William Shakespeare – Page 35 – Interesting Literature

Domestic Violence in A Yorkshire Tragedy: An Analysis

By Sara Read

The ongoing explosive storyline between Helen and Rob Titchener being played out on the BBC Radio 4 show, The Archers has attracted a lot of attention. The plot is one of domestic abuse by coercive and controlling behaviour, which culminated in Helen stabbing Rob in Sunday night’s episode (3.4.16 available on Listen Again here). If you’re not familiar with the story so far, you can catch up here. Listeners have been spellbound by the plot which has been played out slowly to match the reality of the build-up of this abuse in as close to a real-life timeframe a possible.

Five Fascinating Facts about King Lear

Fun facts about one of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies

1. The original story on which Shakespeare based King Lear had a happy ending. King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s must-read plays. Yet less than a hundred years after the Bard wrote the play, it was given a rather dramatic (as it were) rewrite by Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate. Yet this is not the full truth. It is often said that Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of King Lear and then Nahum Tate rewrote the ending as a happy one. This much is true, but what is little known is the fact that the story of King Lear was originally a happy one, when it first appeared in the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. The anonymous play, King Leir, on which Shakespeare based his tragedy also ends on a somewhat more upbeat note.

10 Classic Shakespeare Plays Everyone Should Read

The best of the Bard’s plays, with some interesting facts about them

Every Shakespeare play is a classic, of course. But William Shakespeare left behind nearly forty plays, including his collaborations with John Fletcher and others, and it would be disingenuous to claim that they all have equal ‘classic’ status among the Bard’s work. What we’ve compiled here, then, is less a definitive list of ‘best Shakespeare plays’ and more a small selection of some of his most talked-about, reread, performed, and adapted plays. We’ve included some facts about them as we go. We’ve not attempted to place them in any preferential order: that would be a step too far. But what, if you had to choose, would be the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays?

November 28 in Literary History: William Blake Born

The most significant events in the history of books on the 28th of November

1582: William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway pay a £40 bond for their marriage licence.

1628: John Bunyan is born. He wrote much of his defining work, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), while imprisoned in Bedford Jail. As well as the famous allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress – which, as well as arguably being an early English novel, also gave us the name of another classic novel, Vanity Fair – Bunyan also wrote a sort of spiritual memoir, Grace Abounding (1666), and The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680), a sort of follow-up book to The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The Best Books about Shakespeare

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

We thought it was time we offered our pick of the best books about William Shakespeare: the best introductions to his life and his work. The following is not designed to be an exhaustive list, but many of these books were written by leading Shakespeare scholars and each contains something which every fan of the Bard should know.