William Shakespeare and the English Theatre

 

William Shakespeare is probably the greatest playwright who has ever lived, was born in England in 1564 at the beginning of a period often called "the golden age of English literature". We actually know very little about the private life of Shakespeare, although his thirty seven plays are famous throughout the world and have been translated into many different languages. We do know that he was the son of a fairly wealthy merchant and is believed to have been born on April 23. As a middle class child, he would have had a grammar school education which focused on the classics. Part of his education would have been learning by heart texts from the works of the great classical authors and his plays contain many references to characters from their works. His plays also show a knowledge of languages other than Greek and Latin. In one of his plays, Henry V, for example, there is a scene in French.
Shakespeare married at an early age a woman by the name of Anne Hathaway and had three children including twins Judith and Hamnet. Very little is known about his family life except that his son, Hamnet, died at the age of twelve. Shakespeare's plays are full of fascinating characters and are obviously the work of someone who understood the theatre. In fact, he was an actor himself and played some of the smaller roles in his own plays including that of the ghost in Hamlet. Many great writers and composers are not popular with their own generation, but Shakespeare's plays were loved by his fellow Elizabethans and attracted large audiences.
In Shakespeare's time almost everyone went to the theatre. Tickets were cheap and plays were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Theatres like the Globe were open air, very large and built in a circular shape. The cheapest tickets were a penny and the people who bought these did not have a seat but just sat or stood on the ground in front of the stage. They were known as "groundlings". The most expensive seats were three pence. These were close to the stage and the people who sat here did so, not because they had the best view of the play, but because they wanted to be seen themselves. There were other forms of entertainment, such as bear baiting, going on nearly and so if the play was not entertaining, the members of the audience would start talking loudly or just get up and leave. People selling food would walk through the theatre during the performance. Shakespeare knew that he had to appeal to a wide range of people and so his plays have a lot of variety. A lot of the language is very learned and this would appeal to the most educated members of his audience, but there are also many scenes of high comedy, written specially for the groundlings.
The plots of Shakespeare's plays are not original. He used material from other writers both living and dead and he also used stories from British history and classical sources. Although he "borrowed" from many different sources, he was able to take the material and transform it into great theatrical works, which not only were popular with his contemporaries, but have stood the test of time and over three hundred years after his death are performed regularly in countries all over the world.