William Shakespeare

Just an additional major playwright : William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
Shakespeare was educated at the King's New School in Stratford,a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar, the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. .  and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.

By 1592, there is evidence William Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in London and possibly had several plays produced. The September 20, 1592 edition of the Stationers' Register (a guild publication) includes an article by London playwright Robert Greene that takes a few jabs at William Shakespeare: "...There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country," Greene wrote of Shakespeare.

Scholars differ on the interpretation of this criticism, but most agree that it was Greene's way of saying Shakespeare was reaching above his rank, trying to match better known and educated playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe or Greene himself.

By the early 1590s, documents show William Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, an acting company in London. After the crowning of King James I, in 1603, the company changed its name to the King's Men. From all accounts, the King's Men company was very popular, and records show that Shakespeare had works published and sold as popular literature. The theater culture in 16th century England was not highly admired by people of high rank. However, many of the nobility were good patrons of the performing arts and friends of the actors. Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first- and second-published poems: "Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lucrece" (1594).

By 1597, 15 of the 37 plays written by William Shakespeare were published. Civil records show that at this time he purchased the second largest house in Stratford, called New House, for his family. It was a four-day ride by horse from Stratford to London, so it is believed that Shakespeare spent most of his time in the city writing and acting and came home once a year during the 40-day Lenten period, when the theaters were closed.

By 1599, William Shakespeare and his business partners built their own theater on the south bank of the Thames River, which they called the Globe. In 1605, Shakespeare purchased leases of real estate near Stratford for 440 pounds, which doubled in value and earned him 60 pounds a year.

William Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the story's plot or characters. However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words. With only small degrees of variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose.

William Shakespeare's first plays were mostly histories written in the early 1590s. Richard II, Henry VI (parts 1, 2 and 3) and Henry V dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt rulers, and have been interpreted by drama historians as Shakespeare's way of justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty.

Shakespeare also wrote several comedies during his early period: the witty romance A Midsummer Night's Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice, the wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Other plays, possibly written before 1600, include Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

It was in William Shakespeare's later period, after 1600, that he wrote the tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth. In these, Shakespeare's characters present vivid impressions of human temperament that are timeless and universal. Possibly the best known of these plays is Hamlet, which explores betrayal, retribution, incest and moral failure. These moral failures often drive the twists and turns of Shakespeare's plots, destroying the hero and those he loves.

In William Shakespeare's final period, he wrote several tragicomedies. Among these are Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Though graver in tone than the comedies, they are not the dark tragedies of King Lear or Macbeth because they end with reconciliation and forgiveness.


Tradition has it that William Shakespeare died on his birthday, April 23, 1616, though many scholars believe this is a myth. Church records show he was interred at Trinity Church on April 5, 1616.

In his will, he left the bulk of his possessions to his eldest daughter, Susanna. Though entitled to a third of his estate, little seems to have gone to his wife, Anne, whom he bequeathed his "second-best bed." This has drawn speculation that she had fallen out of favor, or that the couple was not close.

Today, his plays are highly popular and constantly studied and reinterpreted in performances with diverse cultural and political contexts. The genius of Shakespeare's characters and plots are that they present real human beings in a wide range of emotions and conflicts that transcend their origins in Elizabethan England.

Works Cited
http://www.biography.com/people/william-shakespeare-9480323
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

Major playwrights: Susan Glaspell

Major Playwrights : Susan Glaspell

Susan Keating Glaspell was born on July 1, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa, America to Elmer Glaspell and Alice Keating. She attended Davenport High School, where she graduated as a valedictorian. Glaspell went to Drake University and then to the University of Chicago. After graduating from university Glaspell worked in the Des Moines Daily News as a reporter. Glaspell abruptly resigned from her job after reporting a murder story about a woman strangling her husband in his bed which would soon be an inspiration for her to write her play "Trifles". With her husband George Cram Cook she founded the Provincetown Players Theater. Her play "Alison's House" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Glaspell died on july 27,1948. Susan Glaspell was known to be one of America's prominent feminist writers.

Major Playwriters: Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen born on 20th March 1828 in Skien, Grenland, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway. His parents were Knud Ibsen and Marichen Ibsen. Knud Ibsen's paternal ancestors were ship's captains of Danish origin, but he decided to become a merchant, having initial success. His marriage to Marichen Altenburg, a daughter of ship-owner Johan Andreas Altenburg (1763–1824) and Hedevig Christine Paus (1763–1848), was "an excellent family arrangement. Marichen's mother and Knud's step-father were sister and brother, and the bride and groom, who had grown up together, were practically regarded as sister and brother themselves. Marichen Altenburg was a fine catch, the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in the prosperous lumber town of Skien." Theodore Jorgenson points out that "Henrik's ancestry [thus] reached back into the important Telemark family of Paus both on the father's and on the mother's side. Hedvig Paus must have been well known to the young dramatist, for she lived until 1848." Henrik Ibsen was fascinated by his parents' "strange, almost incestuous marriage," and would treat the subject of incestuous relationships in several plays, notably his masterpiece Rosmersholm.

His father's financial ruin which began when he was only seven years old would later become one of the influences in his writings. Most of  his plays also centralise on the suffering of women (as can be seen in Hedda Gabbler and A Doll's House).

The play "Catilina" was published in 1850 was written under the pseudyom Brynjolf Bjarme when he was 20 years old. However his play "Peer Gynt" made him famous as a playwright in 1876. Ibsen married Suzannah Thorensen on 18 June 1858 and by December 1859 had a son, Sigurd. Ibsen left Christiania on self imposed exile to Sorrento, Italy. bsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany, in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and began work on his first contemporary realist drama The Pillars of Society, first published and performed in 1877. A Doll's House followed in 1879. This play is a scathing criticism of the marital roles accepted by men and women which characterized Ibsen's society.

Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. He had a profound influence on the young James Joyce who venerates him in his early autobiographical novel "Stephen Hero". Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.

Henrik Ibsen died on 23 March 1906 in his house in Christiania after a series of strokes in March 1900. He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo (Christiania).

A poem: Auschwitz..

 Auschwitz

the countless eyes

those eyes that were filled with tears

with nothing but fear,

embodied into their souls

stripped bare,

nothing to cover them

like animals

sent to live in a wooden,crowded cage.

scared,separated from their loved ones

afraid, knowing that death surrounds them

no chance

to even know that 

you may never see 

your father and loved ones

ruthlessly taken from you.

death is all over the place

forced to work

day and night

barely any food to survive

in that miserable hell...

suddenly a few would disappear

into the gas chambers

only dead bodies come out from the chambers

men, women,

even young children.

a young girl was taken here

to this place that was seen as hell

with her sister she tried and tried

to survive

with some hope 

that she may return

and live her dreams

 

alas,

it was not so

for she departed that hell

dying in a terrible and pitiful manner 

just days after her sister died

this young one may have given up as well

letting herself go

not fighting to live anymore

or hoping to be liberated from the hell

that was known as 

 Auschwitz...

A Stray Bullet (Death in Gaza, Everyday)

A Stray Bullet (Death in Gaza, Everyday)

(inspired by the talk given by poet and scholar Refaat Alrareer)

A father,
outside buying food for his young children,
A sudden shot fired,
at the market-place where the father was,
that stray bullet hitting an unintended target
the food dropping from his hands
scattering over the floors of the marketplace
mingling together with the blood seeping out from him.

Such a small thing,
yet so fatal,
in the wrong hands,
spells death for the innocent
coming to anyone,
anywhere,
anytime...

War Poetry: World War 1 to Contemporary War Poetry

War Poetry: World War 1 to Contemporary War Poetry

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

  by Julia Ward Howe
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:  
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;  
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:  
            His truth is marching on.  
  
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;  
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:  
            His day is marching on.  
  
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:  
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,  
            Since God is marching on."
  
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;  
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:  
O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
            Our God is marching on.  
  
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,  
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:  
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,  
            While God is marching on.




Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.

In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of experience. The work of a handful of these, such as Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, has endured to become what Andrew Motion has called ‘a sacred national text’.

Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia.

In the global, ‘total war’ of 1939-45, that saw the holocaust, the blitz and Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war. The same was true for the civil conflicts and revolutions in Spain and Eastern Europe. That does not mean, however, that every poet responded to war by writing directly about it. For some, the proper response of a poet was one of consciously (conscientiously) keeping silent.

War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is, however, about the very large questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘vapid’ after Sassoon: ‘not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects’.


War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation.

Poetry of war

Poetry of war is of two kinds: poetry written about war by poets who may or may not have direct experience of it and poetry written by soldier-poets. The latter are very much a 20th-century phenomenon as whole societies were mobilized for total war. But poems about war are as old as poetry itself, beginning with the greatest poem in European culture, Homer's Iliad composed in the 8th century bc telling the legendary tales of Troy and war between Greek and Trojan.

As the features of modern ‘industrial’ war became discernible in the 19th century, so contemporary poets tried to clothe them in classical respectability. Tennyson's ‘six hundred’ were a modern-day equivalent to the Spartans at Thermopylae save that ‘someone had blundered’ and their sacrifice was unintentional. The fratricidal bloodshed of the American civil war was mourned by James Lowell and Walt Whitman. Time brought reconciliation and death united enemies, but as Julia Howe put it in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, God's purpose remained ‘to make men free’ after Christ's example.

Poets began to accept that war might be worth it when the cause was justified, which explains why the outbreak of war in 1914 was greeted with such apparent enthusiasm in verse. Rupert Brooke was not alone in seeing war as a consummation and it misrepresents his individual and often ironic poetry to view it as the result of naïve and youthful innocence. What is more, his generation, throughout Europe, had been prepared beforehand to describe their sentiments in poetic form. Catherine Reilly has identified details of 2, 225 published poets in English during this period. This can be matched by enormous poetic output across Europe. The nature of modern conscripted mass armies which faced each other provided the reason why it is WW I which sees the specific coining of the phrases ‘war poet’ and ‘war poetry’, as Robert Graves points out, himself one of the foremost ‘poets in arms’. On all sides soldier-poets could be found; men and women in the ranks (including army, navy, air, and support services) who were themselves poets or who used poetry as a medium for expression, as distinct from civilians who only wrote poetry about the war. The most famous and moving of the latter was W. B. Yeats.

A familiar list of British poets was given critical acclaim, mostly after the war, in the framework of a developing critique which saw a transition from youthful innocence in 1914 to knowing and outright condemnation in 1918. Beginning with Brooke, the roll passes through Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon, and ends with Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. Of these, only the middle three lived to tell the tale and could only escape from their post-war reputations in various forms of self-imposed exile. The public taste for ‘war poets’ was insatiable, especially for published collections of poets who had fallen in the war.

Their work had an oracular or prophetic immediacy for a civilian population generally starved of real news about the war. More recently, other poets have been ‘discovered’ and admitted to the roll, such as Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. Other European powers also produced war poets in their own right who became involved in the war. These included George Trakl and Yuan Goll writing in Germany, Guillaume Apollinaire in French, and Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gabiele d'Annunzio in Italian. It is possibly the nature of the war on the western front which produced such a volume of war poetry. The eastern front produced far less although the Russian poet Valery Brysov, working as a war correspondent, wrote a good deal. Other Russian war poets were Nikolai Gumilev and Velemir Khlebnikov. Russian poetry tended to the apocalyptic and visionary rather than preoccupation with the blood and ruin of the real war.

So strong was the desire for the insights of the soldier-poet that it inspired new outpourings in the 1930s during the Spanish civil war and, at the beginning of WW II, the question ‘where are the war poets?’ was answered in work of at least as high a standard as that of Owen and Sassoon, including the poetry of Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Frank Thompson, John Pudney, Henry Reed, and Alan Ross, to select only a small number. WW II produced little poetry of suffering in the West perhaps because of its nature, perhaps because it was seen as a ‘good war’. The greatest volume of poetry in this war came from the country which suffered most: Russia, notably the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Aleksey Tvardovsky.

The lasting achievement of the ‘war poets’ in the 20th century is that they demonstrated that poetry should not follow blindly the political causes of the moment, should not serve the state or provide the new rallying cries, but should remain critical. Poetry about war since 1945 has embraced this rich and diverse legacy. From the therapeutic and popular poetry of Vietnam veterans, to be found in profusion on the internet, to the mannered criticisms of the Cold War and beyond in the work of the Liverpool Poets and Bob Dylan, or to the lyricism of Seamus Heaney's Requiem for the Croppies, the democratization of war poetry is sadly a reflection of the scale, frequency, and universality of the experience of war in our time.



http://www.warpoets.org/articles/what/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poet

A Date with a Literary Scholar : Refaat Alareer

A Date with a Literary Scholar : Refaat Alareer

History of Palestine

Palestine (Arabic: فلسطين‎ Filasṭīn, Falasṭīn, Filisṭīn; Greek: Παλαιστίνη, Palaistinē; Latin: Palaestina; Hebrew: פלשתינה Palestina) is a geographic region in Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is sometimes considered to include adjoining territories. The name was used by Ancient Greek writers, and was later used for the Roman province Syria Palaestina, the Byzantine Palaestina Prima and the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Jund Filastin. The region is also known as the Land of Israel (Hebrew: ארץ־ישראל Eretz-Yisra'el),the Holy Land, the Southern Levant, Cisjordan, and historically has been known by other names including Canaan, Southern Syria and Jerusalem.

Situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, the Sunni Arab Caliphates, the Shia Fatimid Caliphate, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mameluks, Ottomans, the British and modern Israelis and Palestinians.

Boundaries of the region have changed throughout history, and were last defined in modern times by the Franco-British boundary agreement (1920) and the Transjordan memorandum of 16 September 1922, during the mandate period. Today, the region comprises the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.

Evolution of Mandate Palestine and modern Palestinian Territories

• v
 
• t
 
• e

1916-22 Proposals: Three proposals for the post World War I administration of Palestine. The red line is the "International Administration" proposed in the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, the dashed blue line is the 1919 Zionist Organization proposal at theParis Peace Conference, and the thin blue line refers to the final borders of the 1923-48Mandatory Palestine.

1947 (Actual): Mandatory Palestine, showing Jewish-owned regions in Palestine as of 1947 in blue, constituting 6% of the total land area, of which more than half was held by the JNF and PICA. The Jewish population had increased from 83,790 in 1922 to 608,000 in 1946.

1947 (Proposal): Proposal per the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine(UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 1947), prior to the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The proposal included aCorpus Separatum for Jerusalem, extraterritorial crossroads between the non-contiguous areas, and Jaffa as an Arab exclave.

1948-67 (Actual): TheJordanian occupied West Bankand Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip (note the dotted lines between the territories and Jordan / Egypt), after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, showing1949 armistice lines.

Current: Extant region administered by thePalestinian National Authority(under Oslo 2).

Famous Palestinian Poets (Written in Arabic)

- Mahmoud Darwish

- Tamim Bargouti

 Famous Palestinian Poets (Written in English)

- Rafeef Ziadah (We Teach Life, Sir)

- Susan Abulhawa (Wala!)

- Remi Kanazi

Poetry: How it all started

1. Read a lot of good and high quality poetry

2. Believe you can write good stuff

3. Have the will to do so

4. Scribble your thoughts down. Always

5. Imitate

What is in my poetry?

- Dialouge

- Performance / Drama

- About Palestine

Questions that were asked by some of the students to the Scholar.

1. Who are your favourite poets and why?

Answer : John Donne

2. What was the style of poetry written before the war came to Palestine?

Answer : Personal poetry that was distinticve. It was pretty much the same style before the was began.  Poetry became intense after the war broke out in Palestine.