected plays and sonnets as a tribute to their friend in , including 18 plays not printed anywhere else.
According to George Steevens, a knowledgeable Shakespearean scholar of the 's, "All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare, is - that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, - married and had children there, - went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays, returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried".
Certainly, records from Elizabethan England are not as detailed as records from more recent times, but we know more about Shakespeare than we do about most other playwrights from his period. We know he existed, we have all of the major records and documentation of his life, we even have the costuming bills from his theatre company.
Some believe that William Shakespeare didn't write plays or poems at all the Shakespeare Oxford Society Home Page offers a good example. Their arguments fail to convince knowledgeable scholars, who attribute the disbelief to a form of intellectual elitism: Shakespeare was a commoner, and his father a dissolute one at that.
He did not attend college or university, or even very much of his grammar school. How could such a one become so great? According to Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. To those aquainted with the history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is incredible that anyone should be so naive or ignorant as to doubt the reality of Shakespeare as the author of the plays that bear his name.
Yet so much nonsense has been written about other "candidates" for the plays that it is well to remind readers that no credible evidence that would stand up in a court of law has ever been adduced to prove either that Shakespeare did not write his plays or that anyone else wrote them.
Alll the theories offered for the authorship of Francis Bacon, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Hertford, Christopher Marlowe, and a score of others are mere conjectures spun from the active imaginations of persons who confuse hypothesis and conjecture with evidence.
The Globe Theatre is going up again in London's Bankside after just a few hundred year's intermission. It will be the crux of the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, an educational organization inspired and designed by actor and director Sam Wanamaker. Built feet from the site of the original theatre, which is being excavated for archeological purposes the New Globe includes an indoor theatre designed by Inigo Jones, a famous architect and contemporary of playwright William Shakespeare.
Most of Shakespeare's greatest plays were performed on the stage of the original Globe, built in Southwark in In , the theatre burned to the ground.
Live cannon used in a performance of Henry VIII cast sparks into the thatched roof of the Globe, and the entire building was set alight. Apparently there were no casualties, save one gentleman who was burned slightly when his trousers caught fire; this was quickly remedied by a liberally applied bottle of beer. See the bird's eye view of the "wooden O" to the left. Not only is the Globe back, it's being rebuilt using the same methods required to constuct the original almost years ago.
A special permit to obtain a thatched roof in London was required, each bundle was dipped in flame-retardant solution. Master craftsmen are working alongside actors from all over London, using such materials as green oak, brick, lime, goat's hair, and water-reeds. Mortice and tenon joints are used to join the oaken posts, pegged in the same way Elizabethan craftsmen would have done. Willows are split into laths, and Chardstock sand is mixed with goat's hair and lime to make a plaster for the walls.
Care has been taken to insure that all of the building materials are consistent with Elizabethan custom and the design of the original Globe. The amount of work involved is of an incredible scale. It is an exploration of the craft of Shakespeare's time, as well as a celebration of his art. Above, you can see the outside of the Globe Theatre during its construction. The Globe was not a remarkable design in Tudor theatre construction, although we think of it as being unique today.
Most of the theatres that dotted Southwark looked very much like this one. The design of the "wooden O" was favored because it let in the most light. Plays like Henry V , that are very conscious of being a play for instance, the prologue in Henry V apologizes to the audience for the inadequacy of the stage, and asks us to use our imagination can teach historians and students of literature alike how Elizabethan theatre worked, and what the experience of a Shakespearean play would have been like for people who lived during that time.
Sitting on the wooden benches, looking out into the sunny pit and up to the magnificent stage, a great deal of the mystery surrounding Elizabethan drama, and particularly Shakespearean drama, becomes crystal clear.
Why do the characters often repeat a line or word three times? Examples: Polonious asks Hamlet what he is reading. Hamlet answers "words, words, words". The Globe's stage was very much like the modern theatre design that we call thrust. The audience would have been seated directly in front of the stage, but, also, due to the shape of the theatre, to stage left and stage right. Some influential pillars of the community even sat on the stage, not to see but to be seen -- they would parade occasionally in their newest costumes so the audience could have a better view.
So, when a character says something three times, the actor was intended to speak the line while panning the audience, from stage left through the center to finish at stage right, or vice versa. The "penny audience" or "groundlings" were those who purchased the cheapest tickets. These tickets entitled them only to standing room in the pit. They were typically the rowdiest members of the audience. The bawdy humor and ripe puns in Shakespearean drama were usually aimed at this particular crowd.
The two photos above were taken from the entrance stage left, and from the stage itself. Shown to the left is the temporary stage and a view of the stage-left audience seating.
Two Gentlemen of Verona will be performed on this stage in the Fall of , and the stage will then be adjusted based on its performance during that production. The company was reorganised in , with both Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare among the players. Between and , they mostly played in London at the Theatre, and then at the Globe. Richard Burbage and Shakespeare were among their leading members, and Shakespeare created further plays for the company.
From , they also played at their indoor playhouse at Blackfriars. Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, became patron to a company of players in or Shakespeare's theatre 1 2 3.
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