4b. Introduction

Although William Shakespeare wasn't the only playwright in Renaissance England, he is surely the best-known one. Shakespeare wrote many different types of plays and a grand total of 37 plays.

Plays are meant to be played and seen, rather than read, of course. This means we will be studying bits of the script alongside video fragments of actors actually playing the scene.

A play doesn't have chapters like a book. Instead, a script is divided into acts; these acts are further subdivided into scenes. When quoting from plays, we therefore refer to the act and scene number of a quote. For example: "To be, or not to be; that is the question" - Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. 

A classic tragedy consists of five acts following a typical narrative pattern: introduction - rise - climax - fall - catastrophe.

A play's text consists of stage directions and script. The script can contain dialogues, spoken interaction between two or more characters (sometimes interrupted by asides, where a player says something that the other characters supposedly can't hear, but the audience can), monologues, where a character speaks at length to one or more other characters or soliloquys, where a character is alone on the stage and gives voice to their thoughts so that the audience can still follow the story. 

There are different types of plays. The first type of play we are studying is the tragedy. Tragedies were already written by the Greeks, famous examples being Oedipus or Antigone. It is a story revolving around a tragic hero, which is a hero with a character flaw that somehow leads to their doom. A tragedy typically ends with the main character dying. In Grecian times, most of the violence happened off-stage, but Shakespeare was writing for the masses and the masses want to be entertained, so Shakespeare's tragedies are filled with fighting, stabbing, poisoning, drowning and in one case even baking an enemy into a pie and serving it to their mother.

We will be studying fragments from two plays: Hamlet and Othello.

In the videos below, you will find more information on William Shakespeare himself, Shakespearean tragedies as a genre, and summaries of both Hamlet and Othello.