Achievements: Marlowe's greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse & made it the principal medium of English drama.
His second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for English drama.
The theme of his works is the praise of the Renaissance spirit.
His influence: A man of wide learning, Marlowe was one of the extra ordinary poets & playwrights of his time. "Marlowe's mighty line," as Ben Jonson called his blank verse, was one of the most important contributions to the art of English literature.
William Shakespeare
1. 一般识记Brief Introduction
William Shakespeare was the greatest writer of plays who ever lived. His friend & fellow playwright Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare was "not of an age but for all time." The
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18th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson described his work as "the mirror of life." The 19th-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of "myriad-minded Shakespeare." The 20th-century English dramatist George Bernard Shaw stressed his "enormous power over language."
2. 识记His Life & Career
The exact date of Shakespeare's birth is not known, but his baptism was recorded on April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon. Since it was customary to baptize infants within two or three days of birth, April 23 is regarded as a reasonable birth date. It is also the date on which he died in 1616. Generally, his dramatic career is divided into 4 periods.
The First Period (1590-1594)-five historical plays & four comedies:
Henry Ⅵ Richard Ⅲ (1592) Titus Andronicus (1593)
The Comedy of Errors (1592) The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594)
The Taming of the Shrew (1593) Love's Labor's Lost (1594)
The Second Period (1595-1600)-five historical plays, six comedies & two tragedies: Richard Ⅱ (1595) King John (1596)
Henry Ⅳ, Part Ⅰ & Part Ⅱ(1597) Henry V (1598)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) The Merchant of Venice (1596)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598) As You Like It (1599)
Twelfth Night (1600) The Merry Wives of Winsor (1598)
Romeo & Juliet (1595) Julius Caesar (1599)
The Third Period (1601-1609)-Seven tragedies & two dark comedies:
Hamlet Othello King Lear Macbeth
Antony & Cleopatra Troilus & Cressida Coriolonus
All's Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure
The Fourth Period (1609-1612)-Romantic tragic-comedies & two plays:
Pericles Cymbeline The Winte's Tale The Tempest
Henry Ⅷ The Two Noble Kinsmen
Shakespeare's authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems: Venus & Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece & his sequence of 154 sonnets.
3. 领会His Influence
1) Contributions to language
Many words and commonly used phrases have been added to everyday English vocabulary through their appearance in Shakespeare's works.
2) Effects on literature
Shakespeare's plays & poetry have had a pervasive influence on world literature. Most of the great literary figures of the world have been inspired & stimulated by his achievement.
On the whole, however, Shakespeare's contribution has been to the language & spirit of later writing rather than to its form. References & parallels to Shakespeare's phraseology have occurred in literature since the 16th century.
Perhaps the greatest inspiration to subsequent authors has been Shakespeare's capacity to depict life in all its complexity & to illuminate man's character & destiny.
4. 领会 His Major Works
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1) Drama
Hamlet
Hamlet is generally regarded as Shakespeare's most popular play on the stage, for it has the qualities of a "blood-and-thunder" thriller & a philosophical exploration of life & death. And the timeless appeal of this mighty drama lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict & searching philosophic melancholy.
The play opens with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, appearing in a mood of world-weariness occasioned by his father's recent death & by his mother's hasty remarriage with Claudius, his father's brother. While encountering his father's ghost, Hamlet is informed that Claudius has murdered his father & then taken over both his father's throne & widow. This, Hamlet, is urged by the ghost to seek revenge for his father's "foul & most unnatural murder." Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing & plotting, & apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father's death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact & fiction, language & action. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. By characterizing Hamlet, Shakespeare successfully makes a philosophical exploration of life & death.