Shakespeare And His Works example essay topic

William Shakespeare, surely the world's most performed and admired playwright, son of a merchant, was born in April, 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, about 100 miles northwest of London. He married at the age of 18 and had three children. Outstanding all other dramatists, he is no doubt a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly. Although people have been studying the man and his works for a long time, the man's life story remains elusive.

Where did all his afflatus come from? Some people think there must have been a secrete lover. However, nothing has been found to prove it's true. Some others even doubt the existence of such a man. Acknowledged as master in the History of British Literature, Shakespeare and his works are still popular in the modern world. Such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream and so on.

The early comedies share the popular and romantic forms used by the university wits but overlay them with elements of elegant courtly revel and a sophisticated consciousness of comedy's fragility and artifice. These are festive comedies, giving access to a society vigorously and imaginatively at play. The confusions and contradictions of Shakespeare's age find their highest expression in his tragedies. In these extraordinary achievements, all values, hierarchies, and forms are tested and found wanting, and all society's latent conflicts are activated. Shakespeare sets husband against wife, father against child, the individual against society; he un crowns kings, levels the nobleman with the beggar, and interrogates the gods. In his last period, Shakespeare's astonishingly fertile invention returned to experimentation.

Shakespeare's imagination returns to the popular romances of his youth and dwells on mythical themes -- wanderings, shipwrecks, the reunion of sundered families, and the resurrection of people long thought dead. There is consolation here, of a sort, beautiful and poetic, but still the romances do not turn aside from the actuality of suffering, chance loss, and unkindness, and Shakespeare's subsidiary theme is a sustained examination of the nature of his own art, which alone makes these consolations possible. Even in this unearthly context a subtle interchange is maintained between the artist's delight in his illusion and his mature awareness of his own disillusionment. His plays imitate the counter change of values occurring at large in his society.

The sureness and profound popularity of his taste enabled him to lead the English Renaissance without privileging or prejudicing any one of its divergent aspects, while as actor, dramatist, and shareholder he was involved in the Elizabethan theatre at every level. His career (dated from 1589 to 1613) was exactly coterminous with the period of greatest literary flourishing, and only in his work are the total possibilities of the Renaissance fully realized.