William Shakespeare Research Paper

Behind the Scenes

Have you ever came to wonder what an author of something has to go through to make his work come together? As authors compose their literary work, he or she must make many decisions. One of these decisions concerns how to structure specific parts of a text. Such as, an author must decide where to begin or end a story, how to order the events and whether to provide a comedic or tragic resolution. This decision making process is one that William Shakespeare knows all too well. He has written about thirty-seven plays, each time he had to think it all out exactly how the beginning went then on to the middle, connecting it all with a big finally. William Shakespeare is known as the English national poet since he is widely considered

Shakespeare is a very mysterious man, he has no birth records, and we have no childhood records of what he did, where he received and education. The only thing we have is his plays, poems, and sonnets and we also have church and court records. We do know he married Anne Hathaway and had children. Shakespeare first earned a living as an actor and a playwright. By 1597 he had written fifteen of the thirty-seven, he was a huge hit, everyone loved coming and watching his shows. He spent most of his time writing, and he and a business partner built their own theater in which they called the Globe. Once he became his own entrepreneur, business was booming. Shakespeare’s early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that did not always go with the story’s plot or characters. This is what made him such an amazing play wright, he knew what to say to keep the audience entertained. William Shakespeare put much thought and structure in the many plays, poems, and

This can be kind of confusing, because you are all intent on one play and all that is happening within this play. Then suddenly you are thrown into watching another play with different characters and a different plot. In Hamlet, he creates a play that will show whether his stepfather/uncle killed his father. It is called the “Dumbshow” it shows exactly what happened and how his father was murdered. The audience had to shift their attention to what was happening in the play, but also they could not lose track of the character’s expressions. Especially King Claudius’ because he was the one that we were trying to figure out if he was the killer or not. Since Shakespeare throws this curve ball, he set up the structure of forcing the audience to play close attention to more than just the main characters. This puts a whole lot more meaning into the play and effected the audience in a good way. The utilization of the multiple play structure situates a relationship to the creative process that Shakespeare has. It allows the audience to question the creativity. There is a shared responsibility between the playwright and actors, the biggest one of all though, come the responsibility of the audience interpreting Shakespeare’s