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Word of the Day: Kibes
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| Title | Author | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| All's Well That Ends Well | Shakespeare, William |
To paraphrase another of his plays, Shakespeare’s decision to use All’s Well that Ends Well as the title for his play of 1602–3 is a case of protesting too much. The line is used twice towards the end of the ... read more» |
| Antony and Cleopatra | Shakespeare, William |
Antony and Cleopatra is possibly the grandest of the tragedies and the greatest of Shakespeare’s Classical plays. Offering the playwright’s own slant on Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Markus Antonius, and written probably in 1606–7, its epic sweep ... read more» |
| As you Like it | Shakespeare, William |
With one Duke exiled, his younger brother takes his place in the court; a pair of girls, Rosalind and Celia, the daughters of each Duke, are forced by the new Duke’s anger and their ties of friendship to travel into ... read more» |
| The Comedy of Errors | Shakespeare, William |
This is one of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, following The Taming of the Shrew, the Henry VI cycle and Richard III, but preceding A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. It is also one of his funniest, but like ... read more» |
| Coriolanus | Shakespeare, William |
Written about 1608, Coriolanus maintains the mature Shakespeare’s shift in historical settings from the Middle Ages to earlier periods. It is one of Shakespeare’s most relentlessly political plays, with a hero’s personality that seems almost as schematic as Timon of ... read more» |
| Cymbeline | Shakespeare, William |
A play of politics and prophecy, masques and magic, gods and ghosts, nightmares and nationalism, Cymbeline (c. 1609-11) resists categorization. Like The Winter’s Tale it traces a fine line between comedy and tragedy; like Antony and Cleopatra it vacillates between ... read more» |
| Hamlet | Shakespeare, William |
Hamlet is probably Shakespeare’s best known play; a tragedy of monumental depth and linguistic brilliance. The play opens to an atmosphere of darkness and confusion. The scene is Elsinore; the royal castle of Denmark, where King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s ... read more» |
| Henry IV, Part 1 | Shakespeare, William |
“So shaken as we are, so wan with care”: so King Henry IV, the former Bolingbroke, begins a play that remains half in the shadow of the regicide at the end of Richard II. The King worries about his son, ... read more» |
| Henry IV, Part 2 | Shakespeare, William |
No consensus has ever been reached on the precise relation between this play and Henry IV, Part I. With Falstaff, Hal, an anxious Henry IV, a tavern and a battlefield much remains the same, but something has changed in the ... read more» |
| Henry V | Shakespeare, William |
Arguably Shakespeare’s best-known history play, Henry V is actually a highly ambivalent work. Some directors, Kenneth Branagh (1944) famously among them, have seen the play as a celebration of British patriotism, whilst others have emphasised the awful casualties of war, ... read more» |
| Henry VIII | Shakespeare, William |
The First Folio provides Henry VIII’s only authoritative text (1623), probably a clerical copy and not a performance script. It provides a sequel to the triumph of Henry VII which ends Richard III, using episodes from the careers of his ... read more» |
| Henry VI Part 1 | Shakespeare, William | |
| Henry VI, Part 2 | Shakespeare, William |
On March 12, 1594, a quarto play was entered in the Stationers’ Register by bookseller Thomas Millington, and printed by Thomas Creede later that year, under the title The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of ... read more» |
| Henry VI Part 3 | Shakespeare, William | |
| King John | Shakespeare, William |
The Life and Death of King John is cited by Francis Meres in 1598 as one of the plays demonstrating Shakespeare’s talent and status as the English Ovid. It was popular throughout Victorian times but has been one of the ... read more» |
| Julius Caesar | Shakespeare, William |
First performed in 1599, Julius Caesar is remarkable for being one of the best preserved of Shakespeare’s plays, not to mention one of only a very handful on which we have contemporary comment: Thomas Platter, a Swiss doctor from Basle, ... read more» |
| King Lear | Shakespeare, William |
The last word on old age was written in the opening decade of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s darkest and wildest play, King Lear draws on the gravity of ancient British myth, to tell the story of a man literally driven ... read more» |
| A Lover's Complaint | Shakespeare, William | |
| Love's Labour's Lost | Shakespeare, William |
The Duke of Navarre persuades his three friends to foreswear with him the company of women, and to devote themselves to study. Almost immediately afterwards, the Princess of France arrives with her three female friends. It does not take the ... read more» |
| Macbeth | Shakespeare, William |
Essays on Macbeth: John Boe, The Tragedy of Macbeth Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, despite being supposedly cursed: in theatrical circles its name is taboo, and it is referred to simply as ‘the Scottish play’. It is ... read more» |
| Measure for Measure | Shakespeare, William |
As equivocal and all-encompassing as its title suggests, Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s first forays out of Renaissance pomp and convention into the more complicated sensibilities of the Jacobean era. Probably written while the playhouses were closed between ... read more» |
| The Merchant of Venice | Shakespeare, William |
The Merchant of Venice contains some of Shakespeare’s most memorable and complex characters. While Antonio is central to this play — after all, he is normally considered the person for whom it is named — audiences are inevitably fascinated by ... read more» |
| The Merry Wives of Windsor | Shakespeare, William |
This is indeed a merry play, possibly the only one of Shakespeare’s comedies in which all’s more or less well that ends more or less well. Getting there is, except for poor Falstaff and the jealous Master Ford, a wildly ... read more» |
| A Midsummer Night's Dream | Shakespeare, William |
One of Shakespeare’s most enduringly popular plays, and also one of the most frequently reinterpreted. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was systematically cut and blended with other works, David Garrick’s version (1755), entitled The Fairies, contained, for example, ... read more» |
| Much ado about Nothing | Shakespeare, William |
Much Ado About Nothing dates from around 1598, grouped with Shakespeare’s sophisticated middle comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night, but sharing Merry Wives’ more realistic use of prose. Its traditional plot (resembling the twenty-second of Bandello’s novelle, and ... read more» |
| Othello | Shakespeare, William |
The ‘otherness’ of Othello, when compared to the other tragedies, doesn’t just stem from the fact that it features Shakespeare’s only (and English drama’s first) black hero. In Macbeth and King Lear, Shakespeare would go on to use the rugged ... read more» |
| The Passionate Pilgrim | Shakespeare, William | |
| Pericles | Shakespeare, William | |
| The Phoenix and the Turtle | Shakespeare, William | |
| The Rape of Lucrece | Shakespeare, William |
The story of Lucrece, found in both Ovid and Livy, has inspired scores of famous depictions. Britten, Rembrandt, Chaucer, Titian, Gower, Dante, Raphael and Richardson all used the story in their work, but none as famously as Shakespeare in his ... read more» |
| Richard II | Shakespeare, William |
Richard II opens with a dispute between Mowbray and Bolingbroke, which, badly managed by the king, results in banishment for them both. Mowbray’s is the harsher sentence, since his exile will be permanent, and his parting words on how his ... read more» |
| Richard III | Shakespeare, William |
Outstanding for its violence and striking for its postmodern preoccupation with prophecy and the supernatural, Richard III renders masterfully one of the most disturbing episodes in later medieval English history. Though its main character, Richard, was unlikely ever to achieve ... read more» |
| Romeo and Juliet | Shakespeare, William |
Probably composed in late 1596, Shakespeare’s version of ‘the greatest love story ever told’ marks a new stage in his writing career. Ever versatile, Shakespeare now creates pathos from the forbidden love plot that he had previously parodied in the ... read more» |
| Sonnets | Shakespeare, William | |
| The Taming of the Shrew | Shakespeare, William |
At first glance, the continued popularity of The Taming of the Shrew can seem rather hard to stomach. Its two subplots focus on the wooing of Bianca and Katherine, the two daughters of the Paduan gentleman Baptista Milona: while the ... read more» |
| The Tempest | Shakespeare, William |
The Tempest is generally accepted as Shakespeare’s last complete play, with a performance date around 1611. In the 1623 First Folio of his collected works its novelty is probably the reason for its being placed first; its opening storm scene ... read more» |
| Timon of Athens | Shakespeare, William | |
| Titus Andronicus | Shakespeare, William |
Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s first Classical play, written in the early 1590′s, and his first tragedy. It has obvious classical influences, notably from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is discussed onstage, and from Seneca’s graphic tragedies written in Neronian Rome. It has ... read more» |
| Troilus and Cressida | Shakespeare, William |
The siege of Troy provides the backdrop for Troilus and Cressida, but – like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde – Shakespeare opens by claiming that he “leaps o’er…those broils” of the war itself. But, again like Chaucer, Shakespeare finds some ... read more» |
| Twelfth Night | Shakespeare, William |
Reliant as it is on cross-dressing, identical twins and plenty of fast-moving wordplay, Twelfth Night looks like the archetypal Shakespeare comedy – but one which begins with two characters mourning for their lost brothers and ends with another swearing revenge ... read more» |
| Two Gentlemen of Verona | Shakespeare, William |
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is often euphemistically referred to as one of Shakespeare’s ‘early plays’. This phrase attempts to account for its relative immaturity; aesthetically and dramaturgically it is considered by many to be inferior to the ‘later plays’. ... read more» |
| Venus and Adonis | Shakespeare, William |
In Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare is at his most verbally dexterous, revelling in word play and elaborate linguistic devices. The poem is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and takes its story from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ... read more» |
| The Winter's Tale | Shakespeare, William |
The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s last plays and distinguished as one of the most sharply divided ‘problem plays’, or tragicomedies, split between scenes of psychological tension and pastoral clowning, and concluding with an apparently happy ending. This division ... read more» |