Shakespeare: Bryson Flashcards
(38 cards)
Double significance of 1564?
Plague, however, remained the darkest scourge. Just under three months after William’s birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic incepit pestis, ‘Here begins plague’, beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one.
Compare the transition to Protestantism / Catholicism in England / France.
Though it was an age of huge religious turmoil, and although many were martyred, on the whole the transition to a Protestant society proceeded reasonably smoothly, without civil war or wide–scale slaughter. In the forty–five years of Elizabeth’s reign, fewer than two hundred Catholics were executed. This compares with eight thousand Protestant Huguenots
What was the national preoccupation Shakespeare often wrote about?
Elizabeth’s succession.
Most people were ‘church papists’. Meaning?
‘Church Papists’ or ‘cold statute Protestants’–prepared to support Protestantism so long as required, but happy and perhaps even quietly eager to become Catholics again if circumstances altered.
Describe the social hierarchy of Elizabethan England and the law associated with it
Many New Heifers Chewing Grass Can Bring Your Agricultural Crops to Life.
monarch
nobles
high clerics
gentlemen
citizens–which then signified wealthier merchants and the like
the bourgeoisie (merchants, traders)
yeomen–that is, small farmers
–and last came artisans and common labourers.
Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what. A person with an income of £ 20 a year was permitted to don a satin doublet but not a satin gown.
What do we know about John Shakespeare?
He was a high Bailiff.John was a popular and respected fellow. In 1556 he took up the first of many municipal positions when he was elected borough ale taster. He was prosecuted for money lending.
Who was Shakespeare’s mother?
Mary Arden. She came from a prominent family and her father was a farmer.
What was the main thrust of the school curriculum (grammar)?
Reading, writing and reciting Latin.
With whom did Shakespeare have which children?
Anne Hathaway had three children with William Shakespeare–Susanna in May 1583, and the twins Judith and Hamnet in early February 1585–but all the rest is darkness.
Describe the population trend in London
In nearly every year for at least two and a half centuries, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing.
What is paradoxical about Shakespeare’s treatment of suicide?
As Professor Harry Levin of Harvard has noted, Shakespeare condemned suicide in plays like Hamlet, where it would conflict with sixteenth–century Christian dogma, but treated it as ennobling in his Roman and Egyptian plays, where it was appropriate (and safe) to suggest as much.
What happened in 1587 and then 1588?
Name the significant son.
Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth. She was executed in February 1587. Killing a fellow monarch, however threatening, was a grave act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth.
(NOTE: eventually, Mary’s son James took throne)
Why was the defeat of the Spanish armada important?
The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a …. of ………. in E…… that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the c……… and p…. to amodnmc the …. and build a gl…. ……, beginning almost immediately with ….. ……. .
The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confidence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, beginning almost immediately with North America.
Describe theatres in England at that time. In what sense were they new and when / what was ‘the first true playhouse’?
Theatres as dedicated spaces of entertainment were a new phenomenon in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Previously players had performed in inn yards or the halls of great homes, or other spaces normally used for other purposes. London’s first true playhouse appears to have been the Red Lion, built in 1567 in Whitechapel by an entrepreneur named John Brayne.
What contradiction does Bryson point to in theatregoers?
That an audience that could be moved to tears one day by a performance of Doctor Faustus could return the next to the same space and be just as entertained by the frantic deaths of helpless animals may say as much about the age as any single statement could.
Who licensed all dramatic works?
The Master of the Revels licensed all dramatic works (at a cost of seven shillings per licence) and made sure that companies performed in a manner that he considered respectful and orderly.
How were theatrical techniques evolving?
Plays, even the solemn ones, traditionally ended with a jig as a kind of bonus entertainment. It was a time of rapid evolution for theatrical techniques. As Stanley Wells has written: ‘Plays became longer, more ambitious, more spectacular, more complex in construction, wider in emotional range, and better designed to show off the talents of their performers.’ Acting styles became less bombastic. A greater naturalism emerged in the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime–much of which he helped to foster.
Describe the golden age of theatre.
The golden age of theatre lasted only about the length of a good human lifetime, but what a wondrously prolific and successful period it was. Between the opening of the Red Lion in 1567 and the closing of all the theatres by the Puritans seventy–five years later, London’s playhouses are thought to have attracted fifty million paying customers, something like ten times the entire country’s population in Shakespeare’s day. To prosper, a theatre in London needed to draw as many as two thousand spectators a day–about 1 per cent of the city’s population–two hundred or so times a year, and to do so repeatedly against stiff competition.
Describe ‘Venus and Adonis’
(+ a…… flower)
Written in narrative form, Venus and Adonis was rich and decidedly racy for its day, though tame compared with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains eighteen rapes and a great deal of pillage. Shakespeare threw out most of the violence but played on themes–love, lust, death, the transient frailty of beauty–that spoke to Elizabethan tastes and ensured the poem’s popularity.
The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of Love; of her unrequited love; and of her attempted seduction of Adonis, an extremely handsome young man, who would rather go hunting. The poem is pastoral, and at times erotic, comic and tragic. It contains discourses on the nature of love, and observations of nature.
After Adonis is killed by the wild boar, Venus creates the anemone flower from his blood. To some, this flower has come to represent the goddess’s short-lived lover.
What led to Marlowe’s death at 29?
Marlowe went drinking with three men of doubtful character at the house of a widow, Eleanor Bull, in Deptford in south–east London. There, according to a subsequent coroner’s report, a dispute arose over the bill, and Marlowe–who truly was never far from violence–seized a dagger and tried to stab one Ingram Frizer with it. Frizer, in self–defence, turned the weapon back on Marlowe and stabbed him in the forehead above the right eye–a difficult place to strike a killing blow, one would have thought, but killing him outright.
With which company did Shakespeare spend most of his working life?
Two versions:
T.. L… C……… M
T.. K…. P……
… a new group, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (named for the head of the Queen’s household), led by Richard Burbage and comprising several talents absorbed from recently extinguished companies. Among these talents were John Heminges, who would become Shakespeare’s close friend and (some thirty years in the future) co–editor of the First Folio, and the celebrated comic Will Kemp,
Which of Shakespeare’s works didn’t borrow..?
Only a few of Shakespeare’s works–in particular the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest–appear to have borrowed from no one.
What rules had plays tended to obey before Shakespeare? (Get number right!)
Plays before Shakespeare’s day were traditionally governed by what were known as ‘the Unities’–the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it.
Which dramatic rule did Shakespeare follow?
The law of re–entry, which stated that a character couldn’t exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while.
