Romeo and Juliet William shakespeare

Context T HE MOST INFLUENTIAL WRITER IN ALL OF English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and partowner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 15581603) and James I (ruled 16031625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeares company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title of Kings Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeares death, literary luminaries such as Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless. Shakespeares works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeares life, but the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeares personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeares plays were really written by someone elseFrancis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidatesbut the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars. In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeares plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to profoundly affect the course of Western literature and culture ever after. Shakespeare did not invent the story of Romeo and Juliet. He did not, in fact, even introduce the story into the English language. A poet named Arthur Brooks first brought the story of Romeus and Juliet to an English-speaking audience in a long and plodding poem that was itself not original, but rather an adaptation of adaptations that stretched across nearly a hundred years and two languages. Many of the details of Shakespeares plot are lifted directly from Brookss poem, including the meeting of Romeo and Juliet at the ball, their secret marriage, Romeos fight with Tybalt, the sleeping potion, and the timing of the lovers eventual suicides. Such appropriation of other stories is characteristic of Shakespeare, who often wrote plays based on earlier works. Shakespeares use of existing material as fodder for his plays should not, however, be taken as a lack of originality. Instead, readers should note how Shakespeare crafts his sources in new ways while displaying a remarkable understanding of the literary tradition in which he is working. Shakespeares version of Romeo and Juliet is no exception. The play distinguishes itself from its predecessors in several important aspects: the subtlety and originality of its characterization (Shakespeare almost wholly created Mercutio); the intense pace of its action, which is compressed from nine months into four frenetic days; a powerful enrichment of the storys thematic aspects; and, above all, an extraordinary use of language. Shakespeares play not only bears a resemblance to the works on which it is based, it is also quite similar in plot, theme, and dramatic ending to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, told by the great

Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses. Shakespeare was well aware of this similarity; he includes a reference to Thisbe in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare also includes scenes from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in the comically awful play-within-a-play put on by Bottom and his friends in A Midsummer Nights Dreama play Shakespeare wrote around the same time he was composing Romeo and Juliet. Indeed, one can look at the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Nights Dream as parodying the very story that Shakespeare seeks to tell in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet in full knowledge that the story he was telling was old, clichd, and an easy target for parody. In writing Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, then, implicitly set himself the task of telling a love story despite the considerable forces he knew were stacked against its success. Through the incomparable intensity of his language Shakespeare succeeded in this effort, writing a play that is universally accepted in Western culture as the preeminent, archetypal love story.

Pride AND prejudice During Austens life, however, only her immediate family knew of her authorship of these novels. At one point, she wrote behind a door that creaked when visitors approached; this warning allowed her to hide manuscripts before anyone could enter. Though publishing anonymously prevented her from acquiring an authorial reputation, it also enabled her to preserve her privacy at a time when English society associated a females entrance into the public sphere with a reprehensible loss of femininity. The social milieu of Austens Regency England was particularly stratified, and class divisions were rooted in family connections and wealth. In her work, Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of upper-class England. She distinguishes between internal merit (goodness of person) and external merit (rank and possessions). Though she frequently satirizes snobs, she also pokes fun at the poor breeding and misbehavior of those lower on the social scale. Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she depicts is one in which social mobility is limited and class-consciousness is strong. Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored into Austens work as well. While social advancement for young men lay in the military, church, or law, the chief method of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women could only accomplish this goal through successful marriage, which explains the ubiquity of matrimony as a goal and topic of conversation in Austens writing. Though young women of Austens day had more freedom to choose their husbands than in the early eighteenth century, practical considerations continued to limit their options. In general, Austen occupies a curious position between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her favorite writer, whom she often quotes in her novels, was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great model of eighteenth-century classicism and reason. Her plots, which often feature characters forging their respective ways through an established and rigid social hierarchy, bear similarities to such works of Johnsons contemporaries as Pamela, written by Samuel Richardson. Austens novels also display an ambiguity about emotion and an appreciation for intelligence and natural beauty that aligns them with Romanticism. In their awareness of the conditions of modernity and city life and the consequences for family structure and individual characters, they prefigure much Victorian literature (as does her usage of such elements as frequent formal social gatherings, sketchy characters, and scandal).

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

Patriarchal, repressive Victorian society did not encourage women to attend universities or to participate in intellectual debate. Nonetheless, Woolf began publishing her first essays and reviews after 1904, the year her father died and she and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Young students and artists, drawn to the vitality and intellectual curiosity of the Stephen clan, congregated on Thursday evenings to share their views about the world. The Bloomsbury group, as Woolf and her friends came to be called, disregarded the constricting taboos of the Victorian era, and such topics as religion, sex, and art fueled the talk at their weekly salons. They even discussed homosexuality, a subject that shocked many of the groups contemporaries. For Woolf, the group served as the undergraduate education that society had denied her. In Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, Woolf discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England. The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its central characters over a single day in postWorld War I London. Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts. Critics tend to agree that Woolf found her writers voice with this novel. At forty-three, she knew her experimental style was unlikely to be a popular success but no longer felt compelled to seek critical praise. The novel did, however, gain a measure of commercial and critical success. This book, which focuses on commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no act was too small or too ordinary for a writers attention. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway transformed the novel as an art form. She wanted to show characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience. Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britains colonial rule. At home, the Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of Ones Own (1929), as well as in numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the womens suffrage movement F. S. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby- Modernist work Modernist fiction attempted to represent the sense of emptiness and disillusionment that dominated Europe and the United States after World War I. In this way, Gatsby can be considered as related to such modernist works as James Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway (1925). But The Great Gatsby and all of Fitzgeralds works are best compared to those written by other Americans such as Ernest Hemingway, members of the Lost Generation of American writers who moved to Europe after World War I. All these writers depicted the reality, corruption, and sadness of the human condition, but Fitzgerald most effectively portrayed the American cultural moment he called the Jazz Age. RELATED HISTORICAL EVENTS: Fitzgerald coined the term Jazz Age to refer to the period more commonly known as the Roaring Twenties. Jazz is an American style of music marked by its complex and exuberant mix of rhythms and tonalities. The Great Gatsby portrays a similarly complex mix of emotions and themes that reflect the turbulence of the times. Fresh off the nightmare of World War I, Americans were enjoying the fruits of an economic boom and a renewed sense of possibility. But in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgeralds stresses the darker side of the Roaring Twenties, its undercurrent of corruption and its desperate, empty decadence.

During the politically charged atmosphere of the late eighteenth centurythe French Revolution had sent shockwaves through Europe, and England and France were at war , Coleridge made a name for himself both as a political radical and as an important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he became one of the most important writers in England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads of 1798, Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in England; as Wordsworth explained it in the 1802 preface to the third edition of the work, the idea of poetry underlying Lyrical Ballads turned the established conventions of poetry upside down: Privileging natural speech over poetic ornament, simply stated themes over elaborate symbolism, emotion over abstract thought, and the experience of natural beauty over urban sophistication, the book paved the way for two generations of poets, and stands as one of the milestones of European literature. as Wordsworth was the poet of nature, the purity of childhood, and memory, Coleridge became the poet of imagination, exploring the relationships between nature and the mind as it exists as a separate entity. Poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan demonstrate Coleridges talent for concocting bizarre, unsettling stories full of fantastic imagery and magic; in poems such as Frost at Midnight and Dejection: An Ode, he muses explicitly on the nature of the mind as it interacts with the creative source of nature

Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a style of English literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century, ending in the 1740s with the deaths of Pope and Swift (1744 and 1745, respectively). It is a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama, and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. "Augustan" derives from George I's wishing to be seen as Augustus Caesar. Alexander Pope, who had been imitating Horace, wrote an Epistle to Augustus that was to George II and seemingly endorsed the notion of his age being like that of Augustus, when poetry became more mannered, political and satirical than in the era of Julius Caesar (Thornton 275). Later, Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith (in his History of Literature in 1764) used the term "Augustan" to refer to the literature of the 1720s and '30s. The Augustan period showed less literature of controversy than the Restoration. There were Puritan authors, however, and one of the names usually associated with the novel is perhaps the most prominent in Puritan writing: Daniel Defoe. The novel The ground for the novel had been laid by journalism, drama and satire. Long prose satires like Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) had a central character who goes through adventures and may (or may not) learn lessons. However, the most important single satirical source for the writing of novels came from Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605, 1615). In general, one can see these three axes, drama, journalism, and satire, as blending in and giving rise to three different types of novel. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first major novel of the new century and was published in more editions than any other works besides Gulliver's Travels (Mullan 252). Defoe worked as a journalist during and after its composition, and therefore he encountered the memoirs of Alexander Selkirk, who had been stranded in South America on an island for some years. Defoe took aspects of the actual life and, from that, generated a fictional life, satisfying an essentially

journalistic market with his fictio (Hunter 331-338). In the 1720s, Defoe interviewed famed criminals and produced accounts of their lives. Thematically, Defoe's works are consistently Puritan. They all involve a fall, a degradation of the spirit, a conversion, and an ecstatic elevation. This religious structure necessarily involved a bildungsroman, for each character had to learn a lesson about him or herself and emerge the wiser.