The Renaissance: William Shakespeare

If you write plays for the theatre and your audience is composed of the very poor and rowdy, (inaudible)... you (inaudible) bastard! ... the middle class and the rich, snobby, and difficult to please? - Pff! - How can you get everyone to like your play? William Shakespeare succeeded. You've probably heard about Shakespeare, the playwright.

Or perhaps some of his plays: Romeo and Juliet? Or Hamlet? Shakespeare was born in 1564 in England in the town Stratford upon Avon, to a wealthy family. When he was 18, he married and had children here. But he longed to be an actor so he moved to London.

That was a very unusual choice he made, to become an actor when born into a rich family! Luckily, he soon became famous. And not long after that he began to write his own plays. In the 16th century there were no tv's, cinemas, nor mobile phones. So the theatre became the entertainment above all, for all -- rich and poor...

At the front, next to the stage were the cheapest places, they were for standing only. Here the audience was rowdy -- drinking and fighting. To make the play appealing to them, Shakespeare wrote scenes that were as violent as the audience. And he used crude jokes, like sex jokes, and... Hahaha.

He meant a fart! That's right, fart jokes. Shakespeare's fart jokes were fun in a simple way, but they were also clever, and appealed to the more educated, - or the rather posh. - Fart! Shakespeare's intelligent yet funny text AND his strong stories about life and death and love are the reasons why he is still being played often. In the 1590's Shakespeare became famous for being the country's great playwright, dramatist.

And... wealthy! Now he could afford to build a brand new theatre. The Globe! The Globe was built in 1599 and still exists in London - though reconstructed of course.

Here Shakespeare's plays are still being staged. And there are a few to choose from. He wrote 37 plays, that can be divided into three kinds: Plays about kings: The Histories Sad plays: Tragedies And Funny, happy plays: Comedies. But Shakespeare also wrote poems: sonnets. Of Shakespeare's tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is probably the most famous, and Hamlet, of course.

Hamlet is such a well known play that it is called the play of plays. "To be or not to be? That is the question." This is from a very well known scene in Hamlet, where Hamlet - a Danish prince - is thinking about the horrible world he is living in, and wondering if he really wants to live in it. But perhaps nothing beats the extremely sad story of Romeo and Juliet: "Romeo and Juliet" is set in Verona, in Italy. Two families are deadly enemies: the families of Montague and Capulet. Despite this, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall in love with each other.

But they can't be together since their families hate each other, O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Romeo and Juliet marry secretly and plan to run away. But Juliet's family wants her to marry another man.

To get out of that Juliet drinks a sleeping potion to make her family think that she is dead. But Romeo finds Juliet - and believes her be dead for real. This makes him so heartbroken... that he kills himself. Juliet wakes up to find Romeo dead.

She can't stand this so she kills herself with a knife. The only thing that ends well in this story is that the families become friends and unite in mourning their children. Just like the audience united in their praise for Shakespeare.