Straight Outta Stratford-Upon-Avon - Shakespeare's Early Days: Crash Course Theater #14 

TED-Ed Hmmmmmm

When a giant channel comments on another giant channel about a title, what does that say about our society??

Wow! Is this really Ted Ed. Do a collab!

Hello TED-Ed, your Shakespeare videos are also amazing, please do more

yo!

I swear everyone in that town owns like five dogs. It's amazing.

Stratford is amazing, in the summer its just beautiful

I visited Stratford about 4 years ago in summer and I loved the vibe, I really wanna go there again to just relax.

If only that vibe was in Compton lmao

He knew that naming the scotish play was a bad idea, yet he did so anyway

Yeah, "puissant" is french for powerful. And at the time public executions and bear baiting were entertainment so it makes sense that propaganda plays would be about bad-dudes getting their comeuppance rather than glorifying the current rulers.

@audiblebeauty Hah! - *I loved the Hollow Crown.* One brilliant series worth every minute! :)

Lucille M I love Richard III as well!

MarkThePage Iambic pentameter.

I wish I had your bravery. I just say "The Scottish Play" really softly.

But (more sincerely) there are some notable exceptions to the use of iambic pentameter. In some plays it comes and goes without discernible explanation...although certain cases (e.g. the weird sisters use of trochaic incantation, "DOU-ble DOU-ble TOIL and TROU-ble; the contrast of Mark Antony's more (emotionally) rhetorically impactful funeral speech (in meter) with Brutus' (who gives his funeral speech in prose); the porter in Macbeth; etc.) suggest that Shakespeare continued to develop ideas as to how to apply (and also sometimes remove) functional, overarching meter for great effect. "Diction" or "lexis" is one of the core ideas of Aristotle's foundational analysis of the tragedy.

@@patricksratliff and pretty much all of twelfth night is in prose

If you've already got the basics of plot and character, which he did because all his plays were based on earlier stories, you just need to decide structure and write dialogue. It can certainly be done.

Yes! Scripts weren't being printed and sold, so people would see the shows and try to remember the lines and scribble everything down. Though I haven't heard of any of these bootleg scripts being used for productions. One imagines copying a Shakespeare play down the street might not go over well.

Not exactly "most", but a fair amount. Of the 36 plays in the first folio, 5 plays are collaborations: _Titus Andronicus_ with George Peele, _2 & 3 Henry VI_ with Christopher Marlowe(?), _Timon of Athens_ with Thomas Middleton, and _Henry VIII_ with John Fletcher. 1 play, _1 Henry VI_ is Shakespeare’s revision of an earlier play written by Thomas Nashe & 1 or 2 others (possibly Marlowe). 4 plays ( _Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well,_ & _Macbeth_ ) also appear to contain additions by Thomas Middleton. Outside the folio, _Pericles_ was written with George Wilkins, and _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ & _Cardenio_ were written with Fletcher. There's also the anonymous plays _Edward III_ & _Arden of Faversham._ _Edward III_ is definitely a collaboration between Shakespeare & at least 1 other, but their identity(s) is contested. _Arden of Faversham_ may be written by Shakespeare & Thomas Watson(?), but others dispute Shakespeare having any hand in it, let alone Watson. Shakespeare also wrote short additions for the plays _Sir Thomas More, The Spanish Tragedy,_ and possibly _A Knack to Know a Knave._ Finally, there's _Sejanus His Fall,_ by Ben Johnson & a collaborator. The play was very controversial, & accused of "Popery & Treason". Therefore, Johnson rewrote all his collaborator's parts before publication, & never mentioned who they were. Shakespeare is one of the more likely candidates for this collaborator's identity. All in all, that's: *9* definite collaborations *2* potentially collaborations *3* plays added to or revised by Shakespeare *1* play possibly added to by Shakespeare *4* Shakespeare plays revised by Middleton that's *19* in total. Quite a lot, in my opinion.

Heads and shoulders above his contemporaries. There are lots of other good writers, and several of them wrote masterpieces, but none of them are masterpieces in the same way Shakespeare's are - works of great and piercing insight into the human condition.

We shall forever be trapped lol

yeah

I guess because of the reference to a movie called "straight-outta-compton".

Jane Dough Nice profile photo! Power to the aces. ✊

Luboman411 Have you ever seen the BHH video on Anonymous? When I read your comment, I was thinking "Shakespeare is posh dude, because poors can't art good.".

Probably like modern authors he asked other people to read his plays to check for errors or for suggestions especially when writing about things he didn't have first hand knowledge of. It's pretty uncommon for any kind of writing to spring fully formed and perfect from the brain of one person working alone, any number of people - friends, family, actors, publishers - could have looked the manuscripts over and helped correct small details.

It's not that hard to imagine Shakespeare knowing what he did about Italy without having to go there. For one he could gleam information from the source materials. Several of the plots for his plays set in Italy come from Italian novels & stories that were translated into English. There's also his connections to John Florio, who could've provided him with ample knowledge on Italian culture & language, and there's Will Kempe, an actor in the Lord Chamberlain's men who had actually been to Italy. Basically, Shakespeare read stuff about Italy & asked some friends who knew more. It isn't so impossible. And even then, he still gets things wrong. One example that comes to mind is in The Taming of the Shrew, where Shakespeare mistakenly places Padua in Lombardy, when it's actually in Veneto.

Philippa Gregory?! Really?!

I always thought the play was about Brutus.

More evidence than you, my friend. The lack of evidence is common for that time period for anyone non-nobility. That people think you might be the author points more to classicism than anything else. The plays could only be written by someone who truly understood acting, which you did not.

Very punny, but no, the lack of evidence is not common for the non-nobility. One of the reasons people think that someone besides William Shaksper of Stratford wrote the Works of Shake-speare is because it makes no sense for there to be such a lack of evidence to prove the story about a two-decade career on the public stage in the post-Renaissance city of London after the invention of the printing press (especially considering how much time and money has been spent on researching every scrap of paper from the period). Edward de Vere lived with an acting company until he was 12, and later owned theaters and was a patron of acting companies. In 1597 Meres put him at the top of the list of English play-writes. One would think he knew more about acting than a guy who held the horses outside the theater. @@MKPiatkowski

Because gossiping about royalty is a completely new invention which definitely never happened in years past.... (sarcasm)

The question you should be asking is 'what evidence is there that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays?' The answer is, none, beyond hearsay and classist assumptions about Shakespeare's level of education. 'Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays' is the null hypothesis here. You'd need some pretty good evidence to disprove it, and 'I heard once that some guy said so' isn't very good evidence.

There is such a thing as "literature forensics", which is one way people figured out that JK Rowling was behind Robert Galbraith's novels. If an analysis of writing patterns in Shakespeare's plays discovered any big inconsistencies, I imagine this conspiracy would be more than just a theory.

Me too