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There are 269 critical essays on William Shakespeare.
Critical Essays on William Shakespeare
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 Critical Essay by Ann Jennalie Cook
21,041 words, approx. 70 pages
 In the following essay, Cook discusses many of the particulars of Elizabethan marriage laws and customs and then explores the way in which Shakespeare's plays address or correspond to real-life contemporary matrimonial issues. Cook concludes that Shakespeare represents courtship and marriage in a variety of positive and negative ways and that there is no easy way to determine what his own views on the subject were.
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Critical Essay by Matthew H. Wikander
18,860 words, approx. 63 pages
In the following essay, Wikander examines the nature of Shakespeare's historiography in the English history plays, demonstrating the way in which Shakespeare incorporated elements of the medieval, providential view of history and humanist historiography in his approach to English history.
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Critical Essay by Walter C. Foreman, Jr.
18,065 words, approx. 60 pages
In the essay below, Foreman diagrams the variety of ways in which Shakespeare's tragic protagonists meet their ends. Looking closely at the deaths of the central characters in both the minor and major tragedies, he considers the depth of the characters' understanding of themselves and the world, their sense of identity, their will to be in control of their fates, and the creativity of their confrontations with death.
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Critical Essay by Lynda E. Boose
17,431 words, approx. 58 pages
Here, Boose explores the phases of the marriage ceremony—separation, transition, and reincorporation—as a pattern for the father-daughter relationship.
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Critical Essay by Janet Adelman
16,665 words, approx. 56 pages
In the following essay, Adelman traces developments in Shakespeare's treatment of male friendship from the early to middle comedies through the tragedies and late romances.
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Critical Essay by Janet Adelman
16,665 words, approx. 56 pages
In the following essay, Adelman traces developments in Shakespeare's treatment of male friendship from the early to middle comedies through the tragedies and late romances.
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Critical Essay by Phyllis Rackin
16,391 words, approx. 55 pages
In the following essay, Rackin identifies a conflict between two Renaissance theories of history, providentialism and Machiavellianism, as alternate explanations of historical causation. This conflict, maintains Rackin, can be found in Shakespeare's history plays, and it is the source of their theatrical energy and the inspiration for the audience's contemplation of the problems related to historical interpretation. Rackin goes on to investigate how this ideological conflict is portrayed in d... from source:
Critical Essay by Theodore Weiss
15,985 words, approx. 53 pages
In the following essay, Weiss offers an overview of the major characters and themes of the two parts of Henry IV, maintaining that through the character of Prince Hal, Shakespeare constructs a play that is as accomplished as a comedy as it is a history.
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Sherman H. Hawkins
15,661 words, approx. 52 pages
In the following essay, an expanded version of a lecture given at the Shakespeare Association America in 1973, Hawkins examines the competing claims of virtue and lineage over the right to rule in Henry IV, maintaining that Shakespeare appears to stress virtue over lineage in these two plays.
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Critical Essay by Robert C. Evans
15,280 words, approx. 51 pages
In the following essay, Evans suggests that friendship is a fundamental theme in Hamlet and analyzes Hamlet's relationships in the drama, particularly his strong bond with Horatio.
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Critical Essay by Philip C. McGuire
15,242 words, approx. 51 pages
In the following essay, McGuire describes the way five late-twentieth-century productions of Measure for Measure depicted the muteness of Angelo, Barnardine, Claudio, Juliet, Mariana, and Isabella in the play's final scene. By means of nonverbal gestures, blocking, and shifting the sequence of lines, McGuire observes, the directors of these productions explored the many possible interpretations and implications of these characters' silences.
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Critical Essay by Naomi Conn Liebler
14,718 words, approx. 49 pages
In the following excerpt, Liebler examines the way ritual actions in Richard II are honored, abruptly curtailed, subverted, or ignored. The critic focuses on the joust between Bolingbroke and Mowbray at the opening of the play, the formal deposition of Richard at Westminster, and the continuing degradation of the sacred bonds of kinship.
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Critical Essay by John D. Eure
13,608 words, approx. 45 pages
In the following excerpt, Eure surveys themes of justice and law in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.
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Charles S. Felver
13,210 words, approx. 44 pages
In the following essay, Felver describes the fool roles in the plays of Shakespeare's middle period (1599-1607) that were likely performed by the versatile comedic actor Robert Armin.
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Baldo
13,117 words, approx. 44 pages
In the following essay, Baldo contrasts the styles of rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James and studies the way in which James's aloofness is reflected in Macbeth. Baldo explains that whereas Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays reflect Elizabeth's theatricality and interrupted succession, Macbeth is a reflection of James's aloof style of rule and of his emphasis on lineal succession.
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Critical Essay by M. J. B. Allen
12,855 words, approx. 43 pages
In the following essay, Allen comments on the diverse openings of eight plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet—with particular emphasis on the degree to which the ending of each tragedy is inherent in its beginning. Allen apportions the fullest coverage to the opening scenes of Macbeth, which he judges to be the most dense and profound of all Shakespeare's beginnings.
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Critical Essay by Frederick Kiefer
12,613 words, approx. 42 pages
In the following essay, Kiefer surveys the interaction of fortune and occasion in Shakespearean tragedy, focusing on three tragic Shakespearean figures: Richard II, Brutus (of Julius Caesar), and Hamlet.
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Critical Essay by Anthony Hecht
12,350 words, approx. 41 pages
In the following essay, Hecht examines the types of love which are expressed in Shakespeare's sonnets. He also compares the poetical imagery in the sonnets with that found in Shakespeare's plays. Throughout his essay, Hecht traces scholarly assessment of the sonnets and how this assessment has changed over the centuries.
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Critical Essay by Margo Hendricks
12,147 words, approx. 41 pages
In the following essay, Hendricks examines Shakespeare's “figurative evocation” of India in A Midsummer Night's Dream, probing “the play's complicity in the racialist ideologies being created by early modern England's participation in imperialism.”
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Critical Essay by Roger Ellis
11,857 words, approx. 40 pages
In the following essay, Ellis discusses Shakespeare's fools as figures who represent worldviews fundamentally different from those of the majority of society.
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Critical Essay by R. S. White
11,851 words, approx. 40 pages
In the following essay, White studies the endings of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, maintaining that the playwright experiments with combining the finality of a comic ending with the "endless" nature of a romantic ending.
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Critical Essay by Lisa Hopkins
11,836 words, approx. 40 pages
In the following essay, Hopkins regards marriage as the source of tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello.
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Critical Essay by Ricardo J. Quinones
11,591 words, approx. 39 pages
In the following essay, Quinones identifies three principal concepts of time in Shakespeare's works: augmentative time, whose potentially destructive power may be averted; contracted time, whose corrosive effects are inevitably tragic; and extended time, which works in league with nature to bring about auspicious resolutions.
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Louis Marder
11,476 words, approx. 38 pages
In the following essay, Marder reviews the arguments against Shakespeare and—after disputing the cases of Bacon, Marlowe, and Oxford as authors—argues that "there is nothing in the plays that was beyond the powers of an alert Elizabethan intimately connected with the stage, a reader of books, a friend to gentleman and travelers. . . . "
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Critical Essay by Walter C. Foreman, Jr.
11,433 words, approx. 38 pages
In the excerpt below, Foreman identifies and discusses a set of features that he finds in the final scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies: the tragic figure's readiness for death, his or her spiritual or emotional isolation, the establishment of a new order in the world of the play, and the relative dullness of the characters who will administer this new order. Foreman also comments on three tragic endings that deviate from this pattern: Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, and Macbeth. Finally, he... from source:
Critical Essay by Richard Levin
11,403 words, approx. 38 pages
In the essay below, Levin examines the problems with the thematic approach to Shakespeare's tragedies in general, and the feminist thematic approach to the tragedies in particular. Levin observes that the central theme of Shakespeare's tragedies, as seen by feminist thematics, is the role of gender within society and the individual, and that according to feminist thematics critics, the tragic outcome of the plays is a result of masculinity or patriarchy.
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Bate
11,132 words, approx. 37 pages
In the following essay, Bate examines the profound influence of Ovid on Renaissance culture and Shakespeare's works. The critic additionally provides an overview of the Elizabethan educational system, describing the emphasis placed on memorizing and imitating Latin literary models.
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Richard Abrams
11,065 words, approx. 37 pages
In the following essay, Abrams argues that signs of Shakespeare's authorship of the poem "The Funeral Elegy " are evident in the poem's allusions to the theatrical profession and to Shakespeare's works. Abrams also maintains that the poem's narrator reveals "biographical coincidences" which point to Shakespeare, as the elegist.
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Critical Essay by Peter Holbrook
10,822 words, approx. 36 pages
In the following excerpt, Holbrook discusses Shakespeare's dramatic inversion of social hierarchy in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew.
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Shakespeare and Clarissa: 'General Nature',
Genre and Sexuality
10,820 words, approx. 36 pages
Martin Scofield, University of Kent I. Universality and Difference Most critics in the eighteenth century, unlike academic critics today, were confident of at least one assumption about great literature: that the truths it embodied were universal and that, in the words of Dr Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare, 'Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature.' It is a view which depends of course on even more basic assumptions—that there is... from source:
Critical Essay by Donald W. Foster
10,650 words, approx. 36 pages
In the following essay, Foster maintains that both internal and external evidence indicate that the ascription of "Shall I Die?" to Shakespeare is wrong. Foster notes that the verbal parallels cited by Taylor (above) are inconclusive; he also attacks Taylor's dating of the poem.
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Critical Essay by Don M. Ricks
10,599 words, approx. 35 pages
In the essay below, Ricks examines the relationship between politics and history in Tudor—and in particular, Shakespearean—historiography, maintaining that Shakespeare's historiography was characteristic of his age in its didacticism.
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Linda Bamber
10,443 words, approx. 35 pages
In the following essay, Bamber studies the role of the feminine "other" in Shakespeare's comedies as a figure that avoids change, development, and decisionmaking.
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Critical Essay by Ronald Takaki
10,330 words, approx. 34 pages
In the following essay, Takaki probes The Tempest's relation to the English colonization of America, interpreting Caliban as representative of a “savage” American Indian figure.
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Critical Essay by Jeannette S. White
10,250 words, approx. 34 pages
In the following essay, White contends that Aaron in Titus Andronicus subverts the Elizabethan notion that equates blackness with evil.
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The Doubled Jaques and Constructions of Negation in As
You Like It
10,203 words, approx. 34 pages
Cynthia Marshall, Rhodes College So thoroughly does Shakespeare's work encompass our sense of textual possibility that even his apparent missteps take on interest and meaning. The Fool's unexplained disappearance from King Lear, for instance, has famously come to serve as an emblem of Shakespeare's writerly economy—-a character, disappears when no further use exists for him—and has been formally linked with the king's own descent into a Foolish view of things.1... from source:
Critical Essay by Diane Elizabeth Dreher
10,106 words, approx. 34 pages
In this essay, Dreher discusses the tragic fates of Ophelia, Hero, and Desdemona maintaining that all three women are victims of patriarchal oppression,
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Critical Essay by Sukanta Chaudhuri
10,029 words, approx. 33 pages
In the following essay, Chaudhuri contends that in the character of Henry V Shakespeare reveals "an integrated and purposive development of a new Renaissance ideal of kingship" in which he "appropriates and extends the Machiavellian view of man."
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Critical Essay by Jane Hedley
10,000 words, approx. 33 pages
In the following excerpt, Hedley contends that self-love or narcissism is pervasive in Shakespeare's sonnets. After observing that the sonnet genre in general can be perceived as one where the poet is "talking to himself, " Hedley also remarks that Shakespeare's sonnets in particular convey narcissism through their use of puns and through the poet's clear desire to become one with his beloved.
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Critical Essay by David Shelley Berkeley
9,905 words, approx. 33 pages
In the following excerpt, Berkeley examines the theory of class bias associated with heredity—or "blood"—as it exists in Shakespeare's dramas.
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Critical Essay by Germaine Greer
9,902 words, approx. 33 pages
In the following essay, Greer considers representations of social class in the audiences, players, and characters of Shakespearean drama.
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Critical Essay by Richard Mallette
9,900 words, approx. 33 pages
In the following essay, Mallette claims that The Two Noble Kinsmen contains two sets of homosocial friendship bonds—those of Arcite/Palamon and Emilia/Flavina. The critic contends that these bonds are destroyed over the course of the drama without being satisfactorily redeemed by the “superficially happy marriage” that closes the play.
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Critical Essay by Alan C. Dessen
9,688 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following excerpt, Dessen discusses Shakespeare's adaptation of allegorical figures to his “late moral plays,” particularly regarding Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida.
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Critical Essay by Lewis Walker
9,646 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Walker contends that the moral allegory of Fortune featured in the first scene of Timon of Athens highlights the central theme of the play: the undesirability of owing one's success to fickle Fortune.
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Critical Essay by Rob Nixon
9,612 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Nixon focuses on the anticolonial interpretations of The Tempest set forth by African and Caribbean intellectuals of the period from the late 1950s to early 1970s.
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Critical Essay by Christina Luckyj
9,591 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Luckyj relates Renaissance notions of female reticence as decorum or defiance to the silence of women in King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida.. She contends that sixteenth-century conduct book writers' ambivalent views of feminine silence are reflected in Shakespeare's plays.
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Critical Essay by Christina Luckyj
9,591 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Luckyj relates Renaissance notions of female reticence as decorum or defiance to the silence of women in King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida.. She contends that sixteenth-century conduct book writers' ambivalent views of feminine silence are reflected in Shakespeare's plays.
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Critical Essay by Ejner J. Jensen
9,500 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Jensen contends that late twentieth-century commentators have placed too much emphasis on closure in Shakespeare's comedies. He believes they have evaluated Shakespeare's comic endings more rigorously than those of his predecessors and contemporaries, tied the plays' meanings too closely to their endings, and disregarded complexities in the final scenes that run counter to a unified interpretation. In the course of his argument, Jensen provides a detailed review... from source:
Shakespeare's Queer Sonnets and the Forgeries
of William Henry Ireland
9,476 words, approx. 32 pages
Michael Keevak, National Taiwan University In 1795 a young man named William Henry Ireland, then about eighteen years of age, fabricated a series of Shakespearean forgeries that, for the space of few months at least, were enthusiastically believed by both the educated English public and some of the leading scholars and critics of the day. By the end of his meteoric career, Ireland's portfolio of impostures included legal deeds, promissory notes, receipts, letters both to and from Shakespeare, a portr... from source:
Critical Essay by Carol Thomas Neely
9,436 words, approx. 32 pages
In the following essay, Neely examines the way in which marriage—achieved and postponed or destroyed—influences the structure and themes of Shakespeare's plays. Neely maintains that marriage becomes the focal point for relationships, both social and emotional, for men and women in the plays.
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Critical Essay by Robert Lane
9,420 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following essay, Lane reflects on the ways in which King John addresses the succession crisis of the 1590s, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Lane explains that the play explores the doubts regarding legitimacy and succession that plagued the reigns of both King John and Queen Elizabeth.
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Critical Essay by Margreta de Grazia
9,404 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following essay, de Grazia asserts that in terms of Elizabethan cultural imperatives, the primary scandal of Shakespeare's sequence is the depiction, in the final twenty-eight lyrics, of a love that threatens to annihilate the patriarchal and hierarchical order of society.
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Critical Essay by Jean E. Howard
9,354 words, approx. 31 pages
In the essay that follows, Howard challenges theories of comic structure which assert that Shakespeare's comedies inevitably conclude with the restoration of social order and the harmonizing of disruptive or contradictory elements. Focusing on the final scenes of The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, Howard proposes that in these scenes Shakespeare interrogates comic conventions to demonstrate the hazards audiences will encounter if they ignore or suppress featu... from source:
Critical Essay by Barbara Fuchs
9,239 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following essay, Fuchs extends typical colonialist interpretations of The Tempest to include the play's references to European imperialism in Ireland and the Islamic Mediterranean.
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Critical Essay by E. A. M. Colman
9,227 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following essay, Colman cautions against reading too many indecent elements in Shakespeare, and finds that many critics distort the significance of bawdy in Shakespeare's works.
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Critical Essay by John Klause
9,198 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following essay, Klause closely examines the apparent inconsistencies in the poetic voice of the sonnets. While acknowledging that the aging "Poet" of the sonnets sounds "humble" and "submissive." Klause asserts that this tone is intentionally used by the poet as a persuasive device and that it is not in conflict with the sonnets' powerful imagery.
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Critical Essay by Marliss C. Desens
9,158 words, approx. 31 pages
In the following excerpt, Desens remarks on the efforts of women in such works as The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, Cymbeline, and Othello to create an equal union between husband and wife by selecting men outside their own social rank.
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Richard C. McCoy
9,126 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following essay, McCoy explores the theatrics of royal ceremony and antends that Shakespeare's later history plays undercut the majesty of ceremony and expose its " 'made-up quality' and the void behind its illusions."
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Critical Essay by Graham Holderness
9,125 words, approx. 30 pages
In the essay below, Holderness maintains that many of Shakespeare's plays, especially the English history plays, were intentional acts of historiography. In particular, Holderness analyzes the second tetralogy (Richard II through Henry V) and argues that the historiography offered in these plays was a new, emergent form with a bourgeois viewpoint.
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Critical Essay by Stuart M. Kurland
9,104 words, approx. 30 pages
In the essay below, Kurland argues that Hamlet portrays the controversy surrounding James's succession to Queen Elizabeth's throne. The political world of Hamlet, explains Kurland, is informed by England's uncertainty generated by James's threats to secure the English throne through military action.
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Critical Essay by Anne Ferry
9,098 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following excerpt, Ferry calls attention to the poet-lover's assertions that through his manipulation of language he can transform nature and substitute the laws of poetic order for those of the temporal world. She focuses her analysis on the eternizing sonnets—particularly Sonnets 15, 18, and 65—to demonstrate how Shakespeare creates verbal constructs that are based on human experience yet nevertheless alter that experience and the laws of nature.
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Critical Essay by Richard P. Wheeler
9,069 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following essay, Wheeler explores the psychological polarities associated with seeking self-fulfillment in Shakespeare's late tragedies and romances.
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Critical Essay by David N. Beauregard
9,050 words, approx. 30 pages
In the essay below, Beauregard asserts that Roman Catholic teachings regarding sin, repentance, and salvation are central to the plot and characterization of All's Well that Ends Well. The first half of the play is concerned with the concepts of miracle and merit and the second with pilgrimage and prayer, the critic contends, and together the two parts delineate the Catholic doctrines of grace, merit, and free will.
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Critical Essay by Peggy Muñoz Simonds
8,940 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following excerpt, Simonds focuses on analogies between Prospero and Orpheus, the mythical demigod who employed music and eloquence to civilize brutish men and induce harmony in his kingdom.
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Critical Essay by Bernard Beckerman
8,880 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following essay, Beckerman surveys the final scenes of Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, and histories. In his analysis of these, he distinguishes between the resolution (how the narrative is unraveled) and the closing (the particular way the playwright conveys the sense of an ending.) Beckerman emphasizes that with regard to each of the dramatic genres, Shakespeare transformed the principles of accepted dramatic conventions even as he ostensibly observed them.
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Critical Essay by Ralph Berry
8,847 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following essay, Berry surveys class issues raised in Shakespeare's Roman plays and Timon of Athens.
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Critical Essay by W. H. Auden
8,841 words, approx. 30 pages
In the following essay, Auden surveys the dramatic relevance of vocal and instrumental music in Shakespeare's plays.
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Critical Essay by William H. Matchett
8,801 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following essay, Matchett maintains that the plot of King John focuses on the issue of the “right” to the throne, and studies the claims to the throne of Arthur, John, and the Bastard. The critic asserts that in King John the mark of a true king is decided not by power or prestige, but on the basis of what is best for England.
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Critical Essay by Michael Neill
8,758 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following essay, Neill discusses the theme of revenge in Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. He asserts that Hamlet and Macbeth are antitypes—the first seeking to preserve the past and the second to obliterate it—and contends that both are destroyed by their obsession. By contrast, Neill suggests, Prospero redeems the past not by revenging it but by restoring it.
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Critical Essay by Peggy Muñoz Simonds
8,679 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following essay, Simonds studies Shakespeare's dramatization of the Protestant marriage ideal in Cymbeline through his references to classical emblematic imagery of the elm and vine.
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Critical Essay by Gerald Hammond
8,631 words, approx. 29 pages
In this essay, Hammond explores the sources of readers ' uncertainties about the predominant tone of the sequence and the mood of individual sonnets. Focusing on Sonnets 1-19, he illustrates the discrepancies between text and subtext, the sometimes bewildering array of possible meanings in a single line or quatrain, and the sonnets' immunity to comprehensive generalizations.
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Lecture by John Arthos
8,610 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following lecture, originally delivered at the University of Michigan in 1970, Arthos argues that Shakespearean drama represents the synthesis of classical source material and the medieval Christian imagination.
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Critical Essay by Thomas Moisan
8,602 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following essay, Moisan investigates three comic exchanges between members of differing classes in Shakespeare's plays, which he suggests hint at social inversion but ultimately leave the standards of social privilege unquestioned.
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Critical Essay by Peggy Muñoz Simonds
8,599 words, approx. 29 pages
In the following essay, Simonds describes the figures of Coriolanus and Volumnia in Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus as personifications of the Roman gods Mars and Juno, respectively.
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Critical Essay by George K. Hunter
8,597 words, approx. 29 pages
In the essay below, Hunter provides a detailed account of the Tudor conception of Roman history. The critic additionally shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of political events during the Republic and Empire is informed by values that differ from those of Ben Jonson in such plays as Sejanus and Catiline.
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Shakespeare's King Richard III and the Problematics of Tudor Bastardy
8,568 words, approx. 29 pages
Maurice Hunt, Baylor University Granted Queen Elizabeth's touchiness concerning the subject of royal bastardy, Shakespeare ran a risk in King Richard III by focusing questions of bastardy in such a way that they invite comparison with problematical details of bastardy in the Tudor succession. The queen's life-long association with bastardy makes Shakespeare's emphasis surprising.1 Analysis of Tudor bastardy reveals the emergence of a paradigm of illegitimate legitimacy (or le... from source:
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Critical Essay by Joyce Green MacDonald
8,518 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, MacDonald explores the implications of a black Cleopatra who uses her sexuality to thwart Roman imperial power.
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Critical Essay by Harold E. Toliver
8,511 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Toliver follows Shakespeare's increasingly ambiguous and complex treatment of the theme of time from the sonnets and early comedies to the late romances. He calls particular attention to the dramatist's exploration of the effectiveness and limitations of different strategies of resisting time.
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Critical Essay by Richard A. Levin
8,505 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Levin contends that in his romantic comedies, Shakespeare explores the conflict between romantic and antiromantic values, such as the opposition between love and the desire for fortune. Levin stresses that this conflict was apparent in Elizabethan society and in other literature of the time, and that in part the tension deals with the perceived failure of Elizabethan society to live up to the values extolled in medieval romance.
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Critical Essay by James Black
8,457 words, approx. 28 pages
[In the essay that follows, Black analyzes the "comic discourse " in the Henry IV plays and argues that while discourse in Shakespeare's history plays is typically limited, the comedic elements in the conversations and 2 Henry IV. Act I, scene ii. Falstaff and the Chief Justice. By F. Barnard (n.d.). discussions (most notably those of Falstaff) in these two plays function as a means of revealing the themes of time and deferment.]
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Critical Essay by Mary Bly
8,424 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Bly examines Juliet's use of bawdy puns in Romeo and Juliet, and considers the influence of her character on the comic heroines of Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington and Thomas Dekker's Blurt, Master Constable.
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Critical Essay by Kim F. Hall
8,411 words, approx. 28 pages
In the excerpt below, Hall evaluates the racial and sexual threat to imperial culture posed by Caliban and Cleopatra in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, respectively.
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Charlton Ogburn
8,400 words, approx. 28 pages
In this essay, Ogburn reviews the public documents connected with "Shakspere of Stratford, " suggesting that among the baptismal records, marriage licenses, legal proceedings and wills, there is a lack of evidence demonstrating that the man from Stratford was the literary genius behind the works attributed to Shakespeare.
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Shakespeare at Work: The Two Talbots
8,358 words, approx. 28 pages
E. Pearlman, University of Colorado, Denver The enactment of the deaths of Talbot and his young son John in The First Part of Henry the Sixth is by all odds Shakespeare's first great theatrical success and therefore an event of great importance in the dramatist's progress. The evidence for this proposition is to be found in Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, written in late 1592, where Thomas Nashe allows himself this expressive fancy:
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Critical Essay by Eleanor Prosser
8,339 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Prosser surveys a number of examples of Shakespearean characters who either choose or decline to pursue personal vengeance. She finds no evidence that Shakespeare's plays portray private revenge as divinely sanctioned, required by a code of honor, or justified by social convention; instead, she argues, they repeatedly link revenge with such pernicious traits as irrationality, impulsiveness, and madness.
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Critical Essay by Frankie Rubinstein
8,307 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Rubinstein explores the dream language and imagery of Shakespeare's dramas and the relation of these to Freudian psychoanalysis.
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Critical Essay by Heather Dubrow
8,276 words, approx. 28 pages
In the following essay, Dubrow challenges assumptions that Shakespeare's sonnet sequence has a two-part structure and a linear plot, and contends that the traditional association of the Friend with the laudatory or positive sonnets and the association of the Dark Lady with the largely negative ones has fostered the notion that in these lyrics, evil has a feminine gender.
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Critical Essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
8,211 words, approx. 27 pages
In the following essay, Sedgwick distinguishes between homosocial bonding and homosexuall desire in the sonnets. Asserting that the poems depict male-male love in the context of social institutions that confirm men's power and hegemony, she maintains that the Dark Lady represents a disruptive force that threatens to emasculate the speaker and destroy the homosocial bonds between the poet and the youth.
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Critical Essay by Zvi Jagendorf
8,204 words, approx. 27 pages
In the following essay, Jagendorf examines the depiction of male friendship and heterosexual love in The Merchant of Venice, arguing that Shakespeare's play features a strong contrast between the two: marriage promises profit and increase while friendship portends only debt and continued sacrifice.
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Critical Essay by Clifford Davidson
8,077 words, approx. 27 pages
In the following essay, Davidson interprets the title figure in Timon of Athens as a Renaissance emblem of failed friendship.
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Critical Essay by Susan Letzler Cole
8,049 words, approx. 27 pages
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 becomes obsessed with replacing his father rather than forging his own, separate identity.
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Critical Essay by Minoru Fujita
8,013 words, approx. 27 pages
In the following essay, Fujita contrasts Hal's arrival in regal costume and procession in Act V, scene v of Henry IV, Part 2 with Falstaff's appearance in dirty and disheveled clothes, and contends that the fat knight's disregard of ceremony and his mockery of royalty, though amusing in Part 1, can no longer be tolerated by the new king.
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Critical Essay by Julia Reinhard Lupton
7,977 words, approx. 27 pages
In this essay, Lupton maintains that in Othello religious difference is more significant than racial difference, for—according to Renaissance doctrine—if the Moor was a Muslim rather than a pagan before his conversion to Christianity, he is forever barred from the congregation of universal brotherhood.
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Critical Essay by Darryl Tippins
7,965 words, approx. 27 pages
In the following essay, Tippins offers a reading of King Lear that attempts to mediate between absurdist or pessimistic interpretations of the play and religious or redemptive ones.
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Juliet Dusinberre
7,933 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following excerpt originally published in 1975, Dusinberre discusses Shakespeare's use of women in male disguise as a means to more fully explore the nature of femininity.
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Eva Figes
7,891 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following excerpt, Figes provides a historical overview of kingship and claims that Shakespeare 's plays serve the function of the "chronicling and dramatization of the history of past kings . . . [and the justification and explication of the present."]
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Critical Essay by John F. Andrews
7,833 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Andrews recognizes the profound influence of “Fortune, Fate, and the Stars” in Romeo and Juliet, but nevertheless contends that the deaths of these young lovers are the result of choice, causality, divine will.
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Crewe
7,825 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Crewe examines the “racializing potential” of Shakespeare's drama and poetry, arguing that “race is ubiquitous in Shakespeare's work.”
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Critical Essay by Stephen X. Mead
7,763 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Mead contends that the ritual slaying of Alarbus in Titus Andronicus, intended as a means of appeasing the dead Andronici and forestalling further violence, instead initiates a cycle of retaliatory bloodletting.
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Critical Essay by Paul A. Cantor
7,724 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Cantor identifies devotion to religious principles as the quality that links Shylock and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, asserting harmony is only achieved by the defeat of both the Jew and the merchant, whose commitment to the values of their respective religions threatens the traditional values of comedy.
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Critical Essay by Harvey Rovine
7,713 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Rovine contrasts the silence of women in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. In the comedies, he contends, it generally conveys acquiescence, while in the tragedies it may be construed as despair, resignation, or confusion. Rovine maintains that in both genres women's silence underscores their social, political, and familial obligations.
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Critical Essay by Raymond B. Waddington
7,703 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Waddington examines how the forces of fortune, justice, and Cupid dictate the fates of men and women in The Merchant of Venice.
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Critical Essay by Katherine Duncan-Jones
7,702 words, approx. 26 pages
In the essay that follows, Duncan-Jones asserts that the poem 's tone, imagery, and literary allusions establish a profile for the author of the poem—one that does not fit William Shakespeare.
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Murray Krieger
7,693 words, approx. 26 pages
In this essay, Krieger scrutinizes the internal logic of several sonnets in which the movement from one set of images to another appears spontaneous yet is, in his judgment, the result of a conscious strategy. In these sonnets, he maintains, Shakespeare develops a subtle dialectic which the reader does not perceive until the final lines, when the various images merge into one, inevitable resolution.
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Critical Essay by Jyotsna G. Singh
7,656 words, approx. 26 pages
In the following essay, Singh studies postcolonial readings of The Tempest, which emphasize the role of Caliban as a prototype of the modern revolutionary due to his engagement in a power struggle with Prospero.
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Critical Essay by James C. Bryant
7,585 words, approx. 25 pages
Bryant, James C. “Shakespeare's Use of Religious Controversy in King John.” In Tudor Drama and Religious Controversy, pp. 129-49. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984. In the following essay, Bryant maintains that in King John Shakespeare was able to achieve a measure of objectivity in his treatment of late fifteenth-century religious disputes.
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Critical Essay by Robert A. Ravich
7,538 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1963, Ravich presents a psychoanalytic overview of Shakespeare's eleven earliest plays and highlights the dramatist's conception of mental disorder.
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Critical Essay by David O. Frantz
7,498 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following excerpt, Frantz studies the bawdy language of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and maintains that a reader's understanding of the play is enriched by a knowledge of Renaissance erotica.
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Critical Essay by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt
7,491 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following essay, Boose and Burt discuss Hollywood's influence in the popularization of Shakespearean drama in the late 1990s, noting the changes wrought by filmmakers in an attempt to appeal to contemporary audiences.
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Critical Essay by Ann Jennalie Cook
7,389 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following essay, Cook illuminates differences between Shakespeare's dramatic representations of marriage and the social customs of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
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Critical Essay by Harvey Rovine
7,347 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following essay, Rovine associates the silence of male characters in Shakespeare's comedies with their social alienation, and the silence of men in the tragedies and histories with a variety of motives—including antagonism, treachery, and a desire to influence or control the actions of others.
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Critical Essay by Harvey Rovine
7,347 words, approx. 25 pages
In the following essay, Rovine associates the silence of male characters in Shakespeare's comedies with their social alienation, and the silence of men in the tragedies and histories with a variety of motives—including antagonism, treachery, and a desire to influence or control the actions of others.
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Critical Essay by Frederick Turner
7,232 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Turner examines the associated themes of love and time in Shakespeare's sonnets. He argues that even though these verses depict time as corrupting all material or external things, especially beauty, they also represent true love as a transcendent, spiritual relationship to which time is irrelevant.
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Critical Essay by Derek Peat
7,195 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Peat focuses on the ambiguities and mounting anxiety in the final scene of King Lear. Audience response to this scene repeatedly alternates between hope and despair. Peat asserts that spectators with no previous knowledge of the play would be thoroughly confused by the tumultuous events taking place on stage during this scene, and would become so emotionally involved that it would be impossible for them to serenely view the deaths of Lear and Cordelia as signs of affirmation or rene... from source:
Critical Essay by Charles R. Lyons
7,178 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Lyons maintains that Isabella's transformation from volubility to silence is a reverse image of the metamorphosis of Ben Jonson's Epicoene from submissiveness to stridency. He contends that both Measure for Measure and Epicoene demonstrate the eroticism of female silence and the power women possess when they are objects of male desire.
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Critical Essay by Marjorie Garber
7,162 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Garber surveys Shakespeare's onstage silences, his use of the indirect mode of representation—that is, characters' reports of events that occur offstage—and his adaptations of the conventional theme of inexpressibility. Garber asserts that Shakespeare understood that silence can be as effective as speech in communicating emotion.
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Critical Essay by Marjorie Garber
7,162 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Garber surveys Shakespeare's onstage silences, his use of the indirect mode of representation—that is, characters' reports of events that occur offstage—and his adaptations of the conventional theme of inexpressibility. Garber asserts that Shakespeare understood that silence can be as effective as speech in communicating emotion.
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Critical Essay by Sigurd Burckhardt
7,136 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Burckhardt proposes that the hyperbolic, ceremonial language of Henry VI, Part 1 perfectly matches the play's dramatic action, in which the characters are impelled to disaster by their adherence to a ritualistic mode of confrontation, defiance, and combativeness.
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Tom Bethell
7,095 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Bethell discusses the parallels between Hamlet and the life of Edward de Vere, and insists that the experiences of de Vere—most notably his courtly life and familiarity with Italy—show that he is more likely to have written the plays than Stratford's Shakespeare.
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Critical Essay by Roy Battenhouse
7,092 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Battenhouse surveys 150 years of commentary on the Christian aspects of Shakespeare's art.
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Critical Essay by Roy Battenhouse
7,092 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Battenhouse surveys 150 years of commentary on the Christian aspects of Shakespeare's art.
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Lecture by Clifford Leech
7,056 words, approx. 24 pages
In the essay below, Leech argues that in such plays as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's choice of a Greek setting "was bound up with his desire for experiment and for the taking of an oblique view of the world. "
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Critical Essay by D. Douglas Waters
7,035 words, approx. 24 pages
In the following essay, Waters illuminates the significance of fate and fortune in Romeo and Juliet and explains how the intersection of chance circumstances, seemingly irrational forces, and human contingency come together to produce a tragedy written in the stars.
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Critical Essay by Lawrence Danson
7,031 words, approx. 23 pages
"'The Catastrophe is a Nuptial': The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 46, 1994, pp. 69-79. In the essay below, Danson discusses male jealousy and sexual possessiveness in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale.
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Critical Essay by Barry Weller
7,015 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Weller evaluates The Two Noble Kinsmen as a play that examines a fundamental conflict between friendship and marriage.
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Critical Essay by John Bayley
6,989 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Bayley links the absence of value and meaning in Troilus and Cressida to the omission in the play of any sense of past or future in the lives of the characters.
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Critical Essay by J. L. Styan
6,984 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Styan reviews many occasions of music and dance in Shakespeare's plays, arguing that their principal function is to manipulate audience response.
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Critical Essay by Michael D. Friedman
6,955 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Friedman suggests that contemporary attitudes toward wedded union and romantic love have skewed the meaning of the marriage proposals in Measure for Measure; according to critic, Renaissance audiences would have viewed the play's three marriage proposals as examples of males taking responsibility for sullying a woman's chastity.
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Critical Essay by Barbara D. Palmer
6,954 words, approx. 23 pages
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.
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Critical Essay by David K. Weiser
6,938 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following excerpt, Weiser briefly contrasts the idealized love of the sonnets in what he calls the "Fair Youth section" with the "destructive" and "distressing " sex of the "Dark Lady " section. Weiser then looks more closely at the relationship between the poet and the Dark Lady,and argues that initially at least, the Dark Lady sonnets reveal more about the poet's own selfish needs than about the lady herself
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Critical Essay by Gareth Lloyd Evans
6,900 words, approx. 23 pages
In the essay below, Evans observes developments in Shakespeare's dramatic representation of the fool character as they coincide with the appearance of Robert Armin as a member of Shakespeare's acting company.
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Critical Essay by Gayle Greene
6,892 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Greene points out that although Prospero occasionally uses language to constrain or coerce, his special powers of healing are affected by silence, show, and music. Greene maintains that this accentuates Shakespeare's exploration of both the necessity and the limitations of speech.
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Critical Essay by Ronald G. Shafer
6,865 words, approx. 23 pages
In the essay below, Shafer charts what he sees as Hamlet's temporary abandonment of Christian principles for the precepts of humanism—and his ultimate reversion to orthodox religious values. In his humanistic phase, the critic proposes, Hamlet is arrogant and egotistical, elevating his own volition above God's sovereignty, but after he acknowledges the righteousness of Christian morality, he humbly submits himself to God's will and becomes an agent of divine retribution.
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Critical Essay by Robert F. Willson, Jr.
6,847 words, approx. 23 pages
In this essay, Willson emphasizes the iteration, in Hamlet's final scene, of action, motifs, and language presented in the first scene. He further contends that by the end of the play, Hamlet has become a stoic, leaving Providence to direct events rather than trying to control them himself. In addition, Willson discusses the significance of the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, and the resolution of the theme of revenge versus justice.
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Critical Essay by William C. Carroll
6,841 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Carroll argues that the ending of Romeo and Juliet is announced at the beginning, and is repeatedly articulated in succeeding scenes. Pointing out significant deviations between the final scene of Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare's principal source—The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet—Carroll proposes that Shakespeare wanted to emphasize there is no escape from the tomb for the young lovers and that the only satisfactory means of memorializing their love ... from source:
Critical Essay by Cynthia Marshall
6,758 words, approx. 23 pages
In the following essay, Marshall claims that Titus Andronicus offers a profoundly misogynistic view of male-female relations through its presentation of women as estranged, alienated, and silenced.
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Critical Essay by Paula S. Berggren
6,685 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Berggren surveys the woman 's role in Shakespeare's plays as an archetypal figure of innate power that elicits both fear and adoration in men.
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Critical Essay by Gillian Murray Kendall
6,657 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Kendall argues that the elaborate ceremony surrounding the trial by combat between Edgar and Edmund in Act V, scene iii of King Lear betrays the hollowness of the ritual and highlights the ineffectuality of all human constructs designed to establish legitimacy or affirm a natural order.
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Critical Essay by Richard Harrier
6,646 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Harrier examines Richard's conduct in Act III, scene iii of Richard II. In the critic's opinion, the king's increasing inability to preserve the ritual show of monarchy is an outward manifestation of his loss of confidence in his entitlement to the throne.
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Critical Essay by Marion D. Perret
6,640 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Perret examines Shakespeare's use of bawdy in The Taming of the Shrew, and contends that the purpose of the bawdy is to comically introduce serious values.
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John A. Hart
6,595 words, approx. 22 pages
In the essay that follows, Hart probes Shakespeare's presentation of fools in his romantic comedies from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Twelfth Night.
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Lecture by R. W. Ingram
6,575 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Ingram explores Shakespeare's unconventional use of military music in the English history plays, especially Henry VI, Part 1. He also examines the way that parodic or ironic music underscores the dissonance between pretense and reality in Troilus and Cressida.
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Critical Essay by William C. Carroll
6,572 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Carroll states that the way in which Richard III explores the failure of ritual reflects the political concerns of the 1590s related to the succession issue. Carroll concludes that the play demonstrates Shakespeare's skeptical attitude toward the “logic of succession.”
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Critical Essay by Alexander Leggatt
6,547 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Leggatt evaluates the deaths of Lord Talbot and his son John in 1 Henry VI as Shakespeare's earliest portrayal of tragic heroes meeting their end.
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Critical Essay by Catherine I. Cox
6,485 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following essay, Cox explores Shakespeare's blending of comedy and death, principally through the use of laughter and clowning, in his tragedies.
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Critical Essay by Catherine I. Cox
6,465 words, approx. 22 pages
In the following excerpt, Cox discusses how Shakespeare's tragedies often combine death and the comical to foster our acceptance of the protagonists' unavoidable fate and our anticipation of the freedom and social reordering made possible by their deaths.
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Critical Essay by René Girard
6,423 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Girard endeavors to reconstruct Shakespeare's view of mythology, and claims that Shakespeare employed myth to dramatize an essential “mimetic crisis” in human culture.
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Critical Essay by Leah Scragg
6,422 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Scragg argues that a passage from Act II, scene v of Twelfth Night—in which Malvolio reads the forged letter—can be read as both a bawdy joke and as a warning against pickpockets.
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Critical Essay by Robert Smallwood
6,388 words, approx. 21 pages
In this essay, first delivered as a lecture in Vienna in April 1992, Smallwood describes a series of Royal Shakespeare Company productions in which directors prefaced the first lines of text with various devices designed to promote specific interpretations, create atmosphere, or lead the audience into the world of the play. The critic points out that each of these techniques evokes the same question: where does a play begin?
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Critical Essay by Jan H. Blits
6,368 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Blits contends that the antique virtue of manliness is the basis of true friendship in Julius Caesar.
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Critical Essay by R. Chris Hassel, Jr.
6,366 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Hassel calls attention to similarities in substance, style, and structure between Richard III and the Book of Revelation. Characterizing the play as a vivid depiction of earthly apocalypse, he remarks on its repeated allusions to the day of final judgment, the prophetic visions of Clarence, Richard, and Edmund, and the contrasting portraits of Richmond as an agent of divine retribution and Richard as a diabolic Antichrist.
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Critical Essay by Leslie C. Dunn
6,353 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Dunn construes Ophelia's songs in Act IV, scene v as emblematic of resistance to—and estrangement from—the patriarchal order that links music with female sexuality and emotional excess. Dunn also comments on the way the onstage auditors of these songs attempt to impose their own meanings on them in order to allay the threat they represent.
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Critical Essay by Charles A. Hallett
6,321 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Hallett investigates Shakespeare's combined emphasis on mutability, fortune, and time as defining forces in the pre-Christian world of Antony and Cleopatra.
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Critical Essay by Christina Luckyj
6,318 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Luckyj asserts that Volumnia's speechlessness in Act V, scene v of Coriolanus represents not triumph but despair, for she understands that her son will die because he yielded to her supplication. The critic emphasizes the Roman matron's vulnerability as well as her vitality, describing various ways she has been represented in performance.
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Critical Essay by Leslie C. Dunn
6,282 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Dunn argues that Lady Mortimer's song in Act III, scene i of Henry IV, Part 1 represents a singular moment of a woman's domestic, erotic voice in a play dominated by male power struggle.
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Critical Essay by Charles Frey
6,271 words, approx. 21 pages
In the essay below, Frey examines the complex and timeless responses of daughters to familial pressures.
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Critical Essay by James L. O'Rourke
6,255 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, O'Rourke examines the conflict between divine omniscience and human free will in Macbeth and suggests that Shakespeare's drama ironically subverts both of these concepts.
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Critical Essay by Alan Stewart
6,243 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Stewart examines the idealized friendship of Palamon and Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen and notes that their friendship, which is defined by medieval codes of chivalric honor and kinship, exists uncomfortably among the social realities of Jacobean England.
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Critical Essay by David Ellis
6,220 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Ellis marks Parolles' progress from knave to fool in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.
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Critical Essay by John W. Velz
6,215 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following excerpt, Velz examines the ways in which previous scholars and critics have portrayed Shakespeare's conception of Greece and Rome.
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Bate
6,186 words, approx. 21 pages
In the following essay, Bate focuses on Hero's passivity and her provisional dispatch to death—the ultimate silencing. Noting how frequently other characters speak of her or allude to her—thus demonstrating her centrality in the play—he compares Hero to sacrificial women in classical literature who die in order that their husbands may be transformed.
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Critical Essay by Thelma N. Greenfield
6,118 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Greenfield discusses the integral function of music in several Shakespearean plays. She focuses on musical imagery in Richard II; Lorenzo's discourse on music in Act V, scene v of The Merchant of Venice; the disparate effects of martial music in Coriolanus; and the patterns of sound that accompany crucial episodes in Hamlet and the murder of Duncan in Macbeth.
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Critical Essay by Barbara J. Baines
6,101 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Baines argues that, despite what many critics have previously argued, Shakespeare portrays Bolingbroke in a sympathetic manner and that this depiction of the future king highlights Shakespeare's "very realistic" attitude toward kingship.
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Critical Essay by Zvi Jagendorf
6,091 words, approx. 20 pages
In the excerpt below, Jagendorf analyzes the discovery scenes in The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure in the context of the comic conventions of recapitulation and return. In each of these plays, Jagendorf notes, the final scenes are preceded by ones which feature a real or proposed substitution that complicates the plot; the satisfactory consequences of these exchanges, the critic maintains, are then revealed in trial-like, concluding episodes.
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Critical Essay by Susan Baker
6,088 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Baker examines the rites of passage that the characters undergo in As You Like It and suggests that Shakespeare intended the theatrical experience of life in the Forest of Arden to be as transformative for audiences as it is for the characters in the play.
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Critical Essay by Edward T. Washington
6,077 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Washington argues that the figure of Aaron transcends the Renaissance representation of blacks “as stereotypical dramatic emblems of evil.”
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Shakespeare's Historicism: Visions and Revisions
6,071 words, approx. 20 pages
Paola Pugliatti, University of Florence Paul Valéry said that history is "the most dangerous compound that the mind's chemistry has ever produced," because "it can justify whatever one wishes."1 This article is an attempt to deal with several aspects of this dangerous compound: that of Shakespeare's historical plays themselves and the things they seem and have seemed to justify; that of the interpreters and their histories and the things they have ... from source:
Critical Essay by David M. Bergeron
6,036 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following analysis of Henry IV, Part Two, Bergeron maintains that Falstaff serves as the means by which Shakespeare explores the concept of "ahistory."
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Critical Essay by Thomas W. Ross
6,028 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Ross studies the dual effect of certain word groups, or “bawdy clusters”—words that take on indecent meanings when they occur in clustered references.
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Critical Essay by G. K. Hunter
6,025 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Hunter studies the way in which Elizabethans viewed the treatment of history in history plays.
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Critical Essay by Derek Cohen
5,996 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Cohen views the combat between Hal and Hotspur in Act III, scene ii of Henry IV, Part 1 as a ritual purification of the violence that has engulfed England.
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Rosalie L. Colie
5,993 words, approx. 20 pages
In the excerpt below, Colie regards Shakespeare's sequence as an exercise in reappraising the conventions and limitations of the traditional sonnet, calling attention to Shakespeare's innovative juxtaposition of mel and sal—sweetness and sharpness—and to his distinctly unconventional decision to address many of his sonnets to a young man rather than a woman.
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Critical Essay by Richard A. Lanham
5,965 words, approx. 20 pages
In the following essay, Lanham argues that Shakespeare created a unique kind of poetics in his sonnets by superimposing a rhetorical or "play" discourse upon a serious one. The critic points out that this mode of expression allowed Shakespeare to reanimate Petrarchan clichés, to praise the youth extravagantly while simultaneously destroying his character, and to continually re-present the poetics in a series of inconsistent, contradictory guises.
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Critical Essay by Glenys McMullen
5,901 words, approx. 20 pages
In the essay that follows, McMullen examines the fool's role as a satirical voice in Shakespeare's plays.
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Critical Essay by Roy Battenhouse
5,832 words, approx. 19 pages
Battenhouse, Roy. “Henry V in the Light of Erasmus.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 77-85. In this essay, Battenhouse evaluates Henry V in terms of the principles set forth by the sixteenth-century Catholic humanist Erasmus in his Praise of Folly and The Education of a Christian Prince, contending that Shakespeare presents Henry as a monarch who repeatedly evades personal responsibility and only counterfeits the role of ideal Christian king.
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Kenneth Muir
5,824 words, approx. 19 pages
In the essay below, Muir analyzes Shakespeare's handling of Roman themes, maintaining that despite certain trivial anachronisms, the playwright's "knowledge of the Roman world and of Roman literature was considerable."
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Lecture by Jill Levenson
5,822 words, approx. 19 pages
In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Levenson contends that silence in King Lear is integral to the play's structure, characterization, and thematic development.
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Critical Essay by Deborah T. Curren Aquino
5,812 words, approx. 19 pages
In this essay, Curren Aquino discusses the concluding scenes of The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Lost. She judges that in each instance, the final scene effectively crystallizes the themes, imagery, characterization, and dramatic action of the play as a whole.
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Two Distincts, Division None: Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen of 1613
5,712 words, approx. 19 pages
Philip J. Finkelpearl, Wellesley College The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare and Fletcher's adaptation of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale," can be dated in 1613 with some precision.1 The date is of some importance because several distinguished scholars have recently linked the play to the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and to other events of the same year.2 Here, in an essay honoring the most rigorous biographer Shakespeare has ever had, I want to conside... from source:
Robert S. Miola
5,709 words, approx. 19 pages
In the following essay, Miola explores the ways in which Shakespeare used and adapted the poetry of Vergil throughout his career.
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Critical Essay by Cyrus Hoy
5,611 words, approx. 19 pages
In the following essay, Hoy argues that it was the psychological climate of the late romances which allowed Shakespeare to create an ideal feminine figure in the form of a daughter.
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Critical Essay by Norman N. Holland
5,592 words, approx. 19 pages
In the following excerpt, Holland surveys the patterns of psychological criticism typically applied to Shakespeare's plays.
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Critical Essay by Wendy Rogers Harper
5,473 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Harper contrasts Roman Polanski's naturalistic, psychological, and character-driven film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth with Orson Welles's supernatural, externalized, and fatalistic screen interpretation of the tragedy.
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Critical Essay by Sandra L. Hermann
5,468 words, approx. 18 pages
In the excerpt below, Bermann discusses Shakespeare 's unique creation of a dramatic lyric, focusing on Sonnet 87 to illustrate how the poet evokes a sense of interior dialogue and involves the reader in resolving the ambiguities of his metaphors.
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Critical Essay by Sarah Wintle and René Weis
5,454 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Wintle and Weis examine the relationship between James I's legitimacy issues and Macbeth's concern with succession and legitimacy as revealed through the play's emphasis on children and babies.
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Critical Essay by Carol Thomas Neely
5,439 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Neely suggests that Shakespeare's comic marriages demonstrate varied patterns of disruption, postponement, or dislocation brought about by feminine resistance, female fear of submission, or a male perception of marriage as a threat to masculine friendship.
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Critical Essay by Mark Rose
5,411 words, approx. 18 pages
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-century Puritan campaign against church rituals and ceremonies is analogous to the anti-authoritarianism of Cassius, Casca, and the tribunes.
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Critical Essay by James L. Calderwood
5,393 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Calderwood assesses Shakespeare 's use of metaphoric language to explore the nature of kingship in Henry IV, concluding that Shakespeare emphasizes the redemptive value of lineal succession through Hal, and that Prince Hal's restoration of English royal succession similarly re-establishes verbal creativity in the English language.
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Critical Essay by Alan Sinfield
5,390 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Sinfield discusses the connection between Hamlet's reference to “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and the question of whether the play's conception of the world is pagan or Christian.
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Critical Essay by Ruth Morse
5,383 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Morse explores the antipathy between male friendship and romantic love dramatized in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
5,323 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Kermode examines the ways in which various critics have interpreted Shakespeare's language, including his use of sexual innuendo and bawdy.
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Critical Essay by Thomas Clayton
5,318 words, approx. 18 pages
In the essay below, Clayton focuses on the final couplets uttered by Desdemona and Othello, reading these lines as affirmations that love unites the tragic pair in a single identity. With these four lines, Clayton suggests, Shakespeare evokes a poignant sense of pathos and enhances his presentation of the Moor as an essentially sympathetic figure.
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Critical Essay by A. M. Challinor
5,307 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Challinor surveys ten arguments against the man from Stratford being the Shakespeare who wrote the plays and poems.
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Critical Essay by René E. Fortin
5,288 words, approx. 18 pages
In the essay below, Fortin asserts that a Christian reading of King Lear is as compatible with the “facts” of the play as a secular one, but that neither one is authoritative. Noting that the death of Cordelia is the principal impediment for Christian interpreters, he suggests that the play's ending, far from contradicting Christian doctrine, confirms the Catholic and Protestant notion of God's judgments as unknown and inexplicable.
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William C. Carroll
5,273 words, approx. 18 pages
In the following essay, Carroll studies the speech and political views of the underclass in Shakespeare's plays.
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John A. Hart
5,223 words, approx. 17 pages
In the essay below, Hart assesses the function of the father-daughter device in Shakespeare's romantic comedies and the varied problems that arise from that relationship.
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Critical Essay by Lorraine Helms
5,181 words, approx. 17 pages
In the following essay, Helms provides a feminist critique of Shakespeare's female roles in performance and envisions "a theatre where patriarchal representations of femininity can be transformed into roles for living women. "
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Critical Essay by Robert J. Fehrenbach
5,151 words, approx. 17 pages
In the following essay, Fehrenbach argues that while King Henry's failure to be viewed as Henry IV 's protagonist is "understandable, " the characterization of the king has "unfortunate[ly" received little critical attention. Fehrenbach then analyzes Shakespeare's portrayal of King Henry, maintaining that the characterization is achieved through indirect means, and is appropriate for a character who routinely masks himself to those around him.]
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Critical Essay by A. D. Nuttall
5,127 words, approx. 17 pages
In the essay below, Nuttall evaluates the opening scenes of Hamlet, Twelfth Night,and the Tempest in terms of the challenge presented to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by the absence of a distinct, visual threshold between the playgoers and the actors on stage. He demonstrates how, in the early lines of these three plays, Shakespeare exploits this drawback—even heightens the sense of uncertainty—by creating openings that emphasize the indeterminacy of the dramatic action.
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Critical Essay by Gary Schmidgall
5,001 words, approx. 17 pages
In the following essay, Schmidgall compares Shakespearean play texts to musical scores. Schmidgall argues that, like operas, Shakespeare's plays are designed to appeal to audiences more attuned to listening than viewing.
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Critical Essay by James R. Andreas, Sr.
4,963 words, approx. 17 pages
In the following essay, Andreas discusses the school censorship of the bawdy elements in Romeo and Juliet, and contends that students, in order to fully appreciate Shakespeare, need to be taught the whole text.
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Critical Essay by Marianne Novy
4,924 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay first delivered at the 1977 conference on Shakespeare in Performance, Novy discusses the imbalance of power between Lear and his daughters, and observes that Cordelia tries to keep her integrity by withdrawing from "the coercive 'mutuality' that patriarchy seems to demand. "
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Critical Essay by Robert S. Miola
4,883 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Miola explores the nature of Elizabethan classicism and advocates an organic approach "to the problem of coherence in Shakespeare's Rome," arguing that the city maintains a distinct identity in Shakepseare's poetry and drama despite the variety of ways in which it is portrayed.
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Critical Essay by David Kaula
4,880 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Kaula discerns two different time perspectives in sonnets 1-126, and analyzes the sonnets' syntax, rhetoric, and imagery in order to explain the disparate strategies these poems use to defy the tyranny of time.
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Critical Essay by Robert L. Montgomery
4,854 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Montgomery focuses on the depth and emotionalism of Shakespeare's conception of the present in the sonnets. In most of the sonnets to the young man, the critic contends, only the present is valued, though it is unstable and variable; by contrast, the imminent future promises only death, deprivation, and destruction.
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Critical Essay by Tibor Fabiny
4,810 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Fabiny analyzes the image of the wheel of fortune and contends that the figurative turning of the wheel is a central organizing principle in Shakespearean tragedy, particularly Richard III, King Lear, and Macbeth.
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Critical Essay by Marianne Novy
4,779 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following excerpt, Novy explores Shakespeare's changing use of gender imagery in his comedies, later tragedies, and romances.
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Critical Essay by Frank Nicholas Clary
4,767 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Clary discusses the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in A Midsummer Night's Dream in terms of the ritual of wedding-night revelry. The critic argues that although traditionally the principal function of this rite is to allay male fears of domestication, here it is also designed to initiate Hippolyta into Athenian society.
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Critical Essay by Maurice Hunt
4,702 words, approx. 16 pages
In the following essay, Hunt discusses the attitudes toward providence expressed by various characters in Twelfth Night, as well as the play’s satirical treatment of Puritanism.
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Critical Essay by David M. Bergeron
4,625 words, approx. 15 pages
In the essay below, Bergeron compares and contrasts the Prologues in Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and links the plays' Epilogues to their respective beginning speeches. He argues that while each of these Prologues expresses a moral judgment, it also calls on the spectators to form their own opinions of what they will see.
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Critical Essay by Mark Berge
4,595 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Berge links the disappearance of the Fool and Cordelia's final silence to Lear's failed search for self-knowledge. In the critic's judgment, although the king comes to understand his daughter's initial reticence as a strength rather than a fault, he never comprehends his own complicity in the tragic events.
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Critical Essay by Mark Berge
4,595 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Berge links the disappearance of the Fool and Cordelia's final silence to Lear's failed search for self-knowledge. In the critic's judgment, although the king comes to understand his daughter's initial reticence as a strength rather than a fault, he never comprehends his own complicity in the tragic events.
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Critical Essay by Stanley J. Kozikowski
4,571 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Kozikowski offers a reading of The Merchant of Venice that focuses on the play's lottery scenes as allegorical interludes depicting the rivalry of virtuous Love and capricious Fortune.
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Critical Essay by Barbara Roche Rico
4,552 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Rico follows Shakespeare's treatment of the Pygmalion myth in his dramas The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale.
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Critical Essay by J. L. Styan
4,524 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Styan focuses on Shakespeare's stagecraft in the first scene of All's Well that Ends Well. He calls attention to specific ways in which the text underscores—and actors and directors may further highlight—Helena's grief and isolation. In addition, Styan maintains that the alternation of romance and realism that occurs throughout the play is first manifested in its opening lines.
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Critical Essay by Karl S. Guthke
4,467 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Guthke examines the death scenes of several principal Shakespearean characters, and maintains that Shakespeare repeatedly questions the traditional idea that a dying individual's last words reveal whether that person will be damned or saved. The critic argues that Shakespeare contests this belief by assigning these characters death speeches that focus on this world rather than the hereafter—or giving them no last words at all.
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Critical Essay by Mark Taylor
4,436 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Taylor focuses on the inscrutability of characters' reports of events in Much Ado about Nothing that are not represented on stage. Emphasizing the subjectivity of these reports, he focuses on Don Pedro's offstage conversation with Hero in Act II, scene i and the chamber-window scene in which Margaret is mistaken for Hero.
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Critical Essay by Irvin Matus
4,427 words, approx. 15 pages
In this essay, Matus attacks several anti-Stratfordian arguments, explaining some of the apparent gaps in what is known about Shakespeare's life.
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John M. Love
4,415 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Love contends that All's Well That Ends Well is a dark comedy associated with the corrupting power of class.
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Halle Smith
4,406 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay. Smith draws on the writings of T. S. Eliot to show how the voice heard in the sonnets is directed both toward itself—in the form of a soliloquy or meditation—and toward an audience—the Friend, for example, but also posterity.
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Critical Essay by Gregory W. Bredbeck
4,383 words, approx. 15 pages
In the excerpt below, Bredbeck proposes that Shakespeare 's sonnets represent a critique of language as a means of restricting expressions of desire to a single gender or sexuality. Focusing on Sonnets 1-21, he explains that although each poem demands a gendered interpretation, each one simultaneously frustrates our attempts to construct such a reading.
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Critical Essay by Phoebe S. Spinrad
4,376 words, approx. 15 pages
In this essay, Spinrad maintains that no formal dramatic theory or convention can adequately explain why the death of Lear is so profoundly moving. We weep, she suggests, because his death arouses our compassion: we feel that his suffering was undeserved.
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Critical Essay by Amy Lechter-Siegel
4,337 words, approx. 15 pages
In the following essay, Lechter-Siegel traces Isabella's movement from articulate, rational speech to submissive silence, contending that the change in her discourse reflects the Duke's increasing control of social, political, and religious power in his realm. She compares the Duke's consolidation of power in Measure for Measure with the model of governance set forth by James I in his Basilikon Doron (1599).
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Critical Essay by G. M. Pinciss
4,242 words, approx. 14 pages
Pinciss, G. M. “The ‘Heavenly Comforts of Despair’ and Measure for Measure.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 30, no. 2 (spring 1990): 303-13. In the following essay, Pinciss contends that in his role as friar, Duke Vincentio assays the spiritual well-being of each of the central characters in Measure for Measure, successfully guiding Claudio, Angelo, and Isabella from a state of religious despair to a renewed faith in God's forgiveness and their own salvation.
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Critical Essay by Charles Wells
4,163 words, approx. 14 pages
In the following essay, Wells provides an overview of the role of Roman values in Renaissance culture generally, and concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare's handling of these values.
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Critical Essay by Roberta Mullini
4,152 words, approx. 14 pages
In the following essay, Mullini investigates Shakespeare's use of fools to disrupt hierarchical order and the conventions of language.
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
4,138 words, approx. 14 pages
In the following essay, Kermode evaluates the conjunction of speech and silence in Shakespeare's plays, with special reference to the way in which speechlessness can be a form of eloquence.
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Critical Essay by Frank Kermode
4,138 words, approx. 14 pages
In the following essay, Kermode evaluates the conjunction of speech and silence in Shakespeare's plays, with special reference to the way in which speechlessness can be a form of eloquence.
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Critical Essay by Clifford Davidson
4,125 words, approx. 14 pages
In the following essay, Davidson proposes that in the context of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, the term iconography may pertain to every visual aspect of a stage production. He also maintains that whereas Protestant iconoclasts of the period deplored the potential deceptiveness of visual images, Shakespeare and his contemporaries exploited the visual images of the Renaissance to enrich their plays.
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Critical Essay by Robert G. Hunter
4,071 words, approx. 14 pages
Hunter, Robert G. “Shakespeare's Comic Sense as It Strikes Us Today: Falstaff and the Protestant Ethic.” In Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, edited by David Bevington and Jay L. Halio, pp. 125-32. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. In the following essay, originally presented in 1976, Hunter views Falstaff as the antithesis of the Protestant ethic.
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Philip Martin
4,010 words, approx. 13 pages
In the following excerpt, Martin discusses the manner in which the sonnets deal with positive self-love—a trait that he describes as "necessary, if the self is to survive and not disintegrate." Martin asserts that the poet of the sonnets is neither as "passive" nor as "slavish" as some critics have described him, but that instead, the poet reveals a healthy knowledge and irony about himself and the object of his affection.
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Critical Essay by James Black
3,974 words, approx. 13 pages
In the following essay, Black contends that Act IV, scenes ii-iii of Richard II validate rather than mock the stately rituals of the deposition scene that precedes them. The critic argues that during the grievous pageant of his uncoronation, Richard becomes a self-declared beggar, praying for the same dispensation from Henry IV that Aumerle asks of him in the subsequent scenes.
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Critical Essay by Robert F. Willson, Jr.
3,955 words, approx. 13 pages
In the essay below, Willson asserts that the opening scenes of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth are, in effect, prophetic interludes. Willson argues that Shakespeare raises significant symbolic or thematic issues in each of these scenes by introducing a character—specifically, Horatio, Brabantio, France, and Cawdor—whose actions at the beginning of the play foreshadow the conduct of the tragic hero in a subsequent, climactic episode.
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William Willeford
3,911 words, approx. 13 pages
Below, Willeford views the character of Hamlet as a tragic fool.
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Critical Essay by Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman
3,873 words, approx. 13 pages
In the following essay, Phillips and Keatman assess the theory of Christopher Marlowe as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare, maintaining that while Marlowe was "arguably capable " of authoring the plays and poems, he was "officially" dead at the time most of the plays were composed.
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Critical Essay by T. W. Craik
3,705 words, approx. 12 pages
In this essay, Craik considers the manner in which Shakespeare employs stage directions and concluding couplets to achieve a sense of finality at the conclusion of a play's performance. Craik is particularly concerned here with the tragedies and the histories, but he also calls attention to the formal and informal epilogues of some of the comedies.
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Critical Essay by Robert W. Witt
3,674 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following excerpt, Witt evaluates the sonnets which focus on the poet's "mistress," or "the Dark Lady, " as opposed to the poems which center around the poet's male friend. Witt argues that while the earlier poems to "the Friend" demonstrate the ideals of "reasonable love, " those to the Dark Lady represent the destructiveness of a lustful, "sensual, " and therefore false love. This negative love, Witt asserts, event... from source:
Critical Essay by Walter Kaiser
3,664 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following excerpt, Kaiser analyzes Falstaff's position as the "wise fool" of the Henriad.
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T. J. B. Spencer
3,656 words, approx. 12 pages
In the essay below, Spencer shows how Renaissance attitudes towards ancient Greece, derived ultimately from unfavorable accounts in Latin sources, informed Shakespearean drama.
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John Dover Wilson
3,613 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following excerpt, Wilson examines the sonnets which describe the love that the "Poet, " or Shakespeare, feels for his young male "Friend. " After asserting that the relationship between the two men was not homosexual, Wilson speculates about the Friend's social rank and his personality, and suggests that when a poet as great as Shakespeare was settles his affections on one so apparently "commonplace " and uncomprehending as was his Friend, the consec... from source:
Critical Essay by Michael Manheim
3,604 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following essay, Manheim stresses Henry VI's humanity and compassion, characterizing him as a man of integrity who is shocked into silence by the treachery and brutality of England's fractious noblemen.
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Critical Essay by Meredith Anne Skura
3,566 words, approx. 12 pages
Below, Skura surveys Shakespeare's use of clowns in his plays, and their popularity with both Elizabethan and modern audiences.
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Gary Taylor
3,513 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following essay, Taylor urges that the poem "Shall I Die? " must be accepted as Shakespeare's until evidence can be brought forth against this claim. The author cites verbal parallels between the poem and Shakespearean canon as supportive of the claim for Shakespeare's authorship.
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Critical Essay by Lorie Jerrell Leininger
3,437 words, approx. 12 pages
In the following essay, Leininger discusses the oppression of women and non-whites—personified in the characters of Miranda and Caliban, respectively—in The Tempest.
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Critical Essay by Shyam M. Asnani
3,414 words, approx. 11 pages
In the essay below, Asnani offers an overview of Shakespeare's fools, notably Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's Fool.
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Critical Essay by Barbara H. Traister
3,383 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following essay, Traister investigates the character of King John as an example of a Shakespearean monarch lacking his "second body, the public image of majesty and power."
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Critical Essay by Zvi Jagendorf
3,317 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following essay, Jagendorf evaluates the motif of silence in Hamlet, arguing that it permeates the dramatic action and underscores the play's representation of truth as subjective and therefore open to different interpretations. In particular, he discusses the dumb show, the Ghost's initial speechlessness, and the ambiguity of silent gestures.
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Critical Essay by Eric Partridge
3,310 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following excerpt, originally published in 1947, Partridge studies Shakespeare's outlook and attitude toward sex and bawdiness, and examines both the sexual and non-sexual elements of bawdy in Shakespeare's works.
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William B. Bache
3,304 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following essay, Bache chronicles Lear's growth throughout the play, from his desire for a son to his acceptance of his daughter.
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Wayne A. Rebhorn
3,302 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following essay, Rebhorn compares the "rhetorical kingship" of King Henry IV, which relies more heavily on visual effects than on words to persuade, with Prince Hal's skillful use of rhetoric to reconcile with his father and, later as King Henry V, to rule his kingdom.
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Critical Essay by Jean E. Howard
3,284 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following excerpt, Howard contends that cross-dressing, while destabilizing the "notion of fixed sexual difference" in Shakespeare's plays, is nevertheless part of a conservative process in which inverted gender roles are ultimately restored to their "proper" positions.
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Critical Essay by Stephen Booth
3,245 words, approx. 11 pages
In the excerpt below, Booth proposes that the ending of King Lear is terrifying because Shakespeare renders us powerless to call on any of the usual defenses by which we might avoid confronting it directly. Before Lear enters with Cordelia in his arms, the play has reached a formal conclusion, the critic points out, and, like the characters on stage, we have been so caught up in other events that we have forgotten about the King and his daughter. Unprepared for the narrative to continue—particularly... from source:
Evelyn Gajowski
3,241 words, approx. 11 pages
In the following essay, Gajowski argues that in Shakespeare's love tragedies, Shakespeare emphasizes the humanity common among male and female characters, despite culturally enforced conceptions of gender roles. Gajowski focuses on the characteristics of the female protagonists in these plays and the nature of their love for the male protagonists.
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Critical Essay by Bruce R. Smith
3,187 words, approx. 11 pages
In this excerpt, Smith describes some features that distinguish Shakespeare's lyrics from other sixteenth-century English sonnet sequences, including his subjectivity, his focus on love after sexual consummation, and his use of erotic images in poems addressed to another man.
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Critical Essay by Marilyn L. Williamson
3,002 words, approx. 10 pages
In the following essay, Williamson views the goddess Fortune as the principal symbolic figure in Antony and Cleopatra, and finds that the tragedy of the drama is one of mighty individuals unwillingly caught among forces far beyond their understanding or control.
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Critical Essay by John Micheli
2,940 words, approx. 10 pages
In the following overview, Micheli outlines the authorship controversy, noting that while Shakespeare 's life is for the most part a mystery, there is no evidence against his claim as author. Micheli also illustrates the primary thrust of the anti-Stratfordian argument, that there exists a tremendous disparity between the life of Shakespeare and "the mind of the person" who authored the plays and poems.
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Critical Essay by B. S. Field, Jr.
2,904 words, approx. 10 pages
In the following essay, Field considers the reactions of characters in Twelfth Night to the whims of fortune and fate.
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Critical Essay by Michael Lloyd
2,851 words, approx. 10 pages
In the following essay, Lloyd examines the destabilizing role of fortune in Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, observing Antony's affinity with the unpredictable powers of chance.
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Critical Essay by James I. Wimsatt
2,796 words, approx. 9 pages
In the following essay, Wimsatt centers on the speech of the Player King in Act III, scene ii of Hamlet, which mentions the mutability of friendship, and contends that Shakespeare portrayed the motifs of fortune and friendship in the play as fickle, unstable, and inscrutable forces.
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Critical Essay by Nicholas Brooke
2,679 words, approx. 9 pages
In the following essay, Brooke analyzes the juxtaposition of naturalism and myth in All's Well That Ends Well, Macbeth, and several other Shakespearean dramas.
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M. M. Reese
2,653 words, approx. 9 pages
In the excerpt that follows, Reese offers a brief discussion on the character of Hotspur, maintaining that, despite Hotspur's admirable qualities and charm, the young knight dies having learned nothing.
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B. J. Pendlebury
2,573 words, approx. 9 pages
In the following essay, Pendlebury examines the development of Shakespeare's treatment of marriage in his plays, noting that in the early comedies, the prospect of marriage is of primary significance and is represented in an optimistic manner, whereas in the later plays, Shakespeare's tone regarding marriage shifts to a more pessimistic one.
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Critical Essay by Irvin Matus
2,355 words, approx. 8 pages
In his reply to Bethell 's essay (above), Matus disputes the Oxfordian chronology asserted by Bethell and defends the "country bumpkin " from Stratford as the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare.
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Critical Essay by Tom Bethell
1,879 words, approx. 6 pages
In his reply to Matus 's essay (above), Bethell counters Matus 's Stratfordian arguments, maintaining that evidence of the connection between Shakespeare and the Earl of Oxford cannot be dismissed.
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Critical Essay by Clifford Leech
1,837 words, approx. 6 pages
In the essay below, Leech argues that while Shakespeare does honor sixteenth-century attitudes toward the value of history to some degree, the playwright also transcends—both in literary expertise and poetic insight—the chronicles he used as source material.
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