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Shakespeare's plays.
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Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University
The quene perswaded and encoraged by these meanes, toke upon her and her husbande, the high power and aucthoritie ouer the people and subiectes. And although s...
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In the following essay, Cole compares Hamlet to Xerxes, the protagonist of Aeschylus's The Persians, arguing that because Hamlet has been denied the catharsis of traditional funeral rites, he b...
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In the following essay, Rose compares the political strife in Julius Caesar with the divisiveness that roiled the Protestant church in Elizabethan England. The critic contends that the late sixteenth-...
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In the following essay, Palmer points out the subtlety of Shakespeare's depiction of pageantry and ceremony as political tools in Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V.
A single defi...
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In the following essay, Parker addresses the tension between ideals of love and war in All's Well That Ends Well. The critic suggests that the principal function of the war in the play is to pr...
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In the following essay, Snyder remarks on a similar absence of a crucial battle scene in both Othello and Hamlet, noting that Shakespeare did not dramatize the Turkish attack against Cyprus in Othello...
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In the following essay, Meron compares Shakespeare's treatment of war to medieval and Renaissance legal, religious, and chivalric doctrines of “just war.” Focusing on the English ...
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In the following essay, Mattox evaluates Shakespeare's portrait of Henry V in terms of well-established tenets of “just war” theory, arguing that the king has the right to wage wa...
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In the following essay, Caldwell analyzes Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry V in the context of French and English historians' and artists' representations of the Hundred Years' War (133...
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In the following essay, Lerner compares Shakespeare's King John with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann (1968), an adaptation of Shakespeare's work with marked chan...
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In the following essay, Colón Semenza suggests that the decay of chivalric ideals, radical changes in the nature of warfare, and the clash of personal rivalries chronicled in the Henry VI trilo...
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In the following essay, Hassel compares the rhetorical power and effectiveness of Richard's and Richmond's addresses to their forces before the crucial battle at Bosworth Field in Richar...
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In the following essay, Helms analyzes Shakespeare's treatment of male and female notions of war and honor in Troilus and Cressida.
Concidit virgo ac puer. Bellum peractum est.
—Seneca,...
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In the following essay, Barish discusses the portrayal of war in Shakespeare's histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances, concluding that the dramatist consistently viewed the pursuit of bot...
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In the following essay, Carney comments on the tensions between love and war and between heterosexual desire and single-sex friendship in The Two Noble Kinsmen, suggesting that these antipathies are n...
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In the following essay, Meron considers Shakespeare's portrayal of Henry V's order to kill the French prisoners (in Act IV, scene vii) in light of medieval rules and customs of war. The ...
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In the following essay, Willems evaluates Hotspur and Coriolanus as exemplars of the cult of military heroism. The critic compares Henry IV, Part 1 and Coriolanus in terms of their depictions of heroi...
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In the following essay, the published version of a lecture delivered at a conference in Salzburg, Austria, in October 1995, Marsland compares Laurence Olivier's and Kenneth Branagh's rep...
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In the following essay, Spencer assesses the justice of Henry's invasion of France and the legitimacy of royal power in Henry V, concluding that the play casts a deeply ironic shadow on the kin...
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Elizabethan England is a fascinating historical time period. This time period is immensely different from modern day America. The streets in the Elizabethan time period were filthy. The homes emptied ...
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William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were both Elizabethan play writers in the mid fifteen hundreds. Their plays are alike in many ways. Shakespeare and Marlowe's plays style can be compared t...
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