Shakespeare Study Questions

William Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time.

He lived in the country of England during the Renaissance.

He was born in the year 1564, when Elizabeth I was queen of England.

England was established as a world power in 1588, when the English defeated an attempted invasion by Spanish Armada.

Plays in which dialogue is mostly poetry is called verse drama.

In the 1590's, Shakespeare's theatre group was a place called the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

When Queen Elizabeth I died, the group's new sponsor was King James I and the group changed it's name to the King's Men.

The Globe Theatre was located on the banks of the Thomas River.

The theatre was three stories, made of wood, and could hold as many as three thousand spectators. Customers, called theatergoers stood on the pit by the stage and paid the lowest price for admission. Richer patrons sat in balconies, also called inner galleries.

Most theatres in that day had no artificial lighting or heating, so performances were given in daylight in warmer weather.

Many commonly quoted phrases came from Shakespeare's plays. Some examples are: " Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears." from Julius Caesar, "O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" from Romeo and Juliet, and "To be or not to be." from Hamlet.

Terms

1. Verse Dramas - plays that the dialogue is mostly poetry.

2. Blank Verse - nonrhythmic lines of iambic pentameter.

3. Iambic Pentameter - distressed, stressed.

4. Soliloquy - a long speech given by a character while alone on stage to reveal his or her private thoughts.

5. Aside - a character's quiet remark to the audience or another character that no one else on stage can hear.

6. Rhetorical Devices - persuade.
1) Repetition
2) Parallelism
3) Rhetorical Questions

7. Irony - contrast between appearance and reality.

8. Dramatic Irony - reader knows something that one or more characters do not know.

9. Pun - play on words.

10. Allusion - whenever a writer refers to a person, place, poem, book, or movie that he expects alluding, indicating, inference.

You Should Know:

1. Ambition - selfish, a strong desire for status, fame, or power.

2. Vanity - something that is vain.

3. Envy - such hatred.

4. Revenge - plotting against someone in an evil way, somebody turns against the person, and that gets payback on that somebody who betrayed him or her.

In your opinion, is it right to ask a close friend to do something dangerous? Explain.

Not really because it would be so wrong to say or do something like that. It's really unnecessary.