Preview Shakespeare’s Home DVD
April 25, 2012 at 4:26 pm | Posted in Shakespeare's Life | Leave a commentHi Everyone!
Check out the link below to preview a great documentary called Shakespeare’s Home, also known as Stratford Upon Avon. If you’re interested, you can order the DVD after watching this preview – which is a great opportunity, because it is currently only available at the Shakespeare Birthplace shop in Stratford Upon Avon.
The Friday Fact
August 12, 2011 at 9:00 am | Posted in Shakespeare's Life, The Friday Fact | Leave a commentDid you know that there’s a lost Shakespeare play? The play was The History of Cardenio, or Cardenio for short. We know it was definitely performed in London in 1613 by a group of players called the King’s Men (so named because King James I was their patron). Shakespeare was associated with the King’s Men (originally the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) for most of his career. There are, at least, records of performances of Cardenio.
Scholars think that Shakespeare wrote the play based on a 1653 Register entry listing Shakespeare and the writer John Fletcher as co-authors. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Shakespeare was involved in the writing of the play at all – writers sometimes used his name to boost their own reputations. But it’s likely that Shakespeare and Fletcher did collaborate on Cardenio, since they had worked on a number of previous plays together.
In any case, we have no idea what has become of the play. There is no text or manuscript – not even a scrap of one – and no records of what the play was even about. Based on the title, scholars have guessed that the plot of the play is taken from Cervantes’ novel Don Quioxte, as there is an episode in that novel involving a character named Cardenio. But beyond that we can only guess.
This is actually not that unusual. As Bill Bryson tells us in his great biography of Shakespeare, record-keeping was not the best back then. Shakespeare actually wasn’t very popular for years after his death (in terms of performances of his plays), so people got him mixed up with other playwrights all the time, and sometimes gave him credit for things he didn’t even write! Many of Shakespeare’s most famous plays would have been lost as well, if his friends and collaborators Heminges and Condell hadn’t published them in the First Folio in 1623.
Just imagine – maybe someday, someone will turn up the lost manuscript of Cardenio! People have claimed to do so before, but they’ve all been outed as scam artists.
The Friday Fact
July 22, 2011 at 9:00 am | Posted in Shakespeare's Life, The Friday Fact | Leave a commentHere’s a curious piece of information – there are over 80 different recorded variations of Shakespeare’s name. In legal documents, works by his contemporaries, and even the historical record, his name appears as something different nearly every time. Sometimes it’s “Shakespeare,” of course, which is how we know him today. Sometimes he’s referred to as Shaxberd or Shappere. Why? We honestly have no idea, except that Elizabethan spelling rules were considerably less strict than they are today.
The man himself actually signed his name in different ways as well. It’s been recorded as Willm Shaksp, Wm Shakspe, and even William Shakspeare – but he never actually wrote William Shakespeare, the name by which he’s been known since his death.
Strange, right?
Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!
April 23, 2011 at 10:00 am | Posted in Shakespeare's Life, Special Events | 1 CommentWe may never know for sure if today is really Shakespeare’s birthday – but why let that stop us from celebrating?
Delicious-looking Bard-themed cake!*
We here at Shakespeare in Action wish the Bard a very happy 447th! This year we’ve been invited to participate in the Happy Birthday Shakespeare blog project, which is exactly what it sounds like – bloggers all over the world joining together to wish Will a happy one. Click here to find out more about this project and read the other blog posts! It is being run by the great people at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
We thought we’d honour the Bard by writing a little bit about why we love his plays, how we first encountered his language, and just what makes him so special to us.
Laboni Islam, Education & Outreach Coordinator:
I met Shakespeare in middle school, where some students put on a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was an acrobatic adaptation – the fairies sprung and flung off trampolines and vaulted over things.
In high school, I did what most students do, tracked the patterns of light and dark in Romeo and Juliet, deconstructed Macbeth’s ambition, contemplated poor Yorick’s skull – imbued each word, phrase, and passage with such meaning, knowing that a third of my final grade rest on how well I accomplished the task.
Then when I was on the flip side and teaching, we had an annual Shakespeare production. I worked with some amazing Grade 6, 7, and 8 students on four shows – The Tempest, Macbeth, As You Like It, and Henry IV I & II (abridged, of course – that was an ambitous year). There were many memorable moments, one of the funniest when, in the final fight, in the final scene, in the final performance of Macbeth, Macbeth’s exhausted sword split in half. Young Siward, slain and dead upon the ground, was generous enough to toss the stunned Macbeth his sword. Such fun!
And so it has continued.
I return to Shakespeare’s work time and time again because he was so perceptive – he paid attention to people. He understood a range of human motivations, actions, and experiences. He packaged it all into compelling stories and astute metaphors: hope, a lover’s staff; glory, a circle in the water; our life, a mingled yarn; the world, a stage. He [gave] to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.
Kathleen Keenan, Senior Administrative & Production Intern:
I can’t remember how or when I first encountered Shakespeare, but I know when I first started to really understand Shakespeare: grade 11 English class. We read Macbeth, and thanks to a great teacher I fell in love with this tale of witches, magic, murder and mayhem. (The previous year I had absolutely hated reading Romeo and Juliet.) Part of the reason our class loved this play so much was due to our teacher’s belief that Shakespeare should be read aloud and acted out in the classroom. We filmed our own version of the famous opening scene where Macbeth encounters the witches, and put together the soundtrack, costumes, and set design ourselves. We also spent a lot of time reading scenes from the play aloud and puzzling over what the words meant.
It’s now a few years later, and after several university courses in Shakespeare, a couple of fantastic play-going experiences (from the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival to student theatre at Queen’s University), and even the opportunity to teach a Shakespeare for Kids workshop, I still think the best thing about Shakespeare is how alive and fun his language can be. Shakespearean language is meant to be experienced, whether onstage, in film or just with a group of friends reading aloud.
And now, having seen Shakespeare in Action’s production of Romeo and Juliet more than a few times, I finally get the appeal of that particular play! And so I wish the Bard a very happy birthday – he’s enriched countless lives and given us plays to read, study and perform for many years to come.
Patricia Sarantakos, Creative Environment Intern:
Happy Birthday Shakespeare! Oh how you have touched my life! So, why do I love Shakespeare so much? My love for Shakespeare started in Grade 12, when my class had to read King Lear. At first I dreaded reading Shakespeare because I did not understand what he was trying to say! But my teacher got us excited about reading King Lear and broke every sentence down for us, making it understandable for the class. From that moment on, I began to love Shakespeare. What I love about his work is that it allows you to use your imagination and create your own interpretation of his stories. You can relate his stories to everyday life, even today. His words are beautiful- if only we could all describe our love for someone the way Shakespeare did!
I now work for a company whose focus is to make Shakespeare more understandable and enjoyable for students. I love seeing kids get excited about Shakespeare! We’ve laughed and cried with Shakespeare and will continue to dig through his stories for years to come!
Jaclyn Scobie Scoger, Senior Administrative & Production Intern:
It’s one thing to read Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. I first studied Shakespeare in High School for the required plays, but I never truly experienced Shakespeare until I was bringing alive his scripts onstage. That is when I truly felt the beauty of his words and poetry. It is like silk to speak those words. I did not understand the meaning of a seemingly foreign language when reading it in school, and without a connection to reading it and understanding, I did not feel the spark of passion inside myself toward it.
That all changed for me when I first spoke and brought to life the words written in front of me, without a script in hand, but free to be that character. I owned those words. And instead of seeming like a foreign language, and forcing myself to interpret and understand, I experienced his lines. I felt his lines. And to speak those melodic words…It opened a world to me that I continue to crave and search for opportunities to live again. It didn’t resonate from reading it, and it didn’t fully resonate with me to hear it performed by others.
All this to say: There is nothing like experiencing Shakespeare’s works for yourself. Pick up a play or sonnet and read it out, feel his words, for yourself. Look into the depth of the lines and what his words mean to you. It changed my life as an actor.
The Shakespeare in Action team obviously loves Shakespeare – he’s the inspiration behind our company, after all. But what’s great about the Bard is that each of us loves him for a different reason. He means so many things to so many people. Once again, happiest of birthdays, Shakespeare!
* Photo credit here.
Photo Friday: Portrait of a Shakespeare Edition
April 22, 2011 at 1:59 pm | Posted in Photo Friday, Shakespeare's Life | Leave a comment
The First Folio image of Shakespeare
As we found out yesterday, we don’t know very much about William Shakespeare the man. So does it surprise you to learn that we’re not actually sure what he looked like, either? (Probably not.) There are two images of Shakespeare that scholars accept as definite likenesses: the one pictured to the left of this paragraph, and a bust (basically, a small statue from the shoulders up) that lives in a church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown.
The picture to the left there is from the First Folio. The First Folio is a collection of most of Shakespeare’s plays that was put together in 1623 by two of Shakespeare’s theatre colleagues. We learned yesterday that Shakespeare died in 1616, so this engraving that appeared in the Folio was most likely done after his death. We don’t really know how accurate it is, but Ben Jonson, another playwright who knew Shakespeare and lived in the 17th century, claimed that it was a good likeness.
The First Folio is an amazing record of Shakespeare’s plays – without it, several of the plays probably would have faded away into obscurity. The Elizabethans weren’t always great at writing things down, remember, and plays in particular were usually not published or printed unless the author paid for it himself. So the fact that two people – Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues – collected his plays together after his death is pretty remarkable. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily know if the engraving that appears inside the Folio is accurate. It was done by artist Martin Droeshout.
There are some portraits that may be of Shakespeare – you have probably seen one or more of these, as these are the images used to represent Shakespeare in pop culture. The most famous is probably the Chandos portrait, which art historians think was painted in 1610. This means that the artist probably worked from life, or perhaps knew Shakespeare well enough to do it from memory. As with most things Shakespeare-related, we just can’t be sure!
As always, you can learn the basics about all this from Wikipedia, or check Bill Bryson’s great book about Shakespeare out of the library!
Shakespeare’s Birthday: A Tale of Mystery and Intrigue
April 21, 2011 at 10:33 pm | Posted in Shakespeare's Life, Special Events, Theatre History | Leave a commentAll right, dear readers, settle in for a quick history lesson. Got a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket? I’ll wait…
Yes, I did say in my last post that Shakespeare’s 447th birthday is this week. But! I didn’t give you a specific day, did I? And that’s because scholars just don’t know when William Shakespeare was really born! It might seem weird to us that things like actual days of birth went unrecorded back then – the information could have been lost (the Elizabethans were notoriously spotty record keepers and were just starting to collect all this data right around the time of the Bard’s birth) or just never registered with the authorities.
The original man of mystery?
In any case, scholars guess that Shakespeare’s birthday was April 23rd. Most babies at that time were baptized very quickly – just a few days after their birth. The Elizabethans celebrated all kinds of Saint’s Days, which were days honouring various saints (as you might have guessed), and babies were usually baptized on the first Saint’s Day after their birth.
We definitely know that Shakespeare was baptized on the 26th because, according to this nifty online resource, the baptismal records of the local Stratford church show the following name on April 26th, 1564:
Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare
That’s Latin for “William, son of John Shakespeare.” The 26th is not a Saint’s Day, but since we know for sure that Shakespeare was baptized on that day, we can count backwards and guess when he was born. Many scholars and historians in the past chose the 23rd of April because Shakespeare also died on that day, 52 years later in 1616. You have to admit, the symmetry is appealing. But really we have no idea what day was Shakespeare’s real birthday. We can only guess. Scholars around the world generally agree on the 23rd, and it is celebrated accordingly.
Whew – are you still with me after all that birthday information? There are plenty of websites where you can read all about the controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s life. There’s also a great, funny and easy-to-read book on the subject by Bill Bryson.
The truth is, as Bryson writes, we just don’t know much about Shakespeare at all. He wrote some of the world’s most famous, memorable, funny, moving and innovative plays, but he left hardly any marks of his own personality or life upon the world. We hardly know where he lived, what he thought, how he wrote or even how much time he spent with his family. That’s not necessarily unusual, since we don’t know a whole lot about other, similar figures from the same time period – as I mentioned, record keeping was spotty at best and downright nonexistent at worst. But it sure would be nice to know more about the man who gave us Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and all those other wonderful characters, wouldn’t it?
Nevertheless, just because we don’t know the man’s real birthday doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate! So come back on Saturday the 23rd for a special birthday post!
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