Twelfth Night – "Do you regard Twelfth Night simply as a lighthearted festive comedy, or do you feel it contains more serious themes and issues?" The first known performance of Twelfth Night was on the 2nd February 1602, which is in fact Candlemas Day. It was a traditional festiv...

Friend or Fairy?A Midsummer Night's Dream is the best of Shakespeare's early comedies. It is an unrealistic fantasy concerning lovers, fairies and royalty. Its action centers around four lovers' plights brought about by the fantasy world in which they enter. All through this play, there is a supe...

'Troilus and Cressida appeals to the iconoclastic and sceptical temperament of the contemporary era. Its anxieties about the problems of locating stable values and meanings, and its distrust of the claims of military and political authority, have obvious applications to the personal and public cris...

Named after the Latin word meaning shepherd, we can trace pastoral traditions as far back as the third century B. C. in Greece, when the Sicilian poet Theocritus included poetic sketches of rural life in his Idylls. Furthermore, we can assert that the Greek pastorals existed in three main forms. One...

The Taming of the Shrew: A Perceptual Ability TestA recurrent theme In Shakespeare's plays is the idea that things are not always what they seem. The Taming of the Shrew shows a good example of this theme. In this play we find many discrepancies between what seems to be and what is. The main them...

"If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and whiche is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my wo? (Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde) This is an extract of "Troilus' Song", a translation of a Petrarch's Sonnet 88 ("S'amor non ...

The great flaws of humanity, as defined in the characters of the tragedy, make Hamlet to be considered one of the greatest tragedies ever written. As Emily Dickonson stated, "Hamlet wavered for all of us," humanity can indeed find a likeness of himself in the Prince of Denmark. Thousands of scholars...

To be or not to be, that is the question. For many decades (excuse me for the exaggeration, I am not that old), I have desperately sought its real meaning. Whether it's just Shakespeare's endeavor to promote his palpable brilliance, or his unsuppressed desire to baffle our already-confused...

In \"A Midsummer Night\'s Dream,\" Theseus, the duke of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, a lady warrior who he conquered. Egeus brings his daughter Hermia to court. She and Lysander want to get married, but Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius, who also wants her. Under Athenian law, Hermia must e...

The Works of Shakespeare's Third PeriodThroughout Shakespeare's lifetime it is agreed by most scholars that he has written 37 plays. Although the exact date of several of these plays is uncertain, his remarkable career is generally divided into four periods. The third period, from 1600, includes m...