An Introduction to Shakespeare

The Second and Third periods slightly overlap; for _Julius Caesar_, the first play of the later group, was probably written before _Twelfth Night_ and _As You Like It_. But the...

The first period of Shakespeare's work carries him from the youthful efforts at dramatic construction to such mastery of dramatic technique and of original portrayal of life as...

It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that Shakespeare was ever less than the greatest dramatist of his time, to think of him as the pupil and imitator of other dramatists...

As the reader will remember, our main aim in attempting to date Shakespeare's plays was to trace through them his development as a dramatist and poet. Just as the successive cha...

+Our Knowledge of Shakespeare+.--No one in Shakespeare's day seems to have been interested in learning about the private lives of the dramatists. The profession of play writing...

The Elizabethan audiences who filled to overflowing the theaters on the Bankside possessed a far purer text of Shakespeare than we of this later day can boast. In order to under...

In 1575 London had no theaters; that is, no building especially designed for the acting of plays. By 1600 there were at least six, among which were some so large and beautiful a...

The history of the drama includes two periods of supreme achievement, that of fifth-century Greece and that of Elizabethan England. Between these peaks lies a broad valley, the...

No less clear than the interest in tragic themes which attracted the London audiences for the half-a-dozen years following 1600, is the shifting of popular approval towards a ne...

We shall later trace Shakespeare's development as a writer of plays. We must first, however, turn back to discuss some early productions of his, which were composed before most...

The mystery which enwraps so much of Shakespeare's life, combined with the interest which naturally centers around a great genius, is ideally calculated to stimulate human imagi...

The most profitable method of studying any writer is to take up his works in the order in which they were written. More and more this method is being adopted toward all authors,...

Shortly after Shakespeare came to London, England demonstrated her new greatness to an astonished world; by the defeat of Spain's greatest fleet, the "invincible Armada," Englan...

+Shakespeare and Plagiarism+.--Among the curious alterations in public sentiment that have come in the last century or two, none is more striking than the change of attitude in...