William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare was an English poet,
playwright and actor, widely regarded as the
greatest writer in the English language and the
world's pre-eminent dramatist.
• William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman
and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He
was born in Stratford - upon-Avon.His actual date of birth is
unknown, but is traditionally observed April 23, 1564.
• At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne
Hathaway.
• Six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter,
Susanna.Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost
two years later Hamnet died uncauses at the age of 11.
This design of Sir Nathaniel Curzon, dated
1708, should represent Anne Hathaway.
• It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but
contemporary allusions and records of performances show that
several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.
• The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the
three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a
vogue for historical drama.
• Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing
tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the
mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest
comedies.
• In this perod William Shakespeare wrote a lot of "Italianate
comedies",we rember some of them:"A Midsummer Night's
Dream","Merchant of Venice" and in particular "Romeo and
Juliet",the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged
adolescence, love, and death.
• Romeo
•
Romeo and Juliet by Francesco Hayez
• Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent
the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most
famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than
any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous
soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".
•
The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors
or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he
loves.[105] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy
to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.
• In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy
and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale
and The Tempest.
Hamlet with Yorick's skull
Othello and Desdemona in Venice by Théodore
Chassériau
• In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague,
Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus
and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
•
The Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to
be printed. Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a
private readership.
• Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the
day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring
naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. Soon,
however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his
own purposes.
• No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style.
Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo
and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.
• He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays,
however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately
returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the
illusion of theatre.
Title page from 1609 edition
of Shake-Speares Sonnets.
Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper
engraving of Shakespeare byMartin Droeshout.
• Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and
two daughters.
• Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his
memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of
writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and
Virgil.Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and
memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in
Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Shakespeare's funerary monument in
Stratford-upon-Avon.
Shakespeare's grave
My mistress’eyes
• My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
• I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
• I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Red=repetitions light blue=assonance
• Text analysis
• Sonnet 130 is a pleasure to read for its simplicity and frankness of
expression. It is also one of the few of Shakespeare's sonnets with
a distinctly humorous tone. Its message is simple: the dark lady's
beauty cannot be compared to the beauty of a goddess or to that
found in nature, for she is but a mortal human being.
The sonnet is generally considered a humorous parody of the typical
love sonnet. Petrarch, for example, addressed many of his most
famous sonnets to an idealized woman named Laura, whose
beauty he often likened to that of a goddess. In stark contrast
Shakespeare makes no attempt at deification of the dark lady.
• Yet the narrator loves her nonetheless, and in the closing couplet
says that in fact she is just as extraordinary ("rare") as any woman
described with such exaggerated or false comparisons.
• About the style,in this sonnet we have the alternate rhyme
(ABAB...)and finally we have the couplet rhyiming (GG).We can
recognize also many examples of repetition and assonance in this
text,there are also some exemples of allitteration.In the third
stanza,Shakespeare tells us that despite his woman isn’t a
goddes;he loves her anyway,which is expecially endorsed in the
last two lines.
• Shall I compare thee
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Red: a question blue:the answer green:the justification to the answer
orange:a promise violet:the result of the promise
• Text analysis
• Sonnet 18 is the best known and most well-loved of all 154
sonets.It is also one of the most straightforward in language and
intent.The stability of love and its power to immortality are the
subject of the poet’s verse is the teme.
• The poet starts the promise to his dear friend without
ostentation,but he slowly builds the image of his friends into that
of a perfect being.His friend is compared to summer in the
octave.The poet’s only answer to such profound joy and beauty is
to ensure that his friend be forever in human memory.The final
couplet reaffirms the poet shape that has long as there is breath in
mankind,his poetry too will live on,and ensure the immortality of
his muse.
• The sonet can be divided in five parts:a question,the answer,the
justification to the answer,a promise and the result of the promise.
• In the first four stanzas there is an exemple of alternate rhyme and
in the last two lines there is the couplet rhyming.
• There are also a lot of examples of allitteration that gives a normal
sensation not sad and not happy with different consonants.The
work “Fair” is repeated a lot of times with the meaning of beauty.