5.5 Literature
Theatre: William Shakespeare
We know relatively little about Shakespeare’s life, and what we do know does not necessarily add to our understanding of his plays. The impact of those plays, however, is beyond question. Shakespeare is credited with introducing about 1700 words to the English language (by invention, by turning nouns into verbs, by pulling words from other languages, etc.). When we talk about a gust of wind, or someone swaggering into a room, or bumping into someone, we are using Shakespeare’s words. Many phrases introduced by Shakespeare are also in common usage: such as if someone catches a cold after too much of a good thing and is now a sorry sight who has seen better days. It is Shakespeare’s use of language that has kept him so popular; the basic plot of Hamlet was based on historical events recounted by Saxo Grammaticus and written about by previous authors, but like Homer’s version of the story of the Trojan War, Shakespeare’s presentation of the material surpasses all others. Hamlet’s grief about his father’s death—and his mother’s subsequent marriage to his uncle—could have led to a straightforward Elizabethan revenge tragedy. In Shakespeare’s hands, the play instead explores the philosophical, psychological, and physical ramifications of revenge. Shakespeare’s plays are well known around the world, and they have influenced countless authors. Hamlet is a particularly good example of this phenomenon; Goethe’s Faust (a masterpiece in its own right) includes quotations from Hamlet and rewrites the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship in the context of Romanticism, while Fyodor Dostoevsky rewrites the relationship in the context of Realism in his Notes from Underground. Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted successfully in many countries, which is an argument for their timeless appeal. For example, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) takes Macbeth and sets it in feudal Japan, with the title character as a samurai. Of all of the plays, Hamlet is both the most well-known and the most frequently adapted, both on the stage and in film.
Read entirety of Hamlet here
World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Used under Fair Use for Education Purposes
The Tempest is regarded as the last play Shakespeare wrote alone, based on the fact that it uses material only available in late 1610 C.E. and it was performed before King James on Hallowmas Night, 1611 C.E. After writing this play, Shakespeare soon retired to Stratford, but he also collaborated on at least two other plays. Scholars group The Tempest among Shakespeare’s late plays called “romances,” a modern term for a genre of plays that blend elements of tragedy and comedy. It was published in the First Folio of 1623, which is the first published edition of the collected works of William Shakespeare. The actions of The Tempest take place in a single location in a single day (keeping the unities of time and place), beginning with a storm raised by Prospero, the former duke of Milan, whose position has been usurped by his brother Antonio and King Alonzo of Naples. The play has lent itself to numerous adaptations, including Aimé Césaire’s 1969 postcolonial adaptation, Une Tempête (“A Tempest”).
Read the entirety of The Tempest here
World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Video URL: https://youtu.be/piTraKIfQWk?si=IUjkV8605hk6bt6G
Used under Fair Use for Education Purposes