Name:- Kailas Gohil
Roll No:-17
Class:- sem-1
Email id:- kailasgohil1998@gmail.com
Paper:-1(Renaissance literature)
Topic:-Shakespeare predecessors in the drama.
Submitted:-Department of English
Topic:- Shakespeare predecessors in the drama
Introduction:-
William Shakespeare(April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor. Works by the ‘Bard of Avon’ including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of his death.
The term Elizabethan drama covers not only the beginning of poetic drama (1588-1600) but also the period after the reign of James I up to the closing of theatres in 1642. But modern critics generally designate the mature phase as Jacobean drama and the decline as Caroline drama. If we fall back upon this distinction, Elizabethan drama would include the plays of Marlowe, the early plays of Shakespeare, the plays of Lyly, Peele and Greene.
Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England’s national poet, William Shakespeare has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theatre festivals around the world honour his work and his works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre, students memorise his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed.
Born into a family of modest means in Elizabethan England, the ‘Bard ofAvon’ wrote at least 37 plays and a collection of sonnets, established the legendary Globe Theatre and helped transform the English language.
The distinction between tragedy and comedy was particularly important in Shakespeare’s time. Elizabethan tragedy was the familiar tale of a great man or woman brought low through hubris or fate (though some of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes--such as Romeo or Macbeth--do not easily accommodate Aristotle’s definition of the type). Tragedies and comedies are two of the genres into which the First Folio of Shakespeare divides the plays; the third category is Histories, comprising plays that chronicled the lives of English Kings, but these plays themselves often tended toward the tragic (Richard II or Richard III, for instance) or the comic (the Falstaff subplots of both parts of Henry IV and the Pistol-Fluellen encounters of Henry V).
Thus, almost from the start, Shakespeare’s method was to mingle the heretofore antagonistic visions of comedy and tragedy in ways that still seem novel and startling. There is more to laugh at in the tragedy of Hamlet than there is in a comedy like The Merchant of Venice, and some modern critics go so far as to consider King Lear at once the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s tragic achievement and a kind of divine comedy or even absurdist farce. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy assembled from comic materials (a story of young lovers struggling to overcome the obstacle of parental disapproval), and in Shakespeare’s later tragedy of romantic love, Antony and Cleopatra, there is much poignant humour at the expense of middle-aged lovers attempting with difficulty to sustain the passion usually associated with adolescence. Indeed, some of Shakespeare’s comedies--Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well are the most notable--seem so far removed from the optimism usually associated with that genre that they have acquired the qualifying title of “problem comedies.”
Therefore, Shakespeare united the three main steams of literature: verse, poetry, and drama. To the versification of the Old English language, he imparted his eloquence and variety giving highest expressions with elasticity of language. The second, the sonnets and poetry, was bound in structure. He imparted economy and intensity to the language. In the third and the most important area, the drama, he saved the language from vagueness and vastness and infused actuality and vividness. Shakespeare’s work in prose, poetry, and drama marked the beginning of modernization of English language by introduction of words and expressions, style and form to the language. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.
Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet’s mind:
“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well ...” Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2.
While it is true that Shakespeare created many new words (the Oxford English Dictionary records over 2,000), an article in National Geographic points out the findings of historian Jonathan Hope who wrote in “Shakespeare’s ‘Native English’” that “the Victorian scholars who read texts for the first edition of the OED paid special attention to Shakespeare: his texts were read more thoroughly, and cited more often, so he is often credited with the first use of words, or senses of words, which can, in fact, be found in other writers”.
However, William Shakespeare created a new epoch in world literature. The ideas set forth by the Renaissance, the ideology of Humanism are expressed by him in the most realistic way. Shakespeare has faith in Man. He hates injustice. His plays have become popular throughout the world because of his realistic characters. The history of English drama is reflected in Shakespeare’s works. The development of his characters makes him different from his predecessors (Marlowe and others). Shakespeare’s characters don’t remain static, they change in the course of action.
Needless to say, Shakespeare’s contribution to the development of English drama is incalculable. Just his work on the King James Bible alone has shaped generations of people’s imagination. When it comes to tragedy, he is pretty important for a few reasons. First, tragedy was chiefly a western invention from the Greeks, but it was lost for a long time. Some scholars even posit that no one, but the Greeks could write proper tragedy. Perhaps it was due to the historical circumstances.
In light of this, it is significant that Shakespeare wrote successful tragedies. For this reason, it can be said that he revived a Greek form for generations. His language was understood even by the common people of those times. The soliloquies in his plays are not long; the dialogues are true to life. Many well-known English sayings come from his works.
The writer is a Masters student (English Literature) at Dhaka College.
His Drama………
(1)The Merchant of Venice is a 16th-century play written by William Shakespeare in which a merchant in Venice (Antonio) must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It is believed to have been written between 1596 and 1599. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is most remembered for its dramatic scenes, and it is best known for Shylock and the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech on humanity. Also notable is Portia's speech about "the quality of mercy". Critic Harold Bloom listed it among Shakespeare's great comedies.
(2Remaissance drama:-) English Renaissance drama is sometimes called Elizabethan drama, since its most important developments started when Elizabeth I was Queen of England from 1558to 1603. But this name is not very accurate; the drama continued after Elizabeth's death, into the reigns of King James I (1603–1625) and his son King Charles I (1625–1649). Shakespeare, for example, started writing plays in the later years of Elizabeth's reign, but continued into the reign of James. When writing about plays from James's reign, scholars and critics sometimes use the term Jacobean drama; plays from Charles I's reign are called Caroline drama. (These names come from the Latin forms of the two kings' names, "Jacobus" for James and "Carolus" for Charles.) But for the subject as a whole, terms like English Renaissance drama or theatre are more accurate.
Conclusion:-
Behind Shakespeare's use of prose lies the history of the prose convention in the Elizabethan drama. The term is ambiguous, for no single convention governed the use of prose in the English drama at the beginning of Shakespeare's career. There were, instead, several conventional uses of prose which were apparently unconnected: prose was used for letters and proclamations, for the representation of madness, and for comic matter. None of Shakespeare's predecessors seems to have been aware of a dramatic principle unifying these uses; and virtually the same eclecticism characterized the work even of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors.
The origins of those first conventional uses remain more or less obscure. Definite proof is lacking, but in all likelihood common experience furnished the idea for letter- and proclamation-prose. The well-known elaborate and heavy prose of the typical proclamation, for example, made it impossible for a dramatist to present verse proclamations on the stage. One cannot tell how or when empirical information combined with a developing sense of dramatic decorum to produce a convention.
Roll No:-17
Class:- sem-1
Email id:- kailasgohil1998@gmail.com
Paper:-1(Renaissance literature)
Topic:-Shakespeare predecessors in the drama.
Submitted:-Department of English
Topic:- Shakespeare predecessors in the drama
Introduction:-
William Shakespeare(April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor. Works by the ‘Bard of Avon’ including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of his death.
The term Elizabethan drama covers not only the beginning of poetic drama (1588-1600) but also the period after the reign of James I up to the closing of theatres in 1642. But modern critics generally designate the mature phase as Jacobean drama and the decline as Caroline drama. If we fall back upon this distinction, Elizabethan drama would include the plays of Marlowe, the early plays of Shakespeare, the plays of Lyly, Peele and Greene.
Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England’s national poet, William Shakespeare has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theatre festivals around the world honour his work and his works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre, students memorise his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed.
Born into a family of modest means in Elizabethan England, the ‘Bard ofAvon’ wrote at least 37 plays and a collection of sonnets, established the legendary Globe Theatre and helped transform the English language.
The distinction between tragedy and comedy was particularly important in Shakespeare’s time. Elizabethan tragedy was the familiar tale of a great man or woman brought low through hubris or fate (though some of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes--such as Romeo or Macbeth--do not easily accommodate Aristotle’s definition of the type). Tragedies and comedies are two of the genres into which the First Folio of Shakespeare divides the plays; the third category is Histories, comprising plays that chronicled the lives of English Kings, but these plays themselves often tended toward the tragic (Richard II or Richard III, for instance) or the comic (the Falstaff subplots of both parts of Henry IV and the Pistol-Fluellen encounters of Henry V).
Thus, almost from the start, Shakespeare’s method was to mingle the heretofore antagonistic visions of comedy and tragedy in ways that still seem novel and startling. There is more to laugh at in the tragedy of Hamlet than there is in a comedy like The Merchant of Venice, and some modern critics go so far as to consider King Lear at once the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s tragic achievement and a kind of divine comedy or even absurdist farce. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy assembled from comic materials (a story of young lovers struggling to overcome the obstacle of parental disapproval), and in Shakespeare’s later tragedy of romantic love, Antony and Cleopatra, there is much poignant humour at the expense of middle-aged lovers attempting with difficulty to sustain the passion usually associated with adolescence. Indeed, some of Shakespeare’s comedies--Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well are the most notable--seem so far removed from the optimism usually associated with that genre that they have acquired the qualifying title of “problem comedies.”
Therefore, Shakespeare united the three main steams of literature: verse, poetry, and drama. To the versification of the Old English language, he imparted his eloquence and variety giving highest expressions with elasticity of language. The second, the sonnets and poetry, was bound in structure. He imparted economy and intensity to the language. In the third and the most important area, the drama, he saved the language from vagueness and vastness and infused actuality and vividness. Shakespeare’s work in prose, poetry, and drama marked the beginning of modernization of English language by introduction of words and expressions, style and form to the language. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.
Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet’s mind:
“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well ...” Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2.
While it is true that Shakespeare created many new words (the Oxford English Dictionary records over 2,000), an article in National Geographic points out the findings of historian Jonathan Hope who wrote in “Shakespeare’s ‘Native English’” that “the Victorian scholars who read texts for the first edition of the OED paid special attention to Shakespeare: his texts were read more thoroughly, and cited more often, so he is often credited with the first use of words, or senses of words, which can, in fact, be found in other writers”.
However, William Shakespeare created a new epoch in world literature. The ideas set forth by the Renaissance, the ideology of Humanism are expressed by him in the most realistic way. Shakespeare has faith in Man. He hates injustice. His plays have become popular throughout the world because of his realistic characters. The history of English drama is reflected in Shakespeare’s works. The development of his characters makes him different from his predecessors (Marlowe and others). Shakespeare’s characters don’t remain static, they change in the course of action.
Needless to say, Shakespeare’s contribution to the development of English drama is incalculable. Just his work on the King James Bible alone has shaped generations of people’s imagination. When it comes to tragedy, he is pretty important for a few reasons. First, tragedy was chiefly a western invention from the Greeks, but it was lost for a long time. Some scholars even posit that no one, but the Greeks could write proper tragedy. Perhaps it was due to the historical circumstances.
In light of this, it is significant that Shakespeare wrote successful tragedies. For this reason, it can be said that he revived a Greek form for generations. His language was understood even by the common people of those times. The soliloquies in his plays are not long; the dialogues are true to life. Many well-known English sayings come from his works.
The writer is a Masters student (English Literature) at Dhaka College.
His Drama………
(1)The Merchant of Venice is a 16th-century play written by William Shakespeare in which a merchant in Venice (Antonio) must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It is believed to have been written between 1596 and 1599. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is most remembered for its dramatic scenes, and it is best known for Shylock and the famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech on humanity. Also notable is Portia's speech about "the quality of mercy". Critic Harold Bloom listed it among Shakespeare's great comedies.
(2Remaissance drama:-) English Renaissance drama is sometimes called Elizabethan drama, since its most important developments started when Elizabeth I was Queen of England from 1558to 1603. But this name is not very accurate; the drama continued after Elizabeth's death, into the reigns of King James I (1603–1625) and his son King Charles I (1625–1649). Shakespeare, for example, started writing plays in the later years of Elizabeth's reign, but continued into the reign of James. When writing about plays from James's reign, scholars and critics sometimes use the term Jacobean drama; plays from Charles I's reign are called Caroline drama. (These names come from the Latin forms of the two kings' names, "Jacobus" for James and "Carolus" for Charles.) But for the subject as a whole, terms like English Renaissance drama or theatre are more accurate.
Conclusion:-
Behind Shakespeare's use of prose lies the history of the prose convention in the Elizabethan drama. The term is ambiguous, for no single convention governed the use of prose in the English drama at the beginning of Shakespeare's career. There were, instead, several conventional uses of prose which were apparently unconnected: prose was used for letters and proclamations, for the representation of madness, and for comic matter. None of Shakespeare's predecessors seems to have been aware of a dramatic principle unifying these uses; and virtually the same eclecticism characterized the work even of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors.
The origins of those first conventional uses remain more or less obscure. Definite proof is lacking, but in all likelihood common experience furnished the idea for letter- and proclamation-prose. The well-known elaborate and heavy prose of the typical proclamation, for example, made it impossible for a dramatist to present verse proclamations on the stage. One cannot tell how or when empirical information combined with a developing sense of dramatic decorum to produce a convention.
