Watching Sandy Powell's designs for Shakespeare in Love for the second time only reaffirmed my feeling that she deserved the Academy Award, if only for the peacock-feather dress worn by Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth. I was literally drooling over the costumes both times through the film. ...

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is a comedy where commoners and royalty speak together frequently, in both prose and blank verse. The usage is not always clear to the modern reader but is easily understood with sufficient knowledge of the literary styles of the period in which Shakespeare lived...

The Life and Death of Christopher Marlowe Many of the great writers that are remembered to this day emerged during the Elizabethan era. One of these often overlooked writer is Christopher Marlowe. Many people normally associate this period with the great William Shakespeare. Christopher Mar...

William Shakespeare, arguably the most important writer in all of English literature, is certainly the most influential playwright of the English Renaissance. Born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in rural northern England, he was the son of a middle-class glovemaker. He married in 1582 and fathered t...

Ben Jonson was a playwright who lived during the English Renaissance. He was a man of great talent who was often overlooked because of the fame and popularity of William Shakespeare. Most of Jonson\'s works are comedies that deal with human behavior and temperaments. Jonson used these plays to try t...

During the time of the Elizabethan theater, plays about revenge were very common and a regular convention was formed on what aspects should be put into a typical revenge tragedy. In revenge tragedies, a crime is committed and for various reason laws and justice cannot punish the crime, so the indivi...