CHAPTER 2. William Shakespeare’s legacy in 21th century and his most
famous works
2.1. Literary activity and works of W. Shakespeare
Shakespeare's comedies. The comedies by Shakespeare did not establish a
lasting literary tradition in the theatre, as did those of Ben Jonson or Moliere, in
which the authors portrayed the everyday life of their time, and the characters were
exaggerated almost into satirical grotesque. Shakespeare's comedies are based on
different principles: the scene is usually in some imaginary country, but in this
fairy-tale setting we find characters that are true to life, and they are depicted with
deep insight into human psychology for which Shakespeare is distinguished. In
each comedy there is the main plot and one or more subplots. The comic characters
always have the English flavor even if the scene is laid in some distant or
imaginary place. All these plays are written in easy-flowing verse and light prose;
the texts are full of jokes and puns. The comedies tell of love and harmony, at first
distributed, finally restored.
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Shakespeare's
histories The
histories,
or
historical plays,
or
chronicles, are more closely related to
Shakespeare's
tragedies
than
to
comedies. They can be regarded as a
profound and detailed treatise upon the
nature of monarchy. Shakespeare
shows all types of autocratic
rulers
in
them.
Shakespeare's
tragedies
Shakespeare brought something new to
the genre of tragedy: the hero of any of
his tragedies perishes by reason of
some trait of character that makes him
either prefer some positive ideal to life, or make him betray an ideal and meet his
doom. All the tragic characters of Shakespeare are shown in their development: a
hero at the end of the tragedy is not the man in the beginning. The development of
the character is explained by social factors that form their psychology and
influence their lives. In some of the tragedies Shakespeare
treats important
ethical
problems.
Shakespeare's
sonnets Shakespeare's sonnets can not be considered
absolutely autobiographical, we can see variations on themes traditional in
renaissance poetry in them; but they occupy a unique place in Shakespearean
heritage, because they are his only lyrical pieces, the only things he has written
about himself. In many of his views Shakespeare was far ahead of his time. He
could not give concrete answers to the problems he put forth, but he was a truly
great inquirer, and his penetration into life gives us an opportunity to try and
answer his questions better than he could have done it himself. Shakespeare's
literary work is usually divided into three periods. The first period of his creative
work falls between 1590 and 1600. Shakespeare's comedies belong to the first
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period of his creative work. They all are written in his play full manner and and in
the brilliant poetry that conveys the spectator to Italy. Some of the first plays of the
first period are: "Richard III" (1592), "The Comedy of Errors" (1592), "Romeo and
Juliet" (1594), "Julius Caesar" (1599), "As You Like It" (1599), 1600 - "The
Twelth Night". Shakespeare's poems are also attributed to the first period,
"Venus and Adonis" and "Lucrece", and 154 sonnets. "Venus and Adonis" was the
first of Shakespeare's works that came off the press. The second period of
Shakespeare's creative work during from 1600 to 1608. His famous tragedies
appeared at this time. In the plays of this period the dramatist reaches his full
maturity. He presents great humans problems. His tragedies and historical plays
made Shakespeare the greatest humanist of the English Renaissanse. Some plays of
the second period: 1601 - "Hamlet", 1604 - "Othello" Shakespeare is today known
primarily as one of the great English playwrights, however much of his literary
reputation while alive rested on his poetic works, particularly the Ovidian narrative
poems Venus and Adonis(1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). His well-
known Sonnets, probably dating from the mid
‐1590s, were printed in 1609 and
further
bolstered his standing
as
a
poet.
The writing of plays, on the other hand, was not considered a literary
activity, nor an activity with the goal of publication in print. The plays of
Shakespeare were thus published by being performed. Scripts of only half of them
appeared in print in his lifetime, some in short, corrupt texts, often known as "bad
quartos." Dates and order of composition are often difficult to establish. The texts
of Shakespeare‘s plays survive either in the form of so-called quarto editions of
single plays, published during his lifetime and after, or in the posthumous edition
of collected plays known
as
the First Folio from 1623.
Shakespeare probably began to write for the stage in the late 1580s,
developing plays based on episodes from English history centered on the life of
kings, eventually known as "history plays." Works such as Richard III,Richard
II and Henry V appeared from this period throughout the 1590s. Simultaneously
during this decade, Shakespeare was producing well-known comedies such as The
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Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Love‘s Labour‘s Lost, A
Midsummer Night‘s Dream and Twelfth Night. At the same time, he was also
establishing
himself
as
a
tragedian
with
works
such
as Titus
Andronicus and Romeo & Juliet dating from the early-to-mid 1590s. These
tragedies culminated in the so-called major or great Shakespearean tragedies, such
as Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra, which date
from the period 1599–1607. Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare turned to
tragicomedy and romance, with plays such as The Winter‘s Tale and The Tempest,
both performed in
1611.
Establishing the Shakespearean corpus—the collection of his writings—has
occupied many people over many hundreds of years, in a process begun as early as
1623 with the publication of the First Folio and continuing until the present day,
with significant editions produced in every century in between. Shakespeare‘s
works thus exist in multiple versions, produced according to multiple aims: some
seeking to establish a kind of master text, a "best version" compiled from all those
available, others seeking to explode the very notion of a master text by juxtaposing
all
available
versions
in
the same edition.
Forever demanding new performers to interpret them for new audiences under
new circumstances, and continuing to elicit a rich worldwide profusion of editions,
translations, commentaries, adaptations and spin-offs, Shakespeare‘s works have
never behaved like unchanging monuments about which nothing new remains to be
said. The histories of important theatre companies need almost continuous
rewriting.
Both Shakespeare‘s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example,
carried out some significant architectural self-reinvention between 2001 and 2015
and a fair few changes of artistic policy too. Current critics and artists move from
bylines to obituaries in a sort of permanent melancholy background knell. (I
remember adding ‗d.2000‘ to the entry about Sir John Gielgud when the first
edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare was just going to press; Alan
Howard‘s ‗d.2015‘ just missed the deadline for the second.) Yet neither Stanley
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Wells nor I could have anticipated the extent of changes in the culture at large and
to Shakespeare‘s place within it within the last fifteen years.
While the last two decades have seen a boom in biographies of Shakespeare,
there have been no major archival discoveries about his life, though if the Cobbe
portrait (brought to fresh public attention in 2009) is genuinely a likeness of
Shakespeare we may be able to make some new inferences about his interactions
with the aristocracy (more of which were convincingly teased out of his poem ‗The
Phoenix and Turtle‘ by James Bednarz in 2012). Recent theatre archaeology,
meanwhile, notably at the site of the Theatre in Shoreditch (the main playing place
of the Lord Chamberlain‘s Men until they dismantled it and recycled its timbers to
build the Globe in 1599), has tended to confirm earlier hypotheses rather than to
overturn them. More attention is devoted to new Shakespearean theatres rather
than old. These have included not just the remodelled Royal Shakespeare Theatre
in Stratford (2010) and the indoor, neo-Jacobean Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in
London (2014) but more novel structures elsewhere in the world.
The remarkable Teatr Szekspirowski in Gdansk, Poland (2014), for example, a
distant dream in 2001, can convert from being an indoor, seated, proscenium-arch
venue to being an outdoor yard-based one (its shape based on that of the Fortune in
London) thanks to its magnificent self-opening roof.
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