13. About the Dramatists

William Shakespeare - Thomas Hardy

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

·                     An English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. 

·                     He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". 

·                     His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, two epitaphs on a man named John Combe, one epitaph on Elias James, and several other poems. 

·                     His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. 

·                     Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon.

·                     At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. 

·                     Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. 

·                     He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. 

·                     Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. 

·                     Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. 

·                     His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. 

·                     He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. 

·                     In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. 

·                     Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. 

·                     In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. 

·                     It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time." 

·                     Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. 

·                     The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". 

·                     In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance.

·                      His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the worldwide.

THOMAS HARDY – 

·                     An English novelist and poet. 

·                     A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth. 

·                     Charles Dickens is another important influence on Thomas Hardy. Like Dickens, he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. 

·                     While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. 

·                     Initially therefore he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). 

·                     However, since the 1950s Hardy has been recognized as a major poet, and had a significant influence on The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Phillip Larkin. 

·                     The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances. 

·                     Hardy's Wessex is based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom and eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, and much of Berkshire, in south west England.




All the best........