2. THE INFLUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE RENAISSANCE PERIOD

3. RENAISSANCE ▪ Broadly speaking, the Renaissance period is used to describe the era when Europeans moved away from the restrictive ideas of the Middle Ages. The ideology that dominated the Middle Ages was heavily focused on the absolute power of God and was enforced by the formidable Roman Catholic Church. ▪ From the 14th century onward, people started to break away from this idea. The artists and thinkers of the Renaissance did not necessarily reject the idea of God. In fact, Shakespeare himself may have been Catholic. The Renaissance cultural creators did, however, question humankind’s relationship to God. ▪ This questioning produced enormous upheaval in the accepted social hierarchy. And the new focus on humanity created new-found freedom for artists, writers, and philosophers to be inquisitive about the world around them. They often drew on the more human-centered classical writing and art of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.

4. Shakespeare, the Renaissance Man ▪ The Renaissance arrived in England rather late. Shakespeare was born toward the end of the broader Europe-wide Renaissance period, just as it was peaking in England. He was one of the first playwrights to bring the Renaissance’s core values to the theater.

5. SHKESPEARE AND THE RENAISSANCE ▪ William Shakespeare was among the people who brought about a lot of changes during the renaissance period in England and transformed literature, thus affecting later culture. His biography evidences that Shakespeare (1564-1616) was among the most prominent poets and authors who ever lived (E-Notes.com 2011).Shakespeare ▪ He is the most famous writer of all times with his works being used even today in many societies in the world. He started his career in London in 1592 when the theatre in England has just begun to flourish. ▪ Due to his excellent work, he had a broad audience, mainly composed of people from the middle class who flocked to the theatres to see his work (McEvoy 92). The most famous and important plays Shakespeare wrote during the renaissance are Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. Before his retirement, he had made a lot of innovations in the genres, comedy, drama, romance, and other forms of performing arts, which we still use up to the present moment.

6. Shakespeare embraced the Renaissance in the following ways: ▪ Shakespeare updated the simplistic, two-dimensional writing style of pre- Renaissance drama. He focused on creating human characters with psychological complexity. Hamlet is perhaps the most famous example of this. ▪ The upheaval in social hierarchy allowed Shakespeare to explore the complexity and humanity of every character, regardless of their social position. Even monarchs were portrayed as having human emotions and were capable of making terrible mistakes. Consider King Lear or Macbeth. ▪ Shakespeare utilized his knowledge of Greek and Roman classics when writing his plays. Before the Renaissance, these texts had been suppressed by the Catholic Church.

7. How Did Shakespeare Impact the Renaissance Period? ▪ Shakespeare is usually referred to as the Renaissance man due to the contributions he had on the lives of people during this period. As stated earlier, there were a lot of cultural changes during this period. Most of these changes were initiated by the elite people in the society who felt that the rights and freedoms of individuals in the community were being violated. ▪ These people noticed that the few people of the upper class were using the law and religion to their advantage, which led them to benefit more from the available resources as compared to the other people of the society who composed the bulk of the community. This led to the emergence of a group of philosophers, artists, writers, and scholars who were inquisitive about their surroundings. ▪ As a result, these elite people advocated for equality of all people in the society, raising a lot of issues that affected the economy, religion, and political stability of the community.

8. How Did Shakespeare Impact the Renaissance Period? ▪ To protect their dignity, the government started to persecute such people and tried to minimize the influence of the movements which such people had created to fight for people’s rights. To avoid persecution, most of these people hid under the umbrella of the public and used public means to air out their grievances and ideologies. William Shakespeare was among the people who embraced the renaissance. ▪ Through his works, he brought out various issues that were affecting society. He brought out the problems which the monarch and the general community were facing, geographical zealotry hand the effects of the renaissance period in the society. While doing so, he also entertained his audience.

9. How Did Shakespeare Impact the Renaissance Period? ▪ The people loved his works because he touched on the key issues which were affecting them at the individual level and as a society. That is why his works were very famous during those days and still are at the present moment. ▪ Shakespeare is credited with having brought about various innovations in the world performing arts. Some of these innovations were used to accommodate the information which he was passing to his audience about the renaissance.

10. Conclusion ▪ William Shakespeare’s contributions to the renaissance were of great significance. He was not just a writer but an advocate of change in the lifestyles of people of Europe, just like the philosophers, artists, and other scholars. Through his works, the popularity of literature, plays, and poems increased.

11. Conclusion ▪ This is because they all were talking about various issues which the society was facing. As a result, therefore, Shakespeare used his works to enlighten the public on what they were facing and means through which they could face such oppression. This led to the emergence of modern society in which we are living now.

12. Conclusion ▪ Shakespeare influenced the Renaissance by standardizing the English language and expanding its vocabulary, deepening the humanity of the characters in his plays through emotional complexity and using elaborate references to Greek and Roman mythology in his writing. His attention to the intricacies of language, characterization and plot became an example to follow for future playwrights and other writers.

13. THE INFLUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE LITERATURE AND POETRY

14. Shakespeare's Influence From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ▪ Shakespeare's influence extends from theatre and literatures to present-day movies, Western philosophy, and the English language itself. ▪ He transformed European theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through innovation in characterization, plot, language and genre. ▪ Shakespeare's writings have also impacted many notable novelists and poets over the years, including Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and Maya Angelou, and continue to influence new authors even today. ▪ Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world after the various writers of the Bible; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages.

15. Shakespeare's Influence From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ▪ Early Modern English as a literary medium was unfixed in structure and vocabulary in comparison to Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and was in a constant state of fluxe. ▪ When William Shakespeare began writing his plays, the English language was rapidly absorbing words from other languages due to wars, exploration, diplomacy and colonization. By the age of Elizabeth, English had become widely used with the expansion of philosophy, theology and physical sciences, but many writers lacked the vocabulary to express such ideas. ▪ To accommodate this, writers such as Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare expressed new ideas and distinctions by inventing, borrowing or adopting a word or a phrase from another language, known as neologising. [13] Scholars estimate that, between the years 1500 and 2018, nouns, verbs and modifiers of Latin, Greek and modern Romance languages added 30,000 new words to the English language

16. Influence on Theater ▪ Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. Shakespeare created some of the most admired plays in Western literature (with Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear being ranked among the world's greatest plays), and transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through plot and language. ▪ Specifically, in plays like Hamlet, Shakespeare "integrated characterization with plot," such that if the main character was different in any way, the plot would be totally changed. ▪ In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy together to create a new romantic tragedy genre (previous to Shakespeare, romance had not been considered a worthy topic for tragedy). ▪ Through his soliloquies, Shakespeare showed how plays could explore a character's inner motivations and conflict (up until Shakespeare, soliloquies were often used by playwrights to "introduce [characters], convey information, provide an exposition or reveal plans").

17. Influence on Theater ▪ His plays exhibited "spectacular violence, with loose and episodic plotting, and with mingling of comedy with tragedy". In King Lear, Shakespeare had deliberately brought together two plots of different origins. Shakespeare's work is also lauded for its insight into emotion. His themes regarding the human condition make him more acclaimed than any of his contemporaries. ▪ Humanism and contact with popular thinking gave vitality to his language. Shakespeare's plays borrowed ideas from popular sources, folk traditions, street pamphlets, and sermons. Shakespeare also used groundlings widely in his plays. The use of groundlings "saved the drama from academic stiffness and preserved its essential bias towards entertainment in comedy ".Hamlet is an outstanding example of "groundlings" quickness and response.Use of groundlings enhanced Shakespeare's work practically and artistically. ▪ He represented English people more concretely and not as puppets. His skills have found expression in chronicles, or history plays, and tragedies.

18. ▪ Shakespeare's earliest years were dominated by history plays and a few comedies that formed a link to the later written tragedies. Nine out of eighteen plays he produced in the first decade of his career were chronicles or histories. His histories were based on the prevailing Tudor political thought. They portrayed the follies and achievements of kings, their misgovernment, church and problems arising out of these. "In shaping, compressing, and altering chronicles, Shakespeare gained the art of dramatic design; and in the same way he developed his remarkable insight into character, its continuity and its variation". His characters were very near to reality. Influence on Theater

19. CHARACTERS ▪ "Shakespeare's characters are more sharply individualized after Love's Labour's Lost". His Richard II and Bolingbroke are complex and solid figures whereas Richard III has more "humanity and comic gusto".The Falstaff trilogy is in this respect very important. Falstaff, although a minor character, has a powerful reality of its own. "Shakespeare uses him as a commentator who passes judgments on events represented in the play, in the light of his own super abundant comic vitality".Falstaff, although outside "the prevailing political spirit of the play", throws insight into the different situations arising in the play. This shows that Shakespeare had developed a capacity to see the plays as whole, something more than characters and expressions added together. ▪ In Falstaff trilogy, through the character of Falstaff, he wants to show that in society "where touchstone of conduct is success, and in which humanity has to accommodate itself to the claims of expediency, there is no place for Falstaff", a loyal human-being. This sentiment is so true even after centuries.

20. LITERATURE Shakespeare united the three main streams of literature: verse, poetry, and drama. ▪ To the versification of the English language, he imparted his eloquence and variety giving highest expressions with elasticity of language. ▪ The second, the sonnets and poetry, was bound in structure. He imparted economy and intensity to the language. In the third and the most important area, the drama, he saved the language from vagueness and vastness and infused actuality and vividness. ▪ Shakespeare's work in prose, poetry, and drama marked the beginning of modernization of English language by introduction of words and expressions, style and form to the language.

21. Blank verse ▪ Many critics and scholars consider Shakespeare's first plays experimental, and believe the playwright was still learning from his own mistakes. Gradually his language followed the "natural process of artistic growth, to find its adequate projection in dramatic form". ▪ As he continued experimenting, his style of writing found many manifestations in plays. The dialogues in his plays were written in verse form and followed a decasyllabic rule.In Titus Andronicus, decasyllables have been used throughout. "There is considerable pause; and though the inflexibility of the line sound is little affected by it, there is a certain running over of sense". His work is still experimental in Titus Andronicus. ▪ However, in Love's Labour's Lost and The Comedy of Errors, there is "perfect metre-abundance of rime [rhyme], plenty of prose, arrangement in stanza". After these two comedies, he kept experimenting until he reached a maturity of style. "Shakespeare's experimental use of trend and style, as well as the achieved development of his blank verses, are all evidences of his creative invention and influences". [citation needed] Through experimentation of tri-syllabic substitution and decasyllabic rule he developed the blank verse to perfection and introduced a new style.Love's Labour's LostThe Comedy of Errorscitation neededtri-syllabicblank verse ▪ "Shakespeare's blank verse is one of the most important of all his influences on the way the English language was written". [citation needed] He used the blank verse throughout in his writing career experimenting and perfecting it. The free speech rhythm gave Shakespeare more freedom for experimentation. "Adaptation of free speech rhythm to the fixed blank-verse framework is an outstanding feature of Shakespeare's poetry". [21] The striking choice of words in common place blank verse influenced "the run of the verse itself, expanding into images which eventually seem to bear significant repetition, and to form, with the presentation of character and action correspondingly developed, a more subtle and suggestive unity". [21] Expressing emotions and situations in form of a verse gave a natural flow to language with an added sense of flexibility and spontaneity.citation needed [21]

22. Blank verse "Shakespeare's blank verse is one of the most important of all his influences on the way the English language was written". He used the blank verse throughout in his writing career experimenting and perfecting it. The free speech rhythm gave Shakespeare more freedom for experimentation. "Adaptation of free speech rhythm to the fixed blank-verse framework is an outstanding feature of Shakespeare's poetry". The striking choice of words in common place blank verse influenced "the run of the verse itself, expanding into images which eventually seem to bear significant repetition, and to form, with the presentation of character and action correspondingly developed, a more subtle and suggestive unity". Expressing emotions and situations in form of a verse gave a natural flow to language with an added sense of flexibility and spontaneity.

23. POETRY ▪ He introduced in poetry two main factors – "verbal immediacy and the moulding of stress to the movement of living emotion". Shakespeare's words reflected passage of time with "fresh, concrete vividness" giving the reader an idea of the time frame.His remarkable capacity to analyze and express emotions in simple words was noteworthy: When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies– — (Sonnet CXXXVIII) ▪ In the sonnet above, he has expressed in very simple words "complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion". ▪ The sonnet form was limited structurally, in theme and in expressions. Liveliness of Shakespeare's language and strict discipline of the sonnets imparted economy and intensity to his writing style. "It encouraged the association of compression with depth of content and variety of emotional response to a degree unparalleled in English". Complex human emotions found simple expressions in Shakespeare's language

24. SHAKESPEARE OF TODAY ▪ Shakespeare’s works continued to form a lasting impression on subsequent literary composition, art, media, and even psychology. From Coleridge to Tennyson, he influenced most romantic poets, and even novelists Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville were strongly impacted by Shakespeare’s dramatic writing style. Even noted psychologist Sigmund Freud drew on his characters; he frequently used Hamlet and Macbeth for his theories on the human psyche. To add on, numerous artists and sculptors created works of art modeled after scenes and characters in his plays. Moreover, inspired movie, opera, and musical directors repeatedly modernized his plays’ plots to create popular media. ▪ And even up to now that we are still studying his works and still using his works to entertain, to learn or to do a profession. Shakespeare will live in a thousand years and there is immortality in his works.

25. Conclusion To conclude, Shakespeare’s endless contributions to the fields of poetry and playwriting, paired with his longstanding legacy, have ensured him a permanent place in history. Besides writing a phenomenal number of profound plays, he produced a variety of brilliant sonnets and poems that surpassed all others. Consequently, these admired works deeply affected and influenced the people and language of the past, present, and no doubt the future. To summarize, there is definitely no argument as to why Shakespeare’s immortal legacy or lasting literary works have never been and never will be matched; as critics once praised, “he was not of an age, but for all time!”