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Introduction

0.1 Shakespeare’s Life and Dramatic Composition
William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon, a littletown in Warwickshire, England. His father was a wealthy merchant and once assumedthe office of chief alderman. As a child, Shakespeare was sent to a local grammarschool. At the age of fourteen, his father went into bankruptcy. Therefore,Shakespeare left school and worked as a country schoolmaster to support his family.In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway and got three children. They were Susanna,Judith and Hamnet. Later on, he left his hometown for London. The play was mostpopular among the people in London at the time. In London, Shakespeare undertook avariety of odd jobs. At long last, he got acquainted with some theatrical companies.He missed no chance and found himself in the theatre world soon first as an actor.When living a life of an actor, Shakespeare never stopped attempting to write plays.He wrote two plays on an annual basis. His plays were so popular that Robert Green,one of the “university wits”, called him “an upstart crow” in a letter in 1592. When hewas still in the prime of life, Shakespeare somehow gave up writing and went back tohis hometown to live a relatively peaceful life about 1611. On April 23, 1616,Shakespeare passed away. When he was alive, Shakespeare did not seem to have theslightest idea of collecting and publishing his plays. After he died, two of hisfellow-actors, Herminge and Condell, collected and published his plays in 1623. Thisis the very edition which is called the First Folio, to which Ben Jonson dedicated apoem To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, in whichhe says, “He was not of an age, but for all time!”
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0.2 Literature Review
Over the last four hundred years, literary criticism on Shakespeare’s works hasbeen repeatedly made. Generally speaking, literary criticism on Shakespeare’s workscan be divided into five periods. Shakespeare’s contemporaries made little criticismon his works with exception to Ben Jonson. During the Neo-Classical period, the mostinfluential Shakespearean critics include John Dryden, Samuel Jonson and Frenchphilosopher Voltaire. In the Romantic period, the major Shakespearean critics areGotthold Ephraim Lessing, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Johann Wofgang Goethe,Maurice Morgann, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt andThomas De Quincey. During the Victorian period, Edward Dowden, Algernon CharlesSwinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, A.C. Bradley, Frank Harris, George BernardShaw and Leo Tolstoy are the most important Shakespearean critics. In the twentiethcentury, there emerged numerous schools of criticism on Shakespeare’s works and therepresentative ones are Freudian and Jungian psychological analyses, new historicism,Marxism, myth criticism, feminism and deconstruction. The above-mentionedShakespearean critics put forward a variety of ideas from different perspectives, someof which are even poles apart. But, it is hard to say to what degree these ideas couldinterpret Shakespeare in a convincing way. They respectively offer us a newperspective to understand Shakespeare’s works. In a sense, this is exactly where thegreatness of Shakespeare lies, for his works enjoy the infinite possibilities of differentinterpretation as T. S. Eliot says, “About anyone so great as本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。