What types of plays did
Shakespeare write?
Comedy
- is a drama driven by language and complex plots that often involved mistaken identity
- a good rule of thumb is if a character disguises themselves as a member of the opposite sex, you can categorize the play as a comedy.
Some popular comedies are:
Twelfth Night
Much Ado About Nothing
Tragedy
- is a drama that ends in a catastrophe- most often death- for the main character and often for several other characters as well
- events are set in motion by an action of the tragic hero OR by fate
History
- is a drama that talks about historical matter
- Shakespeare used his history plays to make social and political commentary - so they were not always historically accurate
- Shakespeare drew from a range of historical sources and set most of his history plays in the Hundred Years War with France.
Some popular history dramas are:
Henry V
Richard III
Shakespearean Plays & The Elements of
Tragic Hero
- the main character in a tragedy
- someone who is nobly born
- may have great influence in his or her society
- has one or more fatal character flaws- a weakness or serious error in judgment- that leads to his or her downfall
Comic Relief
- a humorous scene, incident, or speech that relieves the overall emotional intensity of the play
- provides contrast that helps the audience to absorb the earlier events in the plot and get ready for the ones to come
Allusion
- a brief reference, within a work, to something outside the work that the reader or audience is expected to know
Blank Verse
a form of poetry that uses unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, lines that ideally have five unstressed syllables, each followed by a stressed syllable
Foil
- a character whose personality or attitudes are in sharp contrast to those of another character in the same work
- helps the writer highlight the other character's traits or attitude (the kind of behavior of one character, for example, will be made clearer when it is presented in sharp contrast to another character who is not at all kind)
Like all playwrights, Shakespeare makes use of what are called dramatic conventions-- devices that theater audiences accept as realistic even though they do not necessarily reflect the way real-life people behave
Soliloquy
- a speech that a character gives when he or she is alone on stage
- its purpose is to let the audience know what the character is thinking
Aside
- a character's remark, either to the audience or to another character, that others on stage are not supposed to hear
- its purpose is to reveal the character's private thoughts
- a stage direction, usually in brackets or parentheses, indicates when an aside is being made
- spoken to the audience unless the stage directions say otherwise
Exit: Using the definition that you learned today, create your own allusion. Be creative.
Shakespearean Drama
Mercutio... Speak to my fair Venus one fair word,
One nickname for her prublind son and heir,
Young Adam Cupid, he that shot so trim
When King Cophetua loved the beggar maid!
Act Two, Scene 1, lines 13-16
[Enter Juliet alone]
Juliet... Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun...
Some popular tragedies are:
Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth
Hamlet Othello
King Lear Hamlet
Act Three, Scene 2, lines 20-26