Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Two plays not included in the First Folio, "The Two Noble Kinsmen" and "Pericles, Prince of Tyre", are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both. No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio. In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them "tragicomedies", Dowden's term is often used.
Classification of the plays
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare | Classification of the plays
It is classified as comedies, histories, and tragedies. His 36 plays are listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies Comedies, histories, and tragedies Yes, they were classified as comedies, histories, and tragedies; Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them "tragicomedies".
how old was william shakespeare when he wrote hamlet
user
Between 1589 and 1613 at the age of 49.
assistant
who is he?
user
He was an English playwright, poet, and actor.
assistant
name a few of his poems?
user
"Venus and Adonis", "The Rape of Lucrece", "Metamorphoses", "A Lover's Complaint".
assistant
what is the third poem about?
user
It is the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework.
assistant
what are its themes?
user
Mutability, love, violence, artistry, and power are just some of the unifying themes.
assistant
what is metamorphosis in it?
user
It is the transformation is a unifying theme amongst the episodes.
assistant
describe the writing style of the author of the poem?
user
It is conventional style extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical in written.
assistant
did he influence how plays are classified?
user
Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Two plays not included in the First Folio, "The Two Noble Kinsmen" and "Pericles, Prince of Tyre", are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both. No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio. In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them "tragicomedies", Dowden's term is often used.
William Shakespeare | Classification of the plays
In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: "All's Well That Ends Well", "Measure for Measure", "Troilus and Cressida," and "Hamlet". "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may, therefore, borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays." The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though "Hamlet" is definitively classed as a tragedy.
William Shakespeare | Classification of the plays
Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in "Titus Andronicus", in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" has been described as stilted. However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes.
William Shakespeare | Style
Several hundred years after Shakespeare's death, scholar F. S. Boas also coined a fifth category, the "problem play," for plays that do not fit neatly into a single classification because of their subject matter, setting, or ending. The classifications of certain Shakespeare plays are still debated among scholars.
Shakespearean tragedy | Introduction
William Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. For example, the grand speeches in "Titus Andronicus", in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, and the verse in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" has been described as stilted. Soon, however, William Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes.
Shakespeare's writing style | Overview
Editors and critics of the plays, disdaining the showiness and melodrama of Shakespearean stage representation, began to focus on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theatre. The rift between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page was at its widest in the early 19th century, at a time when both forms of Shakespeare were hitting peaks of fame and popularity: theatrical Shakespeare was successful spectacle and melodrama for the masses, while book or closet drama Shakespeare was being elevated by the reverential commentary of the Romantics into unique poetic genius, prophet, and bard.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Introduction
The only aspects of Shakespeare's plays that were consistently disliked and singled out for criticism in the 18th century were the puns ("clenches") and the "low" (sexual) allusions. While a few editors, notably Alexander Pope, attempted to gloss over or remove the puns and the double entendres, they were quickly reversed, and by mid-century the puns and sexual humour were (with only a few exceptions, "see" Thomas Bowdler) back in permanently. Dryden's sentiments about Shakespeare's imagination and capacity for painting "nature" were echoed in the 18th century by, for example, Joseph Addison ("Among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others"), Alexander Pope ("every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself"), and Samuel Johnson (who scornfully dismissed Voltaire's and Rhymer's neoclassical Shakespeare criticism as "the petty cavils of petty minds").
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Britain
It is generally classified as apocryphal and not part of the main Shakespearean canon. Other proposed authors have included George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge. Greene's "James IV" (c. 1590) and Peele's "Old Wive's Tale" (1595) belong to the same genre.
Mucedorus | Introduction
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "drama became the ideal means to capture and convey the diverse interests of the time." Stories of various genres were enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Later on, he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years' War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods. His style changed not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.
Shakespeare's plays | Style
The category of genre is one easy way in which to make sense of a play, but then naturally arises the question "To which genre does Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" belong?" It has been called a tragedy, "a comedy of disillusion", . . .a wry-mouthed comedy"," . . . a satire . . . a piece of propaganda . . . a morality . . . and (of course) a Problem Play". Unfortunately, neither critics nor dramatists have been successful in its categorization.
Troilus and Cressida | Genre identification problems
To compare him to other Renaissance playwrights at all, even for the purpose of finding him superior, began to seem irreverent. Shakespeare was rather to be studied without any involvement of the critical faculty, to be addressed or apostrophised—almost prayed to—by his worshippers, as in Thomas De Quincey's classic essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in "Macbeth"" (1823): "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties...".
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Shakespeare in criticism
He was attempting his own neo-classicism. The First Folio of Shakespeare had divided Shakespeare's plays into "history," "tragedy," and "comedy," but these terms were stretched. Dryden, therefore, implicitly recognises that drama had moved into the territory of other types of poetry, but he strives to restrain that freedom by reforming the stage to a true and epic subject matter.
Heroic drama | Heroic drama in literary criticism
The linguist and lexicographer John Florio (1553–1625), whose father was Italian, was a royal language tutor at the Court of James I, and a possible friend of and influence on William Shakespeare, had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. He was also the translator of Montaigne into English. The earliest Elizabethan plays include "Gorboduc" (1561) by Sackville and Norton and Thomas Kyd's (1558–94) revenge tragedy "The Spanish Tragedy" (1592), that influenced Shakespeare's "Hamlet". William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education.
English drama | Renaissance: Elizabethan and Jacobean periods
It is difficult to assess Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime and shortly after. England had little modern literature before the 1570s, and detailed critical commentaries on modern authors did not begin to appear until the reign of Charles I. The facts about his reputation can be surmised from fragmentary evidence. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he seems to have lacked the stature of the aristocratic Philip Sidney, who became a cult figure due to his death in battle at a young age, or of Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare's poems were reprinted far more frequently than his plays; but Shakespeare's plays were written for performance by his own company, and because no law prevented rival companies from using the plays, Shakespeare's troupe took steps to prevent his plays from being printed.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Jacobean and Caroline
Demonstration immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope or fear from the flux of years; but works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be with certainty determined that it was round or square, but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been able to do little more than transpose his incidents, new name his characters, and paraphrase his sentiments.
The Plays of William Shakespeare | Preface
This structure did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as "Love's Labour's Lost" and "The Tempest", are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. While there is much dispute about the exact chronology of Shakespeare plays, the plays tend to fall into three main stylistic groupings. The first major grouping of his plays begins with his histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwrights' works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue.
Shakespeare's plays | Source material of the plays
Computerized comparisons with other playwrights demonstrate that his vocabulary is indeed large, but only because the canon of his surviving plays is larger than those of his contemporaries and because of the broad range of his characters, settings, and themes. Shakespeare's plays differ from those of the University Wits in that they avoid ostentatious displays of the writer's mastery of Latin or of classical principles of drama, with the exceptions of co-authored early plays such as the "Henry VI" series and "Titus Andronicus". His classical allusions instead rely on the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum. The curriculum began with William Lily's Latin grammar "Rudimenta Grammatices" and progressed to Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, all of whom are quoted and echoed in the Shakespearean canon.
Shakespeare authorship question | Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works
Before the Romantics, Shakespeare was simply the most admired of all dramatic poets, especially for his insight into human nature and his realism, but Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge refactored him into an object of almost religious adoration, George Bernard Shaw coining the term "bardolatry" to describe it. These critics regarded Shakespeare as towering above other writers, and regarding his plays not as "merely great works of art" but as "phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers" and "with entire submission of our own faculties" (Thomas De Quincey, 1823). To the later 19th century, Shakespeare became in addition an emblem of national pride, the crown jewel of English culture, and a "rallying-sign", as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British empire.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Introduction
Shakespeare was born in the Elizabethan Era and would certainly have been influenced by culture of that time. According to Henry Threw Stephenson, this time was characterized by a "general freedom of manners". He also points out that people were much more coarse in their discourse during that time and even Queen Elizabeth "swore like a trooper". This could allow Shakespeare to be more crude in his allusions and not hesitate to bring up more indecent sexual imagery without being criticized. During that time in history the bubonic plague was raging throughout Europe, and this meant that many London theaters were frequently shut down, which could have influenced Shakespeare to write more poetic literature and less for a stage audience.
Sonnet 128 | Context
There is no distinction made between the ancient reading, and the innovations of the editor; there is no reason given for any of the alterations which are made; the emendations of former editions are adopted without any acknowledgement, and few of the difficulties are removed which have hitherto embarrassed the readers of Shakespeare. The "Miscellaneous Observations" contains many of Johnson's early thoughts and theories on Shakespeare. For instance, Johnson thought that there was an uncanny power in Shakespeare's supernatural scenes and wrote, "He that peruses Shakespeare looks round alarmed and starts to find himself alone".
The Plays of William Shakespeare | "Miscellaneous Observations"
The English Renaissance, when Shakespeare was writing, was fueled by a renewed interest in Roman and Greek classics and neighboring renaissance literature written years earlier in Italy, France, and Spain. Shakespeare wrote the majority of his tragedies under the rule of James I, and their darker contents may reflect the general mood of the country following the death of Elizabeth I, as well as James' theatrical preferences. Shakespeare, as was customary for other playwrights in his day, used history, other plays, and non-dramatic literature as sources for his plays. In Elizabethan England there were no copyright or protections against plagiarism, so characters, plots, and even whole phrases of poetry were considered common property.
Shakespearean tragedy | Influences and sources
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until "Romeo and Juliet", for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes." Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens.
William Shakespeare | Influence
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as "Julius Caesar" and "Hamlet".
William Shakespeare | Style
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies; and modern scholars recognize a fourth category, "romance", to describe the specific types of comedy that appear in Shakespeare's later works.
Shakespearean comedy | Introduction
It is believed that William Shakespeare was influenced by the fragmented poem, incorporating elements in various ways throughout his works.
Eussouis | Significance
He introduced in poetry two main factors – "verbal immediacy and the moulding of stress to the movement of living emotion". Shakespeare's words reflected the passage of time with "fresh, concrete vividness" giving the reader an idea of the time frame. His remarkable capacity to analyze and express emotions in simple words was noteworthy: In the sonnet above, he has expressed in very simple words "complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion". The sonnet form was limited structurally, in theme and in expressions. The liveliness of Shakespeare's language and strict discipline of the sonnets imparted economy and intensity to his writing style.
Shakespeare's influence | Poetry
Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. He developed theatre to an amazing extent and changed the way theatre is today. Shakespeare created some of the most admired plays in Western literature (with "Macbeth, Hamlet" and "King Lear" being ranked among the world's greatest plays), and transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through plot and language. Specifically, in plays like "Hamlet", Shakespeare "integrated characterization with plot," such that if the main character was different in any way, the plot would be totally changed. In "Romeo and Juliet", Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy together to create a new romantic tragedy genre (previous to Shakespeare, romance had not been considered a worthy topic for tragedy).
Shakespeare's influence | Influence on theatre
Goethe praised Shakespeare for liberating his mind from the rigid Aristoltelian rules, saying: "I jumped into the free air, and suddenly felt I had hands and feet...Shakespeare, my friend, if you were with us today, I could only live with you". Herder likewise proclaimed that reading Shakespeare's work opens "leaves from the book of events, of providence, of the world, blowing in the sands of time". This claim that Shakespeare's work breaks through all creative boundaries to reveal a chaotic, teeming, contradictory world became characteristic of Romantic criticism, later being expressed by Victor Hugo in the preface to his play "Cromwell", in which he lauded Shakespeare as an artist of the grotesque, a genre in which the tragic, absurd, trivial and serious were inseparably intertwined.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | In Germany
The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry", claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.
William Shakespeare | Critical reputation
As the concept of literary originality grew in importance, critics were horrified at the idea of adapting Shakespeare's tragedies for the stage by putting happy endings on them, or editing out the puns in "Romeo and Juliet". In another way, what happened on the stage was seen as unimportant, as the Romantics, themselves writers of closet drama, considered Shakespeare altogether more suitable for reading than staging. Charles Lamb saw any form of stage representation as distracting from the true qualities of the text. This view, argued as a timeless truth, was also a natural consequence of the dominance of melodrama and spectacle on the early 19th-century stage.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Shakespeare in criticism
Too often, the result was a loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. In a series of "Elizabethan" productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today.
Shakespeare's plays | Performance history
In a series of "Elizabethan" productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early 20th century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts, while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today.
Shakespeare in performance | Introduction
The opening soliloquy of "Richard III" has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with "Romeo and Juliet" perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. By the time of "Romeo and Juliet", "Richard II", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
William Shakespeare | Style
"The Chicago Manual of Style" allows both forms. G. Norman Knight quotes Shakespeare's lines from "Troilus and Cressida" (I.3.344) – "And in such indexes ..." – and comments:
Index (publishing) | Etymology and plural
The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. "The Comedy of Errors" was also based on classical models, but no source for "The Taming of the Shrew" has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like "The Two Gentlemen of Verona", in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the "Shrew's" story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.
William Shakespeare | Plays
"It encouraged the association of compression with a depth of content and variety of emotional response to a degree unparalleled in English". Complex human emotions found simple expressions in Shakespeare's language.
Shakespeare's influence | Poetry
That many of his plays were pirated suggests his popularity in the book market, and the regular patronage of his company by the court, culminating in 1603 when James I turned it into the "King's Men," suggests his popularity among higher stations of society. Modern plays (as opposed to those in Latin and Greek) were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments by some contemporaries; the new Bodleian Library explicitly refused to shelve plays. Some of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the history plays, were reprinted frequently in cheap quarto (i.e. pamphlet) form; others took decades to reach a 3rd edition. After Ben Jonson pioneered the canonisation of modern plays by printing his own works in folio (the luxury book format) in 1616, Shakespeare was the next playwright to be honoured by a folio collection, in 1623.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Jacobean and Caroline
Theatres and theatrical scenery became ever more elaborate in the 19th century, and the acting editions used were progressively cut and restructured to emphasise more and more the soliloquies and the stars, at the expense of pace and action. Performances were further slowed by the need for frequent pauses to change the scenery, creating a perceived need for even more cuts to keep performance length within tolerable limits; it became a generally accepted maxim that Shakespeare's plays were too long to be performed without substantial cuts. The platform, or apron, stage, on which actors of the 17th century would come forward for audience contact, was gone, and the actors stayed permanently behind the fourth wall or proscenium arch, further separated from the audience by the orchestra, see image right.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Shakespeare in performance
Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns." Indeed, in the nineteenth century, popular censored versions of the plays were produced as "The Family Shakspeare" by Henrietta Bowdler (writing anonymously) and later by her brother Thomas Bowdler. Comedy is not confined to Shakespeare's comedies, and is a core element of many of the tragedy and history plays. For example, comic scenes dominate over historical material in "Henry IV, Part 1".
Shakespeare's writing style | Form
In the "Preface" Hazlitt establishes his focus on "characters" by quoting Pope's comment that "every single character in Shakespear, is as much an individual, as those in life itself". After reviewing various other critics of Shakespeare, Hazlitt focuses on two of the most important, including the influential Dr. Johnson. Hazlitt found the Shakespearean criticism of Johnson, the premier literary critic of the previous era, troubling in several ways. He insufficiently valued the tragedies; he missed the essence of much of the poetry; and he "reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety [...] the most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as they could be translated into the language of measured prose".
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | Preface
By contrast to the stage history, in literary criticism there was no lag time, no temporary preference for other dramatists: Shakespeare had a unique position at least from the Restoration in 1660 and onwards. While Shakespeare did not follow the unbending French neo-classical "rules" for the drama and the three classical unities of time, place, and action, those strict rules had never caught on in England, and their sole zealous proponent Thomas Rymer was hardly ever mentioned by influential writers except as an example of narrow dogmatism. Dryden, for example, argued in his influential "Essay of Dramatick Poesie" (1668) – the same essay in which he noted that Shakespeare's plays were performed only half as often as those of Beaumont and Fletcher – for Shakespeare's artistic superiority.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Interregnum and Restoration
Anti-Stratfordians rely on what has been called a "rhetoric of accumulation", or what they designate as circumstantial evidence: similarities between the characters and events portrayed in the works and the biography of their preferred candidate; literary parallels with the known works of their candidate; and literary and hidden allusions and cryptographic codes in works by contemporaries and in Shakespeare's own works.
Shakespeare authorship question | Overview
Though each essay constitutes a chapter in a book, in style and length they resemble those of Hazlitt's miscellaneous collection "The Round Table" (published also in 1817, a collaboration with Leigh Hunt), which followed the model for periodical essays established a century earlier in "The Spectator". Though Hazlitt could find much to appreciate in the comedies, tragedy was to him inherently more important, and he weights the tragedies much more heavily. In this he differed from Johnson, who thought Shakespeare best at comedy. The greatest of the plays were tragedies—particularly "Macbeth", "Othello", "King Lear", and "Hamlet"—and Hazlitt's comments on tragedy are often integrated with his ideas about the significance of poetry and imaginative literature in general.
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | Essays
His primary focus, however, is on Shakespeare's dramatisation of "the arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on the privileges of the few and the claims of many". Shakespeare shows the weaknesses of both the nobles and the people, but, thought Hazlitt, he was biased somewhat in favour of the nobility, leading him to gloss over their defects more so than those of the common people. But Hazlitt goes further, to develop an idea that only much later was seen to have radical implications for literary theory: he claims that it is of the very nature of poetry to glorify the aristocrat, the solitary hero, and the monarch, while being much less suited to represent, in ways that capture the imagination, the social problems of the common people.
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | "Coriolanus"
Unattributed poems have also been assigned by some scholars to Shakespeare at various times. See below. The apocrypha can be categorized under the following headings.
Shakespeare apocrypha | Background
Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-operated with chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
The Plays of William Shakespeare | Preface
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter with clever use of puns and imagery. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as "Julius Caesar" and "Hamlet".
Shakespeare's writing style | Overview
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories—along with those of contemporary Renaissance playwrights—help define the genre of history plays. The Shakespearean histories are biographies of English kings of the previous four centuries and include the standalones "King John", "Edward III" and "Henry VIII" as well as a continuous sequence of eight plays. These last are considered to have been composed in two cycles. The so-called first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, covers the Wars of the Roses saga and includes "Henry VI, Parts I", "II" & "III" and "Richard III".
Shakespearean history | Introduction
In Benjamin Disraeli's novel "Venetia" (1837) the character Lord Cadurcis, modelled on Byron, questions whether Shakespeare wrote "half of the plays attributed to him", or even one "whole play" but rather that he was "an inspired adapter for the theatres". A similar view was expressed by an American lawyer and writer, Col. Joseph C. Hart, who in 1848 published "The Romance of Yachting", which for the first time asserted explicitly and unequivocally in print that Shakespeare did not write the works bearing his name. Hart claimed that Shakespeare was a "mere "factotum" of the theatre", a "vulgar and unlettered man" hired to add obscene jokes to the plays of other writers.
History of the Shakespeare authorship question | Debate in the 19th century
Aristocrats such as Derby and Oxford supposedly used pseudonyms because of a prevailing "stigma of print", a social convention that putatively restricted their literary works to private and courtly audiences—as opposed to commercial endeavours—at the risk of social disgrace if violated. In the case of commoners, the reason was to avoid prosecution by the authorities: Bacon to avoid the consequences of advocating a more republican form of government, and Marlowe to avoid imprisonment or worse after faking his death and fleeing the country.
Shakespeare authorship question | Name as a pseudonym
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, or comedy—is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language. Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio.
Shakespeare's plays | Introduction
Johnson criticised Hanmer for editing Shakespeare's words based on subjective opinion instead of objective fact. In particular, Johnson writes: He appears to find no difficulty in most of those passages which I have represented as unintelligible, and has therefore passed smoothly over them, without any attempt to alter or explain them... Such harmless industry may surely be forgiven if it cannot be praised; may he therefore never want a monosyllable who can use it with such wonderful dexterity. "Rumpature quisquis rumpitur invidia"! ("If anyone is going to burst with envy, let him do so!" – Martial) He then continues: The rest of this edition I have not read, but, from the little that I have seen, I think it not dangerous to declare that, in my opinion, its pomp recommends it more than its accuracy.
The Plays of William Shakespeare | "Miscellaneous Observations"
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. The histories—along with those of contemporary Renaissance playwrights—help define the genre of history plays. Shakespeare's Histories might be more accurately called the "English history plays." These plays dramatize historical events from English history as early as the reign of King John and as late as Henry VIII. In addition to these two, Shakespeare wrote eight plays covering the continuous period of history between the reigns of Richard II and Richard III. The so-called first tetralogy, apparently written in the early 1590s, deals with the later part of the struggle and includes "Henry VI, parts one", "two" & "three" and "Richard III".
History (theatrical genre) | Shakespeare
Those of other Poets have a constant resemblance, which shews that they receiv'd them from one another and were but multiplyers of the same image: each picture like a mock-rainbow is but the reflexion of a reflexion. But every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be Twins will upon comparison be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of Character we must add the wonderful Preservation of it; which is such throughout his plays that had all the Speeches been printed without the very names of the persons I believe one might have apply'd them with certainty to every speaker.
Timeline of Shakespeare criticism | 18th century
Besides following the popular forms of his day, Shakespeare's general style is comparable to several of his contemporaries. His works have many similarities to the writing of Christopher Marlowe, and seem to reveal strong influences from the Queen's Men's performances, especially in his history plays. His style is also comparable to Francis Beaumont's and John Fletcher's, other playwrights of the time. Shakespeare often borrowed plots from other plays and stories. "Hamlet", for example, is comparable to Saxo Grammaticus' "Gesta Danorum". "Romeo and Juliet" is thought to be based on Arthur Brooke's narrative poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet".
Shakespeare's writing style | Similarities to contemporaries
This claim that Shakespeare's work breaks though all creative boundaries to reveal a chaotic, teeming, contradictory world became characteristic of Romantic criticism, later being expressed by Victor Hugo in the preface to his play "Cromwell", in which he lauded Shakespeare as an artist of the grotesque, a genre in which the tragic, absurd, trivial and serious were inseparably intertwined.
Shakespeare in performance | Elsewhere in Europe
The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare's greatest ("Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear", and "Macbeth") were composed during this period. Comedies were common, too. A subgenre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy. Examples are Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday" and Thomas Middleton's "A Chaste Maid in Cheapside".
English Renaissance theatre | Genres
Many critics and scholars consider Shakespeare's first plays experimental and believe the playwright was still learning from his own mistakes. Gradually his language followed the "natural process of artistic growth, to find its adequate projection in dramatic form". As he continued experimenting, his style of writing found many manifestations in plays. The dialogues in his plays were written in verse form and followed a decasyllabic rule. In "Titus Andronicus", decasyllables have been used throughout. "There is a considerable pause; and though the inflexibility of the line sound is little affected by it, there is a certain running over of sense".
Shakespeare's influence | Blank verse
This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare. Shakespearean scholars, beginning with Edmond Malone in 1778, have attempted to reconstruct the relative chronology of Shakespeare's "oeuvre" by various means, using external evidence (such as references to the plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries in both critical material and private documents, allusions in other plays, entries in the Stationers' Register, and records of performance and publication), and internal evidence (allusions within the plays to contemporary events, composition and publication dates of sources used by Shakespeare, stylistic analysis looking at the development of his style and diction over time, and the plays' context in the contemporary theatrical and literary "milieu").
Chronology of Shakespeare's plays | Introduction
During the 1660–1700 period, stage records suggest that Shakespeare, although always a major repertory author, was not as popular on the stage as were the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In literary criticism he was nevertheless acknowledged as an untaught genius. In the 18th century, the works of Shakespeare dominated the London stage, and after the Licensing Act of 1737, one fourth of the plays performed were by Shakespeare. The plays continued to be heavily cut and adapted, becoming vehicles for star actors such as Spranger Barry and David Garrick, a key figure in Shakespeare's theatrical renaissance, whose Drury Lane theatre was the centre of the Shakespeare mania which swept the nation and promoted Shakespeare as the national playwright.
History of the Shakespeare authorship question | The rise of bardolatry and authorship doubts
A number of anonymous plays have been attributed to Shakespeare by more recent readers and scholars. Many of these claims are supported only by debatable ideas about what constitutes "Shakespeare's style". Nonetheless, some of them have been cautiously accepted by mainstream scholarship.
Shakespeare apocrypha | Plays attributed to Shakespeare after the 17th century
Saintsbury found Hazlitt's critical judgements sound as a rule, and he thought that the characterisations of Falstaff and Shylock were "masterpieces". Even as the "character" critics began to fall out of favour, and Hazlitt, who was lumped together with them, was also pushed aside, some influence remained. Hazlitt's general approach to Shakespeare's plays, in conveying the prevailing mood, the character of the play itself, had its influence on later twentieth-century critics, like G. Wilson Knight. Other major Shakespeareans, like John Dover Wilson, would occasionally refer approvingly to one of Hazlitt's insights or notable passages, such as the characterisation of Falstaff.
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | 1900–1950: Reemergence
"In shaping, compressing, and altering chronicles, Shakespeare gained the art of dramatic design; and in the same way he developed his remarkable insight into character, its continuity and its variation". His characters were very near to reality. "Shakespeare's characters are more sharply individualized after "Love's Labour's Lost"". His Richard II and Bolingbroke are complex and solid figures whereas Richard III has more "humanity and comic gusto". The Falstaff trilogy is in this respect very important. Falstaff, although a minor character, has a powerful reality of his own. "Shakespeare uses him as a commentator who passes judgments on events represented in the play, in the light of his own superabundant comic vitality".
Shakespeare's influence | Characters
After the lyrical "Richard II", written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, "Henry IV, parts 1" and "2", and "Henry V". His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and "Julius Caesar"—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's "Parallel Lives"—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in "Julius Caesar," "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
William Shakespeare | Plays
Building on the work of W. J. Courthope, Hardin Craig, E. B. Everitt, Seymour Pitcher and others, the scholar Eric Sams (1926–2004), who wrote two books on Shakespeare, edited two early plays, and published over a hundred papers, argued that "Shakespeare was an early starter who rewrote nobody's plays but his own", and that he "may have been a master of structure before he was a master of language". Shakespeare found accusations of plagiarism (e.g. Greene's "beautified with our feathers") offensive (Sonnets 30, 112). Trusting the early 'biographical' sources John Aubrey and Nicholas Rowe, Sams re-assessed Shakespeare's early and 'missing' years, and argued through detailed textual analysis that Shakespeare began writing plays from the mid-1580s, in a style not now recognisably Shakespearean.
Shakespeare apocrypha | A counter-orthodox Shakespeare canon and chronology
He adds a sixth stressed syllable to a standard pentameter verse line—most often "sir" but also "too" or "still" or "next". Various other habits and preferences may reveal his hand. The detection of this pattern, a Fletcherian textual profile, has persuaded some researchers that they have penetrated the Fletcher canon with what they consider success—and has in turn encouraged the use of similar techniques in the study of literature. [See: stylometry.] Scholars such as Jeffrey Masten and Gordon McMullan, have pointed out limitations of logic and method in Hoy's and others' attempts to distinguish playwrights on the basis of style and linguistic preferences.
John Fletcher (playwright) | Plays
Anti-Stratfordians consider Shakespeare's background incompatible with that attributable to the author of the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports such as hunting, falconry, tennis, and lawn-bowling. Some find that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types such as John Shakespeare and his son, and that the author portrays individual commoners comically, as objects of ridicule. Commoners in groups are said to be depicted typically as dangerous mobs.
Shakespeare authorship question | Shakespeare's background
the catalogue should be in every school library in the land. ... every student of English literature should have his own copy and that the book should never go out of print."
Shakespeare: Staging the World | Reception
All references to "Hamlet", unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare Q2. Under their referencing system, 3.1.55 means act 3, scene 1, line 55. All references to "Macbeth", unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Arden Shakespeare second series. Under their referencing system, III.I.55 means act 3, scene 1, line 55.
Shakespeare's writing style | References
The centre of attention is in large part on the characters, described often with a personal slant and using memorable expressions ("It is "we" who are Hamlet") and incorporating psychological insights that were to become highly influential in later criticism. Though at first less influential, Hazlitt's comments on the plays' dramatic structure and poetry and on the central themes and general mood of each play laid the groundwork for later critics' more elaborate interpretations. Frequently expressing the view that stage presentation could not do justice to Shakespeare's plays, Hazlitt nevertheless also found certain plays eminently actable, and he frequently admired the performances of certain actors, particularly Edmund Kean.
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | Introduction
The work gives a short guide to every Shakespeare play, as well as two epic poems. Asimov organizes the plays not in the usual way – as tragedies, comedies, and histories – but regionally, as follows: The last two categories are treated broadly; 'Italian' applies to neighbouring countries, and both "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" are listed with 'The English Plays'. Asimov gives a detailed justification for doing this. Within each category, the plays are arranged according to internal (historical) chronology, making allowance for the several not based on actual events. Asimov notes how much is real history, and describes who the historical people were, where applicable.
Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare | Structure
This article is an index of characters appearing in the plays of William Shakespeare whose names begin with the letters A to K. Characters with names beginning with the letters . NOTE: "Characters who exist outside Shakespeare are marked "(hist)" where they are historical, and "(myth)" where they are mythical. Where that annotation is a link (e.g. (hist)), it is a link to the page for the historical or mythical figure. The annotation "(fict)" is only used in entries for the English history plays, and indicates a character who is fictional." Contents: A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sources | Links
List of Shakespearean characters (A–K) | Introduction
Scholars have long speculated about the influence – if any – of Hamnet's death upon William Shakespeare's writing. Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, who wrote a lengthy piece on the death of his own son, Shakespeare, if he wrote anything in response, did so more subtly. At the time his son died, Shakespeare was writing primarily comedies, and that writing continued until a few years after Hamnet's death, when his major tragedies were written. It is possible that his tragedies gained depth from his experience. Biographical readings, in which critics would try to connect passages in the plays and sonnets to specific events in Shakespeare's life, are at least as old as the Romantic period.
Hamnet Shakespeare | Connection to "Hamlet" and other plays
Jane Lumley (1537–1578) was the first person to translate Euripides into English. Her translation of "Iphigeneia at Aulis" is the first known dramatic work by a woman in English. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) stands out in this period both as a poet and playwright. Shakespeare wrote plays in a variety of genres, including histories, tragedies, comedies and the late romances, or tragicomedies. His early classical and Italianate comedies, like "A Comedy of Errors", containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Much Ado About Nothing", "As You Like It", and "Twelfth Night".
Elizabethan literature | Theatre
The category of Shakespearean romance arises from a desire among critics for the late plays to be recognised as a more complex kind of comedy; the labels of romance and tragicomedy are preferred by the majority of modern critics and editors. In the First Folio of 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, its editors, listed "The Tempest" and "The Winter's Tale" as comedies, and "Cymbeline" as a tragedy. "Pericles" did not appear in it at all. In 1875, when Dowden argued that Shakespeare's late comedies should be called "romances," he did so because they resemble late medieval and early modern "romances," a genre in which stories were set across the immensity of space and time.
Shakespeare's late romances | Labelling and structure
When Dekker began writing plays, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge were still alive; when he died, John Dryden had already been born. Like most dramatists of the period, he adapted as well as he could to changing tastes; however, even his work in the fashionable Jacobean genres of satire and tragicomedy bears the marks of his Elizabethan training: its humor is genial, its action romantic. The majority of his surviving plays are comedies or tragicomedies. Most of Dekker's work is lost. His apparently disordered life, and his lack of a firm connection (such as Shakespeare or Fletcher had) with a single company, may have militated against the preservation or publication of manuscripts.
Thomas Dekker (writer) | Drama
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his "A Dictionary of the English Language", the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" ("Merchant of Venice") and "a foregone conclusion" ("Othello") have found their way into everyday English speech.
William Shakespeare | Influence
As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.
William Shakespeare | Critical reputation
The rise in Shakespeare's popularity coincided with Britain's accelerating change from an oral to a print culture. Towards the end of the century, the basis of Shakespeare's high reputation changed. He had originally been respected as a playwright, but once the theatre became associated with the masses, Shakespeare's status as a "great writer" shifted. Two strands of Shakespearean print culture emerged: bourgeois popular editions and scholarly critical editions. In order to turn a profit, booksellers chose well-known authors, such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, to edit Shakespeare editions. According to Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor, Shakespearean criticism became so "associated with the dramatis personae of 18th-century English literature ...
Boydell Shakespeare Gallery | Shakespeare editions
The Plays of William Shakespeare was an 18th-century edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Johnson announced his intention to edit Shakespeare's plays in his "Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth" (1745), and a full "Proposal" for the edition was published in 1756. The edition was finally published in 1765. In the "Preface" to his edition, Johnson justifies trying to determine the original language of the Shakespearean plays. To benefit the reading audience, he added explanatory notes to various passages. Later editors followed Johnson's lead and sought to determine an authoritative text of Shakespeare.
The Plays of William Shakespeare | Introduction
The opening soliloquy of "Richard III" has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with "Romeo and Juliet" perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. By the time of "Romeo and Juliet", "Richard II", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
Shakespeare's writing style | Overview
It was only some months afterward that the voice of Francis Jeffrey, the highly respected editor of "The Edinburgh Review", was heard. Jeffrey began by expressing reservations: this is not a book of great learning and less a book of criticism than of appreciation. And yet, Jeffrey concedes, the "appreciation" is of the highest kind, and he is "not [...] much inclined to disagree with" Hazlitt "after reading his eloquent exposition" of the points he makes about Shakespeare. "The book [...] is written less to tell the reader what Mr. H. "knows" about Shakespeare or his writings, than to explain to them what he "feels" about them—and "why" he feels so—and thinks that all who profess to love poetry should feel so likewise." While "Characters" does not "show extraordinary knowledge of [Shakespeare's] production" it nevertheless shows "very considerable originality and genius."
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | 1817–1830: Contemporary reception
1589–90, and of the machiavels of revenge tragedy, chronicle-plays rapidly became more sophisticated in characterisation, structure, and style. Marlowe himself turned to English history as a result of the success of Shakespeare's "Contention". In "Edward II", c. 1591, he moved from the rhetoric and spectacle of "Tamburlaine" to "the interplay of human character", showing how chronicle material could be compressed and rearranged, and bare hints turned to dramatic effect. Shakespeare then took the genre further, bringing deeper insights to bear on the nature of politics, kingship, war and society. He also brought noble poetry to the genre and a deep knowledge of human character.
Shakespearean history | Development
Shakespeare continued to be considered the greatest English writer of all time throughout the 20th century. Most Western educational systems required the textual study of two or more of Shakespeare's plays, and both amateur and professional stagings of Shakespeare were commonplace. It was the proliferation of high-quality, well-annotated texts and the unrivalled reputation of Shakespeare that allowed for stagings of Shakespeare's plays to remain textually faithful, but with an extraordinary variety in setting, stage direction, and costuming. Institutions such as the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States worked to ensure constant, serious study of Shakespearean texts and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the United Kingdom worked to maintain a yearly staging of at least two plays.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | 20th century
For centuries there had been an accepted style of how Shakespeare was to be performed which was erroneously labeled "Elizabethan" but actually reflected a trend of design from a period shortly after Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare's performances were originally performed in contemporary dress. Actors were costumed in clothes that they might wear off the stage. This continued into the 18th century, the Georgian period, where costumes were the current fashionable dress. It was not until centuries after his death, primarily the 19th Century, that productions started looking back and tried to be "authentic" to a Shakespearean style. The Victorian era had a fascination with historical accuracy and this was adapted to the stage in order to appeal to the educated middle class.
Shakespeare in performance | Dress and design
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the influence of "Characters" began to be exerted more explicitly, notably in the studies of critic A.C. Bradley, who approvingly adopted Hazlitt's explanation of the character of Iago. At about this time, George Saintsbury, who wrote a comprehensive history of English criticism (finished in 1904), recorded his extreme distaste for Hazlitt's character, and, as noted by critic Elisabeth Schneider, found his writings "filled with vast ignorance, errors, prejudice, and an unpleasantness of temper amounting almost to insanity". Yet he also ranked Hazlitt high as a critic, among the greatest in the language. "Characters" he placed lower than some of Hazlitt's other critical works; yet he allowed that, aside from such "outbursts" as his railing against the historical King Henry V, and his over-reliance on quotation from Schlegel, "Characters of Shakespear's Plays" is filled with much that is admirable, notably Hazlitt's comparison of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's characterisation and his observation that Shakespeare "has no prejudices for or against his characters".
Characters of Shakespear's Plays | 1900–1950: Reemergence
Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, Sir William Alexander, and Mary Sidney wrote closet dramas in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson. Between 1642 and 1660, the English government banned public performance. During this time, playreading became a "substitute" for playgoing. Thus, playwrights were moved to take on "propagandist aims" against parliament and topics beyond the theatre in their writing, meaning reading such work could be considered a revolutionary act. However, playwrights could write in relative security, protected by the anonymous means of print. Thomas Killigrew is an example of a stage playwright who turned to closet drama when his plays could no longer be produced during this period; he was in exile from England during the English Civil War.
Closet drama | Elizabethan and Jacobean
Many English-language Modernist poets drew on Shakespeare's works, interpreting in new ways. Ezra Pound, for instance, considered the Sonnets as a kind of apprentice work, with Shakespeare learning the art of poetry through writing them. He also declared the History plays to be the true English epic. Basil Bunting rewrote the sonnets as modernist poems by simply erasing all the words he considered unnecessary. Louis Zukofsky had read all of Shakespeare's works by the time he was eleven, and his "Bottom: On Shakespeare" (1947) is a book-length prose poem exploring the role of the eye in the plays. In its original printing, a second volume consisting of a setting of "The Tempest" by the poet's wife, Celia Zukofsky was also included.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Poetry
Tamburlaine, Christopher Marlowe. A Doll's House, Ibsen. Justice, John Galsworthy. La Mort de Tintagiles, Maurice Maeterlinck. Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare. Macbeth, William Shakespeare. Othello, William Shakespeare. Hamlet, William Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare.
Qasim Mahmood | Dramas
He names twelve plays written by Shakespeare, including four which were never published in quarto: "The Two Gentlemen of Verona", "The Comedy of Errors", "Love's Labour's Won", and "King John", as well as ascribing to Shakespeare some of the plays that were published anonymously before 1598—"Titus Andronicus", "Romeo and Juliet", and "Henry IV, Part 1". He refers to Shakespeare's "sug[a]red Sonnets among his private friends" 11 years before the publication of the Sonnets. In the rigid social structure of Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare was entitled to use the honorific "gentleman" after his father's death in 1601, since his father was granted a coat of arms in 1596.
Shakespeare authorship question | Historical evidence
"Hamlet" is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature. As such, it reverberates through the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of "Hamlet" in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play. English poet John Milton was an early admirer of Shakespeare and took evident inspiration from his work. As John Kerrigan discusses, Milton originally considered writing his epic poem "Paradise Lost" (1667) as a tragedy.
Hamlet | Influence
As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. For example, "King Lear" is probably an adaptation of an older play, "King Leir", and the Henriad probably derived from "The Famous Victories of Henry V".
Shakespeare's plays | Source material of the plays
Though Shakespeare does not follow the dramatic conventions, Dryden wrote, Ben Jonson does, and as a result Jonson lands in a distant second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare", the follower of nature, the untaught genius, the great realist of human character.
Reputation of William Shakespeare | Interregnum and Restoration
There are four components to Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare": a discussion of Shakespeare's "greatness" especially in his "portrayal of human nature"; the "faults or weakness" of Shakespeare; Shakespeare's plays in relationship to contemporary poetry and drama; and a history of "Shakespearean criticism and editing down to the mid-1700s" and what his work intends to do. Johnson begins: That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.
The Plays of William Shakespeare | Preface
Almost uniquely among his peers, Shakespeare's plays include references to grammar school texts and pedagogy, together with caricatures of schoolmasters. "Titus Andronicus" (4.10), "The Taming of the Shrew" (1.1), "Love's Labour's Lost" (5.1), "Twelfth Night" (2.3), and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (4.1) refer to Lily's "Grammar". Shakespeare also alluded to the petty school that children attended at age 5 to 7 to learn to read, a prerequisite for grammar school.
Shakespeare authorship question | Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works
Philology "met the desire for facts, for accuracy, and for the imitation of the scientific method which had acquired such an overwhelming prestige" in the United States. It had yielded the discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development. A former Harvard graduate student, James H. Hanford, reminisced how under Kittredge, Undergraduate Shakespeare students were required to read six plays extremely slowly and to virtually memorize the texts. "It is the purpose of this course", Kittredge used to remark, "to find out what Shakespeare said and what he meant when he said it." Where Professor Child had often been imposed on in the classroom by students who took advantage of his extremely sweet nature, Kittredge's dramatic classroom manner kept his students on the edge of their seats – lateness, wearing of hats, yawning, and coughing (one student was permanently expelled from the class for this offense) were strictly forbidden.
George Lyman Kittredge | Influence on literary studies
At the end, Hymen himself arrives to bless the wedding festivities. William Shakespeare's play "As You Like It" clearly falls into the Pastoral Romance genre; but Shakespeare does not merely use the genre, he develops it. Shakespeare also used the Pastoral genre in "As You Like It" to 'cast a critical eye on social practices that produce injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive behaviour', most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers. The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide opportunities for wit that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings.
As You Like It | Pastoral mode
R. Leavis as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism.") Since the 1970s, the prevalence of poststructuralist methods of criticism resulted in students turning away from his work, although a number of scholars have recently returned to considering "character" as a historical category of evaluation (for instance, Michael Bristol). Harold Bloom has paid tribute to Bradley's place in the great tradition of critical writing on Shakespeare: 'This [Bloom's] book – "Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human" – is a latecomer work, written in the wake of the Shakespeare critics I most admire: Johnson, Hazlitt, Bradley.' There has also been a renewed interest in the German idealist philosopher Hegel, who influenced Bradley's theory of tragedy.
A. C. Bradley | Reputation
Bevill Higgons: From the preface to the revision of "The Merchant of Venice" (1701) by George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne. Here, Shakespeare is made both to recognize his own lack of sophistication and to approve the neoclassical polish added by Granville. Joseph Addison, 1712: "Among the English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled all others. That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch... his reader's imagination, and made him capable of succeeding, where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius." "Spectator" no. 419 Alexander Pope, 1725: "His Characters are so much Nature her self that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her.
Timeline of Shakespeare criticism | 18th century
Whately's "Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare" was left unfinished at his death and published posthumously by his brother, the Rev. Joseph Whately, in 1785. Whately's analysis of several of Shakespeare's principal characters applies to them the principles of psychology and motivation of Whately's own proto-Romantic sensibilities.
Thomas Whately | "Remarks on Some of the Characters in Shakespeare"