illustrated portrait of English playwright and poet William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

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Distinctive features and main characteristics of Shakespeare's plays

Summary:

Shakespeare's plays are known for their complex characters, intricate plots, and profound themes. They often explore human nature, love, power, and betrayal. His use of iambic pentameter, wordplay, and soliloquies are distinctive features. Additionally, Shakespeare's works span various genres, including tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances, showcasing his versatility and deep understanding of the human condition.

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What are the main characteristics of Shakespeare's plays?

Defining Shakespeare's dramas is a near-impossible task. His plays were, in great part, responsible for changing the entire theater experience, presenting the drama as it had never been seen before.

Shakespeare often used stories that had been told by others: Romeo and Juliet uses a theme that...

...appeared in the fourth century in a Greek tale... 

But it was the way that Shakespeare treated his subjects, used the language and related to things that audience cared about that changed the face of drama forever. Marlowe and Kyd are playwrights that were also popular at the time, but Shakespeare is most often associated with refining the genre—using models from Aristotle and Horace, but making the dramatic art his own.

"The Bard" did not write about religious themes, as earlier English plays did, but spoke to more secular issues. In Macbeth, the question of valid regicide is considered: Elizabethans believed (in keeping with the Chain of Being) that God ordained who would be king. Macbeth's murder of Duncan was considered by the audience to be a mortal sin. It raised the question for Elizabethans—something they would have struggled with in the past—as to if regicide was ever justified: for in the play, Macbeth is a tyrant. 

With Hamlet, Elizabethans would have had strong opinions about Gertrude's remarriage to her brother-in-law, which was then seen as an incestuous union—something Hamlet laments in his soliloquy in Act One, scene two:

...She married. O, most wicked speed, to post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! (159-160)

Shakespeare also addressed the supernatural: Elizabethans deeply believed in witches, ghosts and omens. The ghost of Hamlet's father comes from the grave to demand that his death be avenged: Hamlet struggles with whether the Ghost or good or evil, one reason he delays in killing Claudius.

Shakespeare also changed the way the world looks at fairies, as seen in A Midsummer Night's DreamUntil that time, fairies were perceived as evil and malicious. Not so with Shakespeare's fairies, for he...

...eradicates the old beliefs and creates the new fairy himself...fairies now dwell in places of fancy instead of horrifying abodes.

Lastly, Shakespeare used elements of drama (soliloquies, asides, etc.) to enable his audience to identify with his characters. Shakespeare's mastery with the language of the day drew his audience into the frustrations of the evil Richard III, the sorrow and anger of Hamlet for his father's murder, and Macbeth's struggle between being moral or killing his King—he admits that heaven will bewail the death of such a great man, and that he has little reason to follow such a path:

I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself

And falls on the other— (I.vii.25-28)

Shakespeare, in his comedies, tragedies and dramas is able to capture the imagination of his audience: they believe there is a battle raging on the stage, righteously hate Richard III, admire Brutus even as he kills Julius Caesar, sympathize with Hamlet's heartache, and laugh as Puck declares:

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III.ii.110–115).

Shakespeare's writing, use of dramatic techniques and, most of all, his ability to connect to his audience, with...

...the interplay of human character and motive...

...are characteristics of his works that make them relevant to audiences hundreds of years after they were first presented on stage.

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What are some distinctive features of Shakespeare's plays?

Shakespeare was the greatest playwright that ever lived. He wrote comedies and tragedies; and the comedies are more tragic than the dramatic plays. As You Like It is a comedy while Hamlet is a tragedy.

Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare 'he was not for an age but for all time,'  Shakespeare was Elizabethan and one characteristic of this is his preference for "conceits". In addition he had a habit of never inventing the whole story.

Shakespeare is different from other playwrights because he set out to deal with the deepest problems that resulted from flaws in human character.For example, in 'Julius Casar' an impractical idealist (Brutus) fails; in 'Hamlet' he is split in half psychologically, divided; in 'Othello' the power of jealousy ruins a life; in 'Macbeth' destuction through material ambition.

What is so great about Shakespeare is that he gets at the root of the problem in each character. The most essential qualities of his characters are what brings them down in the end.

Even though he wrote so long ago, the character flaws that his characters display are the same as those that are in the people we encounter everyday in our contemporary lives.

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