The importance of shakespeare’s sonnets in english literature plan

1.2. William Shakespeare’s place in literature

Shakespeare is read and his plays are watched repeatedly. Both his poems and plays enjoy us. All of them enrich us in countless ways.

1. We became more sensitive to language. It means that we would be capable to express ourselves more nicely and respond to world experience.

2. We should be involved in the ethical dilemmas of characters in his tragedies, comedies and histories. This would, of course, increase our moral sensibility.

3. We should be able to pay attention to states of mind different from our own. It would enlarge our imagination greatly.

4. Other people may experience emotions that we find in ourselves, so we are given sense of shared humanity.

His poetry sings friendship and love. They are fascinating and charming for their lyricism. His comedies contain tragic elements, as well as his tragedies are not devoid of humor. His histories are full of powerful expressions and ideas. Death with its terrors can be seen in “Pleasure for Measure”, in his sonnets. Take all this info considerations, please. Shakespeare’s heroes are different characters. Many episodes can work upon our emotions however distant they may be from our personal experience.

Shakespeare’s plays can stimulate thought about abstract issues such as heroism, government, and war: friendship and love; fascinating one another, personal and public responsibilities; humankind’s relationship to society and to the universe. They are packed full with wit and humor. Shakespeare had an extraordinary ability to observe, and to transmute into art, the quirks and oddities of the people talk and behave an enjoyment of eccentricity, a delight in clever answers and sparkling repartee. Shakespeare also wrote about sex. His humor is unique. His plays give aesthetic pleasure, arousing admiration of their readers and audience, of the relationships of details to the whole, of their linguistic virtuosity and intellectual vitality, of their capacity to engage and entertain us in ways that enhance our appreciation of life.

Shakespeare’s plays and poems cover an exceptional range of human experience. They rang from the delicate comedy of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” to the austerely passionate tragedy of “King Lear”; from the farcical complication of “The Comedy of Errors” to the sensuous eroticism of “Anthony and Cleopatra” from the violence and horror of “Titus Andronicus” and the early history plays to the fantasy and charm of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest”. And the engage with the spiritual world, most obviously in the visions of late plays such as “Cymbeline”, “Pericles” and the “The Tempest”, but no less pervasively in, for instance, “Hamlet”, whose hero is charged with a task by a ghost, and the “Richard III” and “Macbeth”, where spirits externalize states of mind. None of his plays has their equal. Each of them is unique. This does not make them better in themselves, but does increase our sense of the achievement of the single mind from which they all proceeded. And it can be fascinating to look for and to think about the links among the plays, as if they all faced one great work of art.

None of Shakespeare’s plays is purely comic or purely tragic, each of them stretches the limits of its framework, inviting not singularity but multiplicity of response. Most of his comedies bring one or more characters close to death, the tragedy of “Hamlet” is shot through with comedy from beginning to end. Macbeth has its comic porter, and even “King Lear” can raise laughter. The plays’ emotional complexity is a part of their richness. Shakespeare’s creativity in the greatest of them is so profuse that like the night sky it can never be taken in all at once. The depth of characterization in figures such as Falstaff and Hamlet, Rosalind and Cleopatra, means that they can only be read or performed selectively. An actor who tried to give equal weight to every word and image in a role would dog the play’s forward movement; a reader who tried to plumb the depths of every speech would lose sense of the shape of the whole.

Each of Shakespeare’s causes great diversity of interpretation. Shakespeare himself was clearly aware that his actors, and their followers from one generation to another, would interact with what we wrote in creative ways, so that each of a role has its own uniqueness.

Many of these roles remain among the greatest and most rewarding challenges ever offered to actors. As actors vary in response, so do readers, according to their education and sensibility. Some of Shakespeare’s plays had more than one version of original text “Hamlet” and “King Lear” for example.

Shakespeare’s plays collaborative calling and the skills of actors, musicians, directors, designers, dancers, costumers, and poetry makers. These are the reasons why we can gain pleasure and understanding by gains. On seeing the plays on the varied interpretation, and why they reveal new facts of themselves in repeating re-reading.

Shakespeare’s influence is pervasive on the English language. This is a great thing! The same can be said about his influence on both Western culture increasingly and world cultures of the peoples all over the world. Many men and women of artists engaged in creative art fields felt his influence on writing the master pieces. His plays (tragedies, comedies, histories as well as his poems) inspired everybody to compose their own things. To understand better such great composers as Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Prokofiev, and many others we should have known Shakespeare’s plays. Many painters such as Reynolds and Blake were influenced by Shakespeare. John Updike wrote his “Claudius and Gertrude” inspired by “Hamlet”. Jane Smiley’s book “A Thousand Acres” is based on “King Lear”. Thousands of popular films and TV sitcoms (abbr. for - situation comedies – комедия положений) make allusions to Shakespeare.

Awareness of Shakespeare has become part of the mental equipment expected of politicians and journalists, preachers and comedians make references to Shakespeare educated persons throughout the world. There are numerous obstacles and questions concerning Shakespeare’s work:

he wrote for theatres and theatre companies differ from our modern theatres;

but many today’s theatres try to capture features of the stages of his time;

or even to replicate them, in order to accommodate his plays. He often writes short scenes, his action is not precisely located, there are far fewer female roles what are the meanings of his terms “aside” and “above”;

we are not accustomed to his heightened language.

He expressed subtle and intellectually probing thoughts, the swift shifts of Shakespeare’s wordplay are not for lazy minds, and sometimes they are omitted. Some of his words became archaic or obsolete, others have shifted in meaning. His syntax also changed.

To overcome such difficulties we should have training in close reading, in Elizabethan vocabulary and grammar, in the proper use of edited and annotated texts.

To enjoy Shakespeare we must understand dramatic and theatrical conventions with which he worked. Hamlet talks to himself, we cannot explain its reason? Twins in “The Comedy of Errors” must be around, but nobody could realize it, why?

In “The Twelfth Night” Viola should not see that the only explanation for what is happening is that her brother has survived the shipwreck? In “As You Like It” Rosalind’s father should not recognize his own daughter until the moment that the plot requires him to do so? In “Twelfth Night” the spectators, the hall can hear Sir Toby and Sir Andrew as they stand before Malvolio, but why can’t he do so? Can anyone really believe that Iago would have been able so quickly to convince Othello of Desdemona’s adultery?

To accept such episodes truly we should have our imagination to be educated. Shakespeare is understood by each reader and spectator according to their own views depending on the time, epoch in which they live. But all of them enjoy his plays immensely and can offer deeper rewards when more intensively studied. So read Shakespeare as often as possible and you will open up, reveal unknown in each case.

One of the most brilliant Shakespearean critics Stanley Wells stated the following and it is great:

“To read books that Shakespeare read, such as Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans”, on which he based his Roman plays, or Thomas Lodge’s “Rosalind”, the source for “As You Like It”, gives us insights into his creative processes.” [1. Shakespeare. An Oxford Guide. Edited by Stanly Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. Oxford University Press, 2003. page 6.]

We really must study historical circumstances in which his plays were composed and only then we could be able to feel how Shakespeare’s contemporaries understood his plays, this way is a true method of illuminating aspects of his writings. He wrote of ancient centers of civilization as an inhabitant of the Epoch of Renaissance of Elizabethan London. Shakespeare’s attitudes towards religion and towards superstition and witchcraft, magic and madness, differed from those now prevalent in world culture. This matter should also be taken into consideration. The rebellion plotted by the Earl of Essex in 1601 shows that the country’s history has much in common with the author’s creations.

Pay attention! The gap between rich and poor was greater in Shakespeare times than today.

The attitudes of the members of the society have changed concerning such matters as love and marriage, friendship and family relations, the place of women, race and nationhood. If we understand properly of what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought about the above-mentioned problems, sure, may broaden and understanding. Much is done to explore relationships between the bard of Avon and his time.

People have been reading, performing, studying writing about Shakespeare’s things for centuries, the fact influences our understanding them freshly. Many approaches should be reassessed Stanley Wells warns us that we could think over the characters of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”, Beatrice and Benedict in “Much Ado About Nothing”, even Falstaff in the “Henry IV” as star roles. His warning seems right to us.

Some thought of the critics we have to think over. They are: “… whereas the plays in which they appear might be better served if they were thought of as having been written for a more evenly matched company. “… textual scholarship has shown that his texts were more fluid in early performance than had been suspected; and we have become more receptive to the idea that collaborative plays such as “The Two Noble Kinsmen” and even possibly “Edward III” are worthy of a place in the canon.” [1. page 7]

Shakespeare’s sonnets are another branch which demand our re-reading them.

Serious thought about Shakespeare’s sonnets was for a long time inhibited by anxiety that they might reflect same-sex desire on Shakespeare’s parts.”

It has increasingly been realized that Shakespeare’s plays shift in meaning according to the mental attitudes that people bring to them.

“Shakespeare”, Torance Hawks has said, “does not mean; we mean by Shakespeare.” His works interact with the preoccupations of those who experience them; and can be appropriated for many different purposes. Much modern study attempts not only to illuminate the plays by applying to them a wide range of critical practices, but also to use reactions to the plays as a means of exploring the society of our and of other times.

Shakespeare criticism and scholarship became highly professionalized and institutionalized for the later part of the twentieth century. He and his works became the object of an industry as never before. Larger and larger numbers of performances were given on film and television as well as on stage, more journals were established, more books – many of them adapted from graduate dissertations – appeared, and new critical approaches were developed. This bears witness to Shakespeare’s continuing appeal to the modern world, to the fact that his plays can go on provoking debate, arousing enjoyment, rewarding intellectual investigation. It also means that students may be overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of material available to them. We hope that our article will act as a friendly guide for the students, removing obstacles and enhancing its readers’ understanding and, above all, enjoyment of Shakespeare.