The Author And His Times Essay Research

The Author And His Times Essay, Research Paper

THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

William Shakespeare lived in a time of great change and excitement

in England- a time of geographical discovery, international trade,

learning, and creativity. It was also a time of international

tension and internal uprisings that came close to civil war.

Under Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) and James I (reigned

1603-1625), London was a center of government, learning, and trade,

and Shakespeare’s audience came from all three worlds. His plays had

to please royalty and powerful nobles, educated lawyers and

scholars, as well as merchants, workers, and apprentices, many of whom

couldn’t read or write. To keep so many different kinds of people

entertained, he had to write into his plays such elements as clowns

who made terrible puns and wisecracks; ghosts and witches; places

for the actors to dance and to sing the hit songs of the time; fencing

matches and other kinds of fight scenes; and emotional speeches for

his star actor, Richard Burbage. There is very little indication

that he was troubled in any way by having to do this. The stories he

told were familiar ones, from popular storybooks or from English and

Roman history. Sometimes they were adapted, as Hamlet was, from

earlier plays that had begun to seem old-fashioned. Part of

Shakespeare’s success came from the fact that he had a knack for

making these old tales come to life.

When you read Hamlet, or any other Shakespearean play, the first

thing to remember is that the words are poetry. Shakespeare’s audience

had no movies, television, radio, or recorded music. What brought

entertainment into their lives was live music, and they liked to

hear words treated as a kind of music. They enjoyed plays with

quick, lively dialogue and jingling wordplay, with strongly rhythmic

lines and neatly rhymed couplets, which made it easier for them to

remember favorite scenes. These musical effects also made learning

lines easier for the actors, who had to keep a large number of roles

straight in their minds. The actors might be called on at very short

notice to play some old favorite for a special occasion at court, or

at a nobleman’s house, just as the troupe of actors in Hamlet is asked

to play The Murder of Gonzago.

The next thing to remember is that Shakespeare wrote for a theater

that did not pretend to give its audience an illusion of reality, like

the theater we are used to today. When a housewife in a modern play

turns on the tap of a sink, we expect to see real water come out of

a real faucet in something that looks like a real kitchen sink. But in

Shakespeare’s time no one bothered to build onstage anything as

elaborate as a realistic kitchen sink. The scene of the action had

to keep changing to hold the audience’s interest, and to avoid

moving large amounts of scenery, a few objects would be used to help

the audience visualize the scene. For a scene set in a kitchen,

Shakespeare’s company might simply have the cook come out mixing

something in a bowl. A housewife in an Elizabethan play would not even

have been a woman, since it was considered immoral for women to appear

onstage. An older woman, like Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, would be

played by a male character actor who specialized in matronly roles,

and a young woman like Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia would be played

by a teenage boy who was an apprentice with the company. When his

voice changed, he would be given adult male roles. Of course, the

apprentices played not only women, but also pages, servants,

messengers, and the like. It was usual for everyone in the company,

except the three or four leading actors, to “double,” or play more

than one role in a play. Shakespeare’s audience accepted these

conventions of the theater as parts of a game. They expected the words

of the play to supply all the missing details. Part of the fun of

Shakespeare is the way his plays guide us to imagine for ourselves the

time and place of each scene, the way the characters behave, the parts

of the story we hear about but don’t see. The limitations of the

Elizabethan stage were significant, and a striking aspect of

Shakespeare’s genius is the way he rose above them.

Theaters during the Elizabethan time were open-air structures,

with semicircular “pits,” or “yards,” to accommodate most of the

audience. The pit could also serve as the setting for cock fights

and bear baiting, two popular arena sports of the time.

The audience in the pit stood on three sides of the stage. Nobles,

well-to-do commoners, and other more “respectable” theatergoers sat in

the three tiers of galleries that rimmed the pit. During breaks in the

stage action- and sometimes while the performance was underway-

peddlers sold fruit or other snacks, wandering thro

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