Литературная гостиная, посвящённая жизни и творчеству Уильяма Шекспира

Звучит современная музыка.

Student 1: Stop, stop. Today we will leave our noisy and fussy 21st century for some time and go back to the 16th century. We will speak about literature – the subject which has excited people since ancient times and still excites people of any age. We will speak about love and the man who sang of love.

Звучит музыка XVI века. На экране – портрет Шекспира (1).

Student 2: (dressed in the 16th century costume) Have you recognized him? No doubt! Everyone knows the man, don’t they? The greatest poet and playwright – William Shakespeare.

На экране – слайд могилы Шекспира (2). Ученик 3 читает стихи Мильтона:

Student 3: Dear son of memory, great heir of fame

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thy self a live-long monument.

Student 1: To understand any author’s works, one needs to know the time they lived, to know their real life.

На экране – виды Стратфорда-на-Эйвоне (3).

Student 2: In the year of 1564, the greatest poet saw the day.

He wrote sonnets, songs and plays,

And he was born to be in love.

His name was William, Will Shakespeare.

So, well, my friends, we thus begin.

And this is Stratford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born.

На экране – слайд дома, где родился Шекспир (4) (можно показать также интерьеры городских домов XVI в., гравюры с изображением ремесленников).

Student 2: His father was a glover, and gloves in the 16th century could be elaborate and expensive. John Shakespeare prospered and held several positions in the city council. William’s mother, Mary Arden, was from a local family of good reputation and even claimed to be of noble descent. In 1596, the Shakespeares got their own coat of arms.

На экране – герб семьи Шекспиров (5).

Затем – слайд школы, где учился поэт (6).

Student 3: No school records from 16th century have survived, but Shakespeare might almost certainly have attended it. It was free to the citizens of the town and his father was a prominent one. It was considered the best school in the shire – a grammar school founded by King Edward VI not long before William Shakespeare was born. Here William studied Latin, Grammar and the works of Seneca and Ovid. He could have stayed there until the age of 16.

Student 4: William Shakespeare was born to love, to be loved and to sing of love. As young as 18, he met his first love. Very soon she was to become his wife. Her name was Anne Hathaway.

Появляется ученица, исполняющая роль Анны Хэтвей (в костюме английской крестьянки XVI в.)

Anne: A thousand kisses buys my heart from me;

And pay them in thy leisure, one by one.

What is ten hundred touches unto thee?

Are they not quickly told and quickly done?

Say, for non-payment that the debt should double,

Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?

Student 2: These are the lines from Shakespeare’s early poem, Venus and Adonis. Many critics think that it is Anna Hathaway whom Shakespeare portrayed as Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

Anne: Look in mine eyeballs, there thy beauty lies;

Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes?

Student 2: They married when William was 18 and Anna 26. Six months after the marriage their daughter, Susanna was born, two years later the twins.

Student 1: But why did he leave Stratford?

Student 2: It’s hard to say. It is believed that in 1587 he set off for London to seek his chance.

Звучит музыка. На экране – картинки Лондона XVI в. (7)

Student 1: Poets are born not made, when I would prove

This truth, the glad remembrance I must love

Of never dying Shakespeare, who alone

Is argument enough to make that one.

First, that he was a Poet none would doubt.

Student 2: Sonnets appeared in Italy, in the 13th century, and they were introduced into the English literature about thirty years before Shakespeare was born. But when we say “sonnet” we immediately remember Shakespeare. Sonnets are generally love poems, and many Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to some unknown lady whom we call “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”.

Появляется исполнитель роли Шекспира.

Shakespeare: (сидит при свечах и пишет, затем берёт листок и читает)

How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st,

Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds

With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st

The wiry concord that my ear confounds,

Do I envy those jacks …

Student 1: Oh, really, how sweet. And listen to this.

Ученики по очереди читают сонет 127: Ученик 1 – по-английски, Ученик 2 – по-русски.

Student 3: Love is an overwhelming feeling. And Shakespeare’s sonnets glorify love to an ordinary woman whose “eyes are nothing like the sun”.

Shakespeare: (Sonnet 130) My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun...

Student 4: (Sonnet 130 – in Russian)... Shakespeare’s poetry is a hymn of love. But Shakespeare also knew friendship. And 126 of 154 sonnets are dedicated to his unknown “Fair Friend”.

Student 1: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate,

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date…

Student 2: The sonnets unfold a whole story. Shakespeare and his Friend were both in love with the same woman, the Dark Lady. It was really upsetting for Shakespeare, because he felt he was betraying his friend. However, he needed both of them, and sometimes he sounds quite lonely and desperate.

Student 3: Here is the most famous of the sonnets dedicated to the Fair Friend.

Ученик 4 декламирует 66-й сонет (“Tired with all these…”). Ученик 3 повторяет его в русском переводе (можно Б. Пастернака или С. Маршака).

Звучит музыка эпохи Ренессанса. На экране – театр Глобус времён Шекспира (8) и современное здание театра Глобус (9).

Student 1: When Shakespeare arrived in London there had been only 4 theatres, but by the end of his lifetime there were 12.

Theatre fascinated Shakespeare since his youth. All travelling players who often performed in Stratford looked too exciting to resist the idea of joining them. And in London in 1592 Shakespeare joined the actors’ company of Lord Strange.

Student 2: Ferdinando Stanley, Baron Strange and Earl of Derby, like other rich people, supported a group of writers and players who often performed to the public or at the court. They are known as ‘Lord Strange’s Men’. Shakespeare’s first play “A History of Henry VI” could be written for this company. Besides writing, Shakespeare performed as an actor.

After the death of Lord Strange in 1594, many of his actors joined a new company created by Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hundson, who was Lord Chamberlain then. So the company was called ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. One of its new members was Shakespeare.

На экране – картинки обложек книг трагедий Шекспира, сцены из его пьес (10).

Student 3: His tragedies are superb. They are quite different from each other in subject-matter and treatment, though they all share some of Shakespeare’s most glorious style – lines from them have become embedded in the English language.

Student 4: Who doesn’t know these famous lines?

1. To be or not to be that is the question!

2. A sea of troubles.

3. The time is out of joint, o cursed spite,

That never I was born to set it right.

4. How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.

5. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Student 1: Oh, yes, I know. These are lines from “Romeo and Juliet”. Two young people, two poor lovers. Anyone who is not captured by “Romeo and Juliet” has a heart of stone.

“Шекспир” читает пролог к “Ромео и Джульетте”.

Shakespeare: Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;

Whole misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Scenes from “Romeo and Juliet”

1. Act 2, Scene 2. (The Balcony scene)

2. Act 5, Scene 3 (The last scene):

Romeo: My love, my wife.

What’s happened? Oh, Juliet, oh, my light,

Oh, arms, take your last embrace.

And lips, oh, you the doors of breath. What shall I do? (берёт яд)

Come, bitter conduct. Here’s to my love.

Thy drugs are so quick. Thus with a kiss I die. (целует и умирает)

Shakespeare: Wake up, my poor girl!

Джульетта просыпается.

Juliet: I do remember well where I should be,

And there I am.

But where is my Romeo? What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand.

Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.

Oh, churl, drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me after.

What shall I do?

Oh, happy dagger. This is thy sheath. There rest and let me die. (Поражает себя кинжалом).

Student 1: What a tragic ending. Both died.

And “Never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

What a sad story!

Student 2: The theme of love is timeless, it’s very often tragic, but I have understood that love is an all-conquering feeling. And is there such love in Shakespeare’s comedies?

Student 3: Yes, certainly, there is. But in one of his comedies the young lady is “intolerable cursed and shrewd and forward”.

Student 4: Oh, from such devils, good lord, deliver us.

Student 3: The main characters of the play Petruchio and Katherina had to overcome a lot of difficulties to find this overwhelming feeling, this all-conquering love.

Звучит музыка из кинофильма “The Taming of the Shrew”. На экране – портрет Шекспира.

Student 1: William Shakespeare died in 1616, on April 23. The great poet is dead but his poems and plays are not.

Student 2: Read and enjoy Shakespeare’s works!

Student 1: Laugh reading his comedies, cry reading his tragedies, dream reading his poetry! Shakespeare’s works have helped millions of people all over the world to make some sense of their lives. They will help you to find your way in this life.

Звучит музыка.

Illustrations from http://dic.academic.ru;
www.stratford-upon-avon.co.uk; http://media-2.web.britannica.com