Henry VI, Part 2 has the largest cast of all Shakespeare's plays, and is seen by many critics as the best of the Henry VI trilogy.

Shakespeare's most striking departure from Cinthio is the manner of his heroine's death.

In much the same way, we recognize the importance of Shakespeare's familarity with Plutarch and Montaigne, of Shelley's study of Plato's dialogues, and of Coleridge's enthusiastic plundering of the writings of many philosophers and theologians from Plato to Schelling and William Godwin, through which so many abstract ideas were brought to the attention of English men of letters.

* Benedick, from William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, says " But that I will have a recheat winded in my forehead or hang my bugle in an invisible baldric all women shall pardon me.

In Shakespeare's day, however, they were considered historical figures of great repute, and the king, James I, based his claim to the throne in part on a descent from Banquo.

Why Shakespeare's Banquo is so different from the character described by Holinshed and Boece is not known, though critics have proposed several possible explanations.

* William Shakespeare's play Hamlet takes place at Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, from whence the English spelling " Elsinore " derived.

The following lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale ( c. 1611 ) are heavily enjambed:

Although he had a reckless, unpredictable, and violent nature that precluded him from attaining any court or government responsibility and led to the ruination of his estate, Oxford was noted in his own time as a patron of the arts, lyric poet, and playwright, and since the 1920s he has been the most popular alternative candidate proposed for the authorship of Shakespeare's works.

In that year, Vitagraph's An Auto Heroine ; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cup and How It Was Won, contains a couple of dialogue titles, and the same firm's Julius Caesar includes three lines of dialogue from Shakespeare's play quoted in intertitles before the actors speak them, finishing with " This was the noblest Roman of them all ".

The phrase " gaudy night " is taken from Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra:

Its name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment, a genre popular from Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre ( for instance Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Webster's The White Devil ) to today's splatter films.

In this, the murdered king has two sons — Hroar and Helgi — who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's.

A 17th-century Nordic scholar, Torfaeus, compared the Icelandic hero Amlodi and the Spanish hero Prince Ambales ( from the Ambales Saga ) to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In 1598, Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia, a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named.

Early editors of Shakespeare's works, beginning with Nicholas Rowe ( 1709 ) and Lewis Theobald ( 1733 ), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1.

In contrast to Zeffirelli, whose Hamlet was heavily cut, Kenneth Branagh adapted, directed, and starred in a 1996 version containing every word of Shakespeare's play, combining the material from the F1 and Q2 texts.

House of Cards draws heavily from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Richard III, both of which examine issues of power, ambition and corruption.

Following a change in vowel pronunciation that marks the transition of English from the medieval to the Renaissance period, the language of the Chancery and Caxton became Early Modern English ( the language of Shakespeare's day ) and with relatively moderate changes eventually developed into the English language of today.

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

"); this derives from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, where it actually forms the first half of a macaronic line: " Et tu, Brute?

" It has no basis in historical fact and Shakespeare's use of Latin here is not from any assertion that Caesar would have been using the language, rather than the Greek reported by Suetonius, but because the phrase was already popular when the play was written.

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 ).

Shakespeare's audience, in this view, expected villains to be wholly bad, and Senecan style, far from prohibiting a villainous protagonist, all but demanded it.

Apart from that, there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era.

* William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and the films made from these two plays ( played by Marlon Brando and Robert Speaight, respectively ).

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.

These include Hall's Croft ( the one-time home of Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna, and her husband Dr. John Hall ) and Nash's House, which stands alongside the site of another property, New Place, owned by Shakespeare himself, wherein he died.

Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream was written for the marriage of Sir Thomas Heneage Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household to the Countess of Southampton, who lived near Loughton at Copped Hall, where it was first performed in the long gallery in 1594.

* John Hall ( physician ) ( 1575 – 1636 ), William Shakespeare's son-in-law and medical author

In 2002 the theatre presented Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Peter Hall starring Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson ; Rose Rage, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, directed by Edward Hall ; and Judi Dench and Maggie Smith appeared on stage together for the first time in over 40 years in The Breath of Life by David Hare.

In 1473-4 during the Wars of the Roses there was a family dispute involving the Bracebridges and their distant relations, the Ardens ( William Shakespeare's maternal ancestors ) of Park Hall in Castle Bromwich.

Jump London followed three French traceurs, Sébastien Foucan, Jérôme Ben Aoues, and Johann Vigroux, as they run around many of London's most famous landmarks, including Royal Albert Hall, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, HMS Belfast, and many others.

In 1869, Albert premièred in public as Mark Anthony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in an amateur performance at the local Cornwall Hall.

In 1974, the group's publicist Martin Lewis arranged for the band to be commissioned to write and record the music for a major stage production of Shakespeare's The Tempest at Britain's National Theatre, directed by Sir Peter Hall.

Raphael Holinshed also included her story in his Chronicles ( 1577 ), based on Tacitus and Dio, and inspired Shakespeare's younger contemporaries Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher to write a play, Bonduca, in 1610.

According to Holinshed, it was predicted that Henry would die in Jerusalem, and Shakespeare's play repeats this prophecy.

Shakespeare's most important source is probably the second edition of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, published in 1587.

* Raphael Holinshed and his collaborators who wrote the Chronicles of England, Scotland and Wales ( 2nd edition, 1587 ), which was Shakespeare's primary source for his history plays.

Holinshed selected the case, from the many murders available as subject matter, because the name of the victim was Arden and Shakespeare's mother's family name was Arden ; the change of name from " Loosebag " To " Shakebags " was a more overt reference.

* W. G. Boswell, Shakespeare's Holinshed.