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If there is a threat of confrontation in the street then the option to retreat may be important in determining whether the use of any force was reasonable In the case of an intruder in the home however the option of retreat is unlikely to arise in many cases and therefore the degree of force used although otherwise appearing to be disproportionate might nonetheless be assessed as reasonable |
There is no explicit stand your ground or castle doctrine provision in the laws of the Czech Republic however there is also no duty to retreat from an attack and that has an effect similar to stand your ground provision In order for a defense to be judged as legitimate it may not be manifestly disproportionate to the manner of the attack |
German law allows self defense against an unlawful attack If there is no other possibility for defense it is generally allowed to use even deadly force without a duty to retreat However there must not be an extreme imbalance extremes Missverhltnis between the defended right and the chosen method of defense In particular in case firearms are used a warning shot must be given when defending a solely material asset Nevertheless due to the low circulation of firearms in Germany the impact of this law is not all that strong |
Under the terms of the Defence and the Dwelling Act property owners or residents are entitled to defend themselves with force up to and including lethal force Any individual who uses force against a trespasser is not guilty of an offense if he or she honestly believes they were there to commit a criminal act and a threat to life However there is a further provision which requires that the reaction to the intruder is such that another reasonable person in the same circumstances would likely employ it This provision acts as a safeguard against grossly disproportionate use of force while still allowing a person to use force in nearly all circumstances |
The law was introduced in response to DPP v Padraig Nally |
A person who uses such force as is permitted by section 2 in the circumstances referred to in that section shall not be liable in tort with respect to any injury loss or damage arising from the use of such force |
The force used is only such as is reasonable in the circumstances as he or she believes them to be |
i to protect himself or herself or another person present in the dwelling from injury assault detention or death caused by a criminal act |
ii to protect his or her property or the property of another person from appropriation destruction or damage caused by a criminal act or |
iii to prevent the commission of a crime or to effect or assist in effecting a lawful arrest |
It does not matter whether the person using the force had a safe and practicable opportunity to retreat from the dwelling before using the force concerned |
This law does not apply to force used against a member of An Garda Siochna Irish Police or anyone assisting them or a person lawfully performing a function authorised by or under any enactment |
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a 1941 horror film starring Spencer Tracy Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner The film also features Donald Crisp Ian Hunter Barton MacLane C Aubrey Smith and Sara Allgood |
Dr Harry Jekyll Spencer Tracy believes good and evil exist in everyone Experiments reveal his evil side named Mr Hyde Experience teaches him how evil Hyde can be he rapes Ivy Pearson Ingrid Bergman who earlier expressed interest in Jekyll Meanwhile Jekyll is preparing to marry Beatrix Emery Lana Turner Over the course of the film Hyde abuses Ivy Feeling remorse over the treatment inflicted on Ivy Jekyll vows to never take the serum again destroys the key to his lab and sends money to Ivy anonymously Ivy believes the money was sent by Hyde in order to trick her into believing she is now free On the advice of a friend over her rattled nerves she goes to Jekyll for comfort Jekyll promises that Hyde will never hurt her again |
On the way to Emery s house for the announcement of his marriage to Beatrix Jekyll transforms into Hyde without taking the serum He goes over to Ivy s house accuses her of meeting with Jekyll and starts to strangle her He escapes back to his lab but discovers that he no longer has the key to the lab He fails to break into the front door of his place and goes to Dr Lanyon Ian Hunter a personal friend for help Lanyon is shocked to find out that both Jekyll and Hyde are the same person as Hyde drinks the antidote in his friend s presence Jekyll decides to break off the engagement to Bea in order to keep his secret She refuses to accept her reaction triggering Jekyll to become Hyde and frighten Bea Her father Donald Crisp responds to her scream only to be beaten to death by Hyde |
Lanyon finds a piece of Jekyll s cane and realizes he is responsible He leads police to search Hyde s laboratory only to find Jekyll having strong armed past his butler Poole Peter Godfrey to get to an antidote During questioning he starts to transform into Hyde In the ensuing struggle Lanyon mortally shoots Hyde who reverts to Jekyll as he dies |
Rather than being a new film version of the novel it is a direct remake of the 1931 film of the same title which differs greatly from the novel due to both films heavy dependence on the Thomas Sullivan stage version The movie was based on Robert Louis Stevenson s 1886 novella the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and directed by Victor Fleming director of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz two years earlier Metro Goldwyn Mayer where Fleming was based acquired the rights to the 1931 film originally released by Paramount Pictures in order to keep the earlier film out of circulation Every print of the 1931 film that could be located was destroyed making it essentially a lost film for decades except for clips until a full version was found and restored |
The MGM version was produced by Victor Saville and adapted by John Lee Mahin from the screenplay of the earlier film by Percy Heath and Samuel Hoffenstein The music score was composed by Franz Waxman with uncredited contributions by Daniele Amfitheatrof and Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco The cinematographer was Joseph Ruttenberg the art director was Cedric Gibbons and the costume designers were Adrian and Gile Steele Jack Dawn created the make up for the dissolute Mr Hyde s appearance |
Despite having not yet met his later costar Katharine Hepburn they met when they made Woman of the Year 1942 Spencer Tracy originally wanted Hepburn to play both Bergman s and Turner s roles as the bad and good woman who would then turn out to be the same person |
Initial casting had Bergman playing the virtuous fiance of Jekyll and Turner as bad girl Ivy However Bergman tired of playing saintly characters and fearing typecasting pleaded with Victor Fleming that she and Turner switch roles After a screen test Fleming allowed Bergman to play a grittier role for the first time |
According to MGM records the film earned 2351000 resulting in a profit of 350000 |
Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported an approval rating of 65 based on 20 reviews with a rating average of 67 10 Film critic Leonard Maltin gave the film 3 out of a possible 4 stars praising Tracy and Bergman s performances |
The movie was nominated for three Oscars for Best Cinematography Black and White Best Film Editing Best Music Scoring of a Dramatic Picture |
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists |
In the 1946 Warner Bros cartoon Hare Remover when Elmer Fudd is going through some bizarre side effects after drinking a potion he created Bugs Bunny turns to the audience and remarks I think Spencer Tracy did it much better |
William Shakespeare 26 April 1564 baptised 23 April 1616 was an English poet playwright and actor widely regarded as both the greatest writer in the English language and the world s preeminent dramatist He is often called England s national poet and the Bard of Avon His extant works including collaborations consist of approximately 39 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 |
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford upon Avon Warwickshire At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway with whom he had three children Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith Sometime between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor writer and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain s Men later known as the King s Men At age 49 around 1613 he appears to have retired to Stratford where he died three years later Few records of Shakespeare s private life survive this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance his sexuality his religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him were written by others Such theories are often criticised for failing to adequately note the fact that few records survive of most commoners of the period |
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613 His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres Then until about 1608 he wrote mainly tragedies among them Hamlet Othello King Lear and Macbeth all considered to be among the finest works in the English language In the last phase of his life he wrote tragicomedies also known as romances and collaborated with other playwrights |
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime However in 1623 two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare s John Heminges and Henry Condell published a more definitive text known as the First Folio a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare s dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as his The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson in which the poet presciently hails the playwright in a now famous quote as not of an age but for all time |
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries Shakespeare s works have been continually adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance His plays remain highly popular and are constantly studied performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts the world over |
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare an alderman and a successful glover glove maker originally from Snitterfield and Mary Arden the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer He was born in Stratford upon Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564 His actual date of birth remains unknown but is traditionally observed on 23 April Saint George s Day This date which can be traced to a mistake made by an 18th century scholar has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616 He was the third of eight children and the eldest surviving son |
Although no attendance records for the period survive most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King s New School in Stratford a free school chartered in 1553 about a quarter mile 400 m from his home Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era but grammar school curricula were largely similar the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors |
At the age of 18 Shakespeare married 26 year old Anne Hathaway The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582 The next day two of Hathaway s neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter Susanna baptised 26 May 1583 Twins son Hamnet and daughter Judith followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585 Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596 |
After the birth of the twins Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592 The exception is the appearance of his name in the complaints bill of a law case before the Queen s Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589 Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare s lost years Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories Nicholas Rowe Shakespeare s first biographer recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him Another 18th century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster Some 20th century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire a Catholic landowner who named a certain William Shakeshafte in his will Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area |
It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592 By then he was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats Worth of Wit |
there is an upstart Crow beautified with our feathers that with his Tiger s heart wrapped in a Player s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you and being an absolute Johannes factotum is in his own conceit the only Shake scene in a country |
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene s words but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university educated writers as Christopher Marlowe Thomas Nashe and Greene himself the so called university wits The italicised phrase parodying the line Oh tiger s heart wrapped in a woman s hide from Shakespeare s Henry VI Part 3 along with the pun Shake scene clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene s target As used here Johannes Factotum Jack of all trades refers to a second rate tinkerer with the work of others rather than the more common universal genius |
Greene s attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare s work in the theatre Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid1580s to just before Greene s remarks After 1594 Shakespeare s plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain s Men a company owned by a group of players including Shakespeare that soon became the leading playing company in London After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I and changed its name to the King s Men |
All the world s a stage and all the men and women merely players they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts |
As You Like It Act II Scene 7 139 142 |
In 1599 a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames which they named the Globe In 1608 the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre Extant records of Shakespeare s property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man and in 1597 he bought the second largest house in Stratford New Place and in 1605 invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford |
Some of Shakespeare s plays were published in quarto editions beginning in 1594 and by 1598 his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson s Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour 1598 and Sejanus His Fall 1603 The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end The First Folio of 1623 however lists Shakespeare as one of the Principal Actors in all these Plays some of which were first staged after Volpone although we can not know for certain which roles he played In 1610 John Davies of Hereford wrote that good Will played kingly roles In 1709 Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet s father Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V though scholars doubt the sources of that information |
Throughout his career Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford In 1596 the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford Shakespeare was living in the parish of St Helen s Bishopsgate north of the River Thames He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599 the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there By 1604 he had moved north of the river again to an area north of St Paul s Cathedral with many fine houses There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy a maker of ladies wigs and other headgear |
Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition repeated by Johnson that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death He was still working as an actor in London in 1608 in an answer to the sharers petition in 1635 Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans the King s Men placed men players there which were Heminges Condell Shakespeare etc However it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609 The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610 which meant there was often no acting work Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611 1614 In 1612 he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy s daughter Mary In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son in law John Hall After 1610 Shakespeare wrote fewer plays and none are attributed to him after 1613 His last three plays were collaborations probably with John Fletcher who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King s Men |
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52 He died within a month of signing his will a document which he begins by describing himself as being in perfect health No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died Half a century later John Ward the vicar of Stratford wrote in his notebook Shakespeare Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton Of the tributes from fellow authors one refers to his relatively sudden death We wondered Shakespeare that thou wentst so soon From the world s stage to the grave s tiring room |
He was survived by his wife and two daughters Susanna had married a physician John Hall in 1607 and Judith had married Thomas Quiney a vintner two months before Shakespeare s death Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616 the following day his new son in law Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler who had died during childbirth Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family |
Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna under stipulations that she pass it down intact to the first son of her body The Quineys had three children all of whom died without marrying The Halls had one child Elizabeth who married twice but died without children in 1670 ending Shakespeare s direct line Shakespeare s will scarcely mentions his wife Anne who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically He did make a point however of leaving her my second best bed a bequest that has led to much speculation Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne whereas others believe that the second best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance |
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008 |
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare To digg the dvst encloased heare Bleste be man spares thes stones And cvrst be he moves my bones |
Modern spelling Good friend for Jesus sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here Blessed be the man that spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones |
Some time 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 In 1623 in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio the Droeshout engraving was published |
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey |
Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same mostly early and late in his career Some attributions such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays remain controversial while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well attested contemporary documentation Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition |
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 plays are difficult to date precisely however and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus The Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare s earliest period His first histories which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed s Chronicles of England Scotland and Ireland dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe by the traditions of medieval drama and by the plays of Seneca The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona in which two friends appear to approve of rape the Shrew s story of the taming of a woman s independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics directors and audiences |
Shakespeare s early classical and Italianate comedies containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences give way in the mid1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies A Midsummer Night s Dream is a witty mixture of romance fairy magic and comic lowlife scenes Shakespeare s next comedy the equally romantic Merchant of Venice contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing the charming rural setting of As You Like It and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare s sequence of great comedies After the lyrical Richard II written almost entirely in verse Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes prose and poetry and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work This period begins and ends with two tragedies Romeo and Juliet the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence love and death and Julius Caesar based on Sir Thomas North s 1579 translation of Plutarch s Parallel Lives which introduced a new kind of drama According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro in Julius Caesar the various strands of politics character inwardness contemporary events even Shakespeare s own reflections on the act of writing began to infuse each other |
In the early 17th century Shakespeare wrote the so called problem plays Measure for Measure Troilus and Cressida and All s Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies Many critics believe that Shakespeare s greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art The titular hero of one of Shakespeare s greatest 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 Unlike the introverted Hamlet whose fatal flaw is hesitation the heroes of the tragedies that followed Othello and King Lear are undone by hasty errors of judgement 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 In Othello the villain Iago stokes Othello s sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him In King Lear the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear s youngest daughter Cordelia According to the critic Frank Kermode the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty In Macbeth the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare s tragedies uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn In this play Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure His last major tragedies Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus contain some of Shakespeare s finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic TS Eliot |
In his final period Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays Cymbeline The Winter s Tale and The Tempest as well as the collaboration Pericles Prince of Tyre Less bleak than the tragedies these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare s part but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen probably with John Fletcher |
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes After the plagues of 1592 3 Shakespeare s plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch north of the Thames Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV Leonard Digges recording Let but Falstaff come Hal Poins the rest and you scarce shall have a room When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre the first playhouse built by actors for actors on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark The Globe opened in autumn 1599 with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged Most of Shakespeare s greatest post1599 plays were written for the Globe including Hamlet Othello and King Lear |
After the Lord Chamberlain s Men were renamed the King s Men in 1603 they entered a special relationship with the new King James Although the performance records are patchy the King s Men performed seven of Shakespeare s plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605 including two performances of The Merchant of Venice After 1608 they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer The indoor setting combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices In Cymbeline for example Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning sitting upon an eagle he throws a thunderbolt The ghosts fall on their knees |
The actors in Shakespeare s company included the famous Richard Burbage William Kempe Henry Condell and John Heminges Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare s plays including Richard III Hamlet Othello and King Lear The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing among other characters He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear In 1613 Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony On 29 June however a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision |
In 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell two of Shakespeare s friends from the King s Men published the First Folio a collected edition of Shakespeare s plays It contained 36 texts including 18 printed for the first time Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions which the First Folio describes as stoln and surreptitious copies Nor did Shakespeare plan or expect his works to survive in any form at all those works likely would have faded into oblivion but for his friends spontaneous idea after his death to create and publish the First Folio |
Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre1623 versions as bad quartos because of their adapted paraphrased or garbled texts which may in places have been reconstructed from memory Where several versions of a play survive each differs from the other The differences may stem from copying or printing errors from notes by actors or audience members or from Shakespeare s own papers In some cases for example Hamlet Troilus and Cressida and Othello Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions In the case of King Lear however while most modern editions do conflate them the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both arguing that they can not be conflated without confusion |
In 1593 and 1594 when the theatres were closed because of plague Shakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton In Venus and Adonis an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus while in The Rape of Lucrece the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin Influenced by Ovid s Metamorphoses the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare s lifetime A third narrative poem A Lover s Complaint in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609 Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover s Complaint Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects The Phoenix and the Turtle printed in Robert Chester s 1601 Love s Martyr mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover the faithful turtle dove In 1599 two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim published under Shakespeare s name but without his permission |
Published in 1609 the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare s nondramatic works to be printed Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599 Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare s sugred Sonnets among his private friends Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare s intended sequence He seems to have planned two contrasting series one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion the dark lady and one about conflicted love for a fair young man the fair youth It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals or if the authorial I who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets Shakespeare unlocked his heart |
Shall I compare thee to a summer s day Thou art more lovely and more temperate |
Lines from Shakespeare s Sonnet 18 |
The 1609 edition was dedicated to a Mr WH credited as the only begetter of the poems It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher Thomas Thorpe whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page nor is it known who Mr WH was despite numerous theories or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love sexual passion procreation death and time |
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 The poetry depends on extended sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits and the language is often rhetorical written for actors to declaim rather than speak The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus in the view of some critics often hold up the action for example and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted |
And pity like a naked new born babe Striding the blast or heaven s cherubim hors d Upon the sightless couriers of the air |
However Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self declaration of Vice in medieval drama At the same time Richard s vivid self awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare s mature plays 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 By the time of Romeo and Juliet Richard II and A Midsummer Night s Dream in the mid1590s Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself |
Shakespeare s standard poetic form was blank verse composed in iambic pentameter In practice this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line spoken with a stress on every second syllable 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 |
After Hamlet Shakespeare varied his poetic style further particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies The literary critic AC Bradley described this style as more concentrated rapid varied and in construction less regular not seldom twisted or elliptical In the last phase of his career Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects These included run on lines irregular pauses and stops and extreme variations in sentence structure and length In Macbeth for example the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself 17 35 38 pity like a naked new born babe Striding the blast or heaven s cherubim hors d Upon the sightless couriers of the air 17 21 25 The listener is challenged to complete the sense The late romances with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another clauses are piled up subject and object are reversed and words are omitted creating an effect of spontaneity |
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre Like all playwrights of the time he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama As Shakespeare s mastery grew he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech 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 |
Shakespeare s work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature In particular he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation plot language and genre Until Romeo and Juliet for example romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events but Shakespeare used them to explore characters minds His work heavily influenced later poetry The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama though with little success Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as feeble variations on Shakespearean themes |
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy William Faulkner and Charles Dickens The American novelist Herman Melville s soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare his Captain Ahab in Moby Dick is a classic tragic hero inspired by King Lear Scholars have identified 20000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare s works These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi Otello and Falstaff whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays Shakespeare has also inspired many painters including the Romantics and the PreRaphaelites The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli a friend of William Blake even translated Macbeth into German The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology in particular that of Hamlet for his theories of human nature |
In Shakespeare s day English grammar spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now and his use of language helped shape modern English Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language the first serious work of its type Expressions such as with bated breath Merchant of Venice and a foregone conclusion Othello have found their way into everyday English speech |
Ben Jonson |
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime but he received a large amount of praise In 1598 the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as the most excellent in both comedy and tragedy The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John s College Cambridge numbered him with Chaucer Gower and Spenser In the First Folio Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the Soul of the age the applause delight the wonder of our stage though he had remarked elsewhere that Shakespeare wanted art |
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century classical ideas were in vogue As a result critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson Thomas Rymer for example condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic Nevertheless poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly saying of Jonson I admire him but I love Shakespeare For several decades Rymer s view held sway but during the 18th century critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius A series of scholarly editions of his work notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790 added to his growing reputation By 1800 he was firmly enshrined as the national poet In the 18th and 19th centuries his reputation also spread abroad Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire Goethe Stendhal and Victor Hugo |
During the Romantic era Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism In the 19th century critical admiration for Shakespeare s genius often bordered on adulation That King Shakespeare the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840 does not he shine in crowned sovereignty over us all as the noblest gentlest yet strongest of rallying signs indestructible The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as bardolatry claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen s plays had made Shakespeare obsolete |
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century far from discarding Shakespeare eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant garde The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare The poet and critic TS Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare s primitiveness in fact made him truly modern Eliot along with G Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare s imagery In the 1950s a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for postmodern studies of Shakespeare By the 1980s Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism feminism New Historicism African American studies and queer studies In a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare s works and comparing Shakespeare literary accomplishments to accomplishments among leading figures in philosophy and theology as well Harold Bloom has commented that Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St Augustine He encloses us because we see with his fundamental perceptions |
Shakespeare s works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623 listed according to their folio classification as comedies histories and tragedies Two plays not included in the First Folio The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles Prince of Tyre are now accepted as part of the canon with today s scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio |
In the late 19th century Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies Dowden s term is often used In 1896 Frederick S Boas coined the term problem plays to describe four plays All s Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet Dramas as singular in theme and temper can not be strictly called comedies or tragedies he wrote We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare s problem plays The term much debated and sometimes applied to other plays remains in use though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy |
Around 230 years after Shakespeare s death doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere 17th Earl of Oxford Several group theories have also been proposed Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution but interest in the subject particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship continues into the 21st century |
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare s family were Catholics at a time when practising Catholicism in England was against the law Shakespeare s mother Mary Arden certainly came from a pious Catholic family The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his father John Shakespeare found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street However the document is now lost and scholars differ as to its authenticity In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church for fear of process for debt a common Catholic excuse In 1606 the name of William s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford As several scholars have noted whatever his private views Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion Also Shakespeare s will uses a Protestant formula and he was a confirmed member of the Church of England where he was married his children were baptised and where he is buried Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare s religious beliefs Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare s Catholicism Protestantism or lack of belief in his plays but the truth may be impossible to prove |
Few details of Shakespeare s sexuality are known At 18 he married 26 year old Anne Hathaway who was pregnant Susanna the first of their three children was born six months later on 26 May 1583 Over the centuries some readers have posited that Shakespeare s sonnets are autobiographical and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love The 26 so called Dark Lady sonnets addressed to a married woman are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons |
No written contemporary description of Shakespeare s physical appearance survives and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait so the Droeshout engraving which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance From the 18th century the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits as well as misattributions repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people |
The domain name mobi is a top level domain TLD in the Domain Name System of the Internet Its name is derived from the adjective mobile indicating it is used by mobile devices for accessing Internet resources via the Mobile Web |
The domain was approved by ICANN on 11 July 2005 and is managed by the mTLD global registry It was originally financially backed and sponsored by Google Microsoft Nokia Samsung Ericsson Vodafone T Mobile Telefnica Mviles Telecom Italia Mobile Orascom Telecom GSM Association Hutchison Whampoa Syniverse Technologies and Visa with an executive from each company serving on mTLD s board of directors |
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