Examination Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Bielefeld University, 71 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "Love" is a central topic in Shakespeare′s plays. Many of his couples have gained a status of immortality: Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, or Beatrice and Benedick are only a few examples. These lovers share one experience, which Lysander in "A Midsummer Night′s Dream" sums up very clearly: "The course of true love never did run smooth ..." (1,1,134) This dilemma is the "raw material" I am interested in. I will take three Shakespearean plays with "love" as their central issue and examine the protagonists′ courses of love in them. This involves the beginning, the obstacles in the way, the reactions to these obstacles and the final failure or success to overcome them. The plays chosen are "Romeo and Juliet", "All′s Well that Ends Well", and "The Taming of the Shrew". In the First Folio edition the first one is classified as belonging to the literary form of "tragedy", the latter two as "comedies". This leads me to the second element in the title, which is "dramatic genre". What Northrop Frye says about comedy is also valid for tragedy: "If a play in a theatre is subtitled ′a comedy′, information is conveyed to a potential audience about what kind of thing to expect, and this type of information has been intelligible since before the days of Aristophanes." One such expectation concerns a play′s mood. Here lies a fundamental difference between tragedy and comedy. Generally speaking, the audience expects that a comedy creates a happy mood and a tragedy a sad one. However, I am not alone finding that "Romeo" is a rather happy play over long stretches, whereas "The Taming" and "All′s Well" are anything but thoroughly happy pieces. In these three dramas Shakespeare only partly fulfils the expectations, which are evoked. Their generic structure does not generate

Pre-University Paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, , language: English, abstract: This essay is about the variations of love in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", for no relationship is like any other. The following will examine the different kinds of love between the protagonists of the play with philosophical approaches to a definition of love. After giving a synopsis, the topic of platonic love will be contemplated in regards of parental and sisterly love. The second chapter will deal with the romantic love of the four Athenian lovers. Finally, the motif of love out of balance will be analysed in detail with an emphasis on the fairy world. For many centuries, Shakespeare’s plays have drawn spectators from all over the world into theatres. Be it “Romeo and Juliet”, “Macbeth” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, one of his plays is always performed in a theatre nearby. The playwright’s diverse writing style, full of metaphors, puns and imagery, offers room for a variety of interpretations and is the reason for many different theatre productions. Whereas Jan Kott, a Polish drama critic and professor of literature, insists on violence and unrepressed animalistic sexuality in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the modern adaption by Casey Wilder Mott rather focuses on the “inherent chaotic spirit of love”. Love as the central theme of the play is presented by the relationships between Shakespeare's characters. They all have a different perception of love.

Drawn from the acclaimed New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles in this concise new reference book provide a complete survey of the poetic history and practice in every major national literature or cultural tradition in the world. As with the parent volume, which has sold over 10,000 copies since it was first published in 1993, the intended audience is general readers, journalists, students, teachers, and researchers. The editor's principle of selection was balance, and his goal was to embrace in a structured and reasoned way the diversity of poetry as it is known across the globe today. In compiling material on 106 cultures in 92 national literatures, the book gives full coverage to Indo-European poetries (all the major Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, as well as other obscure ones such as Hittite), the ancient middle Eastern poetries (Hebrew, Persian, Sumerian, and Assyro-Babylonian), subcontinental Indian poetries (the widest linguistic diversity), Asian and Pacific poetries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, and half a dozen others), continental American poetries (all the modern Western cultures and native Indian in North, Central, and South American regions), and African poetries (ancient and emergent, oral and written).

In this wide-ranging and ambitiously conceived Research Companion, contributors explore Shakespeare’s relationship to the classic in two broad senses. The essays analyze Shakespeare’s specific debts to classical works and weigh his classicism’s likeness and unlikeness to that of others in his time; they also evaluate the effects of that classical influence to assess the extent to which it is connected with whatever qualities still make Shakespeare, himself, a classic (arguably the classic) of modern world literature and drama. The first sense of the classic which the volume addresses is the classical culture of Latin and Greek reading, translation, and imitation. Education in the canon of pagan classics bound Shakespeare together with other writers in what was the dominant tradition of English and European poetry and drama, up through the nineteenth and even well into the twentieth century. Second—and no less central—is the idea of classics as such, that of books whose perceived value, exceeding that of most in their era, justifies their protection against historical and cultural change. The volume’s organizing insight is that as Shakespeare was made a classic in this second, antiquarian sense, his work’s reception has more and more come to resemble that of classics in the first sense—of ancient texts subject to labored critical study by masses of professional interpreters who are needed to mediate their meaning, simply because of the texts’ growing remoteness from ordinary life, language, and consciousness. The volume presents overviews and argumentative essays about the presence of Latin and Greek literature in Shakespeare’s writing. They coexist in the volume with thought pieces on the uses of the classical as a historical and pedagogical category, and with practical essays on the place of ancient classics in today’s Shakespearean classrooms.

Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particularly impressive at integrating her poetry, prose and drama into the canon. This in turn has led to comparative studies that link Wroth to a number of male and female writers, including of course, William Shakespeare. At the same time no single volume has attempted a comprehensive comparative analysis. This book sets out to explore the ways in which Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on Shakespeare and textual studies by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on all the major areas of current research, notably the Shakespeare manuscripts; the printed text and paratext in Shakespeare's early playbooks and poetry books; Shakespeare's place in the early modern book trade; Shakespeare's early readers, users, and collectors; the constitution and evolution of the Shakespeare canon from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century; Shakespeare's editors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century; and the modern editorial reproduction of Shakespeare. The Handbook also devotes separate chapters to new directions and developments in research in the field, specifically in the areas of digital editing and of authorship attribution methodologies. In addition, the Companion contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A-Z of key terms and concepts, a guide to research methods and problems, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field, and a substantial annotated bibliography. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Textual Studies is a reference work aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars and libraries, a guide to beginning or developing research in the field, an essential companion for all those interested in Shakespeare and textual studies.