The Royal Shakespeare Company provides historical context for the role of the fool:

In just one play, Henry V, Shakespeare provides a whole range of military characters, from cool-headed and clear-sighted generals, to captains, and common soldiery.

William Shakespeare provides the following insights from Othello:

The theatre has a new Rooftop Restaurant and Bar with views over the River Avon, a Riverside Cafe and Terrace, a Colonnade linking the Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres together for the first time, the PACCAR Room exhibition space, and a 36m high Tower which provides circulation and views across Stratford-upon-Avon and the surrounding area from its 32m high viewing platform.

The Montreal Gazette is just one of many reviewers who have praised Wright ’ s work, stating that his most recent book, Mr. Shakespeare ’ s Bastard, is “ A masterful novel … confirms his ability to evoke an authentically female sensibility .” The novel has continued to gain recognition and was described by The Winnipeg Free Press as a novel that " Draws us swiftly through the pages ..." Wright provides a narrative of pure life to his settings and character backgrounds that have continued to give him wide recognition as a Canadian novelist.

The critic Harold Bloom revived bardolatry in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, in which Bloom provides an analysis of each of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays, " twenty-four of which are masterpieces.

Yet Sir Thomas More provides a precedent of Shakespeare working as a reviser in a surprising context.

After Shakespeare the master spirits of western consciousness are no longer the blind seers, the poets, or Orpheus performing his art in the face of hell.

In his letter mentioning Shakespeare on January 24, 1597/8, Sturley asked Quiney especially that `` theare might ( be ) bi Sir Ed. Grev. some meanes made to the Knightes of the Parliament for an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsedies wherewith our towne is like to be charged, and I assure u I am in great feare and doubte bi no meanes hable to paie.

Unlike his sources, Shakespeare gives Banquo no role in the King's murder, making it a deed committed solely by Macbeth and his wife.

But Shakespeare may also simply have altered Banquo's character because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder.

" The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: " With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.

Consequently, there is no direct evidence that Kyd wrote it, nor any evidence that the play was not an early version of Hamlet by Shakespeare himself.

Second, Shakespeare may have altered Banquo's character simply because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder ; there was, however, a need to give a dramatic contrast to Macbeth — a role which many scholars argue is filled by Banquo.

The convergence of documentary evidence of the type used by academics for authorial attribution — title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians, and official records — sufficiently establishes Shakespeare's authorship for the overwhelming majority of Shakespeare scholars and literary historians, and no evidence links Oxford to Shakespeare's works.

which appear to me extravagant & improbable, in no way strengthen Oxford ’ s Shakespeare claims, and are likely to bring the whole cause into ridicule.

While there is no documentary evidence connecting Oxford ( or any authorial candidate ) to the plays of Shakespeare, Oxfordian researchers, including Mark Anderson and Charlton Ogburn, believe the connection is provided by considerable circumstantial evidence inferred from Oxford's connections to the Elizabethan theatre and poetry scene ; the participation of his family in the printing and publication of the First Folio ; his relationship with the Earl of Southampton ( believed by most Shakespeare scholars to have been Shakespeare's patron ); as well as a number of specific incidents and circumstances of Oxford's life that Oxfordians believe are depicted in the plays themselves.

Critics have doubted that any of the annotations in the Bible can be reliably attributed to de Vere and not the book's other owners prior to its acquisition by the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1925, as well as challenging the strictness of Stritmatter's standards for a Biblical allusion in Shakespeare's works and arguing that there is no statistical significance to the overlap.

" Oxfordians argue that this supports their own position, since there is no evidence that William Shakespeare ever left England, but Oxford undoubtedly visited the area.

Shakespeare is replete with vulgarisms, though many are no longer readily recognized.

At the end of it his tone becomes more recognizably humanitarian, as he maintains that, although the virtues of the savage are mythical and his way of life inferior and doomed, he still deserves to be treated no differently than if he were an Englishman of genius, such as Newton or Shakespeare:

Although William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were actors, the majority do not seem to have been performers, and no major author who came on to the scene after 1600 is known to have supplemented his income by acting.

These solutions have their own difficulties, in that the text appears to have a meaning separate from the other agents: what if the monkey operates before Shakespeare is born, or if Shakespeare is never born, or if no one ever finds the monkey's typescript?

and Francis Beaumont were among the members ( although it is often asserted that William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh were members of this club, there is no documented evidence to support this claim ).

Making a thinly-veiled criticism of Brook in the process, Alexander praised the fact that there were " no attempts at sensationalism, no efforts to ' modernise ' Shakespeare by introducing Freudian themes, Existentialist ideas, eroticism, or sexual perversion.

" Again however, there is no evidence that Shakespeare directly used this text during the composition of The Shrew.

Daniel and Honigmann believe that an original version of the play existed in which Hortensio was simply a friend of Petruchio's, and had no involvement in the Bianca subplot, but wishing to complicate things, Shakespeare rewrote the play, expanding Hortensio's role, but not fully correcting everything to fit the presence of a new suitor.

In their very first speeches it was clear that Shakespeare, like a Nostradamus, had foreseen this moment.

It is not clear, however, if Shakespeare characterized Falstaff as he did for dramatic purposes, or because of a specific desire to satirize Oldcastle or the Cobhams.

No clear evidence exists that Shakespeare made any direct references to Saxo's version.

Shakespeare scholars point out that Sobran has simply misread Barkstead ’ s poem, the last stanza of which is a comparison of Barkstead ’ s poem to Shakespeare ’ s " Venus and Adonis ", and has mistaken the grammar also, which makes it clear that Barkstead is referring to Shakespeare ’ s " song " in the past tense, not Shakespeare himself.

While Plutarch singles out the “ order of exclusive society ” that the lovers surrounded themselves with – a society with a specifically defined and clear understanding of the hierarchies of power as determined by birth and status – Shakespeare ’ s play seems more preoccupied with the power dynamics of pleasure as a main theme throughout the play.

* Gregory Hines as Sergeant Cass, a strict Drill Sergeant, who makes it clear to Rago upon their first meeting that he finds classroom teaching of this civilian's " students " to be a waste of time and money, mockingly calling him " Shakespeare.

In theory, it ought to be clear what Shakespeare wrote, and what he did not: the plays that were included in the First Folio must be by Shakespeare, and those that were excluded must not, since Heminges and Condell were in a better position to know what Shakespeare wrote than subsequent scholars or other sources.

* Yet framing opportunism as a lesser evil implies the absence of clear positive principles of what would be good to do ; Baldwin could be understood as saying that the political process is itself the means by which it is sorted out what those principles should be, or that politics can achieve no more than prevent worse things from happening ( in his play Hamlet, William Shakespeare refers to the conservative notion of being " cruel to be kind " – so that " bad begins and worse remains behind ").

" Marcus writes that this is seen by editors as out of character for Shakespeare and is therefore an indication that he did not write A Shrew.

A further indication of legitimacy is the fact that the Chandos portrait was the inspiration for two posthumous portraits of Shakespeare, one by Gerard Soest and another, grander one, known as the " Chesterfield portrait " after a former owner of that painting.

The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655, when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years.

He had been in London for several weeks when he wrote to Shakespeare on October 25.

Quiney was in London again in June, 1601, and in November, when he rode up, as Shakespeare must often have done, by way of Oxford, High Wycombe, and Uxbridge, and home through Aylesbury and Banbury.

Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona ( 1593 ), when Speed accuses his master of " puling or whining like a beggar at Hallowmas.

Shakespeare famously alludes to this description when writing of Falstaff's death in Act II, Scene iii.

Shakespeare may allude to the image when Lady Macbeth says to her husband, " Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't " ( 1. 5. 74-5 ).. And the Porter's speech ( 1. 3. 1 – 21 ), in particular, may allude to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606 ; " equivocator " ( line 8 ) may refer to Garnet's defence of " equivocation ", and " farmer " ( 4 ) to one of Garnet's aliases.

He says that his style is so distinctive and unchanging that ' every word doth almost tell my name ,' implying that his name is otherwise concealed – at a time when he is publishing long poems under the name William Shakespeare.

Even Samuel Johnson was not free of applying the unities to drama when judging it in his Prefaces to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare mentions the practice in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona ( 1593 ), when Speed accuses his master of " puling or whining like a beggar at Hallowmas.

Shakespeare sings the funeral song of Act IV, Scene 2, when asked about his view of death ( the song is titled " Fear No More ").

In the 1920s, when Waley's translation was published, reviewers compared Genji to Austen, Proust, and Shakespeare.

A tradition, impossible to verify, holds that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599 — the Globe would have been the " wooden O " mentioned in the Prologue — but Shapiro argues that the Chamberlain's Men were still at The Curtain when the work was first performed, and that Shakespeare himself probably acted the Chorus.

He entitled it " Shakespeare at the Funambules ", and in it Gautier summarized and analyzed an unnamed pantomime of unusually somber events: Pierrot murders an old-clothes man for garments to court a duchess, then is skewered in turn by the sword with which he stabbed the peddler when the latter's ghost lures him into a dance at his wedding.

Peter Holland has speculated that this company / directoral decision – namely choosing to present Shakespeare in a small venue for artistic reasons when a larger venue was available – may at the time have been unprecedented.

Shakespeare made the reference to priests because the religious use of equivocation was well known in those periods of early modern England ( e. g. under James VI / I ) when it was a capital offence for a Roman Catholic priest to enter England.

However, due to the lack of verbal parallels usually found when Shakespeare used a specific source, most critics do not accept either Shroeder or Hosley's arguments.

" Duthie argued that the time-scheme of A Shrew shows that it was a garbled version of something which probably made more sense in an original form, and that Shakespeare reorganised the plot when composing The Shrew so as to make more chronological sense.

The history of the analysis of The Taming of the Shrew is saturated with controversy almost from its inception, something Stevie Davies summarises when she writes that response to The Shrew " is dominated by feelings of unease and embarrassment, accompanied by the desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying ; and that therefore he cannot really be saying it.

They view the physical description of women as evidence of a more farcical intention when considered alongside both the historical context of the Elizabethan theatre ( where female characters were always played by prepubescent boys ) and the Induction in which Sly is attracted to the page disguised as his wife ; thus Shakespeare is satirising gender roles.

Feminist theory, in respect to Antony and Cleopatra, often looks at Shakespeare ’ s use of language when describing Rome and Egypt.

The date of composition is unknown, but must lie somewhere between 1587, the year of publication of the second, revised edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, upon which Shakespeare drew for this and other plays, and 1598, when King John was mentioned among Shakespeare's plays in the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres.

The English playwright William Shakespeare used the word Scotch to describe a jig, but always employed the term Scottish when people were the subject.

Shakespeare also mentions her in the play Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick says, referring to Beatrice,

* Referenced by Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing when Don Pedro courts Hero for Claudio ( 2. 1. 95 ), and also in As You Like It by Jaques ( 3. 3. 7-8 ).