Assignment Paper 101 Literature of Elizabethan and Restoration Periods

This blog task is part of Assingment of Paper 101: History of the Elizabethan Age

• Personal information:   

         Name : Devangini Vyas

         Batch: M.A. sem-1 (2024-26)

         Enrollment number: 5108240040

         E-mail address: devangivyas167@gmail.com

         Roll number: 3

• Assingment Details:

Topic: Shakespeare and ahis works

Ppaer Name: Paper 101 : Literature of Elizabethan and Restoration Periods 

Submitted to: SMT.  S.B. Gardi Department of english, Bhavnagar

Date of submission: 20 November 2024,

• Table Content:
• Introduction
• Shakespeare's works
• Plays
• conclusion

 

 Introduction:   

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights and poets in the English language. His works have had a profound influence on literature, theatre, and the arts. 

 Shakespeare:

What is a man,  If his chief good and market of his time,  Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more (Hamlet)  There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways  Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his  perfection only to die. In Shakespeare’s early plays, his heroes are mainly  historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical  background to the nation’s glory. But character and motive are more vital  to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare’s range expands  considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of  London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and  Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion,  theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for  performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as  entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great  many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time.  Shakespeare’s earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how  ‘this sceptr’d isle’ came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the  horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the  geography of the human soul, just as the voyazges of such travellers as  Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the  horizons of the real world.  Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote some thirty-nine plays over a period of  some twenty-four years, as well as the most famous sonnet collection in  English and a number of longer poems: he wrote all these while working  with his theatre company and frequently performing with them. His was  a working life in the theatre, and his subsequent fame as the greatest writer  in English should not blind us to this fact. He was a constant experimenter  with dramatic form and content, and with the possibilities that the open  thrust stage gave him to relate to his audience (Figure 3).

 The plays

Early plays from  1589 to 1593

 

1 king henry vi, part one

2 king henry vi, part two

3 king henry vi, part three

4 titus andronicus

5 the comedy of errors

6 the two gentlemen of verona

7 the taming of the shrew

8 king richard iii

 

plays from 1593 to 1598

 

9 King john

10 love’s labours lost

11 Romeo and juliet

12 a midsummer night’s dream

13 The merchant of venice

14 king richard ii

15 king henry iv, part one

16 king henry iv, part two

17 The merry wives of windsor

 

Plays from 1598, with likely dates of composition

 

1598 18  Much ado about nothing

1599 19  King henry v

1599 20  Julius caesar

1600 21  As you like it

1600 22  Hamlet

1601 23 Twelfth night

1602 24  Troilus and cressida

1603 25  All’s well that ends well

1604 26  Measure for measure

1604 27  Othello

1605 28  king lear

1606 29  Macbeth

1607 30  Antony and cleopatra

1607 31 Timon of athens

1608 32  Coriolanus

 

‘Late’ plays

 

1608 33 pericles (attributed to Shakespeare and

George Wilkins)

1610 34 Cymbeline

1611 35  The winter’s tale

1611 36  The tempest

1613 37  King henry viii

1613 38  The history of cardenio (attributed to

Shakespeare and John Fletcher)

1613-14 39 The two noble kinsmen (attributed to Shakespeare

and John Fletcher)

  

The starting point of Shakespeare’s writing career was English history. The year 1588 had been the high point of Elizabeth’s reign. The defeat of the Spanish Armada signalled England’s supremacy of the seas. Shakespeare, beginning to write for the theatre around 1589, turns to the recent  history of England in order to trace the human elements behind this  conquest of power. From the three parts of Henry VI (1589-92) to the  tragedy of Richard II (1595) and the historical pageant of Henry V (1599),  Shakespeare examines the personalities who were the monarchs of England  between 1377 and 1485. Generally called the history plays, these works are,  on one level, a glorification of the nation and its past, but, on another level,  they examine the qualities which make a man a hero, a leader, and a king.  This is a process not of hero-worship, but of humanising the hero. The  king is brought close to his people. His virtues and faults are brought to life before  the audience's eyes.Literature is no longer distant, no longer the  preserve only of those who can read. It is familiar history enacted close to  the real life of the people it concerns.  All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shake-  speare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within  society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat  of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought  home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the  Queen’s favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship  between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the  establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as  a means of showing God’s designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses  on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws –  and qualities.  Henry VI is portrayed as weak, indecisive, in complete contrast to the  heroic young Henry V. The audience can follow this prince in his pro-  gress from the rumbustious, carefree Prince Hal (in the two parts of  Henry IV ) to the more mature, responsible hero who wins the Battle  of Agincourt, but who becomes tongue-tied when he tries to woo the  princess of France.  This balance between the role of king and the role of man becomes one  of Shakespeare’s main concerns. Richard III is portrayed as a complete  villain: the epitome of ‘Machiavellian’ evil, the enemy whom the Tudor  dynasty had to destroy. But, as a theatrical character, this villain becomes a  fascinating hero. Like Marlowe’s heroes, he overreaches himself, and his  fall becomes a moral lesson in the single-minded pursuit of power. He  famously introduces himself in his opening soliloquy:  Now is the winter of our discontent  Made glorious summer by this son of York;  and goes on, later in the same speech, to announce his evil intentions:  I am determined to prove a villain.  The idea that the king, the nearest man to God, could be evil, and a  negative influence on the nation, was a new and dangerous idea in the  political context of England in the 1590s. It raises the frightening possibility  that the people might want or, indeed, have the right to remove and replace  their ruler. This idea comes to the fore in several of Shakespeare’s tragedies,  from Richard III to Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and is a major theme in Hamlet,Macbeth and King Lear.  Shakespeare was conscious that he was engaging in his plays with the  struggle between past, present, and future; between history and the new,  expanding universe of the Renaissance. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gives the  hero these words when he addresses a troupe of actors:  The purpose of playing . . . both at the first and now, was and is to hold as  ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show . . . the very age and body of the  time his form and pressure.  The form of the time, and the pressures shaping the move into a new  century, meant the re-evaluation of many fundamental concepts. Time and  again, Shakespeare’s characters ask, ‘What is a man?’  If his chief good andWhat is a man,  If his chief good and market of his time  Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.  (Hamlet)  see key texts p.577. Time and again, aspects of human vulnerability are  exposed, examined, and exploited for their theatrical possibilities. Love in  Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, and the same subject, in a  comic vein, in Love’s Labours Lost, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It; the  theme of revenge and family duty in Hamlet; jealousy in Othello ; sexual  corruption and the bounds of justice in Measure for Measure; misanthropy,  or rejection of the world, in Timon of Athens; family rejection and madness  in King Lear; the power of money and the vulnerability of the minority in  The Merchant of Venice; the healing effects of the passage of time, and hope  in the new generation, in the late plays – with a final return to historical  pageantry in Henry VIII, the monarch with whose Reformation it all began.  Shakespeare’s themes are frequently the great abstract, universal  themes, seen both on the social level and the individual level: ambition,  power, love, death, and so on. The theatre permitted him to create char-  acters who embody the themes directly, and who speak to the audience in  language that is recognisably the same language as they speak. From kings  to ordinary soldiers, from young lovers to old bawds, Shakespeare’s char-  acters speak modern English. The language of Shakespeare is the first and  lasting affirmation of the great changes that took place in the sixteenth  century, leaving the Middle English of Chaucer far behind. In many ways,  the language has changed less in the 400 years since Shakespeare wrote  than it did in the 150 years before he wrote.  The theatre was therefore the vehicle for poetry, action, and debate. In  formal terms, Shakespeare used many kinds of play. His first tragedy, Titus  Andronicus, uses the ‘blood tragedy’ model of the Latin writer, Seneca,which was very much to the taste of the late 1580s audiences. The Comedy of  Errors similarly uses the model of the Roman comic dramatist Plautus; but  Shakespeare soon goes beyond these classical forms in The Comedy of  Errors. Plautus’s plot of the confusion of identical twins is doubled – with  two sets of twins, and twice the complicity of plot. In the next twenty or so  years of his career he will constantly experiment with dramatic forms and  techniques.  All Shakespeare’s plays have come down to us in a standard form: five  acts. But this division into acts and scenes is not always Shakespeare’s own.  He wrote the plays for performance, and there are many differences and  variations between the various editions published in his own lifetime  (usually called Quartos) and the First Folio, put together by John Heminge  and Henry Condell in 1623. The division into acts and scenes of most of  the plays belongs to almost a century later. In 1709, one of the first editors  of Shakespeare’s works, Nicholas Rowe, imposed a pattern of structural  order on the works. This confirms his own age’s concern with order and  propriety rather than stressing Shakespeare’s formal innovations and  experiments. It was also Rowe who, for the first time, added many stage  directions, and gave some indication of the location of scenes.  Shakespeare both affirms and challenges accepted values. He upholds,  in general, the necessity of strong central power in the hands of a monarch,  but he challenges any automatic right to power; worthiness is vital. He  asserts the importance of history, but is quite prepared to bend historical  ‘truth’ to make the play more viable – as in Richard III and Macbeth. (The  original Macbeth was a good king who had no particular problems with his  wife or with witches!) Where Shakespeare is perhaps most innovative is in  his exploration of human defects, and the necessary acceptance of them as  part of what makes humanity valuable.  Might be the be-all. . . this blow  Might be the be-all and the end-all here,  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,  We’d jump the life to come.  (Macbeth)  Shakespeare’s plays can be read as showing that imperfectibility has  not only to be understood, but has also to be enjoyed in all its individual  variety. This is what leads to the ‘wisdom’ of a long line of clowns and  fools; comic characters with a serious purpose.  When we are born , we cry that we come to this great stage of fools. ( King Lear).  Shakespeare’s female roles were always played by boys, a practice  Cleopatra wryly comments on when she says, ‘I shall see Some squeaking  Cleopatra boy my greatness.’ Shakespeare’s women are just as much force-  ful modern Renaissance characters as his men – from Adriana in The  Comedy of Errors, through Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, to the  determined Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, they demonstrate strength  and assertiveness, as well as femininity. But it is usually an untraditional  kind of femininity. Even Katharina’s famous acceptance of the ‘tamed’ role  to her husband Petruchio is framed in such a way as to be theatrically  ambiguous: it is part of a play-within-the-play where the ‘mirror up to  nature’ can be seen has having various prisms and slants.  In fact, many of the female characters question the presumptions of a  patriarchal society, even though they might yield to it by the end of the  play. It is often the female characters who lead and ‘tame’ the men – in the  gender-switching comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night it is Rosalind  and Viola who, temporarily dressed as men, bring Orlando and Orsino  respectively to the fullest realisation of their own masculine potential.  In Othello Emilia asserts to Desdemona, ‘But I do think it is their  husbands’ fault If wives do fall.’ There is a questioning of male/female roles  here, as in so much of Shakespeare. When he uses a well-known traditionalstory, as in Troilus and Cressida, the characters reflect modern social roles  and issues, and the conclusions to be drawn are often still open to con-  troversy and interpretation. Shakespeare gives us mothers (Volumnia in  Coriolanus, Gertrude in Hamlet, Queen Margaret in Richard III, the  Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well ), young lovers such as Juliet, Ophelia  and Miranda (who are also daughters and sisters), and strong decisive  women who might well take on conventionally masculine roles and qual-  ities, such as Portia and Lady Macbeth. The list is endless, and, indeed, some  of the major Shakespearean critics have been accused of treating the char-  acters too much as if they were real people. This has been widely regarded as  testimony to the timeless universality of their preoccupations, desires, fears,  and basic humanity. Although the concerns are Renaissance and Western  European, they strike a chord in many other cultures and times.  The character and the play of Hamlet are central to any discussion of  Shakespeare’s work. Hamlet has been described as melancholic and neur-  otic, as having an Oedipus complex, as being a failure and indecisive, as  well as being a hero, and a perfect Renaissance prince. These judgements  serve perhaps only to show how many interpretations of one character may  be put forward. ‘To be or not to be’ is the centre of Hamlet’s questioning.  Reasons not to go on living outnumber reasons for living. But he goes on  living, until he completes his revenge for his father’s murder, and becomes  ‘most royal’, the true ‘Prince of Denmark’ (which is the play’s subtitle), in  many ways the perfection of Renaissance man.  Hamlet’s progress is a ‘struggle of becoming’ – of coming to terms  with life, and learning to accept it, with all its drawbacks and challenges.  He discusses the problems he faces directly with the audience, in a series of  seven soliloquies – of which ‘To be or not to be’ is the fourth and central  one. These seven steps, from the zero-point of a desire not to live, to  complete awareness and acceptance (as he says, ‘the readiness is all’), give a  structure to the play, making the progress all the more tragic, as Hamlet  reaches his aim, the perfection of his life, only to die.  . . . we defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If  it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not  now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he  leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?  (Hamlet)  The play can thus be seen as a universal image of life and of the necessity of  individual choice and action. No matter how tortured or successful a life  will be, the end is death, and, to quote Hamlet’s final words, ‘the rest is silence'

 Conclusion:

            William Shakespeare’s unparalleled contribution to literature as a playwright lies in his ability to capture the essence of the human experience. His innovative use of language, complex characterizations, and exploration of timeless themes ensure that his works continue to be celebrated and studied. Shakespeare’s legacy endures, affirming his status as one of the greatest writers in the history of literature.

 

Reference:

The Routledge History of Literature in English

                                                                                    -Britain and Ireland

                                                                                                                        3^Rd Edition