莎士比亚戏剧特点莎比亚戏剧特点.doc

Features of Shakespeares Drama Shakespeare is one of the founders of realism in world literature. Through Hamlets famous speech to the players in Hamlet (3.2), Shakespeare makes comment on dramatic performance. Its purpose, he maintains, is to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. this is, in essence, the principle of realism. Realism, according to Engels, implies, besides truth in detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances. living in the historical period of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Shakespeare faithfully and vividly reflects, through a host of characters in his plays, the major social contradictions of his time. Thus, his historical plays describe the decaying of the old feudal nobility and the rising of the new Tudor monarchy which represented the interests of English merchants and well-to-do citizens. His comedies paint, in bright colors, the life and love of the young men and women just freed from the fetters of feudalism. Meanwhile, his great tragedies, in the main, depict the life-and-death struggle between the humanists, representing the then newly emerging forces, and the corrupt kings, the ambitious noble lords and all sorts of adventurists, parasites and flatterers who represent the dark power of the time. Shakespeares dramatic creation often used the method of adaptation. He borrowed his plots widely from Greek legends and Roman history, from Italian stories and English chronicles, and from romances by his English contemporaries. Sometimes he rewrote old plays by certain inferior authors. But the results of all these labors become original compositions. Whatever he touches sparkles with a peculiar beauty of its own and an old story is thus turned into a superb work of dramatic art. Though his characters are often clothed in old, foreign dresses, their thoughts and feelings belo