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The four men debate a series of three topics: (1) the relative merit of classical drama (upheld by Crites) vs. modern drama (championed by Eugenius); (2) whether French drama, as Lisideius maintains, is better than English drama (supported by Neander, who famously calls Shakespeare "the greatest soul, ancient or modern"); and (3) whether plays ...
sarcasm is an insincere form of politeness which is used to offend one's interlocutor. [9] Linguist John Haiman writes: "There is an extremely close connection between sarcasm and irony, and literary theorists in particular often treat sarcasm as simply the crudest and least interesting form of irony." Also, he adds:
Innuendo in British humour is evident in the literature as far back as Beowulf and Chaucer, and it is a prevalent theme in many British folk songs. Shakespeare often used innuendo in his comedies, but it is also often found in his other plays. [6] One example in Hamlet act 4 scene v reads:
Metaphysical poetry as a style was prevalent in the time of English playwright William Shakespeare, who admonished pretension with the phrase "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit". [3] It may combine word play with conceptual thinking, as a kind of verbal display requiring attention, without intending to be laugh-out-loud funny. Indeed wit ...
Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. [27] Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, [28] to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns."
His 2016 Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures were published in 2018 as Shakespeare's Originality. [6] He won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 1998 for Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, an ambitious study in comparative literature, and in 2001 published a book of essays On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature.
Appropriating Shakespeare: contemporary critical quarrels (1993) (ed.) The history of the reign of King Henry VII and selected works by Francis Bacon (1998) (ed.) The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral by Francis Bacon (1999) (ed.) English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999) Shakespeare, Co-author: a historical study of the five ...
In this he differed from Johnson, who thought Shakespeare best at comedy. The greatest of the plays were tragedies—particularly Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet—and Hazlitt's comments on tragedy are often integrated with his ideas about the significance of poetry and imaginative literature in general. [24]