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Critical Approaches To Hamlet
From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, ''Hamlet'' has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex. Even within the narrower field of literature, the play's influence has been strong. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life ... and been converted into a noun in this way." History Renaissance period Interpretations of ''Hamlet'' in Shakespeare's day were very concerned with the play's portrayal of madness. The play was also often portrayed more violently than in later times. The play's contemporary popularity is suggested both by the five quartos that appeared in Shakespeare's lifetime and by frequent contemporary references (though at least some of these could be to the so-called '' Ur-Hamlet''). These allusions suggest that by the early Jacobean per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Hamlet And Ophelia
Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian people, Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ''Commedia'') and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to the most educated readers. His ''De vulgari eloquentia'' (''On Eloquence in the Vernacular'') was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as ''La Vita Nuova, The New Life'' (1295) and ''Divine Comedy'' helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian write ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unities
The classical unities, Aristotelian unities, or three unities represent a prescriptive theory of dramatic tragedy that was introduced in Italy in the 16th century and was influential for three centuries. The three unities are: #''unity of action'': a tragedy should have one principal action. #''unity of time'': the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. #''unity of place'': a tragedy should exist in a single physical location. History Italy In 1514, author and critic Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478 – 1550) introduced the concept of the unities in his blank-verse tragedy, ''Sofonisba''. Trissino claimed he was following Aristotle. However, Trissino had no access to Aristotle's most significant work on the tragic form, ''Poetics''. Trissino expanded with his own ideas on what he was able to glean from Aristotle's book, ''Rhetoric''. In ''Rhetoric'' Aristotle considers the dramatic elements of action and time, while focusing on audience reception. Po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his '' nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—especially of the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and was at constant risk from the strict censorship laws of the Catholic French monarchy. His polemics witheringly satirized intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl Of Shaftesbury
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (26 February 1671 – 16 February 1713) was an English politician, philosopher, and writer. Early life He was born at Exeter House in London, the son of the future Anthony Ashley Cooper, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury and his wife Lady Dorothy Manners, daughter of John Manners, 8th Earl of Rutland. Letters sent to his parents reveal emotional manipulation attempted by his mother in refusing to see her son unless he cut off all ties to his father. At the age of three Ashley-Cooper was made over to the formal guardianship of his grandfather Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. John Locke, as medical attendant to the Ashley household, was entrusted with the supervision of his education. It was conducted according to the principles of Locke's ''Some Thoughts Concerning Education'' (1693), and the method of teaching Latin and Greek conversationally was pursued by his instructress, Elizabeth Birch. At the age of eleven, it i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dennis (dramatist)
John Dennis (16 September 1658 – 6 January 1734) was an English critic and dramatist. Life He was born in the parish of St Andrew Holborn, London, in 1658. He was educated at Harrow School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1679. In the next year he was fined and dismissed from his college for having wounded a fellow student with a sword. He was, however, received at Trinity Hall, where he took his M.A. degree in 1683. After travelling in France and Italy, he settled in London, where he became acquainted with Dryden, and close to Wycherley, Congreve and the leading literary figures of his day; and being made temporarily independent by inheriting a small fortune, he devoted himself to literature. The Duke of Marlborough procured him a place as one of the queen's waiters in the customs with a salary of £20 a year. This he afterwards disposed of for a small sum, retaining, at the suggestion of Lord Halifax, a yearly charge upon it for a long t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Rowe (dramatist)
Nicholas Rowe (; 20 June 1674 – 6 December 1718), English dramatist, poet and miscellaneous writer, was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate in 1715. His plays and poems were well-received during his lifetime, with one of his translations described as one of the greatest productions in English poetry. He was also considered the first Shakespeare's editors, editor of the works of William Shakespeare. Life Nicholas Rowe was born in Little Barford, Bedfordshire, England, son of John Rowe (d. 1692), barrister and sergeant-at-law, and Elizabeth, daughter of Jasper Edwards, on 20 June 1674. His family possessed a considerable estate at Lamerton in Devonshire. His father practised law and published Benlow's and Dallison's Reports during the reign of King James II of England, James II. The future Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate was educated first at Highgate School, and then at Westminster School under the guidance of Richard Busby. In 1688, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas D'urfey
Thomas d'Urfey (a.k.a. Tom Durfey; 165326 February 1723) was an English writer and wit. He wrote plays, songs, jokes, and poems. He was an important innovator and contributor in the evolution of the ballad opera. Life D'Urfey was born in Devonshire and began his professional life as a scrivener, but quickly turned to the theatre. In personality, he was considered so affable and amusing that he could make friends with nearly everyone, including such disparate characters as Charles II of England and his brother James II, and in all layers of society. D'Urfey lived in an age of self-conscious elitism and anti-egalitarianism, a reaction against the "leveling" tendencies of the previous Puritan reign during the Interregnum. D'Urfey participated in the Restoration's dominant atmosphere of social climbing: he claimed to be of French Huguenot descent, though he might not have been; and he added an apostrophe to the plain English name Durfey when he was in his 30s. He wrote 500 songs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electra (Sophocles)
''Electra,'' ''Elektra, or The Electra'' ( grc, ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ, ''Ēlektra'') is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the ''Philoctetes Philoctetes ( grc, Φιλοκτήτης ''Philoktētēs''; English pronunciation: , stressed on the third syllable, ''-tet-''), or Philocthetes, according to Greek mythology, was the son of Poeas, king of Meliboea in Thessaly, and Demonassa o ...'' (409 BC) and the ''Oedipus at Colonus'' (401 BC) lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Jebb dates it between 420 BC and 414 BC. Set in the city of Ancient Argos, Argos a few years after the Trojan War, the play tells of a bitter struggle for justice by Electra and her brother Orestes for the murder of their father Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and their stepfather Aegisthus. When King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War, his wife Clytemnestra (who has taken Agamemnon's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short View Of The Immorality And Profaneness Of The English Stage
In March 1698, Jeremy Collier published his anti-theatre pamphlet, ''A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage''; in the pamphlet, Collier attacks a number of playwrights: William Wycherley, John Dryden, William Congreve, John Vanbrugh, and Thomas D'Urfey. Collier attacks rather recent, rather popular comedies from the London stage; he accuses the playwrights of profanity, blasphemy, indecency, and undermining public morality through the sympathetic depiction of vice. Description Collier begins his pamphlet with this conclusion: " thing has gone farther in Debauching the Age than the Stage Poets, and Play-House" (Collier A2). He goes on, in great detail—despite the title—to give his evidence. For Collier, the immorality of the title stems from Restoration comedy's lack of poetic justice. With his exhaustively thorough readings—in a sense, pre-close reading close readings—he condemns the characters of Restoration comedies as impious and wicked and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jeremy Collier
Jeremy Collier (; 23 September 1650 – 26 April 1726) was an English theatre critic, non-juror bishop and theologian. Life Born Jeremiah Collier, in Stow cum Quy, Cambridgeshire, Collier was educated at Caius College, University of Cambridge, receiving the BA (1673) and MA (1676). A supporter of James II, he refused, as a nonjuror (see Nonjuring schism) to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II after the Glorious Revolution. Furthering his obvious disapproval of the new monarchs, he publicly absolved two Jacobites who had conspired to assassinate the King and Queen. In 1713 he was consecrated a non-juror bishop by George Hickes and two Scottish bishops, Archibald Campbell and James Gadderar. Works Collier was the primus of the nonjuring line and a strong supporter of the four usages. (see Nonjuring schism) In the years following the Revolution he wrote a series of tracts questioning the legitimacy of the new monarchs and the deprival of the Non-juror ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Betterton
Thomas Patrick Betterton (August 1635 – 28 April 1710), the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London. Apprentice and actor Betterton was born in August 1635 in Tothill Street, Westminster.''The National Cyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge'', Vol.III, London, Charles Knight, 1847, p.273 He was apprenticed to John Holden, Sir William Davenant's publisher, and possibly later to a bookseller named John Rhodes, who had been wardrobe-keeper at the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1659, Rhodes obtained a license to set up a company of players at the Cockpit Theatre in Drury Lane; and on the reopening of this theatre in 1660, Betterton made his first appearance on the stage. Betterton's talents at once brought him into prominence, and he was given leading parts. On the opening of the new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1661, Davenant, the patentee of the Duke's Company, engaged Betterton and all Rhodes's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Downes (17th-century Prompter)
John Downes (died c. 1712) worked as a prompter at the Duke's Company, and later the United Company, for most of the Restoration period 1660–1700. His "historical review of the stage", ''Roscius Anglicanus'' (1708), is an invaluable source for historians both of Restoration and of Stuart theater. Downes first enters the theatrical record in 1664, when he was registered by the Lord Chamberlain as a member of William Davenant's troupe under the patronage of the Duke of York. By his own admission, stage fright kept him from an acting career, although he is known to have played Haly in '' The Siege of Rhodes''. Later in the 1660s, he is recorded as a member of Thomas Betterton's King's Company; his main work seems to have been as prompter. He continued in this function when the two companies united in 1682; when the companies split in 1694, he remained with Betterton until the middle of the next decade. He is the subject of a number of the ''Tatler''; in this letter from Downes (pres ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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