SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS

By: Kenny White, Sebastian Barry, David Anderson, Paolo Gianzanti,

and Caleb Green

Shakespeare’s Plays 39 plays Comedies, Tragedies, and

Histories Comedy- A Midsummer’s Night

Dream Tragedy- Macbeth History- Henry V

Shakespeare’s Plays Continued A Midsummer’s Night Dream

“Within Theseus's world of Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into marriageable couples. At each point in the story the fickle young men think they are behaving rationally and responsibly as they are leaded into fierce claims and counterclaims, and the audience is shown the power of desire to take over one's vision and one's actions. Shakespeare displays and probes the mystery of how lovers find differences.”

Macbeth “In Scottish history of the eleventh century, Shakespeare found

slaughter of whole armies and of innocent families, the assassination of kings, the ambush of nobles by murderers, the brutal execution of rebels, witches and wizards providing advice to traitors. Shakespeare’s Macbeth supplied its audience with a sensational view of witches and supernatural apparitions and equally sensational accounts of bloody battles.”

Henry V “During this first engagement between the invading English army

and the French at Harfleur, Henry tells his men that they can never be more truly and gloriously the sons of their fathers than in making war. The play's Chorus urges us to join the invasion by grappling our imaginations to the sterns of Henry's ships as they set sail for France, and then to join with the Chorus in praise of Henry on the eve of his greatest battle.”

Shakespeare’s Language Unusual sentence structure Difficult Vocabulary Highly compressed and structured Many English words are derived from

Shakespeare’s Language Is it very similar to poetry It is very difficult for modern readers

to understand

Shakespeare’s Language Continued

Difficult Pieces Of Literature by Shakespeare A Midsummer’s Night Dream Henry V Hamlet The Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Publications

18 quartos published during lifetime

Quarto- a book made by folding printed sheets twice to form four leaves or eight pages

Written by audience members and actors/actresses

The earliest that still remain are Titus Andronicus and a version of the play King Henry VI, Part 2

Sold for just a few cents each

Shakespeare’s Publication Continued

First Folio Folio was considered superior to quartos

Printed edition larger than quartos

Shakespeare’s Poems Passages in Shakespeare's poems remain imbedded in popular

culture today The Phoenix and the Turtle

“In the classical tradition, the phoenix is a mythological creature that is unique and that consumes itself in fire from the ashes of which another phoenix is born. Because it regenerates in this way, it is not characterized as either male or female (although Shakespeare does maker the phoenix female in Sonnet 19). Ordinarily, too, the turtledove, the symbol of constancy, is female, as it is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare, in making the phoenix female and giving her a male consort in the turtledove, thus seems to begin with Chester’s version of the phoenix myth.”

The Sonnets Mostly love poems Spoken as a murmur, like an inner monologue or dialogue 154 Sonnets in 1609

Examples are The Young Man, and The Dark Lady

Shakespeare’s Poems Continued

Venus and Adonis Minor Epic “…Shakespeare found the story of the encounter between the

Roman goddess of love and the boy hunter in book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid, the beautiful Adonis is the willing lover of Venus, and his death is an accident of the hunt. Shakespeare transforms the story by having his Adonis reject Venus’s advances in a way that, for his early readers, was clearly both ironic and comic. Shakespeare makes his Venus highly verbal, a seemingly endless source of arguments for making love. He makes the boy Adonis capable of only brief and petulant protests against her advances.”

Lucrece Minor Epic “…draws upon the legendary history of a great empire, the

moment when Rome ceases to be a kingdom ruled by the Tarquins and becomes a republic governed by elected consuls.

Shakespeare’s First Folio

Tribute to the King’s Men most successful playwrights

Cost about 15- 20 shillings which is equivalent to $1-$2

Shakespeare’s First Folio Continued

Principle Publishers are Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard

Made about 750 copies Folio was seen as an outdated book

in bad condition during the eighteenth century but as time went on people began to realize that it had a unique importance

After this people had their copies cleaned and rebounded

Work CitedLibrary, Folger Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s Works.” Folger. 7, Apr. 2011.