Into how many categories do scholars group the early works of the author of the play A Midsummer Night's Dream?
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Egeus Egeus is a character in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", the comedy by William Shakespeare. He is an Athenian who tries to keep his daughter, Hermia, from marrying Lysander the man she loves. In original performances, the actor for his role probably played the part of Philostrate as well.
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Shakespearean comedy In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies, though today many scholars recognize a fourth category, romance, to describe the specific types of comedies that appear as Shakespeare's later works.
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Plautus Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 – 184 BC), commonly known as Plautus, was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest Latin literary works to have survived in their entirety. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.
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Thomas J. King Jr. Professor Thomas J. King Jr. (July 25, 1925 – 1994) was an educator, and an early user of word processing and sequence analysis to compare available early versions of William Shakespeare's plays for identification of variant texts and their analysis. Dr. King's historical work also researched original prompt copies of Elizabethan Era and Jacobean Era plays contemporary to Shakespeare, along with their marginalia, in order to identify stage directions and infer physical staging of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe and other London venues, as well as at provincial halls and inns where Elizabethan troupes performed on tour. In his extensive studies, Prof. King created databases of every Shakespeare play and other extant Elizabethan contemporary playhouse documents, by scene and character, to determine number of lines, and therefore the roles that could be doubled with sufficient time between for costume change, thus enabling him to determine the size of a working Elizabethan theater company.
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Sebastian (Twelfth Night) Sebastian is one of the main characters from William Shakespeare's play "Twelfth Night", believed to have been written around 1600 or 1601. It has been played by several famous actors, and even by actress Vivien Leigh in an acclaimed production directed by John Gielgud in 1955.
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The Triumph of Beauty The Triumph of Beauty is a Caroline era masque, written by James Shirley and first published in 1646. The masque shows a strong influence of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
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Vatican Mythographers The so-called Vatican Mythographers (Latin: Mythographi Vaticani ) are the anonymous authors of three Latin mythographical texts found together in a single medieval manuscript, Vatican Reg. lat. 1401. The name is that used by Angelo Mai when he published the first edition of the works in 1831. The text of the First Vatican Mythographer is found only in the Vatican manuscript; the second and third texts are found separately in other manuscripts, leading scholars to refer to a Second Vatican Mythographer and a Third Vatican Mythographer.
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The Passionate Pilgrim The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is an anthology of 20 poems collected and published by William Jaggard that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are considered authentically Shakespearean. These are two sonnets, later to be published in the 1609 collection of "Shakespeare's Sonnets", and three poems extracted from the play "Love's Labour's Lost". Internal and external evidence contradicts the title-page attribution to Shakespeare. Five were attributed to other poets during his lifetime, and two were published in other collections anonymously. While most critics disqualify the rest as not Shakespearean on stylistic grounds, stylometric analysis by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza put two blocks of the poems (4, 6, 7 and 9, and 10, 12, 13 and 15) within Shakespeare's stylistic boundaries. Jaggard later published an augmented edition with poems he knew to be by Thomas Heywood.
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Crollalanza theory of Shakespeare authorship The Crollalanza theory of Shakespeare's identity posits that Shakespeare was an Italian called Michelangelo Florio a.k.a. "Crollalanza", whose mother's family name is variously given as Crollalanza or Scrollalanza ("shake-speare"). He is said to have emigrated to England where he became (or at least was responsible for the works attributed to) William Shakespeare supposedly of Stratford-upon-Avon. First proposed in the 1920s, at which time it was associated confusingly with the idea that the Elizabethan linguistic scholar John Florio or his father (another Michelangelo Florio) was involved in creating Shakespeare's works, the Crollalanza hypothesis has gone through several permutations and developments. In most recent versions, the character's birthplace has moved from the North to the South of Italy.
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Sources of Hamlet The sources of "Hamlet", a tragedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601, trace back as far as pre-13th century Icelandic tales. The generic "hero-as-fool" story is so old and is expressed in the literature of so many cultures that scholars have hypothesized that it may be Indo-European in origin. A Scandinavian version of the story of Hamlet, Amleth or Amlóði (Norse for "mad", "not sane") was put into writing in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus around 1200 AD in the "Gesta Danorum" (from which Shakespeare borrowed). Similar accounts are found in the Icelandic "Saga of Hrolf Kraki" and the Roman legend of Lucius Junius Brutus, both of which feature heroes who pretend to be insane in order to get revenge. A reasonably accurate version of Saxo's story was translated into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest in his "Histoires Tragiques". Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced the hero's melancholy.
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Prometheia The Prometheia (Ancient Greek: Προμήθεια ) is a trilogy of plays about the titan Prometheus. It was attributed in Antiquity to the 5th-century BC Greek tragedian Aeschylus. Though an Alexandrian catalogue of Aeschylean play titles designates the trilogy "Hoi Prometheis" ("the Prometheuses"), in modern scholarship the trilogy has been designated the "Prometheia" to mirror the title of Aeschylus' only extant trilogy, the "Oresteia". Unlike the "Oresteia", only one play from this trilogy—"Prometheus Bound"—survives. Inasmuch as the authorship of "Prometheus Bound" continues to be debated, the very existence of a Prometheus trilogy is uncertain. To the extent that modern scholars postulate the existence of such a trilogy by a single author, the consensus holds that it comprised "Prometheus Bound", "Prometheus Unbound", and "Prometheus the Fire-Bringer", in that order.
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The Plays of William Shakespeare The Plays of William Shakespeare was an 18th-century edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. Johnson announced his intention to edit Shakespeare's plays in his "Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth" (1745), and a full "Proposal" for the edition was published in 1756. The edition was finally published in 1765.
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The Knight of the Burning Pestle The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play in five acts by Francis Beaumont, first performed in 1607 and first published in a quarto in 1613. It is the first whole parody (or pastiche) play in English. The play is a satire on chivalric romances in general, similar to "Don Quixote", and a parody of Thomas Heywood's "The Four Prentices of London" and Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday". It breaks the fourth wall from its outset.
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Four Branches of the Mabinogi The Four Branches of the "Mabinogi or Pedair Cainc Y "Mabinogi are the earliest prose stories in the literature of Britain. Originally written in Wales in Middle Welsh, but widely available in translations, the "Mabinogi" is generally agreed to be a single work in four parts, or "Branches." The interrelated tales can be read as mythology, political themes, romances, or magical fantasies. They appeal to a wide range of readers, from young children to the most sophisticated adult. The tales are popular today in book format, as storytelling or theatre performances; they appear in recordings and on film, and continue to inspire many reinterpretations in artwork and modern fiction.
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Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom is an 1851 oil-on-canvas painting by British artist Edwin Landseer. Landseer was mainly known for his paintings of animals: this is his only painting of a fairy scene. The painting depicts a scene from the third act of William Shakespeare's play "A Midsummer Night's Dream". It has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia since 1932.
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Southsea Shakespeare Actors The Southsea Shakespeare Actors are an amateur theatrical group in Southsea, Hampshire, England. It has produced nearly 200 plays, of which around two-thirds have been by William Shakespeare. It was the first amateur group in the world to perform the entire Shakespearean canon of plays, during the 1960s, for which it has won a Guinness World Record - it repeated this achievement in 1997. Members have included the naval historian Colin White.
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World Shakespeare Bibliography World Shakespeare Bibliography Online is a searchable electronic database consisting of the most comprehensive record of Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide between 1960 and the present. Containing over 146,000 annotated entries, this collected information provides annotated citations for anyone engaged in research on William Shakespeare or Early Modern Britain. It is the single-largest Shakespeare database in the world.
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Restoration literature Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660–1689), which corresponds to the last years of the direct Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature that center on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both "Paradise Lost" and the Earl of Rochester's "Sodom", the high-spirited sexual comedy of "The Country Wife" and the moral wisdom of "The Pilgrim's Progress". It saw Locke's "Treatises of Government", the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theaters from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a commodity, the essay develop into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.
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Heptalogy A heptalogy (from Greek ἑπτα- "hepta-", "seven" and -λογία "-logia", "discourse") is a compound literary or narrative work that is made up of seven distinct works. Whilst not in wide usage, it has been used to describe such examples as the "Harry Potter" series of books. The only term in common usage for a certain number of books, films, etc., is trilogy.
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First Folio Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio. The First Folio is considered one of the most influential books ever published in the English language.
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A Midsummer Night's Dream A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1595/96. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.
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Sonnet 154 As the last in the famed collection of sonnets written by English poet and playwright William Shakespeare from 1592 to 1598, Sonnet 154 is most often thought of in a pair with the previous sonnet, number 153. As A. L. Rowse states in "Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems Solved", Sonnets 153 and 154 "are not unsuitably placed as a kind of coda to the Dark Lady Sonnets, to which they relate." Rowse calls attention to the fact that Sonnets 153 and 154 "serve quite well to round off the affair Shakespeare had with Emilia, the woman characterized as the Dark Lady, and the section of the Dark Lady sonnets". Shakespeare used Greek mythology to address love and despair in relationships. The material in Sonnets 153 and 154 has been shown to relate to the six-line epigram by the Byzantine poet known as Marianus Scholasticus, who published a collection of 3,500 poems called "The Greek Anthology". When translated, the epigram resembles Sonnets 153 and 154, addressing love and the story of Cupid, the torch, and the Nymph's attempt to extinguish the torch.