Shakespeare’s Style in the 1590s

Author(s):  
Goran Stanivukovic

Shakespeare’s early style is explored from the angles of theory and dramatic practice, and in relation to the social and political contexts of the 1590s. Arguing that ornament and symmetry are the two distinct properties of Shakespeare’s early style, the essay discusses hyperbole, repetition, and parallelism as the most prominent features of that style. Claiming that Shakespeare’s use of bombast in the Henry VI trilogy and in Titus Andronicus is more sophisticated than Robert Greene and William Scott deemed it to be, the essay also explores the complex employment of symmetry, repetition and parallelism in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Richard III, and in the embedded sonnets in Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. In conclusion, hyperbole is linked with the period’s colonial aspirations, demonstrated in a comparative analysis of Much Ado and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal nauigations.

PMLA ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 620-666
Author(s):  
Allison Gaw

Gradually the mists veiling Shakespeare's dramatic production prior to the year 1594 are thinning, and we are enabled with clearer vision to isolate his early steps in play-writing and study his development in artistry. We are becoming more keenly sensible of the fact that his earliest plays in their present form have a false aspect of maturity. On the basis of internal allusions, Professor Charlton would place the Love's Labour's Lost so late as the autumn of 1592; and to the duplications in the text of the same play clearly illustrating Shakespeare's method of amplifying and remodeling, Professor H. D. Gray has added other considerations in an attempt to reconstruct its first form, from which he would entirely eliminate the characters of Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes. Over a decade ago Dr. Tucker Brooke recognized the fact that 1 Henry VI underwent some revision as late as 1599, and pointed out that in 2 and 3 Henry VI the dramatic strength is largely that of Marlowe. Mr. J. M. Robertson has recently renewed the attack upon the problem of Richard III. Professor Pollard's new angle of approach to the history of the texts in the First Folio and the quartos has had fruitful results in the invaluable studies of the editors of the New Cambridge edition, revealing, among other disclosures, an extremely immature Midsummer-night's Dream of 1592 or earlier. Professor Adams, in his new Life of Shakespeare, has discussed the probable significance of the plague years, 1592-93, in the poet's intellectual development. Students of Shakespeare are thus enabled to clarify, and partly to reconstruct, their conceptions of his mentality and professional production in the years 1590-94. We no longer need to assume that Shakespeare came to London in 1586 or 1587 in order to account for his apparent professional maturity in 1591-92; nor do we need to thrust the original form of 1 Henry VI back to 1589 or earlier under the assumption that Shakespeare's connection with a work so immature in parts as the present 1 Henry VI cannot be later than Henslowe's entry of harey the vj in March, 1592.


Author(s):  
Stanley Wells

During the first decade of Shakespeare’s career he wrote a series of closely inter-related plays based on English history drawing heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicles and other accounts. These plays show a serious concern with political problems, with the responsibilities of a king, his relationship with the people, the need for national unity, and the relationship between national welfare and self-interest. ‘Plays of the 1590s’ introduces each of these plays, sketching its origins, stories, and themes. It also touches on aspects of Shakespeare’s techniques and artistry. The plays considered are Henry VI (Parts One to Three), Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Edward III, and King John.


Author(s):  
Neema Parvini

This chapter assesses the extent to which harm is caused in Shakespeare’s plays when the moral order breaks down by focusing on plays in which the dramatis personae revert to the Hobbesian state of nature and unspeakable cruelty: Titus Andronicus, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, and King Lear. In such moments Shakespeare seems to invoke the image of the tiger, which he only uses fifteen times in all his works. In the constrained or tragic vison (Thomas Sowell), when there are no institutions with which to reinforce the morals that bind people together (authority, loyalty, fairness, sanctity), the worst aspects of humanity – as embodied in the tiger – are granted their fullest expression. However, in Shakespeare’s version of this vision, human nature provides the seeds of its own rebirth.


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