The idea, or possibility, of female centaurs was certainly known in early modern times, as evidenced by Shakespeare's King Lear, Act IV, Scene vi, ln. 124 – 125:

Edgar may have been named after a character in William Shakespeare's King Lear, a play the couple was performing in 1809.

The most common imbrication between these two categories of mental impairment occurs in the polemic surrounding Edmund from William Shakespeare's King Lear.

Shakespeare's play The Life and Death of King John

By contrast, Shakespeare's King John, a relatively anti-Catholic play that draws on The Troublesome Reign for its source material, offers a more " balanced, dual view of a complex monarch as both a proto-Protestant victim of Rome's machinations and as a weak, selfishly motivated ruler ".

Shakespeare's source for the tragedy are the accounts of King Macbeth of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles ( 1587 ), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

In Shakespeare's day, Banquo was thought to be a direct ancestor of the Stuart King James I ( Banquo's Stuart descent was disproven in the 19th century, when it was discovered that the Fitzalans actually descended from a Breton family ).

* In William Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, Part 2, Prince Harry refers to Murad as " Amurath " in Act V Scene 2 when he succeeds his father, King Henry IV, in 1413:

Far from being the aged King Duncan of Shakespeare's play, the real King Duncan was a young man in 1034, and even at his death in 1040 his youthfulness is remarked upon.

In Shakespeare's play, Macbeth is portrayed initially as a valorous and good-hearted general to King Duncan, but who later is corrupted by ambition.

The historical content of Shakespeare's play is drawn from Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which in turn borrows from Boece's 1527 Scotorum Historiae, which flattered the antecedents of Boece's patron, King James V of Scotland.

* King Philip appears in William Shakespeare's historical play King John.

By the end of Shakespeare's play, Prince Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, King Claudius and Gertrude all lie dead.

Between 1512 and 1519, Thomas More worked on a History of King Richard III, which was never finished, but which greatly influenced William Shakespeare's play Richard III.

Both More's and Shakespeare's works are controversial to contemporary historians for their unflattering portrait of King Richard III, a bias partly due to both authors ' allegiance to the reigning Tudor dynasty that wrested the throne from Richard III in the Wars of the Roses.

In William Shakespeare's play King Lear ( c. 1600 ), when the King learns that his daughter Regan has publicly dishonoured him, he says They could not, would not do't ; ' tis worse than murder: a conventional attitude at that time.

* December 26 ( St. Stephen's night ) – First recorded performance of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, before King James I of England in the banqueting hall of Whitehall Palace.

Shakespeare's plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe's Edward II and George Peele's Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First.

The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare's greatest ( Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth ) were composed during this period, as well as many others ( see Shakespearean tragedy ).

** Shakespeare's King Lear ( as Cordelia )

One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted in Tudor histories, and particularly in Shakespeare's play, as humpbacked and who was defeated, despite his armies at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare's Art.

In Shakespeare's King Lear ( 1603 ), the Earl of Kent refers to Oswald as: "... nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch ..."

Shakespeare's earlier version, The True Chronicle of the History of the Life and Death of King Lear and His Three Daughters, was published in quarto in 1608.

Conversely, Frank Kermode, in the Riverside Shakespeare, considers the publication of Leir to have been a response to performances of Shakespeare's already-written play ; noting a sonnet by William Strachey that may have verbal resemblances with Lear, Kermode concludes that " 1604-5 seems the best compromise ".

His version had a powerful emotional impact: Lear driven to madness by his daughters was ( in the words of one spectator, Arthur Murphy ) " the finest tragic distress ever seen on any stage " and, in contrast, the devotion shown to Lear by Cordelia ( a mix of Shakespeare's, Tate's and Garrick's contributions to the part ) moved the audience to tears.

In 1974, Buzz Goodbody directed Lear, a deliberately abbreviated title for Shakespeare's text, as the inaugural production of the RSC's studio theatre The Other Place.

The only two significant big-screen performances of Shakespeare's text date from the early 1970s: Grigori Kozintsev was working on his Korol Lir at the same time as Peter Brook was filming his King Lear.

Unlike Shakespeare's Lear, but like Hidetora and Sandeman, the central character of Uli Edel's 2002 American TV adaptation King of Texas, John Lear played by Patrick Stewart, has a back-story centred on his violent rise to power.

Cordelia takes its name from the youngest daughter of Lear in William Shakespeare's King Lear.

Though some scholars disagree, Creiddylad is traditionally identified as the prototype of Geoffrey of Monmouth's pseudo-historical Queen Cordeilla, who is the source of William Shakespeare's heroine Cordelia ( the youngest daughter of King Lear ).

Another of her notable roles was as Goneril in an Emmy-winning television production of Shakespeare's King Lear, opposite Laurence Olivier as King Lear and Robert Lang as the Duke of Albany.

* English poet Robert Browning composed an epic poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came ; the title of which comes from a line in William Shakespeare's play King Lear.

The dramatic reading in the mix towards the end of the song is a few lines of Shakespeare's King Lear ( Act IV, Scene VI ), which were added to the song direct from an AM radio Lennon was fiddling with that happened to be receiving the broadcast of the play on the BBC Third Programme.

The first Blackadder is named after the treacherous Edmond from Shakespeare's King Lear.

Similarly, when Jean de Schelandre wrote about Banquo in his Stuartide in 1611, he also changed the character by portraying him as a noble and honourable man — the critic D. W. Maskell describes him as “… Schelandre's paragon of valour and virtue ”— probably for reasons similar to Shakespeare's.

In Act 3, Scene VI of Shakespeare's Macbeth ( c. 1603 – 06 ) Lennox refers to Edward as " the most pious Edward ," and in Act 4, Scene III, Malcolm describes his powers of healing those afflicted with " the evil ", or scrofula.

Fludd's philosophy is presented in Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia ( The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser, published in Germany between 1617 and 1621 ); according to Frances Yates, his memory system ( which she describes in detail in The Art of Memory, pp. 321 – 341 ) may reflect the layout of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre ( The Art of Memory, Chapter XVI ).

The most famous exposition of the theory is in Oscar Wilde's short story " The Portrait of Mr. W. H .," in which Wilde, or rather the story's narrator, describes the puns on " will " and " hues " in the sonnets, ( notably Sonnet 20 among others ), and argues that they were written to a seductive young actor named Willie Hughes who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays.

In William Shakespeare's play, Love's Labours Lost, Berowne describes himself and his friends as ' four woodcocks in a dish ', after discovering they have all fallen in love when they have sworn not to.

Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Randolph speaks of fairy rings in his Amyntas, or the Impossible Dowry ( 1638 ), and Michael Drayton describes one in Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy:

Hemlock is mentioned by Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear where she describes her missing father, who has become insane, to the Doctor.

* In William Shakespeare's Henry V ( 1599 ), the King describes the betrayal of Lord Scroop – a friend since childhood – as being " like another fall of man ", referring to the loss of his own faith and innocence the treason has caused.

The growth of Shakespeare's reputation is illustrated by a timeline of Shakespeare criticism, from John Dryden's " when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too " ( 1668 ) to Thomas Carlyle's estimation of Shakespeare as the " strongest of rallying-signs " ( 1841 ) for an English identity.

For example, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, act 4, scene 1, the character Grumio describes the eventful coming of his master and new wife to a young servant by saying,