Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare reverses this so that it is through the soliloquies, not the action, that the audience learns Hamlet's motives and thoughts.

Shakespeare was writing for an audience whose minds weren ’ t restricted to house and home, but looked toward the greater world beyond and the role that they might play in that world.

Another difference between the audiences of Shakespeare and Plautus is that Shakespeare ’ s audience was Christian.

The many deceits that Plautus layered his plays with, giving the audience the feeling of a genre bordering on farce, appear in much of the comedy written by Shakespeare and Molière.

Shakespeare's audience similarly did not ask whether the University of Wittenberg had existed in Hamlet's day, or whether clocks that struck time were available in Julius Caesar's ancient Rome: Shakespeare portrayed Brutus, plotting to assassinate Caesar in 44 BC, being interrupted by the striking of the clock, although ancient Rome was the era of the sundial, with invention of the mechanical clock dating from the 11th-13th centuries AD.

Oliver, for example, believes that Shakespeare created the Induction so that the audience wouldn't react badly to the inherent misogyny in the Petruchio / Katherina story, in effect defending himself against charges of sexism.

One example of this is his schema of the container as suggested by critic Donald Freeman in his article, “ The rack dislimns .” In his article, Freeman suggests that the container is representative of the body and the overall theme of the play that “ knowing is seeing .” In literary terms a schema refers to a plan throughout the work, which means that Shakespeare had a set path for unveiling the meaning of the “ container ” to the audience within the play.

In their first exchange in Act I, scene 1, Cleopatra says to Antony, “ I ’ ll set a bourn how far to be beloved .” In this case Cleopatra speaks in an authoritative and affirming sense to her lover, which to Shakespeare ’ s audience would be uncharacteristic for a female lover.

Shakespeare ’ s audience may have made the connection between England ’ s westward expansion and Antony and Cleopatra ’ s convoluted picture of Roman imperialism.

The imprisoned muse Calliope is forced to provide story ideas, a cat seeks to change the world with dreams, Shakespeare puts on a play for an unearthly audience, and a shape-shifting immortal ( obscure DC Comics character Element Girl ) longs for death.

Pericles draws in part on the 14th century Confessio Amantis ( itself a frame story ) by John Gower and Shakespeare has the ghost of Gower " assume man's infirmities " to introduce his work to the contemporary audience and comment on the action of the play.

The explorations of love found in the sonnets of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walter Raleigh and others also implies a courtly audience.

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt notes how Richard even refers to himself as " the formal Vice, Iniquity " ( 3. 1. 82 ), which informs the audience that he knows what his function is ; but also like Vice in the morality plays, the fates will turn and get Richard in the end, which Elizabethan audiences would have recognised.

Paola Pugliatti however argues that the case may be somewhere between Wilson and Taylor's argument ; " Shakespeare may not have been the first to bring English history before the audience of a public playhouse, but he was certainly the first to treat it in the manner of a mature historian rather than in the manner of a worshipper of historical, political and religious myth.

" He wanted the audience to be fully immersed into the culture of the period, " Over there is Mr Shakespeare rehearsing a play and having trouble with the Puritans ... over here are the preparations for Queen Elizabeth's visit ... in that house is a craftsman turning wooden bowls, and in that one a woman selling roast thrushes to take away while there is a house being built using genuine tools and skills and over there a Tudor ship.

For example, in his 1990 edition of the play for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Kurt Schlueter suggests that Valentine is indeed handing Silvia over to Proteus, but the audience is not supposed to take it literally ; the incident is farcical, and should be interpreted as such.

It is likely that Shakespeare ’ s audience would have been influenced in their perception of feasts by the religious precept of penitence.

It was, perhaps, the most authoritative work on Shakespeare not principally intended for an English-speaking audience to have been published in any country.

The theatre is a “ one-room ” theatre, which allows the actors and the audience to share the same space, as they did when Shakespeare ’ s plays were first produced.

Walpole presents a " more fragmented recasting " of the Ghost in Hamlet, which had served as a representation of the " now unsanctioned, but still popular Catholic view of ghosts as speakers of truth " for Shakespeare The Catholic elements at play within both Hamlet and Otranto are both invoked to represent a further sense of wonder and mystery to the Protestant audience of both works.

At Carnegie they had first used elaborate scenery for Shakespeare plays, but Payne discovered that the more they simplified the scenery the better it was for the production and the more immediate was the appeal to the audience.

A bystander in the audience of the show admitted famously, “ This is the Jew / That Shakespeare drew ”.

Although she left the profession as an actress, Olivia's mother did not fail to appreciate the arts, as she read Shakespeare to her children, and taught them diction and voice.

To do this, he tried to teach one to appreciate and to feel the influence of such great minds of literature as Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare.

In contrast, at the time of Shakespeare it was common to appreciate more the similarity with an admired classical work, and Shakespeare himself avoided " unnecessary invention ".

The long-lived belief that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by unstinting praise from writers throughout the 18th century.

" Through drama he allowed his imagination to run wild, but he also came to appreciate Shakespeare and to realise that the truths of the Bard's plays never change.

In the imagination of the nineteenth century the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare stand side by side, their affinity transcending all the immense contrarieties of historical circumstance, religious belief, and poetic form.

These conceptions and the manner in which they were transposed into poetry or engendered by poetic form are intrinsic to western life from the time of Aeschylus to that of Shakespeare.

However, the theory was revived and expanded by Elisabeth Sears in Shakespeare and the Tudor Rose ( 2002 ), and Hank Whittemore in The Monument ( 2005 ), an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets which interprets the poems as a poetic history of Queen Elizabeth, Oxford, and Southampton.

As can readily be seen with the context restored, Barkstead compares his poem about Venus and Adonis (“ my Muse ”) with Shakespeare ’ s, saying that his poetry sung " the withered tree " while Shakespeare ’ s " sung the fair blossom ", and that Shakespeare deserves laurel, the emblem of victory or poetic superiority, but that Barkstead, the lesser poet, deserves only cypress in comparison.

As with other poetic techniques, poets use it to suit their own purposes ; for example William Shakespeare often used a rhyming couplet to mark off the end of a scene in a play.

The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.

Shakespeare for Berlioz represented the summit of poetic utterance, with the bard's veracity of dramatic expression and freedom from formal constraints resounding in the composer's spirit.

Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry ( including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare ).

These dramas, in which Tieck's poetic powers are to be seen at their best, are typical plays of the first Romantic school ; although formless, and destitute of dramatic qualities, they show the influence of both Calderón and Shakespeare.

He is sometimes known as the " Shakespeare of Divines " for his poetic style of expression and was often presented as a model of prose writing.

The range of feeling and mood as well as poetic and formal invention which Berlioz found in Shakespeare had a strong influence on his music, making a direct musical setting of Shakespeare's work only natural.

Reuven Tsur in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry ( including different actors ' readings of a single line of Shakespeare ).

McCrea compares Florio's own poetry to Shakespeare's, observing that " Reading Shakespeare alongside Florio makes one painfully aware of how beautiful and poetic even the two dedications to Southampton are, and how prosaic and fundamentally different is Florio's mind.

The English Renaissance saw the height of dramatic verse in the English-speaking world, with playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare developing new techniques, both for dramatic structure and poetic form.

The rift between Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page was at its widest in the early 19th century, at a time when both forms of Shakespeare were hitting peaks of fame and popularity: theatrical Shakespeare was successful spectacle and melodrama for the masses, while book or closet drama Shakespeare was being elevated by the reverential commentary of the Romantics into unique poetic genius, prophet, and bard.

Besides Rimbaud's sybolism, the song is also influenced by the alliterative poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poetic vision of William Blake and the violent drama, mixed with compassion and romantic language, of William Shakespeare.

Had Marlowe ( 1564-1593 ) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts.