SHAKESPEARE

=THE ACTOR AND THE PLAYWRIGHT= Shakespeare was a playwright, a poet, an actor and a shareholder in his theatrical company. The company might perform for anyone who could pay a penny to stand and watch a play at the Globe and also for court's queen Elizabeth or king James I 's. Shakespeare created tragic, hilarious, suspenseful, philosophical and challenging dramas famous all over the world.

=THE LANGUAGE GENIUS= In his time, Shakespeare didin't have any technologies or special effects, so he created the scenes by words and he introduced new words in the languagethat we still use today. He wrote about different topics. Nowadays, some of them are still the same, for example racism, love or jealousy. The others, like religion and family, are described as Shakespeare's contemporary people saw them. He usually made his audience laugh in painful scenes, or made them think about philosophical question in funny ones.

We don’t have any trustful information about Shakespeare. However we know that he wrote about 154 sonnets, written in the 1590s and published in 1609. He introduced a new structure of sonnet, different from that used by Petrarch. His sonnets weren’t published chronologically but according to their style, method and content. They can be divided in two sections: - FAIR YOUTH: dedicated to the Southampot, his patron and in which the principal theme was “increase”. In fact he encourages young men to marry and to pass their virtues and beauty to their children. - DARK LADY: dedicated to a Dark lady and in which the principal theme is “love”. The lady described is physically unattractive but irresistibly desirable.
 * THE POET **

=THE HISTORIAN= The first plays written by Shakespeare were very similar to the Tudors' chronicles. They didn't tell just about kings, queens or lords, but they made a portrait of England composed also by paesants, workers and soldiers. So he gave in this way a sense of identity to people who started seeing themselves as a whole nation. Shakespeare's plays told also about the english civil wars. His plays can be divided into two tetralogies: the first one includes Henry VI and Richard III, the second one: Richard III, Henry IV and Henry V.

=THE COMEDIAN = Shakespeare put his first ten comedies onto the stage between 1593 and 1600, passing from farce to romance. Shakespeare's comedies follow a set of conventions including: disguise, mistaken identity,like the Latin playwright Plauto,misunderstanding and frustated love, following the model of courtly love. The main part of the comedies end in multiple marriages, and they have in common the journey of young women, from the state of virginity, to that of marriage, passing from their parents' control to their husbands' control.

=THE TRAGIC PLAYWRIGHT =

Shakespeare's works were influenced by the historical period that was characterized by the passage from the medieval world to the modern one. He had no direct contact with the conventions of the classical tragedy, appreciated only by a few people in London. He focused his tragedies on the different aspects of human life and in particular on the problems associated to the nature of political power.