Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

LATE COLLABORATIONS
Although
The Tempest
probably was Shakespeare’s final solo creation, he
is thought to have continued to work as a collaborator on several plays,
including
Henry VIII
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
. The historical drama
Henry VIII, also known as All Is True, was probably written about 1613 with
English dramatist John Fletcher, and first published in the 1623 Folio. It
dramatizes events from Henry’s reign leading to the birth of the future Queen
Elizabeth I, presenting an implied history of the Reformation in a series of
scenes on the fall from greatness of some characters (the Duke of
Buckingham, Catherine of Aragуn, and Thomas Cardinal Wolsey) and the
rise of others (Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cranmer). At the end of a
performance at the Globe on June 29, 1613, the theater’s thatched roof
caught fire and the building burned to the ground.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, probably the last play Shakespeare wrote, was
written jointly with John Fletcher about 1613. Both men’s names appear on
the first published edition in 1634. Scholars generally attribute to
Shakespeare most of acts one and five and to Fletcher the bulk of the play’s
middle. The play tells of the competition of two friends, Palamon and Arcite,
for the love of one woman, Emilia. She is the sister of Hippolyta, who was
queen of the Amazons and wife of the Greek hero Theseus. The story is taken
from
The Knight’s Tale
, part of Chaucer’s influential 14th-century
masterpiece T
he Canterbury Tales.
UNIT XIII.
LITERARY QUALITIES OF THE PLAYS
Everyone loves a good story, and Shakespeare was one of the very best
storytellers. Most of Shakespeare’s stories have an almost universal appeal,
an appeal often lacking in the plays of his contemporaries, who clung more
closely to the tastes and interests of their own day. An even greater
achievement is Shakespeare’s creation of believable characters. His people
are not the exaggerated types or allegorical abstractions found in many other
Elizabethan plays. They are instead men and women with the mingled
qualities and many of the inconsistencies of life itself. The very richness of
Shakespeare’s language continues to delight, and it is always amazing to be
reminded how many common words and phrases have their origin in
Shakespeare’s art. His poetic and theatrical artistry has created plays that
continue to attract readers and theatergoers, and he properly remains one of

---

55
our own age’s most popular playwrights.