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William Shakespeare
The Shakespearean vocabulary is exceptionally large, comprising over 20,000 words. It is impossible to know exactly how many of these words Shakespeare invented, for two main reasons. In the first...
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William Shakespeare
A. C. Bradley's book Shakespearean Tragedy discusses three plays in depth and provides a thorough description of what Bradley sees as the defining characteristics of a Shakespearean tragedy. Chief...
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William Shakespeare
The centuries-old free will versus determinism debate has never fully resolved, and it almost certainly never will be. And Shakespeare, with characteristic subtlety, doesn't come down on either...
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William Shakespeare
If I had to pick one of these, I would pick the comedy -- "A Midsummer Night's Dream." This is mainly because of its content. I personally do not much like tragedy, and I am especially not very...
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William Shakespeare
I don't think one can make a sweeping generalization that MOST of the characters could be psychiatric patients. Since the plays are tragedies, naturally many of the main characters are troubled or...
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William Shakespeare
The tragic play that probably comes closest to tragicomedy in Shakespeare's work is Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet, although much darker, also has comic elements. The benefits of reading these two plays...
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William Shakespeare
The great Greek tragedies were, as far as we know, all set outside Athens to keep the horrifying incidents they portray a safe distance away, in Thebes or Corinth. Shakespeare seems to have...
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William Shakespeare
This quotation applies to many tragic heroes in William Shakespeare's tragedies, including Othello and Macbeth. Othello is an outstanding character in that he is a strong, brave soldier in the...
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William Shakespeare
Tragic heroes have positive attributes that endear them to the audience, but they also possess flaws, which directly contribute to their own deaths. There are many examples of tragic heroes in...
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William Shakespeare
In Hamlet, the human evil of unchecked jealousy, lust, and ambition is shown in Hamlet's uncle, Claudius. Claudius wishes both for the throne that his brother holds and also has a lustful desire...
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William Shakespeare
Below are some good places to get started. You can also see the eNotes section on Julius Caeser
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William Shakespeare
The actual date of Shakespeare's birth is not certain, though it may be April 26, 1564. It is more traditionally celebrated on St. George's Day, April 23rd.He was born in Stratford, in England,...
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William Shakespeare
The Globe Theater was the theater that Shakespeare and his players, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, used in London. The theater was destroyed in 1613 in the Great Fire of London. Today there is a...
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William Shakespeare
The Globe Theater is the theater most connected with William Shakespeare. It stood in the Southwark district of what is now London, on the south bank of the Thames River. Shakespeare's plays were...
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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
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
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
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
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’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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
A "battle of the sexes" implies a conflict between a man and a women, or men and women, regarding gender roles in a given environment or circumstance, or a more generalized battle for supremacy...
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William Shakespeare
This is a huge question, so I can only give you a brief overview. Maybe you can break this up and ask more specific questions about specific plays if you need more information. A Midsummer's Night...
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William Shakespeare
In As You Like It, Rosalind is banished by her uncle, who has also overthrown her father. Rosalind is smart and knows it is dangerous for a young woman to travel in the world. She decides to...
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William Shakespeare
There's a lot to examine regarding relations between the genders in Shakespeare plays. Here's a brief overview of a few examples that you could choose to analyze further. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth...
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William Shakespeare
Two of William Shakespeare’s distinguishing characteristics as a playwright are the wide range of female roles he employed in his works and the complexity of relationships between men and women in...
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William Shakespeare
Sleep is used as a metaphor for death throughout Macbeth. For instance, in act 2, scene 2, Macbeth refers to it as the "death of each day's life." The establishment of such an intimate association...
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William Shakespeare
As an early sonnet, Sonnet 17 fits with the "Fair Youth" sonnets that implore the young man to procreate. A recurring theme in these involves the poem's ability to preserve the beauty and memory of...
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William Shakespeare
Certainly, Iago, from Othello, must top the list of Shakepeare's villains. He is a treacherous, malicious, underhanded liar who cares about nobody but himself and will stop at nothing to destroy...
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William Shakespeare
Oracy is a term that represents a concept first proposed in the mid-1960s by Andrew M. Wilkinson, a researcher and educator at the University of Birmingham in England. Defined simply, oracy is...
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William Shakespeare
Romeo is an impulsive and changeable adolescent who is in love with love. If the play wasn't so filled with tragic events, we could almost laugh at Romeo over how quickly he moves from Rosaline to...
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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
This question is asking you to examine three different villains and make a decision as to which character you think is the most villainous. Feel free to take your pick. There isn't a definitively...
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William Shakespeare
James Burbage was an important figure in the Elizabethan drama scene and is closely associated with William Shakespeare. He was an actor, but his most lasting legacy is that he financed and...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's tragedy, Macbeth, is based on the account of Macbeth's life and reign in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published in 1577. By the time this came to...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare drew upon a number of sources for the play. In both theme and structure, Romeo and Juliet has certain similarities with the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this...
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is known to have written thirty-seven plays, and of those thirty-seven, seventeen are considered comedies. He was very formulaic in his writing, and therefore most of his...
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William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew opens with a two-scene prologue called "Induction," which is rarely performed as part of The Taming of the Shrew, but which provides an interesting perspective...
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William Shakespeare
Perhaps the best example of satiric comedy in the otherwise tragic play Macbeth is found in act 2, scene 3 in Macduff's exchange with the drunken porter at the gate of Macbeth's castle. Macduff...
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William Shakespeare
The starting point for responding to this assignment might be to deconstruct the underlying assumptions of this prompt. In essence, the prompt sets up a binary set of oppositions between easy and...
