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Eric Sams
Eric Sams (3 May 1926 – 13 September 2004) was a British musicologist and Shakespeare scholar. Life Born in London, Sams was raised in Essex. His early brilliance in school (Westcliff High School for Boys) earned him a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at the age of sixteen. His lifelong passion for puzzles and ciphers stood him in good stead in his wartime service in British Intelligence (1944–47). After the war he read Modern Languages at Cambridge (French and German), 1947–50; upon graduation he entered the Civil Service. In 1952 he married Enid Tidmarsh (died 2002), a pianist. Their elder son, Richard, is a Japanese scholar and chess master working in Tokyo; their younger son Jeremy Sams is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and theatre director. Musicology In music, Sams wrote on and studied a range of subjects and genres, though his specialty was German lieder. He wrote volumes on the songs of Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. His t ...
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London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major settlement for two millennia. The City of London, its ancient core and financial centre, was founded by the Romans as '' Londinium'' and retains its medieval boundaries.See also: Independent city § National capitals The City of Westminster, to the west of the City of London, has for centuries hosted the national government and parliament. Since the 19th century, the name "London" has also referred to the metropolis around this core, historically split between the counties of Middlesex, Essex, Surrey, Kent, and Hertfordshire, which largely comprises Greater London, governed by the Greater London Authority.The Greater London Authority consists of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. The London Mayor is distinguished fr ...
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Nicholas Rowe (writer)
Nicholas Rowe (; 20 June 1674 – 6 December 1718), English dramatist, poet and miscellaneous writer, was appointed Poet Laureate in 1715. His plays and poems were well-received during his lifetime, with one of his translations described as one of the greatest productions in English poetry. He was also considered the first editor of the works of William Shakespeare. Life Nicholas Rowe was born in Little Barford, Bedfordshire, England, son of John Rowe (d. 1692), barrister and sergeant-at-law, and Elizabeth, daughter of Jasper Edwards, on 20 June 1674. His family possessed a considerable estate at Lamerton in Devonshire. His father practised law and published Benlow's and Dallison's Reports during the reign of King James II. The future Poet Laureate was educated first at Highgate School, and then at Westminster School under the guidance of Richard Busby. In 1688, Rowe became a King's Scholar, which was followed by his entrance into Middle Temple in 1691. His entrance into Midd ...
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Chronology Of Shakespeare's Plays
This article presents a possible ''chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare''. Shakespearean scholars, beginning with Edmond Malone in 1778, have attempted to reconstruct the relative chronology of Shakespeare's ''oeuvre'' by various means, using external evidence (such as references to the plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries in both critical material and private documents, allusions in other plays, entries in the Stationers' Register, and records of performance and publication), and internal evidence (allusions within the plays to contemporary events, composition and publication dates of sources used by Shakespeare, stylistic analysis looking at the development of his style and diction over time, and the plays' context in the contemporary theatrical and literary ''milieu''). Most modern chronologies are based on the work of E.K. Chambers in "The Problem of Chronology" (1930), published in Volume 1 of his book ''William Shakespeare: A Study ...
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Henry VIII (play)
''Henry VIII'' is a collaborative history play, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of Henry VIII. An alternative title, , is recorded in contemporary documents, with the title not appearing until the play's publication in the First Folio of 1623. Stylistic evidence indicates that individual scenes were written by either Shakespeare or his collaborator and successor, John Fletcher. It is also somewhat characteristic of the late romances in its structure. It is noted for having more stage directions than any of Shakespeare's other plays. During a performance of ''Henry VIII'' at the Globe Theatre in 1613, a cannon shot employed for special effects ignited the theatre's thatched roof (and the beams), burning the original Globe building to the ground. Characters * Prologue/Epilogue * Henry VIII – King of England * Cardinal Wolsey – Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor; initially, Henry's chief adviser * Queen Katherine – later d ...
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Two Noble Kinsmen
''The Two Noble Kinsmen'' is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed jointly to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'', which had already been dramatised at least twice before. This play is believed to have been William Shakespeare's final play before he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon and died three years later. Formerly a point of controversy, the dual attribution is now generally accepted by scholarly consensus. Characters * Theseus, Duke of Athens * Palamon, nephew of the King of Thebes * Arcite, nephew of the King of Thebes * Pirithous, an Athenian general * Artesius, an Athenian captain * Valerius, a noble of Thebes * Six Knights * A Herald * A Jailer * Wooer of the jailer's daughter * A Doctor * Brother of the jailer * Friends of the jailer * A Gentleman * Gerrold, a schoolmaster * Hippolyta, wife of Theseus * Emilia, her sister * Three Queens * Jailer's Da ...
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Sir Thomas More (play)
''Sir Thomas More'' is an Elizabethan play and a dramatic biography based on particular events in the life of the Catholic martyr Thomas More, who rose to become the Lord Chancellor of England during the reign of Henry VIII. The play is considered to be written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle and revised by several writers. The manuscript is particularly notable for a three-page handwritten revision now widely attributed to William Shakespeare. Content This play is not a biography; it is a drama that deals with certain events in More’s life. Other significant facts are not described: There is no mention of his literary career, his book ''Utopia'', or the dispute between Henry VIII and the Pope in Rome. Also the life of More is at times expanded beyond what actually occurred and beyond the sources that were used, in order to suit the drama. What the play is about has been debated, but the issues revolve around obedience to the crown and rule of law, particularly when a pop ...
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William Shakespeare's Collaborations
Like most playwrights of his period, William Shakespeare did not always write alone. A number of his surviving plays are collaborative, or were revised by others after their original composition, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'', have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as ''Titus Andronicus'', are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars; recent work on computer analysis of textual style (word use, word and phrase patterns) has given reason to believe that parts of some of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are actually by other writers. In some cases the identity of the collaborator is known; in other cases there is a scholarly consensus; in others it is unknown or disputed. These debates are the province of Shakespeare attribution studies. Most collaborations occurred at the very beginning and the very end of Shakespeare's career. Elizabethan authorship The Elizabeth ...
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False Folio
False Folio is the term that Shakespeare scholars and bibliographers have applied to William Jaggard's printing of ten Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean plays together in 1619, the first attempt to collect Shakespeare's work in a single volume. There are only two complete extant copies. One is part of the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The other is held in the Special Collections at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. The term "false folio" intentionally evokes the folio collections of Shakespeare's works that appeared later: the First Folio of 1623 and its three seventeenth-century successors. The description "folio" is not strictly accurate, since the ten plays were printed in a larger-than-usual quarto format, not in folio; but the key qualifier is ''false'' folio. The texts in question were first examined with modern bibliographic procedures primarily by Alfred W. Pollard, W. W. Greg, and William J. Neidig. Pollard provides ...
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Memorial Reconstruction
Memorial reconstruction is the hypothesis that the scripts of some 17th century plays were written down from memory by actors who had played parts in them, and that those transcriptions were published.British LibrarRetrieved: 10 December 2007. The theory is suggested as an explanation for the so-called "bad quarto" versions of plays, in which the texts differ dramatically from later published versions, or appear to be corrupted or confused. The theory however is facing growing criticism by a number of scholars for being overly applied, and for being an elaborate theory, yet with little evidence to support it. In 1623, the preface to the First Folio of Shakespeare's works specifically marketed its content as correct, in contrast to the garbled texts of "stolen and surreptitious copies" published previously. Memorial reconstruction has been supposed to be one of the ways in which texts were "stolen". Examples of possible memorial reconstructions are early editions of Shakespeare, ...
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Bad Quarto
A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.Duthie, George Ian. "Introduction; the good and bad quartos". ''The Bad Quarto of Hamlet''. CUP Archive (1941). pp. 1-4 In contrast, a "good quarto" is considered to be a text that is authorised and which may have been printed from the author's manuscript (or a working draft thereof, known as his ''foul papers''), or from a scribal ...
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The Troublesome Reign Of King John
''The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England'', commonly called ''The Troublesome Reign of King John'' (c. 1589) is an Elizabethan history play, probably by George Peele, that is generally accepted by scholars as the source and model that William Shakespeare employed for his own '' King John'' (c. 1596). The play was printed three times in quarto in Shakespeare's era: Q1, 1591, was published by the stationer Sampson Clarke, with no attribution of authorship. The title page of Q1 states that the play was performed by Queen Elizabeth's Men. Although ''The Troublesome Reign'' is not an exceptionally long play, about 300 lines longer than Shakespeare's, the initial publication split the play into two parts. (The scholarly literature often refers to Parts 1 and 2 of the play as a result.) Q2, 1611, was published by John Helme (printed by Valentine Simmes); the authorship was assigned to "W. Sh." In this edition the first quarto's artificial division into two parts was remove ...
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The Taming Of A Shrew
''The Taming of the Shrew'' is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion. The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship; however, Petruchio "tames" her with various psychological and physical torments, such as keeping her from eating and drinking, until she becomes a desirable, compliant, and obedient bride. The subplot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's younger sister, Bianca, who is seen as the "ideal" woman. The question of whether the play is misogynistic has become the subject of considerable controversy, particularly among mode ...
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