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"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
The skull was a symbol of melancholy for Shakespeare's contemporaries. [4] An old Yoruba folktale tells of a man who encountered a skull mounted on a post by the wayside. To his astonishment, the skull spoke. The man asked the skull why it was mounted there. The skull said that it was mounted there for talking.
[On the other hand r]ather than … explicit references to death, Come and Go spirals delicately around absence and threat." [24] "However, more than death, it is ‘the peevishness of decay’ [25] that pervades the scene, illustrated by the petty bickering and punctuated by the repeated silences that threaten to stop what action there is."
Shakespeare's company is known to have played at court during the time of the visit, and so would have encountered the foreign visitors at first hand. [24] Among Shakespeare's non-fiction, or partly-fictionalised, sources were Gasparo Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice [25] [26] and Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa.
William Shakespeare (c. 23 [a] April 1564 – 23 April 1616) [b] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. [3] [4] [5] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").
The Gravediggers (or Clowns) are examples of Shakespearean fools (also known as clowns or jesters), a recurring type of character in Shakespeare's plays. Like most Shakespearean fools, the Gravediggers are peasants or commoners that use their great wit and intellect to get the better of their superiors, other people of higher social status, and each other.
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Sonnet 20 is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126), the subject of the sonnet is widely interpreted as being male, thereby raising questions about the sexuality of its author.