Shakespeare Writing

1. Shakespeare Writing By Bianca Montes Elise Frelin Kelly Kwolek Erica Griffin

2. Plays • Shakespeare’s plays were written in three categories: Comedies, histories, and tragedies. • Examples of comedies: "A Midsummer Nights Dream", "The Comedy of Errors", "All's Well That Ends Well" • Examples of Histories: "King John", "Richard II", "Henery VI Part 1" • Examples of Tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", "Timon of Athens", "Titus Andronicus“

3. The Poems • Shakespeare's famous sonnets and two other lengthy poems, The Phoenix and the Turtle and A Lover's complaint, are also thought to date from early in his career. • Tradition has it that Shakespeare his two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucerece, during a period of forced unemployment in 1592 - 94, when an outbreak of the plague closed London's theaters. The poems were published, respectively, in 1593 and 1594 • Like his plays, Shakespeare's poems are full of passages that remain embedded in our popular culture.

4. Shakespeares sonnets are collections of his poems • The Sonnets philosophize, celebrate, attack, plead, and express pain, longing, and despair, all in a tone of voice that rarely rises above a reflective murmur, all spoken as if in an inner monologue or dialogue, and all within the tight structure of the English sonnet form(Shakespeares works).

5. The Publication of Shakespeare's Plays • Our modern life and culture is filled with the words of William Shakespeare, from famous speeches such as Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be,” to words he apparently created—or recorded for the first time—such as “boisterous,” “cudgel,” and “peevish.” But in Shakespeare’s own day, the preservation of any playwright’s words was a hit-or-miss process. • A very popular playwright like Shakespeare might see his plays published in inexpensive, cheaply produced editions called quartos, with or without his permission. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s 38 surviving plays first appeared as separate quartos in his lifetime.

6. Continuing … • After Shakespeare’s death, some of his former colleagues published the 1623 First Folio, a collection of 36 of his plays. The First Folio is our only source for eighteen plays, including Macbeth, which would otherwise be lost. Its texts for the other plays often vary from the quartos, requiring editors to choose among these sources in editing Shakespeare’s plays.

7. Quartos and the First Folio • The Quartos • Eighteen of William Shakespeare's plays found their way into print during the playwright's lifetime, but there is nothing to suggest that he took any interest in their publication. These eighteen appeared separately in editions called quartos. Their pages were not much larger than a modern-day paperback, and these little books were sold unbound for a few pence. The earliest of the quartos that still survive were printed in 1594, the year that both Titus Andronicus and a version of the play now called King Henry VI, Part 2, became available. • While almost every one of these early quartos displays on its title page the name of the acting company that performed the play, only about half provide the name of the playwright, Shakespeare. The first quarto edition to bear the name Shakespeare on its title page is Love's Labor's Lost of 1598. A few of these quartos were popular with the book-buying public of Shakespeare's lifetime; for example, the quarto of Richard II went through five editions between 1597 and 1615. But most of the quartos were far from best-sellers; Love's Labor’s Lost (1598), for instance, was not reprinted in quarto until 1631. After Shakespeare's death, two more of his plays appeared in quarto format: Othello in 1622 and The Two Noble Kinsmen, coauthored with John Fletcher, in 1634.

8. Continuing… • The First Folio • In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, Mr.William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was published. This printing offered readers in a single book 36 of the 38 plays now thought to have been written by Shakespeare, including eighteen that had never been printed before. And it offered them in a style that was then reserved for serious literature and scholarship. The plays were arranged in double columns on pages nearly a foot high. This large page size is called "folio," as opposed to the smaller "quarto," and the 1623 volume is usually called the Shakespeare First Folio.

9. Comparing the Texts • Revisiting the First Folio • In a preface to the First Folio entitled "To the great Variety of Readers," two of Shakespeare's former actors in the King's Men, John Heminge and Henry Condell, wrote that they had collected their dead companion's plays. They suggested that they had seen his own papers: "we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." The title page of the Folio declared that the plays within it had been printed "according to the True Original Copies." • Comparing the Folio to the quartos, Heminge and Condell underestimated the quartos. Many Shakespeareans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed Heminge and Condell and regarded the Folio plays as superior to anything in the quartos. • Once we begin to examine the Folio plays in detail, it becomes less easy to take at face value the word of Heminge and Condell about the superiority of the Folio texts. For example, of the first nine plays in the Folio , four were essentially reprinted from earlier quarto printings that Heminge and Condell had underestimated; and four have now been identified as printed from copies written in the hand of a professional scribe of the 1620s named Ralph Crane. Evidently then, eight of the first nine plays in the First Folio were not printed, in spite of what the Folio title page announces, "according to the True Original Copies," or Shakespeare's own papers, and the source of the ninth is unknown.

10. Work Cited • “William Shakespeare’s writing.” online image. Istockphoto.com. 30 March 2012.Web. • “Shakespeare.” Online image. shakespeareauthorship.com. 30 March 2012. Web. • “Shakespeare.” Online image. thethirdray.com. 30 March 2012. Web. • “Romeo and Juliette.” Online image. public.wsu.edu. 30 March 2012. Web. • “ William Shakespeare caricature.” Online image. bradfitzpatrick.com. 30 March 2012. Web.

11. Works Cited Continued • "Shakespeare's Works-Folger Shakespeare Library." Folger Shakespeare Library. N.p. N.d. Web. 1 Apr. 2012.