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Shakespeare's historical plays
Shakespeare's historical plays
elizabethan society and culture
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A Cubist Perspective of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
"The great cycle of the ages is renewed. Now Justice returns, returns the Golden Age; a new generation now descends from on high." - Virgil, Eclogues 1.5
As Virgil stated so many years ago, history is a cyclical phenomenon. The experiences of one age tend to be repeated in future generations. Knowing that, we should not be surprised to find the seeds of modern styles and philosophies sprouting in earlier ages.
Elizabethan England was a society undergoing major social changes. In religion the country had recently left the fold of Catholicism to establish the Church of England. While England during this time was a major world power, she also enjoyed a level of security thanks to her easily defended boundaries as an island nation with a powerful navy. The sense of power and security allowed for the growth of a prosperous middle class. Within this milieu of power combined with internal security and economic growth the seeds of change were nurtured#. Intellectual and artistic freedom and growth were fostered in this environment, Elizabethan England provided an envisronment that allowed men like William Shakespeare to find a voice that reached not only his own generation but continues to speak to the modern world.
If we look at the world at the beginning of the 20th century we can find many parallels with Elizabethan England. In both ages Europe was experiencing a great social and political realignment. The growing nationalism that was the precursor to World War I and the Russian Revolution was accompanied by a new sense of self and a new set of allegiances. For artists like Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris these ...
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...." William Shakespeare Comedies & Romances. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
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Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Brian Gibbons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Vaughn, Jack A. Shakespeare's Comedies. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1980
Watts, Cedric. A Midsummer Night's Dream. London: Penguin, 1986.
Wells, Stanley & Gary Taylor, General Eds. _William Shakespeare: The _Complete Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Young, David P. Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night's Dream. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
Sheshadri, T. (2001, December 26). Student recognized for agricultural acumen. The San Diego Union Tribune, N1-4. Retrieved on March 20, 2002 from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (Newspapers) on the World Wide Web: http://www.lexisnexis.com/universe.htm.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Shakespeare, William. "A Midsummer Night's Dream." A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts. Ed. Gail Kern Paster, and Skiles Howard. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. 1-86.
Michael R. Katz, Ph.D. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Shakespeare, William. The.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Norton Shakespeare: Comedies Greenblatt, Stephen Ed. W.W. Norton and Company, New York: 1997
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington. Sixth edition. New York: Harper Collings, 1998.
Meyer, Michael. "A Note on Reading Shakespeare." The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 1528.
Shakespeare, William. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Books Inc. 2000.
...ated this was the same case during the Romantic period with art and literature and has simply carried over throughout hundreds of years into what we know as the now.
Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Dutton, R., & Howard, J.E. (2003). A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works.(p. 9) Maiden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ed. David L. Stevenson. New York: Signet ……….Classic, 1998. Print.
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. New York: Longman-Addison Wesley Longman, 1997.
Explore how far you agree that ultimately, A Midsummer Night's Dream is a light-hearted and superficial comedy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a light-hearted and superficial comedy written by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's use of the mechanicals, witty wordplay and his expression of human behaviour shows the play to be light-hearted. However the faults of society and theme of magic is what makes the play superficial as the involvement of fairies in mortal affairs strongly shapes the chaos in the play, this because most of the play is set in the woods, where fairies can take advantage of the humans.
Jones, Norman. "Shakespeare's England." A Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 25-42.