Introduction of Shakespeare's characters
William? Shakespeare (1564 ~ 16 16) was the most important writer in Britain and Europe during the Renaissance. He was born into a merchant family in Stratford, central England. When I was a teenager, I received basic education in the local grammar school, studied Latin, philosophy and history, and got in touch with the works of ancient Roman playwrights. Later, he dropped out of school to make a living because of his family's decline. When Shakespeare was young, famous troupes often toured the countryside, which cultivated his interest in drama. 1585 or so, he left his hometown and went to London. First he worked as a handyman in the theater, then he became an actor, and then he changed to writing plays. Shakespeare not only participated in performances and screenwriters, but also had extensive contacts with society, and often went to court or went to the countryside with the troupe. These experiences broadened his horizons and laid the foundation for his creation.
He wrote many plays and poems in his life, and 37 plays, two long poems and 154 sonnets have been handed down. In Shakespeare's early creation, his humanistic thought and unique artistic style gradually formed, reflecting the colorful picture of English society. Romeo and Juliet reflects the conflict between humanists' love ideal and feudal bad habits, and embodies Shakespeare's thought of personality liberation. At the same time, The Merchant of Venice sharply satirizes the extremely selfish nature of usury merchants, which has profound social significance.
The peak of Shakespeare's creation is marked by four tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Hamlet is the best tragedy in the world, and the protagonist Hamlet has become one of the most complicated literary models. In his later years, Shakespeare turned to writing magic plays, hoping for a utopian ideal world. His works include cymbeline and The Tempest.
The artistic features of Shakespeare's plays mainly lie in the perfect combination of vividness and richness of plots. The characters are very typical, and at the same time they have rich and colorful personality characteristics. The idea of the work is naturally expressed through the plot characters. Shakespeare is also a master of language. He absorbed people's languages, as well as ancient and contemporary literary languages, and skillfully used them. Prose and poetry are used in the play, which is not rigid. Shakespeare is called "the soul of the times" by contemporary dramatists, and Marx also praised Shakespeare as "the greatest drama genius".
Shakespeare's style of works
Shakespeare's earliest plays were written in the general style of the time. He writes in standard language, which often cannot be released naturally according to the needs of the role and plot. Poetry depends on unfolding, sometimes containing elaborate metaphors and ingenious ideas, and the language is usually gorgeous, which is suitable for actors to read aloud rather than speak. According to some critics, titus? The solemn speech of the Antelo Knicks often hinders the plot; The lines in Two Gentlemen of Verona are criticized as artificial and unnatural.
Shakespeare soon turned from the traditional style to his own characteristics. The monologue at the beginning of Richard III created evil characters in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid monologue full of self-awareness continues the monologue in Shakespeare's mature plays. No single script marks the transition from traditional style to free style. Shakespeare combined these two styles in his whole writing career, and Romeo and Juliet may be the best interpretation of this mixed style. By the middle of 1590, when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare began to write in a more natural language. He gradually turned his metaphors and symbols into the needs of plot development. Shakespeare's common poetic form is blank verse combined with iambic pentameter. In fact, this means that his poems are usually rhyming, with 10 syllables in each line, and are stressed every other syllable when reading aloud. The blank poems in his early works are quite different from those in his later works. Poetry is often beautiful, but sentences often start, pause and end at the end of a line, which may lead to boredom. When Shakespeare mastered the traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and change the law. This technology is in Julius? In the poems of plays such as Caesar and Hamlet, new strength and flexibility are released.
After Hamlet, Shakespeare's writing style has undergone more changes, especially in the more emotional paragraphs in the later tragedies. British literary critic Andrew? Cecil? Bradley described this style as "more compact, vivid and diverse, and its structure is irregular, often complicated or omitted". Later in his writing career, Shakespeare used many techniques to achieve these effects, including continuous lines, irregular pauses and endings, and extreme changes in sentence structure and length. It is a challenge for the audience to fully understand the meaning. In later legendary dramas, the plot changed in time and unexpectedly, creating a poetic style at the end, which is characterized by the fusion of long and short sentences, the arrangement of clauses, the inversion of subject and object, and the omission of words, resulting in natural effects.
The characteristics of Shakespeare's poems are related to the actual effect of the theater. Like all playwrights of that era, Shakespeare put Francesco? Petrarch and Raphael? The stories created by Holinshed and others are dramatic. He adapted each plot, created several centers of audience's attention, and showed as many story fragments as possible to the audience. The design features ensure that Shakespeare's plays can be translated into other languages, tailored and loosely explained without losing the core plot. When Shakespeare's skills improved, he endowed his characters with clearer and more diverse motives and unique speaking style. However, in his later works, he retained the characteristics of his early style. In later legendary dramas, he deliberately turned back to a more illusory style, emphasizing the effect of the theater.
The artistic features of Shakespeare's creation can be summarized as follows:
First, adhere to the principle of realistic creation and think that drama is a mirror that reflects life.
The second is the performance theory of pursuing nature, which holds that the performance should be true and should not be overdone.
Third, the plot is vivid and rich. A drama often has several complicated clues intertwined, and the factors of tragicomedy are intertwined.
Fourthly, a series of artistic images with distinctive personalities have been created. Such as Hamlet and Falstaff.
Fifth, the characters' language is personalized, such as Hamlet's words are philosophical and poetic, Polonius, the minister of command, is artificial, and Egu's language is full of foul language. According to computer statistics, there are 29,066 words created by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's achievements and honors
Most of Shakespeare's plays are based on old scripts, novels, chronicles or folklore, but they have been rewritten with their own ideas, giving new, rich and profound contents to the old themes. In artistic expression, he inherited and developed the three traditions of ancient Greek and Roman drama, medieval England and Renaissance European drama, and made creative innovations in content and form. His plays are not bound by the three laws, breaking through the boundaries between tragedy and comedy, trying to reflect the true nature of life and explore the inner mysteries of characters, thus shaping many typical characters with complex and diverse personalities and vivid images, and depicting a broad and colorful picture of social life, which is famous for its profoundness, poetry and meaningful philosophy. Shakespeare's plays are popular plays written for the British stage and audience at that time. Therefore, it was criticized by the classicists represented by Voltaire in the18th century, and was arbitrarily deleted during the performance, because of its blending of sadness and joy, appealing to both refined and popular tastes, freedom of time and space, and efforts to mobilize the audience's imagination to make up for the simplicity of the stage. It was not until the beginning of19th century that the real value of Shakespeare's plays began to be known under the discussion of critics such as Coleridge and Khazri. However, Shakespeare's performances at that time were still often included in the model of five-act drama. 19 end, w? Bohr and h? Glanville? Pearl S. Buck strongly opposed the spectacular tradition of Shakespeare's plays at that time, and advocated performing in Elizabethan theaters without scenery to restore its inherent characteristics.
Since the beginning of17th century, Shakespeare's plays have been introduced to Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Northern Europe, and then gradually spread to the United States and even the rest of the world, which has had a great and far-reaching impact on the development of drama in various countries and has become an important link and source of inspiration for the development and exchange of world culture. China began to introduce and translate Shakespeare's plays at the beginning of this century. 1902, students from St. John's College in Shanghai performed The Merchant of Venice in English for the first time. The Complete Works of Shakespeare is based on Zhu Shenghao's translation and published in 1 1 volume. According to incomplete statistics, there are 65 professional and amateur performing groups in China, which have performed 2 1 Shakespeare's plays in five languages, including English, Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian and Cantonese, and in six forms, such as civilized drama, modern drama, traditional drama, radio drama, ballet and puppet drama, including most of Shakespeare's important works. Shakespeare's plays have become the teaching materials of middle schools, universities, especially drama schools in China. The important role of Shakespeare's plays has opened up a vast world for the cultivation and improvement of actors in China.
Shakespeare left 37 plays to the world, including some common plays that he co-wrote with others.
Shakespeare is second to none among all literary figures. Few people talk about Chaucer, Virgil or even Homer today, but if Shakespeare's plays are to be staged, there will definitely be a large audience. Shakespeare's genius in writing is unparalleled, and his words are often quoted-even those who have never seen or read his plays. Besides, his fame is not a flash in the pan. In the past 400 years, his works have brought a lot of joy to readers and critics. As Shakespeare's works have stood the test of time, it is reasonable to speculate that they will be widely welcomed in many centuries to come.
When evaluating Shakespeare's influence, readers should take into account that without him, his works would not exist at all (of course, a similar statement applies to every literary figure, but this factor is not particularly important when evaluating the influence of ordinary artists).
According to statistics, Shakespeare used more than 20 thousand words. It widely uses folk languages (such as folk songs, slang, old proverbs and humorous sketches). ), paying attention to absorbing foreign words, and using metaphors, metaphors and puns extensively, can be described as the masterpiece of English at that time. Many sentences in Shakespeare's plays have become idioms, allusions and aphorisms in modern English. Relatively speaking, his early plays like to use gorgeous and sonorous words; The later mature works are more handy, which can not only vividly express the characteristics of different characters in rich and varied languages, but also convey exciting feelings and thoughts in simple and natural words.
Although Shakespeare wrote in English, he was indeed a world-famous figure. Although English is not a complete world language, it is closer to the world language than any other language. In addition, Shakespeare's works have been translated into many literary works, and many countries have read his works and staged his plays.
Shakespeare and World Book and Copyright Day: April 23rd is a symbolic day for the world literature field, because William? Shakespeare died on 16 16. The UNESCO General Conference held in Paris from 65438 to 0995 chose this day to pay tribute to books and authors all over the world. Encourage everyone, especially teenagers, to find the pleasure of reading, and once again pay tribute to those who have made irreplaceable contributions to promoting human social and cultural progress. 1995165438+10 In October, the 28th General Conference of UNESCO passed a resolution declaring April 23rd as World Book and Copyright Day.
Shakespeare's character evaluation
17th century. Contemporary people dominate the drama? Jonson praised him as "the soul of the times". Said that he "does not belong to an era but to a thousand generations." Dryden was an English classicist in 17 and 18 centuries. He believed that "Shakespeare has a heart that reaches to the sky and can understand all characters and passions."
19th century, after the rise of romanticism and realism, Shakespeare swept Europe. Hugo, Stendhal and others held high the banner of Shakespeare and advocated the spirit of Shakespeare in the struggle against classicism. Hugo said, "The arrival of a genius like Shakespeare has transformed art, science, philosophy or the whole society. His brilliance shines on all mankind, from this end of the times to that end. " The hurricane movement in Germany is also singing Shakespeare's hymns and carrying his flag forward. Goethe said: "I read his first page, which made my life belong to him;" After reading the first book, I was like a born blind man. A strange hand made my eyes see the light again in an instant, thanks to the gods who gave me wisdom. "Balzac, Dickensian, Pushkin, Turgenev, etc. All follow the example of Shakespeare's works. Pushkin believes that Shakespeare has the great quality of being close to the people. Duborolyubov regarded Shakespeare as "a ray of light in the dark kingdom", saying that he "pointed out several new stages of human development" and was "the most full representative of the highest stage of human understanding", and his works "showed the most full moral ideal. "belinsky has infinite admiration for Shakespeare. He wrote in "Fantasy of Literature": "Shakespeare, a sacred and noble Shakespeare, knows hell, earth and heaven like the back of his hand. He is the master of nature and has passed his eye of inspiration. I saw the pulse of the universe. Each of his plays is a microcosm of the world. It includes the whole present, past and future. "
Goethe, the great German poet, pointed out when talking about Shakespeare: "It is the things in our world that interest Shakespeare's great mind, because although magical factors such as prophecy, madness, nightmares, premonitions, illusions, fairies and elves, ghosts, rare and wizards are interspersed in his poems at the right time, these illusory images are not the main components of his works, but the truth of his life is the great foundation of these works."
Shakespeare's position in Marx's mind is also unique. No other writer can compare with it. In Marx's works, only from the quantitative point of view, there are as many as three or four hundred quotations or talks about Shakespeare. So some people say that in the process of scientific research, Shakespeare is always Marx's best companion. He provided examples, models and historical contents for Marx's scientific theory and the embryonic form and trend of capitalist social development, and provided a lot of vivid arguments for revolutionary theory. It even coincides with the beautiful ideal of the future of mankind. It's basically the same.
Engels pointed out in the article "Scenery" written in his youth: "No matter where the plot in his script takes place in Italy, France or Navarra, what actually unfolds in front of us will always be the hometown of eccentric civilians, clever teachers and lovely but eccentric women he described, happy Britain (English); In short, you will see that these plots can only happen under the British sky. Only a few comedies, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, have the same characters as Romeo and Juliet. "
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