The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary.
Shakespeare's Representation of Women Shakespeare's representation of women, and the ways in which his female roles are interpreted and enacted, have become topics of scholarly interest.
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter with clever use of puns and imagery. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable.
William Shakespeare was the original author of the famous sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?”. Shakespeare’s intentions for writing this poem was to compare his beloved to a Summer’s Day. Shakespeare wrote and published this original version of Sonnet 18 in 1609, but was rewritten in the early 1900’s by Howard Moss.
Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare's contemporaries, recognize that his works are difficult, but they insist to reread the material because he is worth the effort. This suggest to current readers to reread and deeply analyze a confusing passage several times to fully understand Shakespeare's masterpieces.
In general, Shakespeare used compound words and open and feminine endings more frequently than his contemporaries, and relative clauses less frequently. We found Shakespeare's patterns to be strikingly consistent, and often strikingly at variance with those of other Elizabethan poets.
Craig systematically compares Shakespeare’s plays to those of his contemporaries, with striking results. In order to allow for a fair comparison, Craig equalizes his samples by only analyzing the first 10,000 words of every play.
While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry.