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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare: Shakespeares life; The
plays preserved (Luck and fame); The drama
(The commercial theatre, Christopher
Marlowe); Histories (Richard II, Henry IV,Henry
V); Comedy (A Midsummer Nights Dream,
Twelfth Night); The poems; Tragedy (Hamlet,
King Lear); Romances (The Tempest),Shakespeares achievement; Ben Jonson (The
Alchemist,Volpone).
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Shakespeares life
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at
Stratford, a market town on the river Avon in
Warwickshire.
He was the eldest son and the third of eight
children of John Shakespeare, a glover, and
Mary Arden, a landowners daughter. In 1568
John was bailiff (mayor) of Stratford.
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Shakespeares life
William kept up his links with Stratford, but his
professional life was in London, writing and
acting.
He was a partner in the leading company of
actors, the Lord Chamberlains Men, founded
in 1594. It played at Court and in the theatre,
the Curtain, and in its own Globe theatre, builtin 1599.
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Shakespeares life
From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford.
On 23 April 1616 he died: he was buried in the
chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford. There,
before 1623, his monument was erected.
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The plays preserved
At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeares
plays had not been printed, but in 1623 two of
his fellow-actors brought out a collected
edition: thirty-six plays in a book of nearly
nine hundred double-column pages in a large
Folio, entitled Comedies, Histories, and
Tragedies.
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The commercial theatre
Shakespeare came in on a rising tide. After 1594Marlowe and Kyd were dead, and he was the leadingplaywright, sharing in the profits of his Company.
He began with the sexual knockabout of The Taming ofthe Shrew, the classical atrocities of Titus Andronicus,and the martial pageantry of Henry VI, but in hisromance comedies combined action with literary highspirits.
Public drama was crude and refined, sensational andcomplex; private theatres were indoor, smaller, quieter.
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Histories
He wrote ten English histories in all, listed inthe Folio in the order of the reigns of the kingsin their titles.
But the order of reigns was not the order ofcomposition. The first tetralogy - the threeparts of Henry VI and Richard III - was writtenin 1590-3. We shall look at the secondtetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2,and Henry V - composed in 1595-9.
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Comedy
Shakespearesearly plays are mostly comedy and
history, kinds of play more open and inclusive
than tragedy.
Comedy came easily to Shakespeare. Half of his
dramatic output is comic, and his earlier critics,
from Jonson to Johnson, preferred his comedy.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors,The Shrew, Loves Labours Lost, A Midsummer
NightsDream, Twelfth Night.
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The poems
What Shakespeare wrote before he was 28
does not survive. His best non-dramatic
poems are found in the volume entitled
Shake-speares Sonnets, published in 1609. His
sonneteering began in 1593-4, the year in
which he also published Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece, longish versenarrativesof sexual passion, modelled on Ovid.
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Tragedey
The four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear and Macbeth - do not conform
strictly to a defined type, except that each
ends in the death of the hero, just as the
comedies end in marriage.
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Romances
Shakespeare ended his career with romance andtragicomedy. His plays do not state his views, buthis choice of subject indicates changing interests.In his last plays, he fixes on the relation of father
and daughter. The strong and often subversive role played by
sexual attraction in Shakespeares writing, fromHamlet onwards, takes a different turn after
Antony. In the Sonnets, Measure for Measure,Troilus, Hamlet, Othello and Lear, the power ofsexual passion to destroy other ties is shown.
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Christopher Marlowe
Shakespeare outshone Kyd, but learned from
his own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe
(b.1564), who was killed in a tavern in 1593.
Marlowe announced his talent in Tamburlaine
the Great (1587).
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Christopher Marlowe
Marlowes Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus,Tamburlaine is an arrogant upstart who scornshuman limits. A Romantic view of the
Renaissance saw Dr Faustus as transcendingworn-out teachings like Galileo, or as an emblemof human aspiration like GoethesFaust.
But Faustus doesnt believe in hell, and sells his
soul for twenty-four years of fun. The knowledgehe seeks is paltry, and he wastes his powers onschoolboy tricks.
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Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson (1572-1632), eighteen years
Shakespeares junior, knew him well; they
acted in each others plays. As playwright,
poet, critic and man of letters, Jonson
dominated his generation. He was a great
poet and a great dramatist. Jonson and
Marlowe belong with Shakespeare.
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Ben Jonson
Every Man in His Humour (1598) is set in
Florence (Shakespeare is listed in the cast),
and Volpone (1605) in Venice; but London is
the scene of Epicoene, or the Silent Woman
(1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew
Fair (1614).
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Stuart Literature: to 1700
The Stuart century: Drama to 1642 (Comedy,
Tragedy); John Donne, Prose to 1642 (Sir
Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, Robert
Burton, Sir Thomas Browne); Poetry to Milton
(Ben Jonson, Metaphysical poets, Devotional
poets, Cavalier poets); John Milton (Paradise
Lost).
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Augustan and Romantic
(Augustan Literature to 1970)
The eighteenth century: The Enlightenment
(Sense and Sensibility); Alexander Pope and
18thcentury civilization; Joseph Addison;
Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope (Translation as
tradition, The Rape o f the Lock, Mature
verse); John Gay; Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu; The novel: Daniel Defoe; Cross-currents; Samuel Richardson; Henry Fielding,
Tobias Smollett; Laurence Sterne;
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Augustan and Romantic
(The Romantics 1790-1837)
The emergence of Sensibility: Thomas Gray;
Pre-Romantic sensibility: `Ossian; Gothic
fiction; The Age of Johnson: Dr Samuel
Johnson (The Dictionary, Literary criticism);
James Boswell; Non-fiction (Edward Gibbon,
Edmund Burke); Oliver Goldsmith; Fanny
Burney; Richard Brinsley Sheridan;Christopher Smart; William Cowper; Robert
Burns
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Augustan and Romantic
(The Romantics 1790-1837)
The Romantic poets: Early Romantics; WilliamBlake; Subjectivity; Romanticism and Revolution(William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Sir Walter Scott); Younger Romantics (Lord Byron,Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats).
Romantic prose: Belles litres (Charles Lamb,William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey); Fiction
(Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Shelley, MariaEdgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen);Towards Victoria