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n “considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance,sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written byothers” (Shapiro 2005: xvii–xviii).

1.2 Shakespeare’s Plays and The Merchant of Venice

As England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”, Shakespeare produced mostof his known work between 1589 and 1613. His extant works, including somecollaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, twoepitaphs on a man named John Combe, one epitaph on Elias James, and several otherpoems. Of all these works, his plays have the reputation of being out of the best in theEnglish language and in Western literature.There are basically three periods of the literary career. His early plays weremainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication andartistry by the end of the 16thcentury. Altogether 22 plays were written in this period,some of which were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists,especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe. He then wrote chiefly tragediesuntil about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, which werereckoned some of the finest works in English. In the last phase, he wrote fourtragicomedies, also known as romances.During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, drama became the popular means tocapture and convey the diverse interests of the time. Shakespeare served his dramaticauthorship at the height of the Elizabethan age and retired at the peak of the Jacobeanperiod. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks ofboth periods. At that time, stories of various genres were enacted for audiencesconsisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Shakespearechanged his style not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery,but also in conformity with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.While many passages in Shakespeare’s plays were written in prose, he almostalways wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In someof his early works, he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameterlines to make the rhythm even stronger. He and many dramatists of this period usedthe form of blank verse extensively in character dialogue, thus heightening poeticeffects.To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet to give a sense ofconclusion, or completion. A typical example is provided in The Merchant of Venice:going through an emotional conflict as Jessica prepares to leave his father and elopewith Lorenzo, she says,If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife,Become a Christian and thy loving wife.conditions of Shylock among the Christians, in this sense, the greatness ofShakespeare’s art and his humanistic ideas are once more demonstrated.

1.3 Chinese Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays

In the early 20thcentury after the Opium War broke out, the imperialist powersstepped up their invasion, confronting China with internal and external worries andplunging it into the danger of national subjugation. Under the circumstances, Chinesetraditional literature suffered from unprecedented challenge and was subjected to theimpact of culture shock while a number of Chinese pioneers reflected on andre-evaluated the domestic culture, and turned their eyes to the western world in questfor truth to save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。