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William Shakespeare — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / The Elizabethan Stage & the English Language

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 12 primary public-domain works.

What William Shakespeare argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), the playwright and poet who stands at the centre of English literature as no other writer stands at the centre of any other. He wrote for a working theatre — the Globe on the South Bank of the Thames — and in doing so gave the language more of its phrases, its characters, and its sense of what a human being is than any single mind before or since.
  • His range is the marvel: the headlong love of Romeo and Juliet, the political murder of Julius Caesar, the bottomless grief of King Lear, the jealousy that ruins Othello, the ambition that damns Macbeth, the doubt that paralyses Hamlet. Against the tragedies stand the comedies of disguise and reconciliation — Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream — and the late romance of The Tempest, his farewell to the stage.
  • Beyond the playhouse he was also a great lyric poet: the 154 Sonnets of 1609 perfected the English sonnet and wrote love, time, and mortality into fourteen lines that have never been bettered. Eleven plays and the complete Sonnets are gathered here, every one in the public domain and every one still performed, filmed, and quarrelled over four centuries on.
  • Each card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of Shakespeare — the Chandos portrait, the Cobbe portrait, and the Droeshout engraving from the 1623 First Folio, the image his own colleagues chose to front his collected plays. All twelve works are in the public domain.

Primary works in William Shakespeare (12)

Chambers connected to William Shakespeare

  • First Plays — Shakespeare is the summit of the dramatic tradition. What the Greek and medieval stage began, he brought to its fullest height — taking tragedy and comedy alike to a depth of character the first playwrights only pointed toward.
  • Poetry — Shakespeare is one of the supreme lyric poets. The Sonnets perfected the English sonnet form, and the blank verse of the plays carried lyric poetry onto the stage, fusing the song and the speech into a single instrument.
  • First Fantasy Literature — Shakespeare is a maker of enchanted worlds. The fairy wood of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the magic island of The Tempest, with Puck, Ariel, and Caliban, stand directly behind the whole later tradition of literary fantasy.