Shakespeare's Place in the Exam

The idea

Shakespeare is the single author this exam is most likely to name, and this unit has given you the works and the methods to meet him. His life is sparse in facts: born and buried in Stratford, an actor and partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, his plays gathered by Heminges and Condell in the First Folio of sixteen twenty-three. The Folio sorted them as comedies, histories and tragedies, and later critics named the last plays romances. The sonnets, published in sixteen-oh-nine, address a young man and a dark lady, and their biography is unproven; Sonnet eighteen promises the beloved immortality in verse, Sonnet seventy-three shrinks its images from a season to a day to a fire, and Sonnet one hundred thirty mocks Petrarchan comparisons to praise honestly. The comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, move lovers through confusion to marriage, and The Merchant of Venice darkens the form around Shylock. The histories follow Prince Hal from Falstaff's tavern to Henry the Fifth's battle. The tragedies are the core: Romeo and Juliet's feud, Hamlet's ghost, delay and soliloquies, Othello's jealousy worked by Iago, Lear's love test and madness with Gloucester's parallel blindness, Macbeth's ambition and its guilt, and Antony and Cleopatra's Rome against Egypt. The Tempest ends the career in forgiveness. His blank verse carries the serious action and his prose the comic, his fools tell the truth, and Ben Jonson called him not of an age but for all time. Identify a quoted speech by its place, its situation and its voice, read a soliloquy as an argument, and place any passage in the comic or tragic shape, and most Shakespeare questions are answered.