Transcription
[Music] William Shakespeare is internationally recognized as one of the greatest literary geniuses in history. Although he died nearly 400 years ago, his plays and poetry are still studied by 50% of all school students around the world, both in his native English and in translation. And his writing has shaped the English language we know today.
But despite the global recognition of his work, very little is known for certain about the life of William Shakespeare. Most of the information we have about Shakespeare's life comes from his time living in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon in England. Today, Stratford is a town dedicated to Shakespeare's life and work. It's home to Shakespeare's birthplace and museum, and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Visitors come here from all over the world to learn more about Shakespeare's life and to experience his plays being performed live by some of the best Shakespearean actors in the world, the Royal Shakespeare Company.
So what do people think they know about Shakespeare's life? "We studied him for GCSE, but apart from that, you don't really know how much good this life. Know either about like foods work. It's like McFadden Romeo and Juliet, King King there, but you don't really learn really about him as a person. He was born in Stratford. I know that much. That's why we're here to have a look. He was a playwright, wrote got loads of plays, and married Anne Hathaway. Did he? Did he? Yeah. Did a mess, sir. He was a playwright and an actor, and he's from Stratford-upon-Avon, and he moved to London from a young age. And there's a few years of his life, I believe, where we don't know what happened to him. Six or seven years missing where we don't know what he did or where he was. Well, he was born here in Stratford, and he lived in London for quite a long time where he wrote plays and ran the company called the Globe Theatre, and we had twins and can't remember who was a narrative. Anne Hathaway's cottage last year."
[Music] So what are the facts? What do we actually know about Shakespeare? William Shakespeare was born on the 23rd of April, 1564, in this house in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John, was a successful glove maker and had a workshop in the house. William was one of eight children, four boys and four girls. He went to school in Stratford, but he left school by the age of 16. At 18, William married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, and they had three children: a daughter, Susanna, and twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died when he was just 11.
We know that in 1592, Shakespeare was living in London. He was writing plays and acting in theatres like the famous Globe Theatre, but we don't know when he left Stratford or how he became a playwright at this time. The theatre was extremely important, and by the time he died in Stratford at the age of 52, Shakespeare was a successful and wealthy man. His 37 plays had been performed for audiences from royalty to the poor in theatres in London and around the country.
[Music] The Globe used to be one of the biggest theatres in London, and since its restoration in 2000, audiences here have been able to experience what going to the theatre used to be like 400 years ago. It was a very different experience, as Jackie O'Hanlon from the RSC explains: "Theatre in Shakespeare's time was an incredibly popular form of entertainment. There wasn't anything else. There was no television. Everybody went to the theatre. Everybody. The tickets were cheap. All kinds of society, all kinds of people would be in a theatre together watching the play. The Globe held an audience of up to three thousand. They were really big events, and they were the kind of thing that you would take an afternoon off work to go to. In Shakespeare's time, the audience misbehaved. It shouted out. It threw things at the actors. Another difference is that women did not perform on stage when Shakespeare was writing plays. The other crucial difference about theatre in Shakespeare's time was that it happened during the day, so evening performances couldn't happen because it was dark. So a lot of our performances happened in the daytime, outside."
[Music] In 2011, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was transformed to provide the best possible venue for bringing Shakespeare to a wider audience. In this new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, everything has been brought much closer together. So the furthest seat from the stage is 15 metres away. In the old theatre, it was 24 metres, a really big difference. We wanted to create a sense that the audience and the actors are in the same room, that we're sharing this story together.
The Royal Shakespeare Company also works hard outside of the theatre to bring the work of Shakespeare to modern audiences in new and unusual ways. Last year, we launched a Twitter play called "Such Tweets Ro," based around Romeo and Juliet. Five actors played five key characters from the play and tweeted using 140 characters over a five-week period their journey through the play, Romeo and Juliet, but in modern language. It created this enormous new audience for Shakespeare, and that's what we're trying to do all of the time: is surprise audiences by who Shakespeare is and what he was writing about.
But the genius of Shakespeare is his use of the English language and the stories that he tells. Shakespeare uses about 20,000 words throughout his 37 plays. That's not a huge number today, but when he was writing, it was. And it's possibly not what the words are, but it's how creatively he uses those words. There is his genius. It's the way he placed his words next to each other that creates their beauty and their very unique meaning to us.
However, while most people have had to study Shakespeare at school, they rarely continue to read his work as adults. So what do we learn from his stories, and why are they so popular? "I think what we learn from Shakespeare, whether we read the plays or perform the plays or watch them as an audience member, is we learn about ourselves. I fundamentally believe that the reason the plays have sustained, have stayed alive for 400 years, is because they speak about us. They speak about the world we live in, each other."
These days, for many people, seeing Shakespeare performed in the theatre is reserved for a special occasion. People worry that they can't understand Shakespeare, but as Jackie O'Hanlon says, this should not be a barrier. "I will first of all look at a Shakespeare play and not immediately be able to understand it. So the first thing is to accept that's normal and good. And we find this a lot with students that we work with that have English as an additional language, that actually they will make more progress with Shakespeare than students who speak English as their first language because speakers of English as an additional language are used to learning new words all the time, and Shakespeare's just another language to learn."
And even if people are some unsure about Shakespearean language, most people can remember at least a few quotes, although not always correctly. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." "To be or not to be, that is the question." "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." "No reason not the need." "That's a good one. When you're shopping from King Lear." "All's well that ends well." "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." My mother used to quote that to me all the time. "I'm trying to pick a war. I can't." "To be or not to be" is the obvious one. "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse." "Shall I not compare thee to a summer's day?" "All right." "Oh, the last I knew him so well." "Yeah." "If music be the food of love, play on." That's a good one. "Is good on us." "A very good one."