Friday, May 26, 2017
William Shakespeare (/ˈʃeɪkspɪər/;[1] 26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[2] He is often called England'snational poet, and the "Bard of Avon".[3][nb 2]His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays,[nb 3] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[4]
Shakespeare was born and brought up inStratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twinsHamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, which has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, and religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[5]
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[6][nb 4] His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, which are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, includingHamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language.[2] In his last phase, he wrotetragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, however, John Hemingesand Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.[7] It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time".[7]
In the 20th and 21st centuries, his works have been repeatedly adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literaturewith their joint publication Lyrical Ballads(1798).
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".[1]Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.[2]
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21
October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and
philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the
Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the
poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major
prose work Biographia
Literaria. His critical work, especially on
Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German
idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture.
Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of
anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, He
was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium
addiction.
He wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem "Frost at
Midnight": "With unclosed lids, already
had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace."
From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus
College,Cambridge. In
1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the
college and enlisted in the Royal Dragons using the false name "Silas
Tomkyn Comberbache".
The Watchman,
to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax. The first
issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume
of poetry, Lyrical
Ballads, which proved to be the starting
point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems,
but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.
Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a
result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked
to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman
family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.
The Conversation poems
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Collected works
A current standard edition is The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited
by Kathleen Coburn and many other editors (1969–2002),
which appeared (from Princeton University Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul)
in Bollingen Series 75, in 16 volumes, broken down as follows into further
volumes and parts, to a total of 34 separate printed volumes:
- 1. Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion (1971);
- 2. The Watchman (1970);
- 3. Essays on his Times in the Morning Post and the Courier (1978) in 3 vols;
- 4. The Friend (1969) in 2 vols;
- 5. Lectures, 1808–1819, on Literature (1987) in 2 vols;
- 6. Lay Sermons (1972);
- 7. Biographia Literaria (1983) in 2 vols;
- 8. Lectures 1818–1819 on the History of Philosophy (2000) in 2 vols;
- 9. Aids to Reflection (1993);
- 10. On the Constitution of the Church and State (1976);
- 11. Shorter Works and Fragments (1995) in 2 vols;
- 12. Marginalia (1980 and following) in 6 vols;
- 13. Logic (1981);
- 14. Table Talk (1990) in 2 vols;
- 15. Opus Maximum (2002);
- 16. Poetical Works (2001) in 6 vols (part1 Reading Edition in 2 vols; part
2 Variorum Text in 2 vols; part 3 Plays in 2 vols).
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