Books About William Shakespeare: Shakespeare was known in his day as a very rapid writer: “His mind and hand went together,” his publishers Heminges and Condell reported, “and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
Despite all the praise, some writer’s were not enthusiastic about his plays. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) called A Midsummer Night’s Dream “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”
William Shakespeare Plays
The plays are conventionally divided into the Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The list here adopts the additional subdivision of Romances used by many collections. Shakespeare’s series of historical dramas, based on the English Kings from John to Henry VIII was a tremendous undertaking to dramatize
The lives and rule of kings and the changing political events of his time. No other playwright had attempted such an ambitious body of work. Some were printed on their own or in the First Folio(1623).
William Shakespeare Books
Some of his great Books About William Shakespeare are :- Venus and Adonis ; The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster ; Lucrece ; The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie of Titus Andronicus ; A Pleasant Conceited Historie, Called The Taming of a Shrew ; The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt ;
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third; The Tragedie of King Richard the second; An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet; Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called, Loues Labors Lost; The History of Henrie the Fourth; A midsummer nights dreams.
With Richard III, Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus under his belt, Shakespeare was a popular playwright by 1590.* The year 1593, however, marked a major leap forward in his career. By the end of that year, he secured a prominent patron in the Earl of Southampton and his Venus and Adonis were published.
William Shakespeare Influence
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 20,000 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.
Feminists, like New Historicists, were interested in contextualizing Shakespeare’s writings rather than subjecting them to historical formalist analysis.
Turning to anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, feminist critics illuminated the extent to which Shakespeare inhabited a patriarchal world dominated by men and fathers, in which women were essentially the means of exchange in power relationships among those men.
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