Top 10 Best Shakespeare Plays
There is no ‘theory’ that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. There is only the doubt in the minds of some people that he wrote them. In order to justify this doubt, those people would need to provide solid evidence of somebody else having written them. Attempts have been made to suggest alternative candidates.
Why Shakespeare Is The Real Author? There is a strong, tight web of evidence that supports the account attributed to William Shakespeare that a real person named William Shakespeare composed the poems and plays attributed to him; that a real person named William Shakespeare appeared in the productions attributed to him; and that the actor from the company made the plays
Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford! Shakespeare's plays were written by anyone, anyone, but William Shakespeare! "Lunacy," says Patrick Cheney, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, gesturing to the early twentieth-century inventor of the Oxford theory, J. Thomas Looney.
William Shakespeare has become the most famous playwright of his time. He wrote or co-wrote almost 40 plays.
William Shakespeare is credited with the invention or introduction of over 1,700 words that are still used in English today.
The word vomit comes from a combination of Latin and Old French. It is commonly mis-reported that Shakespeare invented the word 'puke'.
The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original.
Shakespeare wrote 38 plays. However, in recent years the publisher Arden Shakespeare added a new play to their collection: Double Falsehood under Shakespeare ’s name. Technically, this revises the total number of plays to 39!
Lee Jamieson, M.A. , is a theater scholar and educator. He previously served as a theater studies lecturer at Stratford-upon Avon College in the United Kingdom.
Traditionally, the label relates to All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida because they do not fit general categorization. However, the term is also used to describe many of the plays that resist categorization and there remains debate whether plays like The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale should be included, because they too explore a moral.
What each of these plays has in common is a tragic central character who gains power throughout the play and dies at the end. Romeo falls in love and dies tragically when he thinks Juliet has died. Hamlet builds himself up to avenge the murder of his father, but dies whilst fighting. Macbeth murders his way to King and dies fighting.
Some of the best known Shakespeare histories are Henry V and Richard III. The Tragedies: Shakespeare is perhaps best known for his tragedies.
Nevertheless, here are the most widely accepted categories for Shakespeare's plays: The Histories: These plays tend to focus on the Kings and Queens of England - especially the War of the Roses, the impact of which was still felt in Shakespeare's time.
However, for many, this three-way categorization is far too simplistic. Shakespeare's plays are nearly all based on historical accounts, all have tragic characters at the heart of the plot and have lots of comic moments threaded throughout. Nevertheless, here are the most widely accepted categories for Shakespeare's plays:
How many plays did Shakespeare write? Most scholars agree that he wrote at least 37 plays. However, either because they are lost or poorly documented, no one knows exactly how many plays Shakespeare wrote for certain.
The three types of plays Shakespeare wrote are tragedies, comedies, and histories. Tragedies are often marked by death and sadness, while comedies include happy endings (and often a wedding). Histories reflect a dramatization of historical monarchs and periods of time from Shakespeare’s perspective. Although the exact dates that Shakespeare penned ...
There's no doubt Shakespeare found the royal court to be something of an enigma. He crafted tales of betrayal, love, and murder, all within the king's court. We can learn a lot about this period in time through these plays:
This means that Shakespeare constantly penned new material to entertain his public that eagerly attended his many performances.
His most well-known works include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, and Hamlet.
Although his plays were exceedingly popular, theaters and other public forums had to shut down from roughly 1592 to 1594.
In the 17th century, plays had to be registered before they could be published, essentially so that they could be censored. Shakespeare never published any of his plays, so none of them were registered. Some of them were published by unauthorized publishers (because there were no copyright laws at the time), but other than that, they were only performed until about seven years after Shakespeare's death on April 23, 1616.
For almost twenty years William Shakespeare was its regular dramatist, producing on average two plays a year. Shakespeare stayed with the Chamberlain’s Men, which would later evolve into the King’s Men under the patronage of King James I, for the rest of his career.
It was during this time that Shakespeare wrote his earliest plays, including Henry VI Part 1, Henry VI Part 2, Henry VI Part 3 , The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Titus Andronicus, though it is often debated which of these plays was actually the first. Shakespeare’s first printed works were two long poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) ...
The First Folio, an unprecedented collection of a playwright's work, is the best illustration of the pre-eminence awarded to him.
It is believed that she liked the character of Falstaff so much, in Henry IV, Part One, that she asked Shakespeare to write a play that showed the character in love - this supposedly inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor. When Elizabeth died Shakespeare wrote no elegy for her, unlike most of the poets of the day.
As a member of the acting company called the Chamberlain's Men, which from 1603 were known as the King's Men, Shakespeare enjoyed the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain George Carey 2nd Lord Hunsdon and then of James I. Early in his career as a writer Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece ...
Shakespeare's Career. Read about William Shakespeare's early career as he built his reputation in London.
When Elizabeth died Shakespeare wrote no elegy for her, unlike most of the poets of the day. As you can see it is not easy to determine Shakespeare's relationship to Elizabeth I. It appears that he worked for her as she demanded but there is no indication that their relationship was closer than that.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, or comedy —is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language .
Plays possibly by Shakespeare 1 Arden of Faversham – The middle portion of the play (scenes 4–9) may have been written by Shakespeare. 2 Edmund Ironside – Contains numerous words first used by Shakespeare, and, if by him, is perhaps his first play. 3 Sir Thomas More – A collaborative work by several playwrights, including Shakespeare. There is a "growing scholarly consensus" that Shakespeare was called in to re-write a contentious scene in the play and that "Hand D" in the surviving manuscript is that of Shakespeare himself. 4 The Spanish Tragedy – Additional passages included in the fourth quarto, including the "painter scene", are likely to have been written by him.
His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. For example, King Lear is probably an adaptation of an older play, King Leir, and the Henriad probably derived from The Famous Victories of Henry V. There is speculation that Hamlet (c. 1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet ), but the number of lost plays from this time period makes it impossible to determine that relationship with certainty. (The Ur-Hamlet may in fact have been Shakespeare's, and was just an earlier and subsequently discarded version.) For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch 's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North), and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed 's 1587 Chronicles. This structure did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces.
In comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare's other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic.
Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character. In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than Marlowe's. By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet .
Shakespeare's plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict.
Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than Marlowe's.
The general consensus is that Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays (see list below). However, no one can know for certain because of the inexact documentation at the time the plays were first being organized and published.
Moreover, in the last few years many critics have begun to reassess a play called Edward III, currently grouped with a collection of eleven other plays known as the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Edward III bears striking similarities to Shakespeare's early histories. Another play, Sir Thomas More has also been under debate.
Handwriting analysis has led scholars to believe that Shakespeare revised parts of Sir Thomas More, but, like Edward III, it is not part of the standard collection of Shakespeare's plays. The Plays. Comedies.
A poet referred to the playwright (during Shakespeare’s lifetime) as playing kings in sport, which is another reference to the playwright being an actor.
But all joking aside, they were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford. Every recognized scholar of Elizabethan literature knows this and acknowledges this (although a few of the plays were collaborative works).
Or, the so-called ‘Apocrypha’. The Shakespearean Apocrypha consists of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, but not included in the First Folio (1623)
They didn't write their plays down because written scripts could be stolen and copied.
Also, Shakespeare’s will mentions a property bought by Shakespeare in Blackfrairs, near a theater where his company performed plays. A loan for the property in Blackfriars was signed by one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors.
Like so much about William Shakespeare we cannot be certain if all of his work has survived but we do know that a group of friends put together what is called The First Folio that includes what we have today. It is possible that in his lifetime few of his works were printed and distributed—as a playwright with his own company of players and no copyright protection, his works would have been and probably were stolen by others.
Sadly there is no evidence that the man people think was the world’s best writer ever purchased this one book. Or any books. But the real author HAD to have read this book and because it was first printed in 1577 it was too soon for a school to buy a copy. The education of Stratford ended when he was 14, so the school days of WS were over in 1578.
Whilst some have suggested that the plays Shakespeare wrote were in fact the work of another individual, for many scholars and Shakespeare enthusiasts alike there is little doubt that William Shakespeare was the author of each of 38 plays, in addition to his other literary offerings.
37 – The total number of plays written.
Shakespeare, although a commoner, had received a sufficiently good education that included subjects such the classics, rhetoric, history, and Latin grammar, in order to be able to write such literary works. The majority of the plays bear his name on the title page, including subsequent editions of the same play, ...
In the centuries after the death of William Shakespeare in 1616, comparatively few people have asked the question: Did Shakespeare write his plays?
Theory 3 – Linguistically and structurally, it has been suggested that both the language (lexicon) and writing style is far too varied, and would therefore point to a number of authors – and not necessarily including Shakespeare.
Edward de Vere (1550-1604) One of the more complicated theories, it is argued that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere , was the true author behind the plays. To support this view, amongst other evidential offerings, it has been suggested that Ben Jonson, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, stated that ‘Shakespeare’ had died in, ...
With regards to the deeds to the Globe Theatre, there is documentation that proves that the William Shakespeare named on the deeds, and the William Shakespeare who appears in the Stratford-upon-Avon baptismal record of 1564, are one and the same person. The suggestion that either Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Bacon, ...
And the wide range of dramatic styles that Shakespeare adopted, the fact that he composed an average of around two plays a year, and that he moved freely among the dramatic genres, all indicate his sensitivity to the needs of his company.
It is difficult for us to estimate how long the plays would have lasted in contemporary performance, but the fact that they vary in line length from around 1800 lines for The Comedy of Errors to about 4,000 for Hamlet shows that though there may have been minimum expectations there were no fixed limits. Shakespeare may have wished to make changes between first having a manuscript transcribed for his actors and their putting it into production. This is illustrated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where we see the players having to write a new prologue to assure the ladies in the audience that the actors ‘will do no harm with their swords’; arguing about its versification; discussing how to modify Lion’s appearance so as not to ‘fear the ladies’; suggesting that a window of the great chamber where they are to play should be left open to let moonlight in; and discussing how to present a wall: ‘You can never bring in a wall!’, says Snout (who nevertheless eventually comes on as Wall.)
Shakespeare had models which he could observe, follow, modify, or reject. He knew about the traditional genres of tragedy and comedy, though he conspicuously refused to be constrained by them throughout his career.
Shakespeare would want to write starring roles for the leading actors, and in doing so both to cater for their strengths and to remember their limitations. It is noticeable, for example, that none of the parts that Richard Burbage, star of the company throughout Shakespeare’s career, is known to have played requires him to display any talent in singing – indeed the role of Benedick makes a joke out of his vocal limitations (5.5.2.29), though the demands made of for example both Romeo and Hamlet show that Shakespeare had confidence in the actor’s swordsmanship. And though Shakespeare displays great confidence in the staying power of his leading players he learned to be considerate to them too – whereas Richard III has little respite during the course of his play, the heroes of later plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear all have time off in their plays’ later stages to summon up strength to play their closing scenes.
And the conventions of comedy encouraged the inclusion of dances, of music and song. Here he would have required the collaboration of composers, instrumentalists, and singing actors. We know that some of his actors were musicians: Augustine Philips, for instance, in his will of 1605 bequeathed ‘a cittern, a bandora, and a lute’.
Shakespeare was constrained too, throughout his career, by legal and social requirements and by governmental censorship. It was, for instance, forbidden from early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (by an ordinance of 1559) for plays to be written on biblical subjects. And it was dangerous for a dramatist to engage directly with contemporary political issues. Even episodes which, while not being explicitly topical, might be interpreted as commenting on current events were sensitive: so for example the episode in Richard II relating to the king’s abdication was omitted from editions of the play printed before the death of Queen Elizabeth, for whom this was a sensitive issue. And from 1606 onwards, with the passing of the ‘act to restrain abuses of players’, it was forbidden to use profane language, and existing dramatic texts were revised to bring them into conformity with this. The 1622 quarto text of Othello, written before the Act was passed - probably in 1603 or 1604 –- contains fifty or more profanities that are not present in the Folio text, printed from a theatrical manuscript.
Having chosen the narrative material of a play, Shakespeare had to create a plot, a kind of framework resembling a maquette from which a sculptor might work, or an architect’s ground plan, or a script writer’s story-board - a story line that would give him a structure for his play, deciding how to introduce his narrative material and to establish his characters, how to introduce and to shape any sub-plot or other material extraneous to the principal narrative that he might find desirable, and how to bring it all to a conclusion. And he had to do all this in ways that would fit the physical structures of the theatres of his time and the strengths and limitations of the acting company at his disposal.