In certain cases you can see Shakespeare called a "bard".

He is considered one of the greatest writer and dramatist of England. He was successful during his lifetime since his troop was the official theatrical company, he made 37 plays, 2 major poems and 154 sonnets.

Elizabethan theatre :

Before Shakespeare's time, there was no fixed theatres as troops were traveling, the church was against theatres.

Then, from 1567 theatres were build starting with the RedLion.
The first theatre built exclusively for plays was called the Theatre (1575)

Elizabethan theatres became more and more popular and others were built during that time.

 Anyone could attend the performance, the poor sited next to the stage whereas rich people sited in the upper galleries.

The audience was ranging from royalty to prostitutes.

Since theatres were considered as bad places they were build outside of the city walls, and when the plague started to hit Europe theatres were deeply affected.

The specificities of the stage :

Since it was open-air plays were only during the afternoon, there is no settings, only a few props, the trap door is considered leading to "hell" and the upper stage was considered "heaven", there weren't any intervals even for performances that were very long.

About the actors :

They were all men, even for females parts, they were considered "shareholders" and owned stocks or shares in everything (text, costumes, props). Their pay depended on admission sales.

Actors had only about 3 weeks to practice new plays, in one week some troupes could perform 6 different plays.

Starting from 1594 two theatres were officially licensed for one specific troupe : the Lord Admiral's men performed at the theatre and the Lord Chamberlain men at the Rose. They were rival troupes.

Shakespeare's troupe was the King's men. They built the Globe in 1599 and most of the Shakespeare's plays were stage in it.

Shakespeare's text and language :
During his time, you only had one copy of the text and after you wrote a play for an acting company you no longer owned it.
They were not thought as work of literature, they were entertainment.
No copies of Shakespeare play have survived to us.
About half of Shakespeare plays were printed during his lifetime but he didn't supervise their publication.

The first full collection of Shakespeare's work was published in 1623, seven years after his death.

Some clarifications about Shakespeare's language :

It is not Old English : Language of Beowulf.
The technical old English didn't came until William the Conqueror.
It's not middle English either : Language of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
It is Early Modern English which is not too different from modern English, except for a few specific words and grammatical structures.

During that time everyone love the English language.
And since drama was a business, the more creative you were the more success you had.
There were no fixed grammar rules, punctuations keys or spelling.

The language was constantly evolving, that's why Shakespeare language reflects experimentation.

Shakespeare writing :

The prose : A theatrical rendition of the everyday speech.
Most of the time, lower-class characters are using it.
Upper-class characters can also speak in prose but they are consciously choosing this more colloquial type of speech.

Blank verse : It is poetry writer in regular metrical but unrhymed lines.
It's origin is the Roman and Greeks who started combining drama & poetry.
During Shakespeare's time it's was the norm, and since it was harder to  create rhymes in English they were largely used.

Rhymed verse : It's used in rhyming couplets : two lines of poetry that rhyme and usually have the same meter.
It's often used amongst noble characters : to signal the end of the scene or important moments.

Prosody : The foot is the basic metrical unit in English poetry. A foot is composed of 2 syllables.

The foot has a particular rhythmic or sound pattern : it alternate between stressed and unstressed syllables. There are four main patterns :

Iamb : daDUM x/
Trochee : Dadum /x
Spondee : DADUM / /
Pyrrhic : dadum x x

The IAMBIC PENTAMETER is a meter made of five iambs. It is the most commonly used meter in English poetry. It has the advantage of sounding natural to the ear, because the iamb is a natural



Laure-anne.vicent-aponte@ens-lyon.fr

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