William Shakespeare was the greatest performed and read playwright the English language had ever known. He wrote over 37 plays and 150 poems that powerfully affected the audience. Shakespeare’s multiple talents created works that had relatable scenarios, whether it was tragedy, comedies, or histories, the audience has enjoyed his plays for a very long time. His writing was very different from others of his time, due to the fact that he was very unique to everyone else. William Shakespeare is a phenomenal playwright who incorporates his personal experiences, uses vocabulary that would grow popular, and allowed the audience to make fascinating connections to the characters and to the theme, making his writing memorable 400 years later.
Shakespeare
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“His words still mean something to the people who read or listen to them” (What Makes Shakespeare's Plays Timeless). His audience was able to process and think about the words he was reciting about, which is why his plays and poems are so memorable. As amazing as he was at writing, his vocabulary stood out the most. Scholars believe he created around seventeen hundred words, but it is impossible to say how many words he actually knew. About eight hundred of the seventeen hundred are still used today. It was always new to the audience, as well as to himself. “They tended to be very fancy, big Latinate words, having an interest in medicine, law, military affairs, and natural history” (Bryson 108). Some critics thought he was trying to show off his intelligence, when really he wanted the audience to be engaged in his work. Virginia Woolf described him as, “The word coining genius, as if though plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping” (Marche 25). Woolf illustrated Shakespeare’s variety of vocabulary, and always had the best choice of words for the best situations. William’s vocabulary characterizes “His ability to illuminate the workings of the soul” (Bryson 110). It is often said that this was what set him apart from others. He had a very positive impact on the audience. Crowds began to appreciate the nature of his work. They started to understand his themes and the meanings of his …show more content…
Audiences connected themselves to characters, and to the themes. “He gave us a strong sense of individual character, making us believe in the reality of the people in his plays, often by making them speak in individual ways” (Wells, The Shakespeare Book). William was able to touch the hearts and lives of many people. He gave us reasons to express our feelings. They were able to relate the theme because his plays were based off of real life situations. Whether it was about love, death, happiness, sorrow, or hate, multiple people can be associated with it in some way. Some people would feel sad or happy if something in the plays reminded them about a scenario that occurred in their life. To Shakespeare, having the audience attach to the pieces was very important to him. The actors that played the roles wanted to play two roles. “His plays provide a wealth of complex and theatrically effective roles, which offer rich and demanding opportunities to actors” (Wells, The Shakespeare Book). It was an honor if you got chosen to act in one of his plays. Shakespeare envisioned the best possible actors acting out his plays, because he wanted the audience to recognize the connections. Luckily for him, the actors helped Shakespeare get his work known. If actors did not portray the characters well, then people couldn't connect to his work, and they would not be
The well known plays of Shakespeare contribute their recognition to the characters. In his plays characters are made to imitate people. His most famous play Romeo and Juliet is great demonstration of this. Shakespeare shows the complexities of the characters in Romeo and Juliet such as their actions and their emotions through juxtaposition.
Watching a play is completely different than watching a movie. When watching a movie there are two options, either watching it at home on the couch with a bag of chips, or going to a movie theatre with a bucket of popcorn. Why do we even waste two hours of our time to sit and watch a movie? Primarily, we do watch movies to waste time. When people get bored, we watch movies to pass the time. Well, before they could make movies, people would go watch a play which is an entirely different experience than going to a movie. Many of these plays that people went to watch were written by a man named Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is probably the greatest play write of all time. Two of his plays, Much Ado about Nothing and King Lear, are both wonderful plays with different, but similar narrative structure, or plots. Much Ado about Nothing is a story about Hero and how the love of her life Claudio is planning on marrying her, however a few envious people try to ruin everything which lead to Hero faking her death and Claudio thinking Hero was unfaithful and then passing away. Yet, by the end of the play, Hero reveals herself; Claudio realized that people were lying and that Hero was being faithful and the play ends with a double wedding. In King Lear, two different families are being betrayed and two different fathers make bad decisions about their children that eventually lead to one man being blind and the other father’s demise. Yet, this isn’t all of the play according to Arthur Rosenblatt, “Besides, the plot line, involving two older men and their respective family problems, is only a small part of the play.” (Rosenblatt, Arthur S.). In Shakespeare’s plays King Lear and Much Ado about Nothing, their narrative structures have similar qu...
Shakespeare uses many themes in all his play that attract audiences throughout history. The things he wrote about are as relevant now as they were in his time. Death and Sin were issues that are always around. In his plays, Shakespeare could comment on these things and make audiences see things that they could not before.
By using just the right combination of words, or by coming up with just the right image, Shakespeare wrote many passages and entire plays that were so powerful, moving, tragic, comedic, and romantic that many are still being memorized and performed today, almost four centuries later. But the greatness of Shakespeare’s ability lies not so much in the basic themes of his works but in the creativity he used to write these stories of love, power, greed, discrimination, hatred, and tragedy.
William Shakespeare is considered to be the greatest playwright of all time, even though many facts about his life still remain a mystery. In his lifetime Shakespeare wrote 36 plays and 154 sonnets. The following paragraphs will included the key moments known about William Shakespeare's life, birth through death.
Shakespeare For Students Book 1. Detroit, MI: Gale Research International Limited, 1992. Print. The. Spellberg, Matthew. The. "
The effect achieved by his writing allowed the different feelings, emotions, and differences to be brought out. People who thought long enough could seethe literary terms that Shakespeare was using and get the word play. While people who think only enough can only see the underlying meaning of words and what they mean modernly. The people who only think enough to see what is on the surface only gets what the words are doing for the story. If Norman Maclean is right then people who can think about it can get what Shakespeare is trying to say.
His emotional character traits makes the play’s tragedy even more tragic because Shakespeare shows us Romeo’s soft side. As his emotion is shown, the audience is able to relate to his feelings which contributes to the sympathy that is felt for Romeo and Juliet. Eventually, Romeo
Greenhill, Wendy, and Wignall, Paul. Shakespeare: A Life. Chicago IL: Reed Educational & Professional Publishing, 2000. Print.
Shakespeare gripped audiences with compelling plays such as Romeo and Juliet which combines the sad story of death, with the emotional. portrayal of a first love. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are intriguing. love stories become tangled up in violence, deceit and anger. Out of all his plays, ‘Macbeth’ captivated and still does huge audiences.
Vickers, Brian. Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1993.
He wrote many different works as in plays and poems. “In addition to his thirty-seven plays, Shakespeare wrote an innovative collection of sonnets and two long narrativ...
Shakespeare’s plays are a product of the Elizabethan theatrical context in which they were first performed. A lot of pressure was put on Shakespeare as he wrote his plays because he was not allowed to upset the royal family. His style would have been different than others in those times and a lot more thought has gone into his writing than people listening would think. Usually, the audience take for granted the cleverness and thought of Shakespeare’s writing, however, now we have studied and gone into great detail about Shakespeare’s writing, we can appreciate it more than they did:
Shakespeare has perhaps contributed the most to the English language of any writer known to man – literally. Over 1000 words and phrases that he coined as part of his plays and prose are now in common use across the globe. He changed nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, added on previously unheard-of prefixes and suffixes and in some cases made words out of nothing. Even culturally sensitive words such as ‘ode’ (The ANZACS) and scientific jargon (‘epileptic’) are in fact products of Shakespeare. Bernard Levin probably summed this up best when he wrote: “If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle.
Shakespeare got much recognition in his own time, but in the 17th century, poets and authors began to consider him as the supreme dramatist and poet of all times of the English language. In fact, even today, no one can match his works or perform as well as he did. No other plays have been performed as many times as Shakespeare’s. Several critics of theatre try to focus on the language of Shakespeare and to take out excerpts from the literary text and make it their own resulting in various persons, poets, authors, psychoanalysts, psychologists and philosophers.