The Renaissance

During the 15^th century developed the Humanism; is a cultural movement began in Italy, that take inspiration from Greek and roman tradition with the examination of the classics, and also aim at the valorisation of man and of his earthly characteristics. The ancient literature was studied to recover a thought and a sensibility expressed without any theological influence. This movement started by Humanism was called Renaissance, to refer to a born of the man with his creative and critics qualities. Approximately, we can say that Renaissance takes a period from 1485, during the reign of Henry VII to 1660, the beginning of restoration. In this period rose new cultural centres, like academies and courts, in which born maecenatism. The English Renaissance developed later than in the other parts of Europe, and distinguished as an original movement; infect if influence in Italy was immense in every sphere, England struggled to free itself from this foreign force which it identified with Rome and the papacy. The "New Learning", called also Humanism was established in many Grammar Schools but also in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Humanism encouraged confidence in the power of human reason to interpret Man and Nature, using literature as an instrument, but first of all using English language as a literary medium. English humanists improved English vocabulary and syntax to put their language on a par with European vernaculars.

The Sonnet

The renaissance is considered the golden age of poetry because of the flourishing of songs and sonnets during the period. The Sonnet came from Italy, were it had been experimented by Dante, Petrarch, whose Canzoniere had become the model of all European Renaissance poets, and thanks to Surry and Wyatt arrived also in England. This Italian collection contains all the characteristics of the sonnet sequences: love sought, love satisfied but, above all, love of a lady who cannot return the love's poet. It is the poetry of the great passion for beauty and for the perfection of the form, and these elements were often represented by the figure of the woman. This psychology of love creates one of the most important paradoxes: the lover begs for the lady's love yet does not wish her to surrender. The language of the sonnet is full of these paradoxes: the lady is beautiful yet cruel, desirable but chaste, etc In many sonnets love for the woman turns into love for God; this is one reason why the sonneteers expects no psychological consummation of this love, which must remain pure and idealised. As a metrical form, the sonnet is composed of 14 lines. The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is divided into one octave plus a sestet. The octave generally presents an issue or a situation, while the sestet contains the solution to the problem or personal reflection. After a period of evolution, the English sonnet was identified with the Shakespearean model. The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains and a final couplet; through this structure, the poet can use the quatrains to present a theme or three different arguments, and make a conclusion in the final couplet. Elizabethan sonneteers showed their ability in the use of conceits. A conceit is an elaborated poetic image that gives depth and variety to an opinion; it generally startles the reader, who must be a member of a cultivated public.     

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the greatest English play writer. We don't know many things about his life. Born in Stratford upon Avon in 1564, there went to local grammar school and learnt some Latin and Greek from priests. He belonged to the middle class and so he couldn't be a university wit, but he was instead of this, very famous.

When Shakespeare was 18 he was obliged to marry a woman 8 years older than him and they had a daughter called Susanna and two twins. There are a lot of legends that hells he had gone away from Stratford because he had killed an animal of a lord and so the lord, in revenge, wanted to kill him, but the truth was that he went to London to work as an actor outside theatre. In 1592 he probably has been in Italy. He knew Verona (that's the setting of Romeo and Juliet) and Venezia. When he went back London he becomes immediately so popular to buy a theatre: The Globe.

On the top of the theatre there were a statue hanging a globe where it was written: totus mundi agit istrionem.

Then he becomes more famous and could buy the largest house in Stratford. When he had money and he was very popular he retired with his wife. Shakespeare wrote his theatrical plays only about important fact; he takes inspiration from historical sources and from characters and also from reality that he known very well. He wrote very much under the noble of Southampton. He started writing using a lot of rhymes, but the last compositions doesn't rhymes at all because he wanted to use a language similar to the every day one. William Shakespeare in his compositions started from a cue and than he wrote all the play.

In Shakespeare's works, characters were not tips, but real people capable of suffering and fell joys.

We can divide his works in:

Comedies written after his visit to Rome

Roman Plays about roman history

Tragedies written after a bad event happened in his life

Romances written when he reconciled with his life

Historical plays that tells about history of England: Plantagenets

kings and War of Roses.

Shakespeare The Dramatist

The most important feature of Shakespeare's plays was that language is so compact and full of meaning, flexible and expressive that requires complex literary analysis. Shakespeare, in his plays, takes men of different social level: he takes often a king, an aristocratic, a prince, a duke, or a nobleman. Hierarchy is the base of his plays, and frequently, the lower classes are represented in groups. Another important feature is that of the presence of the family; in many plays we can see the importance of the rapport between father and children, mother and children, and brother and sister.

In his plays Shakespeare uses a sort of double illusion; in fact make the reader aware of memories and vision and in this way he makes him see the action both on the stage and in the distance.

Shakespeare doesn't give importance to the division in acts, because in the Elizabethan period there was no curtain fall between the acts, and the plays were performed without an interval. Shakespeare used also some conventions like soliloquies, asides, introductory passages spoken by prologue or chorus as natural things in a stage where contact between actors and audience was very close.

An important feature is that Shakespeare use different levels of speech, and action to make the character portrayed from different angles.

Also the poets use different kind of linguistic levels and rhetorical figures, like assonance, metaphors, mythological allusions and alliteration. Many Shakespeare's plays had been published after his death. He also uses an impressive structure, reshaping blank verse, using irregular lines from one play to the next.       

The play appears first very mysterious, and proceeds with a gradual clarification of the things. Many opinions that don't seem to be useful they turn out to be decisive in many scenes. The most important scenes are preceded and followed by small scenes with the only purpose to give some information. Finally, Shakespeare makes the structure of his plays very flexible; infect he disregards the three unities of time, place and action.

The Shakespearean Comedies

In many of the Shakespearean plays we notice the big influence of Italian theatre. In Shakespeare life we distingue 3 periods that are connected to 3 different kinds of comedies:

1. Early comedies

2. Bitter comedies

3. Great comedies

1. First comedies like "The two gentlemen of Verona". They are characterized by little development of characters and they display a spirit of simple fun. In this composition Shakespeare used prevalently the rhyming couplet.

2. They belong to the middle period of the production like "All's Well that ends Well" and "Mayor for Mayor". They're so cold because they reflect the cynical mood of the poet. They're set in a realistic environment.

3. They're the final composition like "A midsummer night dream", "As you like it" and "Much Ado about nothing". They shame development in his abilities to construct a complex plot, they've a true comic spirit and the characters are fully developed.

History Plays

They include both English history and Roman plays, and they explore the same problems:

1. How to equate personal morality with the demands of public office
2. How to serve loyally
3. How to rule justly
4. How to combine the liberty of the subject and his own good with the welfare state and freedom

The recurring theme is man's desire for power, the plots and crimes to achieve that power, the consequences of his illegal actions and the disintegration of good government and of a stable society.

Shakespeare's reflections on these subjects are clearly illustrated in Richard II, Richard III, Giulius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Henry IV and Henry V.

On the bases of Shakespeare's reflection we can say that for him history stand still. In each of the plays, history turns full circle, returning to the point of departure. Each of these great historical plays (tragedies) begins with a struggle for the throne or for its consolidation. Each ends with the monarch's death and a new coronation. In each of these histories the legitimate ruler dregs behind him a long chain of crimes. He rejects the lords who helped him to get the crown, he murders first his enemies, then his former allies, he executes possible successor, but he's not able to execute them all. From banishment, a young prince returns to defend the violated law. He personifies the hope for a new order, all the princes are around him, but the young prince, in his turn to keep the power, commits murders and violence.

Feudal history is the image of a grand mechanism, it is like a great staircase on which treads a constant procession of kings or rulers.

The Great Tragedies

(Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth)

They represent as the highest expression of Shakespeare's genius. They present different aspects of central situation. A man great and good in a position of importance or command has within him a fatal defect of character.

Each character of the tragedies has different defects:

Othello's defect is his jealousy

King Lear's defect is his arrogance and selfishness

Macbeth's defect is his ambition

Hamlet's defect is his desire of power

In Hamlet, this flaw is inability to put aside his intellectualism and became a man of action when action is called for.

Shakespeare's places the tragic hero in a set of circumstances where he submits him to the urgings of this hidden defect:

he offends morality; he betrays his own integrity and the inevitable in escalation follow. The hero becomes out of harmony with the circumstances, he violates order within himself and as a consequence in the world around him; coals, death and destruction result.

This conception of the tragic hero derives both from the Aristotelian theory and from the morality plays in the concept that punishment is the inevitable consequence of error.

As in the classical great tragedies, Shakespeare's characters provoke pity and terror.         

Hamlet

Themes

Hamlet isn't only a tragedy of revenge, it's a play of life and death and of man's ambiguous relation to them both. It's also about melancholy and doubt. A very important question for man is the relation between "appearance and reality": how does one separate what appears to be real or absolute from what actually is so?

The essence of the truth is thus divorced from substance and from the means through which substance appears.

A Play Within The Play

In the third act there's a play within-the-play which is the only true thing in the play, since it's wanted by Hamlet to expose his father's murderer. It's a most interesting expedient because it turns the actors into audience: there is a real audience, then there's an audience on the stage composed of the actors of the play, who see a play, The Murder of Gonzago, dealing on the background to the tragedy.

Plot

The play is settled down in Denmark at the castle of Ellsinore. The story began after the death of the king and the marriage between the Queen Gertrude and his brother-in-law Claudius. Hamlet, the prince see his father's ghost that tell him that Claudius have killed him putting some poison into his ear, and he want to be avenged. So Hamlet pretends to be mad to carry on his plans easily. Polonius the king counsellor, thinks that Hamlet has become mad because of his love with Ophelia, the Queen counsellor. After Hamlet arranges for a troupe of actor to perform the "Murder of Gonzago", a play similar to his father death. The king, during the performance of the play rises and rushes away.

After that during an argument with his mother Hamlet kills Polonius who is hiding behind a curtain listening to the discussion. The king suspicious sends hamlet to England to kill him, and meanwhile it happens Ophelia goes mad and kills herself. Her brother Laertes want revenge and so, after the news that Hamlet has escaped, the king organize a duel between Laertes and Hamlet. During the duel the Queen Gertrude drink a poisoned cup of wine that was destined to Hamlet and dies, Laertes wounds Hamlet with his sword but before dying he is able to kill Laertes and the King Claudius. Hamlet dies telling to his best friend Horatio to tell his story.

"To be or not to be"

To be or not to be is the most celebrated of Shakespeare's soliloquies, the most complete and impressive meditation on life and death. Nevertheless instead of finding an answer and resolving the dilemma, Hamlet's doubts spread to the audience. This pause of reflection, that builds up the audience's expectation, shows Shakespeare in contemplation with the ultimate questions of man's existence. The audience, too, is forced to pause and reflect because of the use of the first plural person in his speech. The opening line "to be or not to be" has become very famous and according to an established tradition, is a comment on what Hamlet has been reading. This relationship between an alternative against another, is expressed through the soliloquy with a series of infinitive forms ( to suffer, to take arms, to say, to die, to sleep). The militaristic images in which the theme of existence is expressed, give an immediate impression of how violent is the struggle within Hamlet's mind. Where both passive and active resistance is bound to meet failure, death is seen as a welcome relief. This concept is countered by the doubt of the Renaissance man, concerning the after death (line 11-13). In six successive phrases, Hamlet lists the injustices and miseries inflicted on mandkin. Suggestive is the image of man being forced to bear the load of human existence like a beast of burden. It would only take a knife to bring relief, but the fear of something after death, the unknown country, prevents the medieval man from killing himself. The effect of the whole passage is to make the audience consider what the meaning of cowardice is. Hamlet calls the ability to cross the border between life and death courage, the ability to stay alive and bear the pain of human condition cowardice.

Hotello

Date And Sources

Othello was written in the first years of the 17^th century. It's based on a story connected to the theme of jealousy and gullibility, taken from an Italian artist. Shakespeare, in his work, gave to the bad Italian Othello dignity, and gave him magnificent qualities.

Themes

The main theme is the way in which a jealous villain succeeds in infecting an essentially noble man with his own jealousy and, in so doing, drags him down to his own level. In this tragedy the themes are both positive and negative forces, like Othello's and Desdemona's love that won over cultural difference, and Othello's ingenuity and Iago's whiteness and perversity. Othello and Iago are completely different, and the differences between them are on the base of the tragedy.

Iago And Othello

Iago and Othello are completely different. Black Othello infect is very honest and a perfect Christian, on the contrary the white Iago has a black soul and is very cruel in joking Othello. Othello feels emotions, sensations, Iago invented them. When Othello's harmony is destroyed by the suspected adultery of Desdemona, he decided to put order in his life with the elimination of the responsible element: his wife. He doesn't kill to avenge his honour, but only to recreate the lost harmony. When he discovered to have killed an innocent woman he decided to eliminate the element of his new problem, and so he killed himself.

Style

In this play we can admire the use of four different kinds of dramatic speech: lyric poetry, rhyme, blank verse, prose. All these are used to produce effects of tone, mood and atmosphere. For example the contrast between Iago and Othello is underlined with the use of two different languages; Othello used a typical renaissance language full of mhytological images, Iago, in contrast, used the prose making his voice intellectual, cynical and brute.

Plot

This play is divided in two acts. The first one is settled down in Venice, the second in Cyprus. The story starts with Iago who pretends great loyalty to Othello but makes to have Cassio, the Moor's Lieutenant, dismissed. After the scene is transferred in Cyprus, where the public figure of Othello is being questioned and the tragedy starts. Cassio is dismissed and Iago suggest him to seek the help of Desdemona, Othello's wife. Iago put in Othello's mind the doubt that Cassio may have a love affair with his wife. Desdemona drops a handkerchief that is found Emilia, Iago's wife. Therefore, Iago puts it in Cassio's lodgings, to create and evidence of Desdemona's unfaithfulness. Therefore, Othello kills Desdemona but when he discovers the mistake, he stabs himself. Iago is imprisoned and Cassio becomes governor of Cyprus.

Macbeth

Date And Sources

We don't know very much about the date in which Macbeth was written, but with some elements we can say that probably it would have been written around 1611.

Themes

Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies; it is simple and direct, but instead of this, it's very complex in its psychological analysis. In this tragedy, there's no villain pitted against the hero, but is the hero who starts the play as a brave and ends up as a murderous man thanks to his ambition. The words blood, bloody and to bleed are the most frequent used in the tragedy, because regicide is seen as an act against nature. Shakespeare explores also the difference between what is true and what seems to be true. Another theme of this tragedy is the theme of time; Shakespeare makes us making some questions: Can the future be knowable as the past or the future can't be inevitable but the results of individual activity? In the first case, we seem to be able to change future but in reality, we consolidate it; in the second case, what seems to be inevitable can be changed by action. In my opinion, I think that future can be changed by action, and we can't spend our life trusting to chance.

Blank Verse

Shakespeare used blank verse that was unrhymed pentameter. For example if one character ends his speech without finishing his line verse, then the following speaker completes that line.

Imagery

In Macbeth, there is a large use of imagery using similes, metaphors and symbols that Shakespeare used to expand the literal meaning. The murder of Duncan brings wasted consequences. Duncan is the symbol of harmony, justice and order, and his death is followed by exceptional natural events. On the night of the murder, infect the earth trembles, soon after the sky is troubled, and darkness covers the earth during the day. Darkness is a very important element of the play, the sun shine only twice and only the flashes that remember only scenes painted in red, the colour of blood, interrupt the darkness. In this play night doesn't express the idea of rest, but is connected with lack of sleep and madness, that represent Macbeth's and his wife's punishments.

Plot

The play opens with the news that the attempted invasion by the Norwegians, helped by the thane of Crawdor, has failed thanks to Macbeth. While returning from the battle, Macbeth and his friend Banquo, meet three witches who great Macbeth as Thane of Crawdor, and say that he will become king. They also promise that a line of kings will come from Banquo. Later they meet the king's messenger who tells Macbeth that the king has decided to make him Thane of Crawdor. Macbeth thought to the wiches' prophecy and decided to invite the king to his castle and so he informs his wife. The lady carries on a plan to kill Duncan. Duncan, so is murdered and the blame is put on the king's servants. Duncan's son leave the castle, and now Macbeth is the new king, but he is suspected by Macduff and Banquo. Macbeth doesn't feel well thinking to the prophecy about Banquo, so he decided to kill him, but Banquo's son, manages to escape and Banquo's ghost begins to disturb Macbeth. The three witches warn Macbeth to beware of Macduff. They said also that Macbeth will be safe as long as the forest doesn't move towards him, and none of woman born shall kill him. In this way, soon after lady Macbeth became mad. Malcolm, Duncan's son, is marching into Scotland; his soldiers cut branches from the trees and advance on Dusinane castle. Macduff, who is the man not born from a woman since ha was torn from his mother by a surgeon before he was due to be born, kills Macbeth. The play ends with Macduff carrying Macbeth's head and proclaiming Malcolm king of Scotland.