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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 ...
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."
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:
Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.
Professor Robert DiYanni, in his book Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay [8] wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense."
Shakespeare, as was customary for other playwrights in his day, used history, other plays, and non-dramatic literature as sources for his plays. Additionally, tragedy was a new and exciting theatrical phenomenon in the late 16th century, rather than an established and self-evident dramatic form; because of this, Shakespeare and his ...
The mistaken identity (often of one twin for another) is a centuries-old comedic device used by Shakespeare in several of his works. The mistake can be either an intended act of deception or an accident. Modern examples include The Parent Trap; The Truth About Cats and Dogs; Sister, Sister; and the films of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
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]