Shakespeare For Beginners

Shakespeare For Beginners

Shakespeare For Beginners

Shakespeare For Beginners

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Overview

Despite the reshifting of values that has affected every aspect of life in the 21st century, William Shakespeare still stands as the greatest writer the English language has ever produced. Even so, many people have never read him. If you have never read “the Bard”—or if you’ve tried and given up in frustration—you need Shakespeare For Beginners.

Author Brandon Toropov opens with the observation that Shakespeare’s genius is not in his (or England’s) history, it’s in his words, most notably, his plays—in his brilliant stories, unforgettable characters, and the impossible beauty of his language. So, Shakespeare For Beginners skips the historical foreplay and goes straight to Shakespeare’s plays. The book offers clear, concise descriptions and plot summaries of each play; it lists key phrases and important themes, explains the main ideas behind each work and features excerpt of important passages (with explanatory notes on tough words.) And it is the only ‘entry level’ book available outside Great Britain that covers all of Shakespeare’s plays. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781939994226
Publisher: For Beginners
Publication date: 06/17/2008
Series: For Beginners
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 224
File size: 19 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Brandon Toropov is a playwright, author, and confirmed Shakespeare fanatic who lives in Massachusetts. His plays include "Seven Affidavits on Authority", produced in Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, in 2000; "An Undivided Heart", workshopped at the National Playwrights Conference in 1994; and "The Job Search", produced at the Manhattan Punch Line in 1987. As an actor, he has performed in productions or adaptations of "The Tempest", "A Midsummer Night’s Dream", and "Macbeth". He has authored over a dozen books on popular culture, business, and religion, including Who Was Eleanor Rigby?, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Legends, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Koran

Joe Lee is an illustrator, cartoonist, writer, and clown. With a degree from Indiana University centering on Medieval History, Joe is also a graduate of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey’s Clown College. He worked for some years as a circus clown. He is the illustrator of a baker’s dozen of For Beginners books including, Barack Obama, [Howard] Zinn, Shakespeare, Postmodernism, Deconstruction, Eastern Philosophy, and Global Warming among others. Joe lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife Mary Bess, son Brandon, cat George, and the terriers (or rather terrors) Max and Jack.

Read an Excerpt

SHAKESPEARE FOR BEGINNERS


By Brandon Toropov, JOE LEE

For Beginners LLC

Copyright © 1999 Brandon Toropov
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-22-6



CHAPTER 1

Welcome To Shakespeare


For more than 350 years, William Shakespeare has been the world's most popular playwright. On stage, in movies, and on television, his plays are watched by eager audiences all over the world. People read his plays again and again for the sheer pleasure.

That is where Shakespeare for Beginners comes in. Even if you've had trouble with Shakespeare in the past, Shakespeare for Beginners will make him accessible—and fun. This book will help you enjoy and appreciate Shakespeare quickly, without feeling like you're doing 'home-work' to prepare for him.

Simple, really: For the most part, we will let the stories tell themselves.

Shakespeare was capable —is capable— of stopping people in their tracks and persuading them to listen to a story. The writing Shakespeare is best known for is work for the theater, and theater is, first and foremost, direct.

Newcomers to Shakespeare are often surprised to find that his plays are filled with action, his characters are believable, and the situations they find themselves in are exactly like our own—greed, power, ambition, love, jealousy, old age, racism.

People haven't changed much in the last four centuries. It is both comforting and terrifying to see aspects of your own personality magnified by Shakespeare's genius in the 'overthinking' Prince of Denmark, the jealous Moor of Venice, the noble Cordelia, or the bitchy Kate. And the language, once you relax in its presence, is downright thrilling.


Five Things You Should Know About Shakespeare's Theatrical World

1: Prose and poetry were both used by dramatists in Shakespeare's day. Rhyming couplets (two lines that rhyme) often alerted the audience to the end of a scene, or to a new situation or locale in a scene to come. (Rhyme could also occur within the scenes, of course.)

2: The women's parts were played by men. Ingenues (young girls) were usually played by boys.

3: There were no 'blackouts'—no time when the 'lights' (actually, candles) went out. So any time a character died in front of the audience, the body had to be carried off the stage.

4: The departure of all characters from the stage signaled the end of a scene; and, according to the convention of the time, a character could not take part in both the ending of one scene and the beginning of the next one.

5: The audiences represented a broad cross-section of English society, so successful writers like Shakespeare had to write on at least two levels; they had to appeal to the best—and least—educated people in the audience; they had to know how to use both rude'n'crude humor and refined classical allusions. So the plays themselves have a 'built in' aid to understanding.

* Allusions are sort of literary 'name-dropping'; you mention a name from Greek mythology or a phrase from a famous poem, and the truly refined reader 'gets' it.

Before we go further, let's have a look at the man himself.

What do people really know about this guy?

Not much. He was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon, England. His father John was a glover who was named to several important town posts, and may have had financial difficulties later in life. William wasted no time getting started in life. At the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children: Susanna (born in 1583), and the twins Hamnet and Judith (1585). (Hamnet died in 1596.) Nobody is certain exactly what Shakespeare did between 1583 and 1592. Somewhere along the line, he became an actor and began writing plays. In 1592, a jealous playwright named Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in print, and made fun of the idea of an actor writing plays. Shakespeare apparently wasn't too impressed by Mr. Green's criticism; he continued to write and perform, and he became an important figure in the London literary and theatrical scene. He published two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). A writer named Francis Meres took notice of Shakespeare in 1598, listing twelve of his plays and complimenting his privately circulated poetry. The well-connected acting company with which Shakespeare was associated, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, built a theater in 1598 called the Globe; he owned an interest in the playhouse.

In 1603, when James I became King, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men. Over the years, some of Shakespeare's plays were published in unauthorized editions (but many of his plays were never published during his lifetime); a collection of his sonnets appeared in 1609. After the Globe burned down in 1613, Shakespeare seems to have stopped writing and performing. He spent the last years of his life at Stratford, in a home he'd bought in 1597 called New Place. He died in 1616 and was buried in Stratford. Shakespeare's life was so unspectacular that some people have found it hard to believe that such an 'ordinary' man with so little formal schooling could create the greatest body of work in the English language. (As if genius could be taught in school!) Most scholars now accept the fact that Shakespeare did indeed write his own plays.

Those are pretty slim pickings for the biography of a genius. Fortunately, it is Shakespeare's writing, not his personal life, that has captivated audiences for nearly four centuries. That writing is the Shakespeare we'll be looking at in the following pages.


In most cases textual excerpts and act and scene divisions reflect Nicolaus Delius's seven volume Works of Shakespeare (1854-1860); spelling and punctuation have occasionally been altered to reflect modern usage.

"So how does the book work?"

Shakespeare for Beginners examines the plays first, in roughly the order that we think they were written—we can't be certain. (This book does not include the collaborations, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII.)

This book does not divide the plays into categories (such as comedies, histories, and tragedies), since that approach can be misleading. Shakespeare, himself, did not use any consistent series of labels for the plays he wrote, and pigeonholing them can mean overlooking important parallels between plays that don't happen to fall into the same category.

Shakespeare for Beginners provides summaries of each work, a list of key phrases and themes, brief assessments of main ideas and important concepts in the text, excerpts of key passages, and short but insightful quotes from some of the most influential critics.

Obviously, this book is not meant to replace the works themselves.

A book summarizing the work of a writer usually suggests that you go out and read the author's books. Shakespeare for Beginners, however, will not plead with you to read Shakespeare's plays—unless you feel like it. Plays are meant to be experienced in person, not read. Dogmatic English instructors force their students to read Shakespeare's plays—then they wonder why the students consider Shakespeare boring.

Any play can be boring if you're forced read it to yourself. A theatrical script is like a roadmap showing the way toward a final work of art-it is not the work of art itself. Plays are designed to be performed. If Shakespeare had intended his plays to be read privately rather than acted, he would have seen to it that they were published. As far as we can tell, Shakespeare had no hand in the printing or editing of the dramas he wrote.

If you really want to enjoy Shakespeare's dramatic work, get out to a theater and see a production of the play ... or rent a good video.

(Or get a bunch of friends together and read the script out loud.)

* Once you see the play, you'll have no problem making sense of all of the characters, exits, entrances, and stage directions. But reading a play "cold," dragging yourself through page after page, disoriented and bored-that is an insult to Shakespeare's genius.

The poems, of course, are another matter. They do demand one-on-one attention. Then again, they're probably not what most people think of when they think of Shakespeare!


A Few Words About The Bard's use of language

Don't worry if at first you have trouble understanding Shakespeare's language. Everybody does. Then, in no time at all, like listening to a dialect or 'accent' from another part of the country, the fog clears and you wonder why you had any trouble—it's obvious once you get the hang of it. A few helpful 'tricks:'

* Again: See the play: A good actor can communicate the meaning of a phrase even when you don't understand the dictionary meaning of each individual word.

* Assume (or pretend) that you understand what's being said—and 90% of the time you will.

* Stick with it: In no time, you'll run into enough captivating stuff to make you want to "march unto the breach" again and again. Later on, if you like, you can use footnotes and glossaries to your heart's content. A fat encyclopedia could be written about the Bard's verbal style and influence, but this book isn't it.


And About Blank Verse ...

As Shakespeare's career progresses, his proficiency in the tensyllable blank – that is, unrhyming — verse form becomes breath-taking. (You probably remember blank verse from school: da-DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH da DAH.) The Bard's early efforts at verse are often stiff, forced, and monotonous; the middle period shows confident power and expansion; and the final plays demonstrate an amazing ease and fluidity. Look at these examples, which show the change, over two decades, from block-like, self-contained ten- syllable sentences to shifting, smooth-flowing currents of meaning.

* Early 1590s: (Note: "beldam" means "old hag") Lay hands upon these traitors and their trash! Beldam, I think we watch'd you at an inch. (Henry VI, Part Two, act I, scene iv)

* Late 1590s: You have conspir'd against our royal person, Join'd with an enemy proclaim'd, and from his coffers Receiv'd the golden earnest of our death. (Henry V, act II, scene ii)

* Around 1610: But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded, I here could pluck his Highness' frown upon you And justify you traitors. At this time I will tell no tales. (The Tempest, act V, scene i)


Three Cool Things About Shakespeare's English

1:When Shakespeare began his career, the English language was flexible and still developing. Shakespeare made the most of the situation, displaying dazzling innovations like a great jazz improviser: Shakespeare turns nouns into verbs, links adjectives together to form new combinations, and borrows words from other languages.

2: Shakespeare's vocabulary is big: 21,000 words plus. Not only can't a modern audience 'understand' every word, Shakespeare's audience couldn't understand every word! Shakespeare often chose his words to take advantage of their newness, to make us look at a situation in a new way, and to get the meaning from the context. In other words, he wants you to loosen up and follow him, not sit on each line with a dictionary.

3: Shakespeare often uses what poets call personification—giving human attributes to non-humans. In Shakespeare, a tree may be angry, the moon may blush, the morning may have eyes ... in most cases, that is not meant to be taken literally—it is as if the moon blushed, or as if the morning had eyes.


Twenty Words That Will Make Shakespeare More Accessible

The most dangerous words in Shakespeare aren't the unfamiliar ones, but the ones that seem familiar, but really aren't. They sound straightforward to our ear, but they carried very different meanings for the audiences of the Bard's day. Here are twenty of the trickiest words you'll find in Shakespeare:

'a: he

an, and: if

awful: capable of inspiring awe (country name): king or queen (monarchs are often referred to as the nations they lead)

dear: significant, costly

fond: foolish

get: bring into existence

head: army; source

honest: chaste; virtuous; authentic

his: its (Shakespeare hardly ever uses the possessive its)

humor: one of the four bodily fluids (choler, blood, phlegm, melancholy) regarded as determining tempera ment depending on their proportion; mood; outlook

marry: by the Virgin Mary (mild oath)

mere: utter

nice: trifling, silly; fastidious

rub: (as a verb) to strike against something small; (as a noun) an obstacle (both meanings come from bowling, a game that seems to have appealed greatly to Shakespeare)

power: military force

pretend: to intend; to assert; to claim

sad: serious

still: always

tell: to count

There are other deceptive words, of course, but these are some of the most easily misunderstood. As for obviously unfamiliar expressions, your best bet, after seeing a performance of the play, is to track down a good annotated text of the play in question.

In his best moments, Shakespeare is alive, more alive, perhaps, than any other writer who's ever lived. But don't take my word for—it see for yourself.

And now, on with the show ...

CHAPTER 2

The Plays


WHERE LIES THE SCENE?

Verona and Milan, and a forest close to Mantua.

WHAT HAPPENS?

Two friends, Valentine and Proteus, the gentlemen of the title, prepare to take their leave of each other. Valentine is bound for the court of the Duke of Milan; Proteus, in love with Julia, will stay in Verona in hopes of winning her affections. Upon arriving in Milan, Valentine meets and falls in love with Silvia, the Duke's daughter. Proteus, having himself been ordered to Milan by his father, learns from Valentine that he (Valentine) and Silvia, are planning to elope — inasmuch as the Duke wishes Silvia to wed the wealthy dolt Thurio. Valentine asks for his friend's help in arranging things. The problem: Proteus has fallen instantly in love with Silvia. Julia, still in Verona and unaware of Proteus's newfound passion in Milan, leaves disguised as a boy, hoping to find him Proteus tells the Duke of Milan about Valentine's plan to escape with Silvia and get married. Valentine is banished. Proteus pretends to help Thurio win the affections of Silvia. A band of outlaws captures Valentine and names him as their leader. Julia arrives, in disguise, from Verona. After surmising what Proteus is up to, she wins a place in his service by pretending to be a boy. Julia, acting as Proteus's page, is sent to bestow a gift on Silvia — a ring that Julia had given to Proteus. Silvia refuses it. Silvia makes her escape from Milan and sets out to join Valentine. She is apprehended by members of the wandering band of outlaws, but Proteus and his "page" rescue her. Proteus proves himself once and for all to be a cad and a bounder by preparing to force himself on Silvia, but Valentine, who has been hiding himself nearby, intervenes. In one of the strangest moments in all of Shakespeare, Valentine accepts his friend's apology, then offers him his beloved, Silvia. Julia, disguised as the page, swoons. Thanks to a ring she is wearing, her true identity is discovered. She, too, forgives Proteus for no discernable reason. The Duke materializes, having been taken prisoner by the forest outlaws. He grants a pardon to anyone in need of one and gives his blessing to the love of Valentine and Silvia. Both couples live happily ever after.


WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

Some scholars feel The Two Gentlemen of Verona to be a strong candidate as Shakespeare's first piece of professional playwriting. If it isn't the Bard's first effort, it is certainly one of his earliest pieces of dramatic work, and it shows. Although certain elements of the play are echoed in other memorable comedies of his — the potentially all-consuming nature of love, the constancy of young women in love when compared to the young men who pursue them, the device of an ingenue's assuming the guise of a young boy — these are not handled with quite the same poise and precision as elsewhere. Truth be told, the play has all the hallmarks of an apprentice work. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, although it boasts high moments from such characters as the loving Julia and the plain-spoken clown Launce, is neither a particularly strong piece of writing nor a very funny comedy. It's generally considered an early foray into areas that would be traveled more profitably later in the writer's career.


LINES TO LISTEN FOR

I have no other but a woman's reason: I think him so, because I think him so. (I, ii)

O hateful hands, to tear such loving words! Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey, And kill the bees that yield it with your stings! (I, ii)

Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold, And that I love him not as I was wont: O, but I love his lady too too much, And that's the reason I love him so little. (II, iv)

Time is the nurse and breeder of all good.(III, i)

I'll force thee yield to my desire! (V, iv)

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. (V, iv)


THE CRITICS' CORNER

"It is the general opinion that (The Two Gentlemen of Verona) abounds with weeds, and there is no one, I think, will deny, who peruses it with attention, that it is adorned with several poetical flowers such as the hand of a Shakespeare alone could have raised." (Benjamin Victor)

"In this play there is a strange mixture of knowledge and ignorance of care and negligence." (Samuel Johnson)

"When it is true to itself the comedy insists on both the importance and the relativity of love." (Anne Barton)


(Continues...)

Excerpted from SHAKESPEARE FOR BEGINNERS by Brandon Toropov, JOE LEE. Copyright © 1999 Brandon Toropov. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Who Is Shakespeare?,
The Plays,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Henry VI (all three parts),
Richard III,
The Comedy of Errors,
Titus Andronicus,
The Taming of the Shrew,
Love's Labour's Lost,
Romeo and Juliet,
Richard II,
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
King John,
The Merchant of Venice,
Henry IV (both parts),
Much Ado About Nothing,
Henry V,
Julius Caesar,
Twelfth Night,
As You Like It,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Hamlet,
Troilus and Cressida,
All's Well That Ends Well,
Measure for Measure,
King Lear,
Othello,
Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus,
Timon of Athens,
Pericles,
Cymbeline,
The Winter's Tale,
The Tempest,
The Poems,
Venus and Adonis,
The Rape of Lucrece,
The Sonnets,
The Phoenix and the Turtle,
Bibliography,
Cast of Characters,

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