Open Literature

The quarto edition of this play was printed in 1595 as The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, but appears in the highly revised version of the First Folio as The Third Part …

On March 12, 1594, a quarto play was entered in the Stationers’ Register by bookseller Thomas Millington, and printed by Thomas Creede later that year, under the title The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and …

Henry VI, Part 1 invites controversy. The First Folio prints it chronologically among Shakespeare’s histories, first of three Henry VI plays, diverging from order of composition. Thereby Heminge and Condell imply an intended sequence, but Henry VI, Part 1 may be a ‘prequel’ after The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses …

Written about 1608, Coriolanus maintains the mature Shakespeare’s shift in historical settings from the Middle Ages to earlier periods. It is one of Shakespeare’s most relentlessly political plays, with a hero’s personality that seems almost as schematic as Timon of Athens’ (also derived from Shakespeare’s favored source in Plutarch’s Lives). This hero of the early …

Much Ado About Nothing dates from around 1598, grouped with Shakespeare’s sophisticated middle comedies As You Like It and Twelfth Night, but sharing Merry Wives’ more realistic use of prose. Its traditional plot (resembling the twenty-second of Bandello’s novelle, and the fifth book of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) presents the disruption of the marriage of Claudio, …

In Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare is at his most verbally dexterous, revelling in word play and elaborate linguistic devices. The poem is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and takes its story from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567). Venus, the goddess of love, attempts to seduce Adonis, a young hunter: “Backward she …

The story of Lucrece, found in both Ovid and Livy, has inspired scores of famous depictions. Britten, Rembrandt, Chaucer, Titian, Gower, Dante, Raphael and Richardson all used the story in their work, but none as famously as Shakespeare in his long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The poem shares its theme with Venus …

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is often euphemistically referred to as one of Shakespeare’s ‘early plays’. This phrase attempts to account for its relative immaturity; aesthetically and dramaturgically it is considered by many to be inferior to the ‘later plays’. The actual date of writing is not certain, but the first record we have of …