It is generally believed by both scholars and students that reading Shakespeare is a difficult task ... but there are a few ideas that can help make it easier. Read here.
The first period (1590-1599) includes
comedies (e.g. The
Comedy of Errors, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant
of Venice), history
plays (Richard III) and tragedies
(Romeo and
Juliet, Julius Caesar). In this period
Shakespeare showed great
sympathy for human
nature and a
positive attitude to
life. Even when the play
has a tragic
conclusion, life is
still presented positively as
worth living. Romeo and
Juliet, for example,
is a celebration
of love in
spite of its
tragic ending. These
plays are characterized by
complicated plots and increasing
ability in characterization; great experimentation in the use of poetic imagery
which is often
influenced by the
language of courtly love;
mixture of rhyme,
blank verse and
prose. The central
themes are love
and appearance and
reality, especially in the comedies,
the restoration of order
in the histories
and tragedies.
In the second period (1600-1609) Shakespeare’s works
gradually reflected a
gloomier vision of life.
Traditional human values,
such as love, friendship
and honour, collapse;
family and society are broken
and destroyed by
treachery, violence and
war; man seems
to live in
a godless chaotic
universe, victim to
a cruel fate. This can be deduced from the great tragedies:
Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear and Macbeth.
The other plays
of this period (Twelfth
Night, Measure for Measure, All’s Well
that Ends Well), which reveal the
pessimistic attitude of the dramatist, are in balance between comedy and tragedy,
showing the ambiguities inherent in
such feelings as love and friendship;
only their happy endings technically make them
comedies; for these reason they
are often referred to as "dark
comedies".
The principal themes
have negative connotations:
conflict, disorder, ambition,
hate, usurpation, madness,
death. Style is characterised
by a predominance of
blank verse and an elaborate
choice of imagery
and rhetorical figures (e.g.
simile, metaphor, antithesis, personification, etc.)
connected with a troubled
nature, which was meant
to reproduce human
conflicts and sufferings in the texture
of language.
Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works
consist of three poems and a
sequence of 154 sonnets.
Two poems Venus
and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece
deal with classical
subjects, while The Phoenix
and the Turtle
is an allegory on the theme
of constant love and
faithfulness.
The sonnets can be divided
into two sections. The first is addressed to a “fair
youth”, probably Shakespeare’s young
patron, the Earl of
Southampton; the second section is addressed to
a mysterious “dark
lady” who, though physically unattractive,
is temptingly desirable.
The choice of the addresses
is an innovation
of the Shakespearean sonnets
since it breaks with the
Petrarchan courting tradition.
The situations suggested
in the sonnets
are means to
explore universal themes such as time, death, love, beauty, art. The
style is characterized by a
rich and brilliantly
descriptive language, the effective
use of rhyme,
the adaptation of stress to
the movement of
emotions, and the multitude
of cultural references
implied.
Sonnet
130, for example, is a pleasure to read for its simplicity and frankness of
expression. It is one of the few of Shakespeare's sonnets with a humorous
tone. Its message is simple: the dark lady's
beauty cannot be compared to the beauty of a goddess or to that found in
nature, for she is but a mortal human being. In truth this sonnet plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of the Petrarchan love poetry
common to Shakespeare's day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains
amusing even today.
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