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William Shakespeare and the Renaissance

Shakespeare and the Renaissance

Shakespeare's Success

Biography

How Did William Shakespeare Affect the Renaissance?

  • Renaissance movement is used to describe how Europeans moved away from the restrictive ideas of the Middle Ages. The ideology that dominated the Middle Ages was heavily focused on the absolute power of God and was enforced by the Catholic Church
  • From the Fourteenth Century onwards, people started to break away from this idea. The Renaissance movement did not necessarily reject the idea of God, but rather questioned humankind’s relationship to God
  • People start to focus on humanity and individualism
  • In 1594 Shakespeare became a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, one of the most popular acting companies in London and stayed there for the rest of his career, often playing before the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
  • Oone of Shakespeare's most creative period of his life was in 1595 when he started writing Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice.
  • When King James came to the throne in 1603, he issued a royal license to Shakespeare and his fellow players, organizing them as the King's Men. During King James's reign, Shakespeare wrote many of his most accomplished plays about courtly power, including King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.
  • In 1609 or 1611, Shakespeare's sonnets were published, but did not live to see the First Folio of his plays published in 1623. When he passed away he has come to be seen as not only a great English playwright, but the greatest playwright in the English language.
  • William Shakespeare was born in the year 1564 and died on April 23, 1616 because of a fever.
  • Shakespeare lived in Strafford with his family and went to Strafford's Grammar School where the curriculum was mostly based on Latin and school free of tuition.
  • When William Shakespeare got into theater he went to London and wrote plays and acted. The theatre then closed in 1593 because of "The Plague" (Black Death) and Shakespeare stopped writing plays and started to write poems.

1. Defining "Self" and Humanistic characters

The Renaissance was a period when people started recognized their own individuality

Shakespearean characters:

  • the villain Othello
  • the indecisive Hamlet
  • the ambitious Lady Macbeth (Strong female characters)

Shakespeare demonstrated a deep understanding of self-expression, humanity and intellectual freedom through the characters he created, these characters were both intelligent and amusing characteristics

Shakespeare Embraced the Renaissance in the Following Ways:

  • Updated from the simple, two-dimensional writing style of pre-renaissance and created “human” characters with psychologically complexity. EX. Hamlet, Macbeth
  • Explore the humanity of every character regardless of their social position. Even monarchs are given human emotions and are capable of making mistakes
  • Shakespeare applied his knowledge of Greek and Roman classics when writing his plays, before the renaissance, these texts had been suppressed by the Catholic Church.

Therefore, Shakespeare is seen as the ultimate product of Renaissance humanism; he was an artist with a deep understanding of humanity and an uncanny ability for self-expression who openly practiced the ideals of intellectual freedom.

2. Words and Crammer

  • Expanded vocabulary and language
  • Added 17,000 words -- four times that of the average educated person of the English Renaissance

Contributed many phrases that continue to be used;

All of a sudden

fair play

love is blind...

Shakespeare gave Modern English

style and freedom of word choice

References

Achievements

Therefore...

Altogether, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, 38 plays. He wrote history themed plays, tragedy, and comedy.

William Shakespeare has become an important landmark in English literature. His works are taught and appreciated worldwide. Almost every student in the world is required to study Shakespeare's writings at one point in school.

"A creature cannot survive incomplete, and literature cannot survive without William Shakespeare" Ashlee Jason.

Jenson, Ashlee. The Importance of Shakespeare Shakespeare

Online. 20 Aug. 2003. (March 29, 2015) < http://

www.shakespeare-online.com/essays/importance.html >.

http://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/

SAYLOR.ORG-ENGL401-RENAISSANCE-HUMANISM-

SHAKESPEARE.pdf

http://shakespeare.about.com/od/historicalcontext/a/

Renaissance.htm

William Shakespeare. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved 06:45, Mar 29, 2015,

from http://www.biography.com/people/william-shakespeare-9480323.

The Life of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2015,

from http://www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org/education/life-william-shakespeare

THE END!

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