LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Play
built 141 days ago
A workshop at the Bard's Globe Theatre in London provided new ideas that will enable Richard to share not only the text of Shakespeare's plays but the historical and cultural context in which the dramas were written and performed. Richard's participation in the workshop was made possible by a grant from The Fund for Teachers, an innovative new foundation with the goal of recognizing, stimulating and enhancing the experience of elementary and secondary teachers.
Source:
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date...[66] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.[67] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[68] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[69] Their composition was influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe
Source:
Among Shakespeare's most important sources, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) is significant for the English history plays, although Shakespeare did not hesitate to transform a character when it suited his dramatic purposes. For his Roman tragedies he used Sir Thomas North's translation (1579) of Plutarch's Lives. Many times he rewrote old plays, and twice he turned English prose romances into drama (As You Like It and The Winter's Tale). He ... used the works of contemporary European authors. For further information on Shakespeare's sources, see the table entitled Shakespeare's Play.
Source:
Oxfordians find it suspicious that the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays have not survived. They darkly hint that this is evidence of a coverup, and have even gone so far as to x-ray the Shakespeare monument in Stratford because of a suspicion that the manuscripts may have been hidden inside. (They weren't.) But there is nothing the slightest bit suspicious about the absence of Shakespeare's manuscripts, since virtually no playhouse manuscripts from that era have survived at all. Read The Survival of Manuscripts by Giles Dawson and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton (taken from their 1965 book Elizabethan Handwriting) for the opinion of two scholars who spent decades examining documents from Shakespeare's era.
Source:
Fifteen of Shakespeare's plays were printed during his lifetime, probably without his sanction. He was careless of the fate of his works, leaving them to the mercy of the dramatic companies that owned them and to speculating publishers. The first edition of his plays, a folio edited by his former comrades, Heminge and Condell, appeared in 1623. A second edition followed in 1632, and a third in 1663. Another folio in 1685 supplied the demands of his English readers, until Nicholas Rowe published the first critical edition in 1709.
Source:
FILM ADAPTATIONS - Shakespeare's plays have been adapted to screen about 300 times. Here's some films: The Taming of the Shrew, 1929, starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks - A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935, dir. by Max Reinhardt-William Dieterle - Romeo and Juliet, 1935, dir. by George Cukor - As You Like It, 1936, dir. by Paul Czinner (script adaptation: J.M.Barrie and Robert Cullen) - Henry V, 1945, dir. by Lawrence Olivier - Hamlet, 1948, dir.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Shakespeare's Play