How to Read (and Understand) Shakespeare!

hello everyone and welcome back to the study chute project channel today we are going to be talking about William Shakespeare dun dun dun except it's not going to be intimidating we're gonna look them in the eye and say Willy we're not afraid of you anyway my name is Jack Edwards today we are going to be tackling the work of William Shakespeare and welcome to the channel the work and lasting impact of William Shakespeare is absolutely everywhere if you've ever said that you've been on a wild goose chase then you're quoting Romeo and Juliet the phrase love is blindness from The Merchant of Venice to kill them with kindness or break the ice is quoting The Taming of the Shrew and if you ever mentioned the green-eyed monster that comes from a fellow in fact even the response fair play it can first be found in shakespeare's the tempest and the first ever your momjo actually originates from Titus Andronicus Chiron says thou hast undone our mother to which Aaron replies villain I have done thy mother so in today's video I'm going to be sharing a basic introduction to William Shakespeare and his work including the sonnets and then I'm going to be giving some advice as to how you can actually understand the works of Shakespeare so I'll put the timestamps on the screen now so you can skip the bits if you want to but for now let's get started on a basic introduction to William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was born in stratford-upon-avon in England in 1564 to Mary Arden and John Shakespeare William later married Anne Hathaway and had his first baby with her when he was just 18 this was followed by a serf twin so by the age of 21 he was fathered three children eventually he decided to pursue a career in London and so he moved there to join Lord Chamberlain's Men which was a theatre company and his plays proved incredibly popular another plays that William Shakespeare wrote can be separated out into three categories we have the history plays which are realistic stories of historical figures we have the tragedies which usually end in a lot of deaths especially that of the tragic hero and then finally we have the comedies which end in marriages or reunions now he wrote these plays under two different monarchs which does actually impacts the way that he writes the history plays for instance were written in Elizabethan times and feature a lot of Tudor propaganda for example by depicting Richard the third as evil and a lot the comedies were also written under Lizabeth the first later King James the first came to the throne and a lot of Shakespeare's mature tragedies were written in Jacobean times for example hello King Lear and Macbeth throughout his career he also wrote a lot of amazing poetry for example Venus and Adonis which includes so many sexual innuendos for example graze on my lips and if those hills be dry stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie and he also wrote a lot of sonnets which are 14 line poems they're written in iambic pentameter which will come on to him a little bit later on and they also have a vaulter which basically is the Italian word for turn and means a change in the mood the tone the plots of the poem now there are actually two different forms of sonnets and Shakespeare was the pioneer for one of them so one is the pitch rocking sonnet which has an octave cestus structure so eight lines with a rhyme scheme followed by six lines with a different rhyme scheme and a Volta on the ninth line this follows a rhyming structure of a BBA a BBA CD CD CD but then we have the Shakespearean sonnet which is different so a Shakespearean sonnet is three quatrains and then a couplet so the rhyme scheme is a b a b c d c d e f e f g g and the vaulter is on the couplet these are the main themes to look out for in Shakespeare's sonnets firstly we have the passage of time yet do thy worst old time despite thy wrong my love shall in my verse ever live young procreation thou should sprint more not let that copy die desire from fairest creatures we desire increase sexuality no want of conscience hold is that I call her love for whose dear love I rise and fall there's also the figure of the Dark Lady then will I swear beauty her self is black and all they foul that by complexion lack now these poems are written in iambic pentameter so to break that down basically an iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable and then the word pentameter tells us that each line has five sets of these sets of two syllables that I am so in total there are ten syllables per line and it makes this sound dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum so there you can see that the second syllable is always the one that's stressed for example if muse be the food of love play on now the plays also include a lot of I am bit pentameter but they aren't necessarily meant to be read in that really repetitive structure so take this extract from Richard the third for example you wouldn't read it like this now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York and all the clouds that lourd upon our house you wouldn't read or perform it like that it's just the way that it's written so usually in the place people of high birth or high status or high worth speak in iambic pentameter and this is especially found in soliloquy so soliloquies are basically when the character shares their innermost thoughts to the audience where no one else on the stage can hear them on the contrary we have the more colloquial talk of people of lower status or lower class and they speak in prose or at least that's the way that Shakespeare wrote the plays so that you could tell who is of a higher status and a higher class so that's a bit of an introduction and now I'm going to be talking about how to read Shakespeare and for this I'm going to be focusing on the plays so first and foremost it is important to note that the plays were meant to be performed not read in fact even the actors who were Shakespeare's contemporaries weren't often given the whole script to read they were just given their lines so that means that the best way to understand these plays is by reading them aloud to yourself or by watching adaptations and performances of them hearing actors perform these lines will give you a better insight into the tone that the line is meant to be read in also the way that these actors will deliver their lines makes it much more clear a who's speaking and B when there are jokes or witticisms I'll put a list of places on the screen now where you can watch performances and see some more adaptations another bonus of modern adaptations and performances for example by the RSC is that they often challenge the traditional impressions that we get from plays for example the most modern version of Othello that the RSC performed to cast a character who is typically assumed to be racist as a black actor which was awesome and so interesting cuz it really flips everything on its head also some of the most modern adaptations include rap battles and dance offs and it's just chaotic and a wild time and I would thoroughly recommend now the next thing I know Perce a lot of people off is the language of Shakespeare however organisations like no fair Shakespeare provide what is essentially a modern translation of Shakespeare's writing right next to the original script and this helps you to understand exactly what each line is trying to tell you so you can really focus on the language that Shakespeare uses alternatively something that I personally like to do is to read a synopsis of what's happening on each page before I read it the Oxford and Arden editions of Shakespeare plays are especially good for this and I usually have a really basic synopsis of what's about to happen on the page you're about to read so you're still reading it in a way where the plot is slowly fed to you like you're not getting the whole thing in one go and ruining it completely but you really really focus on the language and how that plot unfolds rather than what is actually going on these additions often also include definitions of certain complicated words or obsolete words that we don't really use anymore as well as allusions to mythology and folklore now when I did a module at university studying Shakespeare one thing that my professors would always say to us is that your first reading of a Shakespeare play is always just receiving the plot and it's only really upon rereading that you can truly appreciate and acknowledge and understand the artistry that goes into crafting each line it's really incredible and it's also important to read slowly slow and steady wins the race it's a marathon not a sprint granted most Shakespeare plays actually aren't that long it won't take you anywhere near as long as it would take you to read a novel but if you only are consuming the plot then you're getting about 20% of the artistry that Shakespeare puts into those plays another thing to appreciate which I slightly touched on earlier is the fact that there are loads and loads of allusions to Roman and Greek mythology folklore and history for example the War of the Roses an example of how allusions to Mythology sort of embellished the plays that they are included in could be when Iago is talking to a fellow and he's deceiving him he is being very very two-faced and as the subtle irony in the fact that the Argo swears by Janus now Janus is the two-faced God and so you can kind of see there how Shakespeare is alluding to his deception and the misinterpretation of events now if it is the plot that you're struggling with you could try watching some modern adaptations and interpretations of Shakespeare through modern films for instance The Lion King is actually based on Hamlet she's the man is based on twelfth night's West Side Story by Romeo and Juliet and ten Things I Hate About You is based on the Taming of the Shrew alternatively if you're totally new to Shakespeare and don't know where to start then Othello has the least characters so maybe that's a way of understanding it I would also say that Macbeth is probably one of the most straightforward plots and research shows that a midsummer night's dream is the most performed and therefore most popular Shakespeare plays that could also be a good starting point although it is one of the comedies and the comedies are usually quite deliberately convoluted and bizarre and they have a lot of kind of witticisms and jokes which on ways that obvious on the first reading especially if you're not used to reading Shakespeare so that's just something to look out for and also don't get me wrong I did not pick up on loads and loads of the puns or the witticisms or any of the you know imagery on first read it really takes time to keep reading keep working on it and improving reading Shakespeare is actually something you can improve that similarly if you are just starting out then the sonnets could actually be a really great place to start because they're quite enclosed 14 line tightly written poems so that could be a good starting point for getting used to I am bit pentameter Shakespeare style the way that he uses imagery and then think about the philosophical implications of what he is suggesting so I am going to leave you with that and conclude this video thank you so so much for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope this helps to unlock the incredible world of Shakespeare's writing because it truly is incredible it can be intimidating it can be difficult to read a hundred percent it can be difficult to read in fact it is difficult to read but it's so rewarding once you start to really appreciate the artistry and the crafting that goes behind it so thank you very much for watching I've been Jack Edwards make sure you subscribe to my channel and also the study tree project channel where we have brandy videos going up every single day at 6 p.m. thanks for watching but baby

Channel: The StudyTube Project

Views: 33,400

Keywords: shakespeare, william shakespeare, how to read shakespeare, understand shakespeare, study shakespeare, jack edwards

Id: rxj5teZ-FFw

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020