PPT2--English_Renaissance and Shakespeare.ppt

Historic background 1.Shakespeare’s Life 3) Comedies The Merchant of Venice Midsummer Nights Dream As You Like It Twelfth Night 威尼斯商人 第十二夜 4) Tragedies Hamlet Othello Macbeth king Lear 李尔王 哈姆雷特 5）Tragicomedy (straight part) Romeo and Juliet 罗密欧与朱丽叶 The English Renaissance 文艺复兴时期英国文学 The term Renaissance, literally means rebirth and is the period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages, conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in classical learning and values. The Renaissance was a time of rebirth. Europeans experienced a reawakening of interest in the classics--government, literature, art, and thought. It was a time of experimentation. It was a time of religious upheaval. And it was a time of war. The Italian Renaissance had placed human beings once more in the center of lifes stage and infused thought and art with humanistic values. In time the stimulating ideas current in Italy spread to other areas and combined with indigenous developments to produce a French Renaissance, an English Renaissance, and so on. Discovery of the world the discovery and exploration of new continents the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy Nicolaus Copernicus，1473-1543 the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariners compass, and gunpowder Discovery of man To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation. da Vincis machines Michelangelo Buonarroti Literature in Britain in the period beginning in around 1500 and lasting until the mid-1600s. Influenced by the artistic and cultural Renaissance, the transformation of both English language and literature in this period can be seen to move away from the medieval Middle English literature period