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William Shakespeare
Hamnet and his twin sister Judith were born to William Shakespeare and his wife Anne (Hathaway) in late January or early February, 1585. They were baptized in Holy Trinity Church in...
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William Shakespeare
As William Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing begins, a messenger arrives with a letter for Leonato, the governor of Messina, informing Leonato that Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, has been...
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William Shakespeare
During the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, when Shakespeare lived, people were married once, and they were married for life. An annulment of the marriage or a "divorce from bed and board"...
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William Shakespeare
Even though there was a woman on the throne of England at the time that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream and Taming of the Shrew, England was nevertheless a male-dominated country. This...
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William Shakespeare
At various points in As You Like It, Rosalind and Orlando get together, are separated, reunite but in changed circumstances or personas, and ultimately are united in a happy ending suitable to a...
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William Shakespeare
In order to discuss whether Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" and "Sonnet 138" are "anti Petrarchan," as your question suggests, we need to understand the commonly-used elements of a typical Petrarchan...
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William Shakespeare
Willam Shakespeare was an English poet and dramatist who lived between the mid-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. He is generally regarded as the greatest playwright who ever lived. His...
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William Shakespeare
In Macbeth, the supernatural elements often serve as a catalyst for human action and are usually (though not always) without a doubt present in the scene rather than products of a character's...
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William Shakespeare
The structure of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 11, "As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st" is comprised both of repeated patterns of sound and of rhetorical patterns giving shape to the...
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William Shakespeare
Many of Shakespeare's comedies fall into the tradition of what a modern audience would call "romantic comedy," stories in which two characters meet and then ultimately get together by the end. In...
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William Shakespeare
Very funny! I am not really sure what the point of it was though. I don't think Shakespeare would have written something like that. It's more like someone just "translated" modern speech into...
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William Shakespeare
There is a search engine that seems reliable at this URL:http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~matty/Shakespeare/test.htmlRemember to enclose phrases in quotation marks if you want to find the exact phrase...
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William Shakespeare
The common theme of Animal Farm, Julius Caesar, and Antigone is that of revolution or rebellion going wrong. Antigone is perhaps slightly different from the other two in that Antigone does not seek...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s emerging themes in act 4 of Othello are becoming clearer. One theme he has woven throughout this work is that people are not who they seem to be. Iago is the obvious example, as he...
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William Shakespeare
Although Don Quixote (1605) is often regarded as the first novel in European literature, there are earlier prose fictions, such as John Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1581)....
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote sonnets because they were a respected poetic form in his time period. A person who wanted to be taken seriously as a literary figure would write sonnets or other forms of poetry....
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William Shakespeare
Hermia is one of Shakespeare's strongest and most assertive female characters. She's feisty, headstrong, defiant of male authority, and firmly opposed to what she perceives as the oppressive...
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William Shakespeare
A core part of the comedy of Twelfth Night consists of Viola's cross-dressing as Cesario and the social dynamics it ignites. We see her fall in love with Orsino and see Orsino's love, Olivia, fall...
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William Shakespeare
One of the major differences in the flaws of the two characters is that Hamlet is one who appears to be able to think clearly and see the problems around him and the falseness of Claudius, etc.,...
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William Shakespeare
I think that both used nature as a critical part of their poetry. Shakespeare seemed to use nature as a metaphor, a way to articulate artistic themes or ideas. For example, in discussing love...
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William Shakespeare
In the final scene of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Paris goes to Juliet's tomb to pay his respects to the young woman to whom he was betrothed and to whom he was to have been married earlier...
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William Shakespeare
Theatre was important to the Elizabethans for several reasons. One reason was self expression. The common people during this time period were often less educated and might even be illiterate....
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William Shakespeare
In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare takes a classic mythological tale and uses it to comment on the nature of love. The original story of Venus and Adonis, like many mythological tragedies, is filled...
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William Shakespeare
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare belonged to and had partial ownership of an acting company called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which had been named in honor of its...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20” follows a very standard rhyme scheme for the sonnets. The poem is divided into four parts, three of them quatrains followed by a two-line refrain at the end of the...
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William Shakespeare
I would start by saying that we don't know much about Shakespeare, but we do know some things (or at least have come to accept them). Most sources say he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564...
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William Shakespeare
Enotes has quite an extensive library pertaining to Shakespeare. Start at the link below to read a summary and a list of characters as a means of introduction, and go from there to find literary...
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William Shakespeare
How else would you know what the actor/actress' character was thinking? If soliloquies were not included in the play, there would be no way to allow the character to reveal his/her innermost...
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William Shakespeare
To me William Shakespeare is synonymous with greatness for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his ability to take ordinary situations and make them intensely comical and/or...
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William Shakespeare
The late sixteenth-century playwrights, dubbed by nineteenth-century writer George Saintsbury as the university wits, included such figures as Marlow, Nashe, Lodge, and Lyly and others who tended...
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare became famous in the same way that many writers today have become famous. He went to London and began selling, producing, and performing in plays. His style of writing was...
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William Shakespeare
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a tempest can be defined as "a violent storm." Its alternate definition is "tumult, uproar." In the classic play The Tempest by William...
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William Shakespeare
In Hamlet, Shakespeare articulates through Hamlet the humanist worldview in a nutshell: What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express...
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William Shakespeare
At the beginning of the scene, Friar Laurence greets Romeo and uses personification to comment upon his clearly stressful state: "Affliction is enamour’d of thy parts,And thou art wedded to...
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William Shakespeare
I am not sure what there is to explain here. The "mouth" of a cannon is simply the opening in the front of the cannon where the cannon ball would (in those days) have been put in and where it would...
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William Shakespeare
This particular quote is not a direct quote from Shakespeare. The word "nightmare" only appears once in Shakespeare's plays and it is not in a context anything like this quote. (This is according...
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William Shakespeare
This question is certainly very open-ended and certainly not specific. I will attempt to give you some ideas of themes Shakespeare explores in multiple works, though he does so in different ways...
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William Shakespeare
This is hard to really say, because it is not always apparent as to which things the characters do are things that Shakespeare himself agrees with and which things are not. I want to focus here on...
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William Shakespeare
If you are having a difficult time with Shakespeare, there are several things you can do. First, go ahead and read the eNotes plot summary. Shakespeare's language is easier when you already know...
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582, and they had three children together. The eldest was Susanna, born just six months after the wedding ceremony. Their twins, one boy, Hamnet, and...
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William Shakespeare
It's interesting how this speech from the play As You Like It has captured people's imaginations so much that it sort of detached itself from the play and became a poem in its own right. We know...
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William Shakespeare
There are two possible answers to this question. The first is that it means absolutely nothing. At this point in the play, Ophelia has gone mad. She goes about chanting nursery songs, random...
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William Shakespeare
This is a poem of duplicity. The speaker says he shall live with his love supposing her love is true to him. However, he can not be sure of her love. He suspects that she is deceiving him, yet...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare used elements of the supernatural in many of his plays. In Shakespeare's day, belief in the supernatural, from witches and ghosts to goblins and fairies was common. Without the ghost...
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William Shakespeare
Published in 1609, the first folio of the sonnets was published during his lifetime, around the time of his retirement from the theatre. They pre-date the publication of his plays (1623), which...
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William Shakespeare
Of Shakespeare's 154 known sonnets, the first 126 are addressed to a young man. Sonnet 20 is complex in that it is very clearly a love poem, yet there is an acceptance that it is a love that will...
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William Shakespeare
One of the key things about Shakespeare's genius was his ability to master several genres. Most of the other writers of his age were specialists in one genre but not the other - Middleton was...
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William Shakespeare
The West Side Story is a musical written to mirror Romeo and Juliet. Ten Things I Hate About You is a modern-day satire to Shakespeare's classic Taming of the Shrew. Many authors have used...
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William Shakespeare
Supernatural elements are certainly recurring themes across Shakespeare. However, this alone cannot establish whether Shakespeare himself believed or disbelieved in the supernatural: only that he...
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William Shakespeare
It is said that Shakespeare left Stratford for London in search of much better fortune between 1585 and 1592. There are plenty indicators that show that he might have actually done this to "run...
