shakespeare essay thesis

A Guide To Writing Shakespeare Essays, Including Pitfalls & Tips

William Shakespeare is undoubtedly one of the most significant personalities of the world and culture in particular. This dramatist is considered to be an inventor of literary English language, an inventor of modern theater, and the greatest poet in the history of England. Starting in the 15th century, Shakespeare’s poems and plays have been published in a lot of countries and translated into almost all languages of the world. It is no wonder that students have to write a Shakespeare essay despite their disciplines and specialization. The assignments vary. You might get a task to analyze the sonnets or a play of a famous playwright and writer, write a book report, or say some words about his life in a Shakespeare biography essay. No matter what is your writing about, experts from  ProHighGrades  collected some ideas and essential tips that will help.

How to Write a Shakespeare Biography Essay

If you are to write essays about the background of a great author, you need to know his biography, and the peculiarities of the time he lived in. Here are some ideas:

• Describe the town he was born and lived. Stratford-upon-Avon was a small English town, and his family was among the noble ones. You can analyze the primal education and the reasons to move to London.
• Literature resources give a little knowledge of young Shakespeare. No one knows the real day of birth. The authors know he was baptized in April. History did not save much about his school or university education. The period which starts in the year 1585 and finishes in 1593 is called “the lost years of Shakespeare.” An excellent attempt to analyze and make suggestions concerning his real life and a search for additional facts will amaze the professors.
• You can analyze the relationship between Shakespeare and other people. Some works and pages contain suggestions about his love, friends, etc. A good Shakespeare biography essay will try to study the stories related to the company surrounding him. Study the writers he mailed.
• Finally, his last years and death are covered in mystery as well. You can try to find a reason why Shakespeare left a big part of his property to his daughter Susanna. Write about a real reason to move back to Stratford.

A good story about a simple man, people to follow him, the political and historical circumstances and terms, the rights of a human of Shakespeare’s society, popular suggestions, and references to his biography from other sources deserve to appear in an excellent Shakespeare essay.

How to Write an Essay About Shakespeare’s Works

Everybody read the author. Students compose tons of writings, where they give information about his collection of works. In order to claim some originality and score free points on exclusiveness, you need to consider many things:

• All the essays about Shakespeare’s literature are written. People wrote about the classic plays after his sonnet or plots. Scholars read, search, and research the significance of his works in almost every paper. You need something contemporary. New plays and interpretations of the texts appear today (for example, a fresh Hamlet play with Benedict Cumberbatch). New movies come from Hollywood and other countries. Take them into account. Many original Shakespeare essay topics are reserved for you
• If you are in despair, choose a way that worked for centuries. Analyze the title of a particular poem or play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the plays entitled by names ( Romeo and Juliet , Macbeth , Much Ado About Nothing and others are a reason to write a good, short essay about William Shakespeare.
• A good idea is to analyze the characters of Shakespeare. His plays are not all full of action, but characters are deep. Conflicts, emotions, experience, and background stand behind every one. To make a Shakespeare paper better, reading work is not enough. Try to watch the performance of actors from plays and movies. Usually, they do not make an exact copy of the text but bring the new interpretation.
• Good Shakespeare essay examples choose famous critics for referencing. A catchy quote or a properly referenced idea will make your essay worth money and effort. Remember that the question you ask in the Shakespeare paper must find its answer despite the length of a paper, and a number of essay pages needed.
• Adjust your essay to a discipline. In every Shakespeare text, you can find something for a history, sociology, culture, linguistics, psychology, arts, mythology, and literature essay.

Shakespeare was not a simple person and now has a truly global identity. His impact on his and further times are great. Many people study him, and increasingly significant numbers will no doubt do so in the future. You can also count on the guys from EditProofRead to check out your paper to make sure it’s good.

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Essay on William Shakespeare

500 words essay on william shakespeare.

William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping one hundred fifty-four sonnets. So let us take a peek inside the life of this genius with this essay on William Shakespeare.

                                                                                                                               Essay On William Shakespeare

Early Life of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the world’s pre-eminent dramatist and according to many experts is the greatest writer in the English language. Furthermore, he is also called England’s National Poet and also has the nickname of the Bard of Avon. Such a worthy reputation is due to his top-notch unmatchable writing skills.

William Shakespeare was born to a successful businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April in the year 1564. Shakespeare’s mother was the daughter of a landlord and came from a well-to-do family. About the age of seven, William Shakespeare began attending the Stratford Grammar School.

The teachers at Stratford were strict in nature and the school timings were long. One can say that William Shakespeare’s use of nature in his writings was due to the influence of the fields and woods surrounding the Stratford Grammar School on him.

Warwickshire was an interesting place to live, especially for those who were writers. Furthermore, the river Avon ran down through the town and because of this Shakespeare later got the title ‘Bard of Avon’. At the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman who in age was eight years older than him.

Illustrious Career of William Shakespeare

After his education, William Shakespeare became engaged in theatrical life in London. Furthermore, it was from here that his career likely took off. Moreover, by the year 1592, the popularity of William Shakespeare had grown to be very much.

Shakespeare became a member of one of the famous theatre companies in the city. Moreover, this company was ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. Also, the theatre companies during that era were commercial organizations that were dependent upon the audience who came to watch the plays.

From the year 1594, Shakespeare became the leading member of the acting group and remained that for almost the entire rest of his career. By the year 1594, the production of at least six plays had taken place by William Shakespeare.

Evidence shows that Shakespeare became a member of a well-known travelling theatre group. After joining this theatre, Shakespeare did plays in the presence of many dignitaries in various places.

Shakespeare, throughout his life, came up with some outstanding pieces of English literature , involving memorable timeless characters with human qualities. Furthermore, the human qualities and struggles of Shakespeare’s characters are such that one can relate with them even today. Shakespeare retired from his acting profession in 1613 and became completely devoted to writing many excellent plays.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

 Conclusion of the Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is, without a doubt, one of the greatest writers of all times. Furthermore, his excellence in story writing, narrative building, and character development is of the highest order. Individuals of such a high calibre appear once in a century or are even rarer than that.

FAQs For Essay on William Shakespeare

Question 1: Why is William Shakespeare so famous?

Answer 1:  William Shakespeare’s story writing skills are of an extremely high-quality. Furthermore, his works are characterized by outstanding narrative building around the topics of jealousy, mystery, love, magic, death, murder, life, revenge, and grief. That is why William Shakespeare is so famous.

Question 2: What are some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare?

Answer 2: Some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare are as follows:

• Romeo and Juliet
• The Merchant of Venice
• Much Ado About Nothing

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A Guide to Writing an Outstanding Shakespeare Essay

By: Max Malak

There is hardly a person who has not heard the name of William Shakespeare, one of the greatest authors in history who has made a large contribution to the development of the English language. Given that Shakespeare's figure is monumental for English and global literature, it comes as a mandatory part of the curriculum in high schools and on other academic levels.

The Life of William Shakespeare: Information to Use in an Essay

Shakespeare essay sample, no clear thesis statement, lack of linking structures, not enough of essential details, weak conclusion, an essay about william shakespeare: possible topics.

If you don't have any prior knowledge of Shakespeare's works and his biography, worry not! This guide will take you through all the essential information needed to create an A+ William Shakespeare essay, alongside a written work sample, tips on improving it, and a list of topics to explore.

Research is one of the critical parts of the essay writing process that should not be disregarded. To make the task easier for you, we have collected some facts from William Shakespeare's biography that can prove to be useful in your essay:

• Full name: William Shakespeare, also known as the Bard of Avon
• Date of Birth: Unknown
• Baptized: 26 April 1564
• Hometown: Stratford-upon-Avon, England
• Date of Death: 23 April 1616
• Parents: Mary Arden and John Shakespeare
• Spouse: Anne Hathaway in 1582
• Children: twins Judith and Hamnet, daughter Susanna

William Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of his time and created around 37 plays . Here are some of the most renowned Shakespeare's plays sorted by year of writing:

• The Taming of the Shrew (1590)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
• The Life and Death of King John (mid-1590s)
• Romeo and Juliet (1594-96)
• 1 Henry IV (1596)
• The Merchant of Venice (1596-98)
• Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• Othello (1603)
• King Lear (1605-06)
• Hamlet (1606)
• Macbeth (1609)
• The Winter's Tale (1609)
• The Tempest (1611)

Besides, here are a few of Shakespeare's most recognized quotes :

• " To be, or not to be, that is the question." - Hamlet
• "All that glisters is not gold." - The Merchant of Venice
• "If music be the food of love, play on." - Twelfth Night
• "Brevity is the soul of wit." - Hamlet
• "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." - The Tempest
• "It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves." - Julius Caesar

The aforementioned information can be used to create argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays. Check out an example below!

There is a wide variety of essay topics connected with the life of William Shakespeare. Here is one prompt sample:

Describe William Shakespeare's biography and life as an actor and playwright in Tudorian England.

Shakespeare is a globally beloved playwright with an intriguing biography, which makes such an essay topic rather common in educational institutions. Here is an example of a descriptive essay on this topic:

The Shakespeare biography is a mystery that contains a lot of uncertainty. The great writer's date of birth remains unknown, but it is clear that he was born in 1564, during the Tudor period in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon. There is not much information on William Shakespeare's early years. It is believed he had a good childhood. Seven years of records on his life, starting from 1585, are non-existent. This period is often called "the lost years" by historians.

In 1592 Shakespeare reappeared in London as an actor, where he first performed at "The Theatre". He was a part of the company known as Lord Chamberlain's Men at that time. However, after facing controversy with the landlord, the building was taken apart and rebuilt as "The Globe", an open-air theater across the river. Shakespeare's plays were extremely successful and earned him a big fortune. He was in favor of Queen Elizabeth I and performed his plays at the royal court.

William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, and there are speculations that it might have been his birthday. Even after death, the great writer, playwright, and actor managed to leave a mystic aura around his persona, leaving a curse written on his gravestone.

A Few Shortcomings and How Can This Essay Be Improved

The sample essay you have just read through is an example of a text that is likely to receive a B- or B grade. But what are the downsides of this written work that hold it back from receiving an A+ assessment?

A thesis statement of a descriptive essay must introduce the reader to the central idea of your essay. However, the sample Shakespeare essay provides a fraction of what the work focuses on. Here is an example of a better thesis statement:

William Shakespeare's life as a renowned dramatist, poet, playwright, and actor appears as a mix of glory and mystery.

This sentence provides the readers with brief information on the person to be discussed in the essay while highlighting the specific aspects of his biography that will be covered.

The sample essay sticks to the chronological order of events in Shakespeare's life. However, the transition from one paragraph to another is not gradual, making the structure seem inconsistent. This can be done by embedding linking words and phrases in the text, such as:

• In spite of
• Furthermore

The list goes on! Integrating such words would enable the essay author to avoid choppy sentences and improve the text flow. Here is an example:

While the great writer's date of birth remains unknown, it is clear that he was born in 1564, during the Tudor period, in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Even though the information on William Shakespeare's early years is not sufficient, it is believed he had a loving upbringing. Besides , for seven years of his adulthood, the great playwright did not appear in any records. That is why this time of Shakespeare's life is often referred to as "the lost years" by historians.

As you can see, linking words make the text significantly easier to read and comprehend.

Besides, it is crucial to keep the thesis statement in mind throughout the whole written work and provide information to support it. The task requires to describe Shakespeare's life as a playwright, which is hardly possible without mentioning at least several of his plays beloved by the public. Here is an example of how the sample Shakespeare essay could be refined in this regard:

Shakespeare's plays were extremely successful already at his time and earned him a big fortune. Notably, early Modern London's public loved his historical plays Henry IV Part I and Richard III.

Even such small alterations create significant changes in the essay, providing more value to the reader.

The essay's conclusion should remind the reader of the thesis statement and be a summary of all the key ideas of the text. The sample essay's final paragraph appears as if it were a part of the written work's main body. Here is what could be added to wrap up the essay in a masterful manner:

While being a public person known to the majority of his contemporaries, Shakespeare remains a mysterious figure. Nevertheless, William Shakespeare's literary works, including his iconic plays, continue to amaze people generation after generation.

This version of the conclusion finalizes the essay while tackling all the topics that have been discussed in it.

Now that you've read through the tips to perfect your William Shakespeare essay, you will be able to create an excellent text deserving the top grade. What's left is to select an interesting topic for your essay if it has not been provided by your teacher or professor. Here are some ideas for your written work's theme:

• How Did Shakespeare Interpret Historical Events?
• The Impact Shakespeare's Acting Career Had on His Playwrighting
• The Perception of Women in Tudorian England As Shown in Shakespeare's Works
• What Do the Sonnets Tell Us About Shakespeare?
• Speculations on Shakespeare's Persona and Literary Works
• The Impact of Shakespeare's Masterpieces on Modern English Literature
• Why Are Shakespeare's Works Considered to Be a Significant Milestone in Literature?
• Shakespeare's Contribution to the Development of English Language

You can take any of the mentioned topics as a basis for your essay about the life of William Shakespeare and his literary achievements. However, if you feel like you are in a bind and don't have enough time or energy to stick to the assignment deadline, you can always turn to the help of a writing service , such as Studybay.

Our experienced authors are ready to help you with any homework and will follow all requirements. Reach out now to get started!

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Writers — William Shakespeare

Essays on William Shakespeare

What makes a good william shakespeare essay topic.

When it comes to crafting an exceptional essay on the works of William Shakespeare, the choice of topic is paramount. The right topic can breathe life into your essay, making it captivating, unique, and unforgettable. Here are some innovative tips to help you brainstorm and select an essay topic that will mesmerize your readers:

- Research and Immerse Yourself: Begin by immersing yourself in the vast repertoire of William Shakespeare's works. Dive into his plays, poems, and sonnets. This deep exploration will provide you with invaluable insights into his themes, characters, and writing style.

- Personal Passion: Opt for a topic that ignites a genuine spark of interest within you. When you are truly passionate about the subject matter, it will shine through in your writing, captivating your readers and making your essay more compelling.

- Unveiling the Unexplored: Seek out uncharted territory and lesser-known aspects of Shakespeare's works. Instead of treading the well-worn path of common themes or characters, venture into the hidden gems that lie within his literature.

- Contemporary Connections: Explore the relevance of Shakespeare's works in today's society and connect them to modern-day issues. Examining the timeless themes and their impact on the present can render your essay thought-provoking and engaging.

- Characters and Relationships Under the Microscope: Shakespeare's characters are multifaceted and intricate. Choose a topic that allows you to analyze their motivations, relationships, or character development within his plays.

- Comparative Analysis: Engage in a comparative exploration of Shakespeare's works alongside other literary pieces, historical events, or even contemporary movies or plays. This fresh perspective will make your essay stand out from the crowd.

- Social and Cultural Context: Delve into the social and cultural milieu that shaped Shakespeare's plays. Discuss how his works were influenced by the Elizabethan era and how they mirror the society of that time.

- Unveiling Symbolism and Imagery: Shakespeare's works are a treasure trove of symbolism and vivid imagery. Select a topic that allows you to analyze and interpret these literary devices, offering profound insights into the text.

- Controversial Contemplations: Shakespeare fearlessly explored contentious themes such as power, love, and morality. Choose a topic that tackles these provocative issues, sparking a lively debate among your readers.

- Unconventional Interpretations: Present a fresh and unconventional interpretation of a particular play, scene, or character. Challenge conventional ideas and encourage critical thinking with your unique perspective.

Remember, a remarkable Shakespeare essay topic should be captivating, original, and thought-provoking. By considering these recommendations, you will be able to select a topic that will enrapture your readers and showcase your exceptional analytical skills.

Essay Topic Ideas for William Shakespeare

Prepare to be dazzled by these outstanding essay topics on William Shakespeare:

• The Empowerment of Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies
• Fate and Its Grip on Romeo and Juliet
• The Fine Line Between Madness and Sanity in Hamlet
• Love's Intricacies and Deception in Much Ado About Nothing
• Unraveling the Allure of Power and Ambition in Macbeth
• Exploring the Dark Depths of Evil in Othello
• Shakespeare's Brave Confrontation of Racism in The Merchant of Venice
• The Mighty Influence of Language and Wordplay in A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Revenge and Justice Collide in Titus Andronicus
• The Greek Mythology Odyssey within Shakespeare's Plays
• The Symbolic Tapestry of Nature in King Lear
• Gender Roles and Identity in Twelfth Night
• Time's Elusive Spell in The Tempest
• The Supernatural's Sinister Dance in Macbeth
• The Illusion of Appearance versus the Reality of Truth in Measure for Measure
• The Complexities of Love's Dominion in Antony and Cleopatra
• The Intricate Weaving of Politics in Julius Caesar
• Jealousy's Venomous Touch in Othello
• The Struggle between Duty and Desire in Hamlet
• A Profound Exploration of Human Nature in Troilus and Cressida

Provocative Questions for Your William Shakespeare Essay

Prepare to embark on an intellectual journey with these thought-provoking essay questions on William Shakespeare:

• How does Shakespeare challenge traditional gender roles in his plays?
• What is the significance of the supernatural elements in Macbeth?
• How does Shakespeare explore the theme of power and its corrupting influence in his tragedies?
• Analyze the portrayal of love and relationships in Shakespeare's comedies.
• To what extent does fate play a role in Romeo and Juliet, and are the characters responsible for their own destinies?
• Discuss the concept of madness and its impact on the characters in Hamlet.
• How does Shakespeare employ symbolism and imagery to convey his themes in The Tempest?
• Analyze the role of loyalty and betrayal in Julius Caesar.
• How does Othello's race affect the outcome of the play?
• Discuss the portrayal of revenge in Shakespeare's plays.

Creative William Shakespeare Essay Prompts

Ignite your creativity with these captivating essay prompts on William Shakespeare:

• Imagine you are a director staging a modern adaptation of one of Shakespeare's plays. How would you interpret the setting, costumes, and overall production to make it relevant to a contemporary audience?
• Write a heartfelt letter from one of Shakespeare's characters to another, expressing their deepest desires, fears, or regrets.
• Create a powerful monologue from the perspective of a minor character in any of Shakespeare's plays, unveiling their untold story or hidden emotions.
• Write a riveting dialogue between Shakespeare and a modern-day playwright, discussing the enduring appeal and relevance of his works.
• Imagine you are a literary critic tasked with analyzing a previously undiscovered Shakespearean sonnet. Interpret its meaning and discuss its significance within the context of his other works.

William Shakespeare Essay FAQ

Q: How should I begin my essay on William Shakespeare?

A: Commence with a captivating introduction that sets the stage for your essay and introduces your thesis statement. You can start with a compelling quote, an intriguing fact, or a thought-provoking question.

Q: Can I choose a lesser-known play by Shakespeare as my essay topic?

A: Absolutely! Exploring lesser-known plays can provide a fresh perspective, allowing you to delve into unexplored themes and characters. Just ensure that you provide enough context and background information for your readers.

Q: Should I include direct quotes from Shakespeare's works in my essay?

A: Including quotes can enhance your analysis and provide evidence to support your arguments. However, make sure to seamlessly integrate and analyze the quotes, rather than using them as mere filler.

Q: Can I incorporate modern examples or references in my essay on Shakespeare?

A: Yes, incorporating modern examples or references can help readers connect with the themes and relevance of Shakespeare's works. Just ensure that the examples are relevant and enhance your analysis, rather than overshadowing it.

Q: How can I make my Shakespeare essay stand out from others?

A: To make your essay shine, choose a unique and thought-provoking topic, offer fresh interpretations, and employ engaging language and writing style. Support your arguments with evidence and provide a well-structured analysis.

Remember, writing a Shakespeare essay is an opportunity to showcase your critical thinking and analytical skills. Embark on a thrilling journey through the world of Shakespeare and let your creativity illuminate your writing!

William Shakespeare Research Paper

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April 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom - April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom

Playwright, Poet, Actor

English Renaissance

Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing,Twelfth Night, Macbeth, etc.

William Shakespeare, widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in history, possessed a unique and influential style of writing. His works demonstrate a mastery of language, poetic devices, and dramatic techniques that continue to captivate audiences centuries later. Shakespeare's writing style can be characterized by several distinctive features. Firstly, his use of language is rich and vibrant. He employed a vast vocabulary and crafted elaborate sentences, often employing complex wordplay and puns to create layers of meaning. Shakespeare's writing is renowned for its poetic beauty, rhythmic verse, and memorable lines that have become ingrained in the English language. Secondly, Shakespeare excelled in character development. His characters are multidimensional, with complex emotions and motivations. Through their soliloquies and dialogues, he explores the depths of human nature, delving into themes of love, jealousy, ambition, and morality. Each character's speech and mannerisms reflect their unique personality, contributing to the depth and realism of his plays. Lastly, Shakespeare's dramatic structure and storytelling techniques are unparalleled. He skillfully weaves together intricate plots, incorporating elements of comedy, tragedy, romance, and history. His plays feature dramatic tension, unexpected twists, and powerful climaxes that keep audiences engaged and emotionally invested.

One of Shakespeare's major contributions was his ability to delve into the depths of human emotions and the complexities of the human condition. Through his plays, he explored themes such as love, jealousy, ambition, revenge, and moral dilemmas, offering profound insights into the human psyche. His characters, like Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, and Othello, are iconic and have become archetypes in literature. Shakespeare's language and wordplay revolutionized English literature. He introduced new words, phrases, and expressions that have become an integral part of the English lexicon. His plays are a testament to his mastery of language, employing poetic techniques such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and iambic pentameter to create rhythm, beauty, and depth in his writing. Moreover, Shakespeare's plays transcended the boundaries of time and place, showcasing universal themes and resonating with audiences across cultures and generations. His works continue to be performed and adapted in various forms, including stage productions, films, and literary adaptations, further solidifying his contribution to the world of literature.

Film Adaptations: Many of Shakespeare's plays have been adapted into films, bringing his stories to life on the silver screen. Notable examples include Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" (1968), Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989), and Baz Luhrmann's modernized version of "Romeo + Juliet" (1996). TV Series and Episodes: Shakespeare's works have been featured in TV series and episodes, either through direct adaptations or by incorporating his themes and characters. For instance, the popular TV show "The Simpsons" has parodied Shakespeare in episodes like "A Midsummer's Nice Dream" and "Tales from the Public Domain." Shakespearean-Inspired Films: Some films draw inspiration from Shakespeare's works without being direct adaptations. Examples include "Shakespeare in Love" (1998), which explores the fictionalized romance between Shakespeare and a noblewoman, and "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), a modern-day adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew." Literary References: Shakespeare is often referenced in literature, showcasing his enduring influence. For instance, Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel "Brave New World" features characters who quote Shakespeare, and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" includes a clandestine resistance group called "Mayday," derived from "May Day" in Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

1. Shakespeare is known for writing 39 plays, including tragedies like "Hamlet," comedies like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and histories like "Henry V." 2. Shakespeare is credited with introducing over 1,700 words to the English language, including popular terms such as "eyeball," "fashionable," and "lonely." 3. Shakespeare's works have been translated into more than 80 languages, making him one of the most widely translated playwrights in history. 4. Shakespeare's plays continue to be performed and studied worldwide, with an estimated 17,000 performances of his works every year. 5. Despite his literary fame, little is known about Shakespeare's personal life. There are gaps and uncertainties surrounding his birthdate, education, and even the authorship of his works. 6. The Globe Theatre: Shakespeare's plays were performed at the famous Globe Theatre in London, which he co-owned. The reconstructed Globe Theatre stands in London today and offers modern audiences a glimpse into the world of Elizabethan theatre. 7. In addition to his plays, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, which are celebrated for their lyrical beauty and exploration of themes such as love, time, and mortality.

William Shakespeare is an essential topic for essay writing due to his immense significance in the world of literature and his enduring influence on various aspects of human culture. Exploring Shakespeare's works provides a rich opportunity to delve into themes of love, tragedy, power, and human nature. His plays and sonnets continue to captivate readers and audiences with their universal themes and timeless relevance. Studying Shakespeare allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the English language itself, as he contributed numerous words and phrases that are still in use today. Additionally, his innovative use of language, poetic techniques, and complex characterizations showcase his unparalleled mastery as a playwright. Furthermore, Shakespeare's impact extends beyond literature. His works have been adapted into numerous films, theater productions, and other art forms, making him a cultural icon. His plays also provide a valuable lens through which to analyze historical and social contexts, as they reflect the values, beliefs, and conflicts of the Elizabethan era.

"All that glitters is not gold." "By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, Whoever knocks!" In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge.

1. Shakespeare, W., Shakespeare, W., & Kaplan, M. L. (2002). The merchant of Venice (pp. 25-120). Palgrave Macmillan US. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-137-07784-4_2) 2. Shakespeare, W. (2019). The tempest. In One-Hour Shakespeare (pp. 137-194). Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429262647-9/tempest-william-shakespeare) 3. Johnson, S. (2020). The Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765). In Samuel Johnson (pp. 423-462). Yale University Press. (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300258004-040/html?lang=de) 4. Denvir, J. (1986). William Shakespeare and the Jurisprudence of Comedy. Stan. L. Rev., 39, 825. (https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/stflr39&div=38&id=&page=) 5. Demmen, J. (2020). Issues and challenges in compiling a corpus of early modern English plays for comparison with those of William Shakespeare. ICAME Journal, 44(1), 37-68. (https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/icame-2020-0002) 6. Liu, X., Xu, A., Liu, Z., Guo, Y., & Akkiraju, R. (2019, May). Cognitive learning: How to become william shakespeare. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6). (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3290607.3312844) 7. Xu, W., Ritter, A., Dolan, W. B., Grishman, R., & Cherry, C. (2012, December). Paraphrasing for style. In Proceedings of COLING 2012 (pp. 2899-2914). (https://aclanthology.org/C12-1177.pdf) 8. Craig, H. (2012). George Chapman, John Davies of Hereford, William Shakespeare, and" A Lover's Complaint". Shakespeare Quarterly, 63(2), 147-174. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41679745) 9. Zhao, Y., & Zobel, J. (2007, January). Searching with style: Authorship attribution in classic literature. In Proceedings of the thirtieth Australasian conference on Computer science-Volume 62 (pp. 59-68). (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3973ff27eb173412ce532c8684b950f4cd9b0dc8)

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Structuring the Shakespeare Essay ( AQA GCSE English Literature )

Revision note.

Structuring the Essay

Answering just one essay question can seem daunting. However, examiners just want to see your ideas and opinions on the Shakespeare play you have studied. The guide below will enable you to best express these ideas and opinions in a way that will gain the highest marks. It includes guides on:

Answering the question

Planning your essay, writing your essay.

As Paper 1 requires you to answer two questions in 1hr 45min, you have 52 and a half minutes to plan, write and check your Shakespeare essay. A good rule of thumb is to spend:

• 7 minutes analysing the question and the extract
• 7-10 minutes of planning
• 30-35 minutes of writing

It is always a good idea to use the rest of your time to review what you’ve written, make any adjustments and check your spelling and grammar. Remember – SPaG in this question is worth 4 marks.

Students usually think that spending more time on writing will gain more marks, but this isn't true: more essay doesn’t mean more marks! Examiners prefer shorter, well-planned responses that have a clear argument throughout.

Indeed, long essays that are unstructured and sprawling can in fact lose marks for being unfocused. Therefore, it is vital to always set aside time to write a plan.

Regardless of which Shakespeare play you study, the type of question you’ll need to write an essay for will be the same. You will be asked a question that asks you to analyse and write in detail about an aspect of the play. Your answer will need to address both an extract from the play that you will be given and the play as a whole.

It is tempting to jump straight in and start analysing the extract immediately. However, completing the steps below first will ensure you answer the question in the way that examiners are looking for.

6 key steps to answer the Shakespeare exam question effectively:

1. The very first thing you should do once you open your exam paper is to look at the question:

• This sounds obvious, but it’s really crucial to read through the question a few times 
• Why is this important? Regardless of what subject you’re being examined in, the single biggest mistake most students make in their exams is not reading the question through carefully enough that they answer the question they think they’re being asked, rather than the question they’ve actually been asked 
• It’s especially important to get this right in your GCSE English Literature exams, because you only have five essay questions to answer across two papers, so if you misread a question, you’re potentially costing yourself a large number of marks

2. Identify the keywords of the question

• The keywords are the focus of the question: the specific themes, ideas or characters the examiners want you to focus on
• For the above question, the keywords of the question are “the effects of the conflict between the Capulet and Montague families” 
• This is the theme the examiners want you to explore in your essay
• Do not be tempted to write a question on a related theme, even if you have revised more for it: this will affect your overall mark badly, as you won’t be directly answering the question! 
• Although this is a related theme, your answer won’t be focused on the question and will lose you marks

3. Critically evaluate the idea or theme of the question in terms of the play as a whole

• Think: what is this question asking, and what is it not asking?
• It is asking you to explore conflict – an ongoing fight or struggle – between the two families
• The question is not asking you to explore any other conflict, for example, conflict among families (Juliet’s conflict with her own family)
• Again, writing about related ideas will actually lose you marks as you aren’t answering the exact question you have been set. The examiner isn’t going to reward you extra marks for information that is factually correct or demonstrates a great understanding of the play if the information is not relevant to the question being asked

4. Now you have identified and evaluated the key idea or theme of the question, read the contextual information above the extract:

• At this point in the play, the Prince has arrived…
• This information, alongside your knowledge of what the theme the examiners are asking you to explore in the question, are vital clues that help you decode the extract

5. Contextualise the extract further yourself, before reading it

• Think: what else happens before and after this point in the play?
• Which characters are involved?
• How does it link to other parts of the text?
• Therefore, even at this stage, it is good to think about how the theme of the question develops before and after this point in the play

6. Read the extract with all of the above information (the keywords from the question; the context) in mind

• This will enable you to pick out quotations and analyse only the most relevant parts of the extract in the context of the play as a whole, and the question you have been set

Planning your essay is absolutely vital to achieving the highest marks. Examiners always stress that the best responses are those that have a logical, well-structured argument that comes with spending time planning an answer. This, in turn, will enable you to achieve the highest marks for each assessment objective. The main assessment objectives are:

• Your plan should include all aspects of your response, covering all of the assessment objectives, but mainly focusing on AO1:
• Your overall argument, or thesis (AO1)
• Your topic sentences  for all your paragraphs (AO1)
• The quotations you will be using and analysing from the extract (AO1)
• The quotations you will be using and analysing from elsewhere in the play (AO1)
• A sense of why Shakespeare makes the choices he does (AO2)
• A sense of what contextual factors give further insight into the ideas and theme presented in the question (AO3)
• Therefore, a plan may look like the following:

Some other tips:

• The questions have been designed to enable as many students as possible to write essays 
• Examiners say that the inclusion of a counter-argument is often unnecessary and unhelpful
• It can affect your AO1 mark negatively
• Think of the extract as a stepping stone to the whole text
• Examiners prefer an “integrated approach”:  paragraphs which include related analysis of both extract and the whole play 
• Examiners dislike essays which treat the extract and the rest of the play as “separate entities”: when students analyse the extract in the first half of their essays, and then the rest of the play in the second half of their response – t his would mean your answer doesn’t cover the full scope of the question, and your AO1 mark would be affected 

Given the time pressure of the exam, there is always a temptation for students to do without a plan, especially if they feel they understand the focus of the question well. However, this is a mistake. 

The exam board states: “Where students have written a plan, there is often a sense of a coherent and organised response, for which references and quotations have been selected to support the student’s argument.”

What this means is that writing a plan not only enables you to achieve the highest AO1 marks (for organisation of argument) but also helps you select the most precise quotations and references, which will lead to a more relevant analysis of the writer’s methods (AO2).

Once you have read and evaluated the question, read and analysed the extract and created a clear plan, you are ready to begin writing. Below is a guide detailing what to include.

Your essay should include:

• An introduction with a thesis statement
• A number of paragraphs (three is ideal!), each covering a separate point. It’s a great idea to start each paragraph with a topic sentence  
• A conclusion

Introduction

• Your introduction should aim to answer the question – clearly and briefly
• The best way to do this is to include a thesis statement
• A thesis statement is a short statement (one or two sentences) that summarises the main point or claim your argument is making:
• You should include the exact words from the question in your thesis statement
• Examiners want to see your own opinion : your interpretation of what Shakespeare is trying to show
• Your thesis statement should also attempt to explain why you think Shakespeare has presented his characters in the way he has: what is he trying to say overall? What is his message?:
• A good way to think about this is to ask: what is Shakespeare’s one big idea in terms of the characters or themes addressed in the question?
• Include contextual ideas and perspectives to help explain Shakespeare’s intentions
• Including Shakespeare’s message or one big idea helps create a “conceptualised response”, for which examiners award the highest marks
• An example of a thesis statement:

Thesis statement:

“Shakespeare presents the effects of the conflict between the Capulet and Montague families as destructive and ultimately self-defeating. He does this to challenge contemporary ideas on family ties and honour, suggesting that conflicts such as these only end in an inescapable cycle of violence.”

• You will not be rewarded for including the same information twice, so don’t waste time repeating yourself
• “I believe that Shakespeare presents the effects of the conflict…” ❌
• “Shakespeare presents the effects of the conflict between the Capulet and Montague families as … in order to show …” ✅
• This will ensure your response is to what examiners call the “full task”
• A topic sentence is an opening sentence which details the focus of its paragraph
• It should include the words of the question
• All topic sentences must relate to your thesis
• They should be seen as sub-points that provide a more specific and narrower focus than your thesis statement
• Everything that follows a topic sentence in a paragraph must support the point it makes

Example of a topic sentence:

“Shakespeare presents the effects of conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues as fatal, even for those characters who do not wish to fight.”

• This is what examiners call an “integrated approach”
• Don’t separate your analysis of the rest of the play into different paragraphs
• The examiners stated that the best students “dip in and out of both the extract and the whole text to select details which support their argument as appropriate”
• You may have learned PEE, PEAL, PEED or other structures for your paragraphs
• However, examiners often say that although these are excellent for learning what to include in essays, they can be limiting in an exam
• Instead, be led by the ideas in the text, and prove your own argument (both the overall thesis, and your topic sentences)
• This can result in improved marks for AO1
• A conclusion for a Shakespeare essay should only summarise the proof you have provided for your thesis
• It only needs to be two or three sentences long
• It should include the words of the question and your thesis
• Remember, you do not get rewarded for including the same information twice

An example of a conclusion:

“In summary, Shakespeare presents the effects of the conflict between the Capulet and Montague families as disastrous, not just for those directly involved in the struggle, but even for those characters who wished to escape the conflict. Romeo and Juliet’s deaths – as well as the untimely murders of Mercutio and Tybalt – show how irrational family ties and ideas about honour bring about only endless violence and destroy even the youngest and most innocent bound up in these conflicts.”

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Author: Nick

Nick is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. He started his career in journalism and publishing, working as an editor on a political magazine and a number of books, before training as an English teacher. After nearly 10 years working in London schools, where he held leadership positions in English departments and within a Sixth Form, he moved on to become an examiner and education consultant. With more than a decade of experience as a tutor, Nick specialises in English, but has also taught Politics, Classical Civilisation and Religious Studies.

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Jeffrey R. Wilson

Essays on hamlet.

Written as the author taught Hamlet every semester for a decade, these lightning essays ask big conceptual questions about the play with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover, and answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. In doing so, Hamlet becomes a lens for life today, generating insights on everything from xenophobia, American fraternities, and religious fundamentalism to structural misogyny, suicide contagion, and toxic love.

Prioritizing close reading over historical context, these explorations are highly textual and highly theoretical, often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Readers see King Hamlet as a pre-modern villain, King Claudius as a modern villain, and Prince Hamlet as a post-modern villain. Hamlet’s feigned madness becomes a window into failed insanity defenses in legal trials. He knows he’s being watched in “To be or not to be”: the soliloquy is a satire of philosophy. Horatio emerges as Shakespeare’s authorial avatar for meta-theatrical commentary, Fortinbras as the hero of the play. Fate becomes a viable concept for modern life, and honor a source of tragedy. The metaphor of music in the play makes Ophelia Hamlet’s instrument. Shakespeare, like the modern corporation, stands against sexism, yet perpetuates it unknowingly. We hear his thoughts on single parenting, sending children off to college, and the working class, plus his advice on acting and writing, and his claims to be the next Homer or Virgil. In the context of four centuries of Hamlet hate, we hear how the text draws audiences in, how it became so famous, and why it continues to captivate audiences.

At a time when the humanities are said to be in crisis, these essays are concrete examples of the mind-altering power of literature and literary studies, unravelling the ongoing implications of the English language’s most significant artistic object of the past millennium.

Publications

Why is Hamlet the most famous English artwork of the past millennium? Is it a sexist text? Why does Hamlet speak in prose? Why must he die? Does Hamlet depict revenge, or justice? How did the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, transform into a story about a son dealing with the death of a father? Did Shakespeare know Aristotle’s theory of tragedy? How did our literary icon, Shakespeare, see his literary icons, Homer and Virgil? Why is there so much comedy in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy? Why is love a force of evil in the play? Did Shakespeare believe there’s a divinity that shapes our ends? How did he define virtue? What did he think about psychology? politics? philosophy? What was Shakespeare’s image of himself as an author? What can he, arguably the greatest writer of all time, teach us about our own writing? What was his theory of literature? Why do people like Hamlet ? How do the Hamlet haters of today compare to those of yesteryears? Is it dangerous for our children to read a play that’s all about suicide? 

These are some of the questions asked in this book, a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet stemming from my time teaching the play every semester in my Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University. During this time, I saw a series of bright young minds from wildly diverse backgrounds find their footing in Hamlet, and it taught me a lot about how Shakespeare’s tragedy works, and why it remains with us in the modern world. Beyond ghosts, revenge, and tragedy, Hamlet is a play about being in college, being in love, gender, misogyny, friendship, theater, philosophy, theology, injustice, loss, comedy, depression, death, self-doubt, mental illness, white privilege, overbearing parents, existential angst, international politics, the classics, the afterlife, and the meaning of it all. 

These essays grow from the central paradox of the play: it helps us understand the world we live in, yet we don't really understand the text itself very well. For all the attention given to Hamlet , there’s no consensus on the big questions—how it works, why it grips people so fiercely, what it’s about. These essays pose first-order questions about what happens in Hamlet and why, mobilizing answers for reflections on life, making the essays both highly textual and highly theoretical. 

Each semester that I taught the play, I would write a new essay about Hamlet . They were meant to be models for students, the sort of essay that undergrads read and write – more rigorous than the puff pieces in the popular press, but riskier than the scholarship in most academic journals. While I later added scholarly outerwear, these pieces all began just like the essays I was assigning to students – as short close readings with a reader and a text and a desire to determine meaning when faced with a puzzling question or problem. 

The turn from text to context in recent scholarly books about Hamlet is quizzical since we still don’t have a strong sense of, to quote the title of John Dover Wilson’s 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet. Is the ghost real? Is Hamlet mad, or just faking? Why does he delay? These are the kinds of questions students love to ask, but they haven’t been – can’t be – answered by reading the play in the context of its sources (recently addressed in Laurie Johnson’s The Tain of Hamlet [2013]), its multiple texts (analyzed by Paul Menzer in The Hamlets [2008] and Zachary Lesser in Hamlet after Q1 [2015]), the Protestant reformation (the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory [2001] and John E. Curran, Jr.’s Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency [2006]), Renaissance humanism (see Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness [2017]), Elizabethan political theory (see Margreta de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet [2007]), the play’s reception history (see David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages [2011]), its appropriation by modern philosophers (covered in Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster’s The Hamlet Doctrine [2013] and Andrew Cutrofello’s All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity [2014]), or its recent global travels (addressed, for example, in Margaret Latvian’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey [2011] and Dominic Dromgoole’s Hamlet Globe to Globe [2017]). 

Considering the context and afterlives of Hamlet is a worthy pursuit. I certainly consulted the above books for my essays, yet the confidence that comes from introducing context obscures the sharp panic we feel when confronting Shakespeare’s text itself. Even as the excellent recent book from Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich announces Hamlet has entered “an age of textual exhaustion,” there’s an odd tendency to avoid the text of Hamlet —to grasp for something more firm—when writing about it. There is a need to return to the text in a more immediate way to understand how Hamlet operates as a literary work, and how it can help us understand the world in which we live. 

That latter goal, yes, clings nostalgically to the notion that literature can help us understand life. Questions about life send us to literature in search of answers. Those of us who love literature learn to ask and answer questions about it as we become professional literary scholars. But often our answers to the questions scholars ask of literature do not connect back up with the questions about life that sent us to literature in the first place—which are often philosophical, ethical, social, and political. Those first-order questions are diluted and avoided in the minutia of much scholarship, left unanswered. Thus, my goal was to pose questions about Hamlet with the urgency of a Shakespeare lover and to answer them with the rigor of a Shakespeare scholar. 

In doing so, these essays challenge the conventional relationship between literature and theory. They pursue a kind of criticism where literature is not merely the recipient of philosophical ideas in the service of exegesis. Instead, the creative risks of literature provide exemplars to be theorized outward to help us understand on-going issues in life today. Beyond an occasion for the demonstration of existing theory, literature is a source for the creation of new theory.

Chapter One How Hamlet Works

Whether you love or hate Hamlet , you can acknowledge its massive popularity. So how does Hamlet work? How does it create audience enjoyment? Why is it so appealing, and to whom? Of all the available options, why Hamlet ? This chapter entertains three possible explanations for why the play is so popular in the modern world: the literary answer (as the English language’s best artwork about death—one of the very few universal human experiences in a modern world increasingly marked by cultural differences— Hamlet is timeless); the theatrical answer (with its mixture of tragedy and comedy, the role of Hamlet requires the best actor of each age, and the play’s popularity derives from the celebrity of its stars); and the philosophical answer (the play invites, encourages, facilitates, and sustains philosophical introspection and conversation from people who do not usually do such things, who find themselves doing those things with Hamlet , who sometimes feel embarrassed about doing those things, but who ultimately find the experience of having done them rewarding).

Chapter Two “It Started Like a Guilty Thing”: The Beginning of Hamlet and the Beginning of Modern Politics

King Hamlet is a tyrant and King Claudius a traitor but, because Shakespeare asked us to experience the events in Hamlet from the perspective of the young Prince Hamlet, we are much more inclined to detect and detest King Claudius’s political failings than King Hamlet’s. If so, then Shakespeare’s play Hamlet , so often seen as the birth of modern psychology, might also tell us a little bit about the beginnings of modern politics as well.

Chapter Three Horatio as Author: Storytelling and Stoic Tragedy

This chapter addresses Horatio’s emotionlessness in light of his role as a narrator, using this discussion to think about Shakespeare’s motives for writing tragedy in the wake of his son’s death. By rationalizing pain and suffering as tragedy, both Horatio and Shakespeare were able to avoid the self-destruction entailed in Hamlet’s emotional response to life’s hardships and injustices. Thus, the stoic Horatio, rather than the passionate Hamlet who repeatedly interrupts ‘The Mousetrap’, is the best authorial avatar for a Shakespeare who strategically wrote himself and his own voice out of his works. This argument then expands into a theory of ‘authorial catharsis’ and the suggestion that we can conceive of Shakespeare as a ‘poet of reason’ in contrast to a ‘poet of emotion’.

Chapter Four “To thine own self be true”: What Shakespeare Says about Sending Our Children Off to College

What does “To thine own self be true” actually mean? Be yourself? Don’t change who you are? Follow your own convictions? Don’t lie to yourself? This chapter argues that, if we understand meaning as intent, then “To thine own self be true” means, paradoxically, that “the self” does not exist. Or, more accurately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet implies that “the self” exists only as a rhetorical, philosophical, and psychological construct that we use to make sense of our experiences and actions in the world, not as anything real. If this is so, then this passage may offer us a way of thinking about Shakespeare as not just a playwright but also a moral philosopher, one who did his ethics in drama.

Chapter Five In Defense of Polonius

Your wife dies. You raise two children by yourself. You build a great career to provide for your family. You send your son off to college in another country, though you know he’s not ready. Now the prince wants to marry your daughter—that’s not easy to navigate. Then—get this—while you’re trying to save the queen’s life, the prince murders you. Your death destroys your kids. They die tragically. And what do you get for your efforts? Centuries of Shakespeare scholars dumping on you. If we see Polonius not through the eyes of his enemy, Prince Hamlet—the point of view Shakespeare’s play asks audiences to adopt—but in analogy to the common challenges of twenty-first-century parenting, Polonius is a single father struggling with work-life balance who sadly choses his career over his daughter’s well-being.

Chapter Six Sigma Alpha Elsinore: The Culture of Drunkenness in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Claudius likes to party—a bit too much. He frequently binge drinks, is arguably an alcoholic, but not an aberration. Hamlet says Denmark is internationally known for heavy drinking. That’s what Shakespeare would have heard in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth, English writers feared Denmark had taught their nation its drinking habits. Synthesizing criticism on alcoholism as an individual problem in Shakespeare’s texts and times with scholarship on national drinking habits in the early-modern age, this essay asks what the tragedy of alcoholism looks like when located not on the level of the individual, but on the level of a culture, as Shakespeare depicted in Hamlet. One window into these early-modern cultures of drunkenness is sociological studies of American college fraternities, especially the social-learning theories that explain how one person—one culture—teaches another its habits. For Claudius’s alcoholism is both culturally learned and culturally significant. And, as in fraternities, alcoholism in Hamlet is bound up with wealth, privilege, toxic masculinity, and tragedy. Thus, alcohol imagistically reappears in the vial of “cursed hebona,” Ophelia’s liquid death, and the poisoned cup in the final scene—moments that stand out in recent performances and adaptations with alcoholic Claudiuses and Gertrudes.

Chapter Seven Tragic Foundationalism

This chapter puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early-modern playwright William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . Doing so allows us to identify a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia – i.e., his “tragic mistake” – but it also allows us to consider the possibility of foundationalism as hamartia. Tragic foundationalism is the notion that fidelity to a single and substantive truth at the expense of an openness to evidence, reason, and change is an acute mistake which can lead to miscalculations of fact and virtue that create conflict and can end up in catastrophic destruction and the downfall of otherwise strong and noble people.

Chapter Eight “As a stranger give it welcome”: Shakespeare’s Advice for First-Year College Students

Encountering a new idea can be like meeting a strange person for the first time. Similarly, we dismiss new ideas before we get to know them. There is an answer to the problem of the human antipathy to strangeness in a somewhat strange place: a single line usually overlooked in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet . If the ghost is “wondrous strange,” Hamlet says, invoking the ancient ethics of hospitality, “Therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” In this word, strange, and the social conventions attached to it, is both the instinctual, animalistic fear and aggression toward what is new and different (the problem) and a cultivated, humane response in hospitality and curiosity (the solution). Intellectual xenia is the answer to intellectual xenophobia.

Chapter Nine Parallels in Hamlet

Hamlet is more parallely than other texts. Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes have their fathers murdered, then seek revenge. Brothers King Hamlet and King Claudius mirror brothers Old Norway and Old Fortinbras. Hamlet and Ophelia both lose their fathers, go mad, but there’s a method in their madness, and become suicidal. King Hamlet and Polonius are both domineering fathers. Hamlet and Polonius are both scholars, actors, verbose, pedantic, detectives using indirection, spying upon others, “by indirections find directions out." King Hamlet and King Claudius are both kings who are killed. Claudius using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet mirrors Polonius using Reynaldo to spy on Laertes. Reynaldo and Hamlet both pretend to be something other than what they are in order to spy on and detect foes. Young Fortinbras and Prince Hamlet both have their forward momentum “arrest[ed].” Pyrrhus and Hamlet are son seeking revenge but paused a “neutral to his will.” The main plot of Hamlet reappears in the play-within-the-play. The Act I duel between King Hamlet and Old Fortinbras echoes in the Act V duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Claudius and Hamlet are both king killers. Sheesh—why are there so many dang parallels in Hamlet ? Is there some detectable reason why the story of Hamlet would call for the literary device of parallelism?

Chapter Ten Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Why Hamlet Has Two Childhood Friends, Not Just One

Why have two of Hamlet’s childhood friends rather than just one? Do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have individuated personalities? First of all, by increasing the number of friends who visit Hamlet, Shakespeare creates an atmosphere of being outnumbered, of multiple enemies encroaching upon Hamlet, of Hamlet feeling that the world is against him. Second, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not interchangeable, as commonly thought. Shakespeare gave each an individuated personality. Guildenstern is friendlier with Hamlet, and their friendship collapses, while Rosencrantz is more distant and devious—a frenemy.

Chapter Eleven Shakespeare on the Classics, Shakespeare as a Classic: A Reading of Aeneas’s Tale to Dido

Of all the stories Shakespeare might have chosen, why have Hamlet ask the players to recite Aeneas’ tale to Dido of Pyrrhus’s slaughter of Priam? In this story, which comes not from Homer’s Iliad but from Virgil’s Aeneid and had already been adapted for the Elizabethan stage in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedy of Dido, Pyrrhus – more commonly known as Neoptolemus, the son of the famous Greek warrior Achilles – savagely slays Priam, the king of the Trojans and the father of Paris, who killed Pyrrhus’s father, Achilles, who killed Paris’s brother, Hector, who killed Achilles’s comrade, Patroclus. Clearly, the theme of revenge at work in this story would have appealed to Shakespeare as he was writing what would become the greatest revenge tragedy of all time. Moreover, Aeneas’s tale to Dido supplied Shakespeare with all of the connections he sought to make at this crucial point in his play and his career – connections between himself and Marlowe, between the start of Hamlet and the end, between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, between epic poetry and tragic drama, and between the classical literature Shakespeare was still reading hundreds of years later and his own potential as a classic who might (and would) be read hundreds of years into the future.

Chapter Twelve How Theater Works, according to Hamlet

According to Hamlet, people who are guilty of a crime will, when seeing that crime represented on stage, “proclaim [their] malefactions”—but that simply isn’t how theater works. Guilty people sit though shows that depict their crimes all the time without being prompted to public confession. Why did Shakespeare—a remarkably observant student of theater—write this demonstrably false theory of drama into his protagonist? And why did Shakespeare then write the plot of the play to affirm that obviously inaccurate vision of theater? For Claudius is indeed stirred to confession by the play-within-the-play. Perhaps Hamlet’s theory of people proclaiming malefactions upon seeing their crimes represented onstage is not as outlandish as it first appears. Perhaps four centuries of obsession with Hamlet is the English-speaking world proclaiming its malefactions upon seeing them represented dramatically.

Chapter Thirteen “To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy

This chapter hazards a new reading of the most famous passage in Western literature: “To be, or not to be” from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . With this line, Hamlet poses his personal struggle, a question of life and death, as a metaphysical problem, as a question of existence and nothingness. However, “To be, or not to be” is not what it seems to be. It seems to be a representation of tragic angst, yet a consideration of the context of the speech reveals that “To be, or not to be” is actually a satire of philosophy and Shakespeare’s representation of the theatricality of everyday life. In this chapter, a close reading of the context and meaning of this passage leads into an attempt to formulate a Shakespearean image of philosophy.

Chapter Fourteen Contagious Suicide in and Around Hamlet

As in society today, suicide is contagious in Hamlet , at least in the example of Ophelia, the only death by suicide in the play, because she only becomes suicidal after hearing Hamlet talk about his own suicidal thoughts in “To be, or not to be.” Just as there are media guidelines for reporting on suicide, there are better and worse ways of handling Hamlet . Careful suicide coverage can change public misperceptions and reduce suicide contagion. Is the same true for careful literary criticism and classroom discussion of suicide texts? How can teachers and literary critics reduce suicide contagion and increase help-seeking behavior?

Chapter Fifteen Is Hamlet a Sexist Text? Overt Misogyny vs. Unconscious Bias

Students and fans of Shakespeare’s Hamlet persistently ask a question scholars and critics of the play have not yet definitively answered: is it a sexist text? The author of this text has been described as everything from a male chauvinist pig to a trailblazing proto-feminist, but recent work on the science behind discrimination and prejudice offers a new, better vocabulary in the notion of unconscious bias. More pervasive and slippery than explicit bigotry, unconscious bias involves the subtle, often unintentional words and actions which indicate the presence of biases we may not be aware of, ones we may even fight against. The Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet exhibited an unconscious bias against women, I argue, even as he sought to critique the mistreatment of women in a patriarchal society. The evidence for this unconscious bias is not to be found in the misogynistic statements made by the characters in the play. It exists, instead, in the demonstrable preference Shakespeare showed for men over women when deciding where to deploy his literary talents. Thus, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a powerful literary example – one which speaks to, say, the modern corporation – showing that deliberate efforts for egalitarianism do not insulate one from the effects of structural inequalities that both stem from and create unconscious bias.

Chapter Sixteen Style and Purpose in Acting and Writing

Purpose and style are connected in academic writing. To answer the question of style ( How should we write academic papers? ) we must first answer the question of purpose ( Why do we write academic papers? ). We can answer these questions, I suggest, by turning to an unexpected style guide that’s more than 400 years old: the famous passage on “the purpose of playing” in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . In both acting and writing, a high style often accompanies an expressive purpose attempting to impress an elite audience yet actually alienating intellectual people, while a low style and mimetic purpose effectively engage an intellectual audience.

Chapter Seventeen 13 Ways of Looking at a Ghost

Why doesn’t Gertrude see the Ghost of King Hamlet in Act III, even though Horatio, Bernardo, Francisco, Marcellus, and Prince Hamlet all saw it in Act I? It’s a bit embarrassing that Shakespeare scholars don’t have a widely agreed-upon consensus that explains this really basic question that puzzles a lot of people who read or see Hamlet .

Chapter Eighteen The Tragedy of Love in Hamlet

The word “love” appears 84 times in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . “Father” only appears 73 times, “play” 60, “think” 55, “mother” 46, “mad” 44, “soul” 40, “God" 39, “death” 38, “life” 34, “nothing” 28, “son” 26, “honor” 21, “spirit” 19, “kill” 18, “revenge” 14, and “action” 12. Love isn’t the first theme that comes to mind when we think of Hamlet , but is surprisingly prominent. But love is tragic in Hamlet . The bloody catastrophe at the end of that play is principally driven not by hatred or a longing for revenge, but by love.

Chapter Nineteen Ophelia’s Songs: Moral Agency, Manipulation, and the Metaphor of Music in Hamlet

This chapter reads Ophelia’s songs in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the context of the meaning of music established elsewhere in the play. While the songs are usually seen as a marker of Ophelia’s madness (as a result of the death of her father) or freedom (from the constraints of patriarchy), they come – when read in light of the metaphor of music as manipulation – to symbolize her role as a pawn in Hamlet’s efforts to deceive his family. Thus, music was Shakespeare’s platform for connecting Ophelia’s story to one of the central questions in Hamlet : Do we have control over our own actions (like the musician), or are we controlled by others (like the instrument)?

Chapter Twenty A Quantitative Study of Prose and Verse in Hamlet

Why does Hamlet have so much prose? Did Shakespeare deliberately shift from verse to prose to signal something to his audiences? How would actors have handled the shifts from verse to prose? Would audiences have detected shifts from verse to prose? Is there an overarching principle that governs Shakespeare’s decision to use prose—a coherent principle that says, “If X, then use prose?”

Chapter Twenty-One The Fortunes of Fate in Hamlet : Divine Providence and Social Determinism

In Hamlet , fate is attacked from both sides: “fortune” presents a world of random happenstance, “will” a theory of efficacious human action. On this backdrop, this essay considers—irrespective of what the characters say and believe—what the structure and imagery Shakespeare wrote into Hamlet say about the possibility that some version of fate is at work in the play. I contend the world of Hamlet is governed by neither fate nor fortune, nor even the Christianized version of fate called “providence.” Yet there is a modern, secular, disenchanted form of fate at work in Hamlet—what is sometimes called “social determinism”—which calls into question the freedom of the individual will. As such, Shakespeare’s Hamlet both commented on the transformation of pagan fate into Christian providence that happened in the centuries leading up to the play, and anticipated the further transformation of fate from a theological to a sociological idea, which occurred in the centuries following Hamlet .

Chapter Twenty-Two The Working Class in Hamlet

There’s a lot for working-class folks to hate about Hamlet —not just because it’s old, dusty, difficult to understand, crammed down our throats in school, and filled with frills, tights, and those weird lace neck thingies that are just socially awkward to think about. Peak Renaissance weirdness. Claustrophobicly cloistered inside the castle of Elsinore, quaintly angsty over royal family problems, Hamlet feels like the literary epitome of elitism. “Lawless resolutes” is how the Wittenberg scholar Horatio describes the soldiers who join Fortinbras’s army in exchange “for food.” The Prince Hamlet who has never worked a day in his life denigrates Polonius as a “fishmonger”: quite the insult for a royal advisor to be called a working man. And King Claudius complains of the simplicity of "the distracted multitude.” But, in Hamlet , Shakespeare juxtaposed the nobles’ denigrations of the working class as readily available metaphors for all-things-awful with the rather valuable behavior of working-class characters themselves. When allowed to represent themselves, the working class in Hamlet are characterized as makers of things—of material goods and services like ships, graves, and plays, but also of ethical and political virtues like security, education, justice, and democracy. Meanwhile, Elsinore has a bad case of affluenza, the make-believe disease invented by an American lawyer who argued that his client's social privilege was so great that it created an obliviousness to law. While social elites rot society through the twin corrosives of political corruption and scholarly detachment, the working class keeps the machine running. They build the ships, plays, and graves society needs to function, and monitor the nuts-and-bolts of the ideals—like education and justice—that we aspire to uphold.

Chapter Twenty-Three The Honor Code at Harvard and in Hamlet

Students at Harvard College are asked, when they first join the school and several times during their years there, to affirm their awareness of and commitment to the school’s honor code. But instead of “the foundation of our community” that it is at Harvard, honor is tragic in Hamlet —a source of anxiety, blunder, and catastrophe. As this chapter shows, looking at Hamlet from our place at Harvard can bring us to see what a tangled knot honor can be, and we can start to theorize the difference between heroic and tragic honor.

Chapter Twenty-Four The Meaning of Death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

By connecting the ways characters live their lives in Hamlet to the ways they die – on-stage or off, poisoned or stabbed, etc. – Shakespeare symbolized hamartia in catastrophe. In advancing this argument, this chapter develops two supporting ideas. First, the dissemination of tragic necessity: Shakespeare distributed the Aristotelian notion of tragic necessity – a causal relationship between a character’s hamartia (fault or error) and the catastrophe at the end of the play – from the protagonist to the other characters, such that, in Hamlet , those who are guilty must die, and those who die are guilty. Second, the spectacularity of death: there exists in Hamlet a positive correlation between the severity of a character’s hamartia (error or flaw) and the “spectacularity” of his or her death – that is, the extent to which it is presented as a visible and visceral spectacle on-stage.

Chapter Twenty-Five Tragic Excess in Hamlet

In Hamlet , Shakespeare paralleled the situations of Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras (the father of each is killed, and each then seeks revenge) to promote the virtue of moderation: Hamlet moves too slowly, Laertes too swiftly – and they both die at the end of the play – but Fortinbras represents a golden mean which marries the slowness of Hamlet with the swiftness of Laertes. As argued in this essay, Shakespeare endorsed the virtue of balance by allowing Fortinbras to be one of the very few survivors of the play. In other words, excess is tragic in Hamlet .

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Shakespeare Studies & Criticism

Explore our collection, latest books & journal articles.

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Welcome to the home of Shakespeare Studies & Criticism on Oxford Academic. We hope you will enjoy this celebration of Shakespeare, and that this page will act as a springboard to new discoveries on your research journey.

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Shakespeare on the oupblog.

Written in the stars: Prince Hal’s almanac

Marissa Nicosia

Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction! What says th’almanac to that?

Marissa Nicosia explores the role of the almanac as a measure of time in Shakespeare’s Henry IV , and the parallels between a past and present-day fascination with astrology.

Sir Stanley Wells and the First Folio

It’s often been difficult to dispel this reverence and distinguish an actual author behind it.

For enabling many readers to accomplish that, we have to thank Sir Stanley Wells, general editor of The Oxford Shakespeare and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University. His diligent and common-sense scholarship has done much to de-mystify Shakespeare and reposition the plays as working documents.

OUP Archivist Martin Maw examines one scholar’s immense contribution to Shakespeare Studies.

“A tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide”: Shakespeare under attack

Robert Stagg 

Around three years into his career as a dramatist, Shakespeare’s blank verse, came under attack.  

In 1592, playwright Robert Greene described William Shakespeare’s blank verse—his unrhymed iambic pentameter—as "bombastic".

Robert Stagg explores this criticism and how Shakespeare came to fend it off over the course of his career.

Why “the all-male stage” wasn’t

Pamela Allen Brown 

Why is “the all-male stage” inadequate as shorthand for the early modern stage?

Pamela Allen Brown explores gender roles on stage, and the arrival and impact of the 'innamorata accesa' (woman inflamed with passion), the trademark of the foreign diva.

How did Shakespeare become a London playwright?

Lena Cowen Orlin

Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, wrote in 1709 that the author married “while he was yet very young.” He then fell in with a bad crowd that “made a frequent practice of deer-stealing” from Warwickshire magnate Sir Thomas Lucy.

Lena Cowen Orlin traces the key events that took the playwright from Stratford to London.

Shakespeare and the sciences of emotion

Benedict S. Robinson

What role should literature have in the interdisciplinary study of emotion? The dominant answer today seems to be “not much.”

Using Shakespeare's Hamlet , Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Mind and Aristotle's Rhetoric ’ as points of departure, Benedict S. Robinson takes a wide view of emotion and "passion" to think about how passion also shaped the rise of new empirical sciences of the mind between 1600 and 1800.

Adapting Shakespeare: shattering stereotypes of Asian women onstage and onscreen

Alexa Alice Joubin

“I should like to see Miss Wong playing Shakespeare. Why not a Chinese Ophelia?”

Alexa Alice Joubin explores the perceptions and portrayal of Ophelia by Asian actors, arguing that gender roles in Shakespeare’s plays take on new meanings when they are embodied by Asian women.

Cut out characters and cracky plots: Jacob’s Room as Shakespeare play

Emily Kopley

But there is another reason, a reason outside of the novel, that Jacob is unknowable. He is the hero of a Shakespeare play.

Emily Kopley analyses Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room as a Shakespeare play, using letters between her and her brother Thoby, as an insight into the novel.

Early Modern Literary Geographies

Influenced by the work of cultural and human geographers, literary scholars have started to attend to the ways in which early modern people constructed their senses of the world out of interactions among places, spaces, and embodied practices. Early Modern Literary Geographies features innovative and agenda-setting research monographs that partake of this spatial turn.

Series Editors: Julie Sanders and Garrett Sullivan

Oxford Shakespeare Topics

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject.

General Editors: Stanley Wells, Peter Holland, and Lena Cowen Orlin

Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures

These Lectures are derived from the series of biennial lectures established in 2008 in honour of Professor Stanley Wells. The inaugural lectures were given by Professor David Scott Kastan and since then a series of highly respected scholars have presented and published in this series.

New Oxford Shakespeare

The New Oxford Shakespeare presents an entirely new consideration of all of Shakespeare's works, edited from first principles from the base-texts themselves, and drawing on the latest textual and theatrical scholarship.

The three interconnected print publications and the online edition have been created by an international, intergenerational team of scholars. The project's scope, depth, and vision provide the perfect platform for the future of Shakespeare studies.

Edited by: Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race

Edited by Patricia Akhimie

Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, has broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom.

Replete with fresh readings of the plays and poems, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race brings together some of the most important scholars thinking about the subject today.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

Edited by Christopher R. Wilson and Mervyn Cooke

With global coverage and an extensive survey of genres embracing music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music.

The Handbook showcases the latest international research into the captivating and vast subject of the many uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, extending from the Bard's own time to the present day.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance

Edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw

A concise reference on dance as both an integral feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and as a means of translating Shakespearean text into movement - a process that raises questions of authorship and authority, cross-cultural communication, semantics, embodiment, and the relationship between word and image.

From narrative ballet adaptations to dance in musicals, physical theatre adaptations, and interpretations using non-Western dance forms this Handbook explores the relationship between William Shakespeare - his life, works, and afterlife - and dance.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment

Edited by Valerie Traub

Extending the purview of feminist criticism, over 40 chapters offer an intersectional paradigm for considering representations of gender in the context of race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and religion.

Theoretically sophisticated and elegantly written this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current debates.

Shakespeare Quarterly | Submit your research  

Shakespeare Quarterly (SQ)  is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies, publishing highly original, rigorously researched essays, notes, and book reviews. Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Oxford University Press, SQ is peer-reviewed and extremely selective.

Read our Author Guidelines to find out how to submit your work

Shakespeare’s Reading

Sir Stanley Wells, CBE, describes the many different sources Shakespeare drew upon in his work. Highlighting comparison passages, Wells explores Shakespeare’s relationship with the different texts he read throughout his life.

Shakespeare and Women

Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, discusses Shakespeare’s portrayal of the power balance between the sexes, women’s contribution to the Elizabethan stage, and Renaissance ideas about gender. She also considers key speeches by Desdemona and Emilia in Othello .

Shakespeare and Religion

Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson, Head of Research and Knowledge at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, explores the religious influences in Shakespeare’s work in the context of 16th century England - a time when the Church of England was given an established authority, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I, and anti-Catholic laws were introduced.

Shakespeare and Sexuality

Sir Stanley Wells, CBE, analyses the references to sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. From his earlier comedies, such as The Two Gentleman of Verona or Much Ado About Nothing , where he is unafraid to play with this topic, to his middle and last texts where he demonstrates a deeper preoccupation with the destructive potential of sexual desire.

Shakespeare and Death

Laurie Maguire, Emeritus Professor, Magdalen College Oxford discusses the theme of death in Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies. She considers how Elizabethans encountered death on a daily basis, and how Shakespeare was clearly very familiar with the details of death, and murder.

Shakespeare and Music

Joseph M. Ortiz, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, El Paso, explains how music was experienced and understood in Shakespeare’s time, with reference to education, the emerging music publishing industry, conflicting religious views, audiences’ expectations, and music as an instrument of political power.

Shakespeare and Race

Ayanna Thompson considers the theme of race in Shakespeare’s plays, the extent to which he would have been aware of Africans, and how he introduced them into his plays. She discusses the current debate amongst black actors about whether or not to play the part of Othello .

Shakespeare and His Collaborators

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100+ Shakespeare Essay Topics

The enigmatic William Shakespeare remains one of the most studied literary figures, and writing essays on his comprehensive works can be as enlightening as it is challenging. At WriteOnDeadline, we understand the complexities and subtleties involved in crafting compelling essays about Shakespeare’s compositions. Therefore, we are here to assist you in navigating this journey through selecting intriguing topics and offering a helping hand in bringing your Shakespeare essay to life.

Table of Contents

What is a Shakespeare Essay?

A Shakespeare essay is a scholarly composition that explores the various aspects of Shakespeare’s works, including his plays, sonnets, and other poetic works. These essays can delve into themes like tragedy, love, betrayal, leadership, and supernatural elements, to name a few, all frequent in Shakespeare’s writings. Analyzing the historical context, linguistic techniques, character development, and unique plot twists are also integral parts of a Shakespeare essay, requiring a deep understanding of literature, Renaissance culture, and, importantly, Elizabethan English.

Choosing the Perfect Shakespeare Essay Topic: A Quick Guide

Embarking on the journey of writing a Shakespeare essay involves first selecting a topic that is not only engaging but also offers ample avenues for research and analysis. Here’s a quick guide on making this crucial choice:

• Passion Meets Relevance: Choose a theme or character from Shakespeare’s works that intrigues you the most. Your passion for the subject will fuel your research and writing process.
• Scope for Exploration: Opt for a topic that allows multiple perspectives and interpretations. The richness of Shakespeare’s work lies in its complexity and the myriad ways it can be understood.
• Resource Availability: Ensure there are sufficient resources and scholarly materials available for your chosen topic. The depth of your analysis will largely depend on the quality of the research you conduct.
• Originality is Key: While Shakespeare’s works have been discussed extensively, strive to find a unique angle or an under-represented theme that will make your essay stand out.

Captivating Shakespeare Essay Topics Lists

Delving into the world of Shakespeare requires a guide to the possible paths one can explore. Below are unique and engaging topics that can be the foundation of insightful essays.

Analyzing the Tragedies

• The manifestation of political power in “Macbeth.”
• Exploring the theme of revenge in “Hamlet.”
• The role of fate and free will in the tragedy of “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Moral dilemmas faced by characters in “King Lear.”

Delving into the Comedies

• Gender disguises and their implications in “Twelfth Night.”
• The concept of love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• Analyzing the comedic elements in “Much Ado About Nothing.”
• Portrayal of friendship in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

The Histories and Their Relevance

• Historical truths versus artistic license in “Richard III.”
• Exploring national identity in “Henry V.”
• The role of prophecy and divination in “Julius Caesar.”
• Leadership qualities depicted in “Henry IV, Part 1.”

Unraveling the Romances

• The supernatural elements in “The Tempest.”
• Realism and idealism in “The Winter’s Tale.”
• Exploration of forgiveness and reconciliation in “Cymbeline.”
• Depictions of loss and redemption in “Pericles.”

Sonnets and Poems

• The theme of immortality in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
• Shakespeare’s depiction of love in his sonnets.
• Analysis of narrative techniques in “The Rape of Lucrece.”
• The role of symbolism in “Venus and Adonis.”

Special Topics

• Shakespeare’s influence on modern literature.
• The relevance of Shakespeare in today’s world.
• Shakespeare’s portrayal of female characters.
• The use of soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays.

Shakespeare’s Worldview

• Shakespeare’s perception of the human experience.
• The idea of mortality in Shakespeare’s plays.
• How Shakespeare’s personal life influenced his work.
• The importance of nature in Shakespeare’s literature.
• Social hierarchies and class distinctions in Shakespearean plays.

Portrayal of Relationships

• Familial bonds in “King Lear.”
• Love versus infatuation in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Friendship dynamics in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• Manipulative relationships in “Othello.”
• Power struggles in marital relationships throughout Shakespeare’s plays.

Villains and Antagonists

• The psychological profile of Iago in “Othello.”
• Lady Macbeth: Power, ambition, and guilt.
• Richard III’s quest for power and its implications.
• The role of jealousy in creating villains in Shakespeare’s works.
• Aaron the Moor’s malevolence in “Titus Andronicus.”

Supernatural Elements

• The importance of the Three Witches in “Macbeth.”
• The role of ghosts and apparitions in “Hamlet.”
• Prophecies and their influences in Shakespeare’s plays.
• The supernatural as a reflection of human psychology.
• Ariel vs. Caliban: Contrasting representations of the supernatural in “The Tempest.”

Philosophical Insights

• To be or not to be: An exploration of existentialism in “Hamlet.”
• The notion of predestined fate in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• The philosophy of dreams in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• The concept of time in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
• Views on ambition and its consequences in “Macbeth.”

Lesser Studied Plays

• Exploration of societal norms in “Troilus and Cressida.”
• Themes of betrayal and loyalty in “Coriolanus.”
• The tragic elements in “Timon of Athens.”
• Elements of satire in “All’s Well That Ends Well.”
• Role of disguise in “Measure for Measure.”

Historical and Political Analysis

• Shakespeare’s portrayal of Roman politics in “Antony and Cleopatra.”
• The Tudor myth in Shakespeare’s historical plays.
• Analysis of the political climate in “Julius Caesar.”
• Leadership dynamics in “Henry IV, Part 2.”
• The politics of love in “Antony and Cleopatra.”

Language and Rhetoric

• Shakespeare’s innovative use of the English language.
• The power of soliloquies in driving plot and character development.
• Wordplay, puns, and their significance in “Twelfth Night.”
• Rhetorical devices in Mark Antony’s speech in “Julius Caesar.”
• The language of love in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Gender and Sexuality

• The role of cross-dressing in “As You Like It.”
• Examining the feminist aspects of “The Taming of the Shrew.”
• Gender roles and expectations in “Macbeth.”
• Exploration of sexuality in “The Sonnets.”
• Female empowerment in “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Religion and Morality

• Religious undertones in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• The interplay of sin, redemption, and justice in “Hamlet.”
• Examination of moral dilemmas in “Othello.”
• Pagan vs. Christian beliefs in “King Lear.”
• The concept of divine retribution in Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Character Development and Evolution

• Evolution of Macbeth: From hero to tyrant.
• Desdemona’s resilience and fragility in “Othello.”
• The transformation of Prince Hal to King Henry V.
• Juliet’s journey from innocence to maturity.
• The multifaceted nature of Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Symbolism and Imagery

• The symbolism of blood in “Macbeth.”
• Light and darkness imagery in “Romeo and Juliet.”
• Nature imagery in “As You Like It.”
• The role of the handkerchief in “Othello.”
• Sea and land as contrasting symbols in “The Tempest.”

Settings and Their Implications

• The significance of the Forest of Arden in “As You Like It.”
• Venice vs. Belmont: Contrasting worlds in “The Merchant of Venice.”
• The claustrophobic setting of Elsinore in “Hamlet.”
• Social dynamics in the court vs. wilderness in “King Lear.”
• The island’s role as a microcosm of society in “The Tempest.”

Deceptions and Revelations

• The impact of Iago’s deceptions in “Othello.”
• Secrets and revelations in “Twelfth Night.”
• The tragic consequences of deceit in “Macbeth.”
• Mistaken identities in “The Comedy of Errors.”
• Portia’s cunning in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Love in Its Many Forms

• Unrequited love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• The destructive nature of obsessive love in “Antony and Cleopatra.”
• Familial love in “King Lear.”
• Friendship vs. romantic love in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.”
• The portrayal of true love in “The Sonnets.”

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Useful References

• Shakespeare Online
• The British Library – Shakespeare in Quarto
• Folger Shakespeare Library
• Shakespeare’s Works: A Comprehensive Resource
• Shakespeare Resource Center

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Shakespeare's Life: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

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Surviving documents that give us glimpses into the life of William Shakespeare show us a playwright, poet, and actor who grew up in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, spent his professional life in London, and returned to Stratford a wealthy landowner. He was born in April 1564, died in April 1616, and is buried inside the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

We wish we could know more about the life of the world’s greatest dramatist. His plays and poems are testaments to his wide reading—especially to his knowledge of Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Holinshed’s  Chronicles , and the Bible—and to his mastery of the English language, but we can only speculate about his education. We know that the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon was considered excellent. The school was one of the English “grammar schools” established to educate young men, primarily in Latin grammar and literature. As in other schools of the time, students began their studies at the age of four or five in the attached “petty school,” and there learned to read and write in English, studying primarily the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. After two years in the petty school, students entered the lower form (grade) of the grammar school, where they began the serious study of Latin grammar and Latin texts that would occupy most of the remainder of their school days. (Several Latin texts that Shakespeare used repeatedly in writing his plays and poems were texts that schoolboys memorized and recited.) Latin comedies were introduced early in the lower form; in the upper form, which the boys entered at age ten or eleven, students wrote their own Latin orations and declamations, studied Latin historians and rhetoricians, and began the study of Greek using the Greek New Testament.

Title page of a 1573 Latin and Greek catechism for children. From Alexander Nowell, Catechismus paruus pueris primum Latine  . . . (1573).

Since the records of the Stratford “grammar school” do not survive, we cannot prove that William Shakespeare attended the school; however, every indication (his father’s position as an alderman and bailiff of Stratford, the playwright’s own knowledge of the Latin classics, scenes in the plays that recall grammar-school experiences—for example,  The Merry Wives of Windsor , 4.1 ) suggests that he did. We also lack generally accepted documentation about Shakespeare’s life after his schooling ended and his professional life in London began. His marriage in 1582 (at age eighteen) to Anne Hathaway and the subsequent births of his daughter Susanna (1583) and the twins Judith and Hamnet (1585) are recorded, but how he supported himself and where he lived are not known. Nor do we know when and why he left Stratford for the London theatrical world, nor how he rose to be the important figure in that world that he had become by the early 1590s.

We do know that by 1592 he had achieved some prominence in London as both an actor and a playwright. In that year was published a book by the playwright Robert Greene attacking an actor who had the audacity to write blank-verse drama and who was “in his own conceit [i.e., opinion] the only Shake-scene in a country.” Since Greene’s attack includes a parody of a line from one of Shakespeare’s early plays, there is little doubt that it is Shakespeare to whom he refers, a “Shake-scene” who had aroused Greene’s fury by successfully competing with university-educated dramatists like Greene himself. It was in 1593 that Shakespeare became a published poet. In that year he published his long narrative poem  Venus and Adonis ; in 1594, he followed it with  The Rape of Lucrece.  Both poems were dedicated to the young earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley), who may have become Shakespeare’s patron.

It seems no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote these narrative poems at a time when the theaters were closed because of the plague, a contagious epidemic disease that devastated the population of London. When the theaters reopened in 1594, Shakespeare apparently resumed his double career of actor and playwright and began his long (and seemingly profitable) service as an acting-company shareholder. Records for December of 1594 show him to be a leading member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was this company of actors, later named the King’s Men, for whom he would be a principal actor, dramatist, and shareholder for the rest of his career.

So far as we can tell, that career spanned about twenty years. In the 1590s, he wrote his plays on English history as well as several comedies and at least two tragedies ( Titus Andronicus  and  Romeo and Juliet ). These histories, comedies, and tragedies are the plays credited to him in 1598 in a work,  Palladis Tamia , that in one chapter compares English writers with “Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets.” There the author, Francis Meres, claims that Shakespeare is comparable to the Latin dramatists Seneca for tragedy and Plautus for comedy, and calls him “the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.” He also names him “Mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”: “I say,” writes Meres, “that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.” Since Meres also mentions Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” it is assumed that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not published until 1609) were also written in the 1590s.

In 1599, Shakespeare’s company built a theater for themselves across the river from London, naming it the Globe. The plays that are considered by many to be Shakespeare’s major tragedies ( Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , and  Macbeth ) were written while the company was resident in this theater, as were such comedies as  Twelfth Night  and  Measure for Measure .  Many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed at court (both for Queen Elizabeth I and, after her death in 1603, for King James I), some were presented at the Inns of Court (the residences of London’s legal societies), and some were doubtless performed in other towns, at the universities, and at great houses when the King’s Men went on tour; otherwise, his plays from 1599 to 1608 were, so far as we know, performed only at the Globe. Between 1608 and 1612, Shakespeare wrote several plays—among them  The Winter’s Tale  and  The Tempest —presumably for the company’s new indoor Blackfriars theater, though the plays were performed also at the Globe and at court. Surviving documents describe a performance of  The Winter’s Tale  in 1611 at the Globe, for example, and performances of  The Tempest  in 1611 and 1613 at the royal palace of Whitehall.

Shakespeare seems to have written very little after 1612, the year in which he probably wrote  King Henry VIII .  (It was at a performance of  Henry VIII  in 1613 that the Globe caught fire and burned to the ground.) Sometime between 1610 and 1613, according to many biographers, he returned to live in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he owned a large house and considerable property, and where his wife and his two daughters lived. (His son Hamnet had died in 1596.) However, other biographers suggest that Shakespeare did not leave London for good until much closer to the time of his death. During his professional years in London, Shakespeare had presumably derived income from the acting company’s profits as well as from his own career as an actor, from the sale of his play manuscripts to the acting company, and, after 1599, from his shares as an owner of the Globe. It was presumably that income, carefully invested in land and other property, that made him the wealthy man that surviving documents show him to have become. It is also assumed that William Shakespeare’s growing wealth and reputation played some part in inclining the Crown, in 1596, to grant John Shakespeare, William’s father, the coat of arms that he had so long sought. William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616 (according to the epitaph carved under his bust in Holy Trinity Church) and was buried on April 25. Seven years after his death, his collected plays were published as  Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies  (the work now known as the First Folio).

Ptolemaic universe. From Marcus Manilius, The sphere of . . . (1675).

The years in which Shakespeare wrote were among the most exciting in English history. Intellectually, the discovery, translation, and printing of Greek and Roman classics were making available a set of works and worldviews that interacted complexly with Christian texts and beliefs. The result was a questioning, a vital intellectual ferment, that provided energy for the period’s amazing dramatic and literary output and that fed directly into Shakespeare’s plays. The Ghost in  Hamlet , for example, is wonderfully complicated in part because he is a figure from Roman tragedy—the spirit of the dead returning to seek revenge—who at the same time inhabits a Christian hell (or purgatory); Hamlet’s description of humankind reflects at one moment the Neoplatonic wonderment at mankind (“ What a piece of work is a man! ”) and, at the next, the Christian attitude toward sinful humanity (“ And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ”).

As intellectual horizons expanded, so also did geographical and cosmological horizons. New worlds—both North and South America—were explored, and in them were found human beings who lived and worshiped in ways radically different from those of Renaissance Europeans and Englishmen. The universe during these years also seemed to shift and expand. Copernicus had earlier theorized that the earth was not the center of the cosmos but revolved as a planet around the sun. Galileo’s telescope, created in 1609, allowed scientists to see that Copernicus had been correct: the universe was not organized with the earth at the center, nor was it so nicely circumscribed as people had, until that time, thought. In terms of expanding horizons, the impact of these discoveries on people’s beliefs—religious, scientific, and philosophical—cannot be overstated.

London, too, rapidly expanded and changed during the years (from the early 1590s to around 1610) that Shakespeare lived there. London—the center of England’s government, its economy, its royal court, its overseas trade—was, during these years, becoming an exciting metropolis, drawing to it thousands of new citizens every year. Troubled by overcrowding, by poverty, by recurring epidemics of the plague, London was also a mecca for the wealthy and the aristocratic, and for those who sought advancement at court, or power in government or finance or trade. One hears in Shakespeare’s plays the voices of London—the struggles for power, the fear of venereal disease, the language of buying and selling. One hears as well the voices of Stratford-upon-Avon—references to the nearby Forest of Arden, to sheepherding, to small-town gossip, to village fairs and markets. Part of the richness of Shakespeare’s work is the influence felt there of the various worlds in which he lived: the world of metropolitan London, the world of small-town and rural England, the world of the theater, and the worlds of craftsmen and shepherds.

That Shakespeare inhabited such worlds we know from surviving London and Stratford documents, as well as from the evidence of the plays and poems themselves. From such records we can sketch the dramatist’s life. We know from his works that he was a voracious reader. We know from legal and business documents that he was a multifaceted theater man who became a wealthy landowner. We know a bit about his family life and a fair amount about his legal and financial dealings. Most scholars today depend upon such evidence as they draw their picture of the world’s greatest playwright. Such, however, has not always been the case. Until the late eighteenth century, the William Shakespeare who lived in most biographies was the creation of legend and tradition. This was the Shakespeare who was supposedly caught poaching deer at Charlecote, the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy close by Stratford; this was the Shakespeare who fled from Sir Thomas’s vengeance and made his way in London by taking care of horses outside a playhouse; this was the Shakespeare who reportedly could barely read, but whose natural gifts were extraordinary, whose father was a butcher who allowed his gifted son sometimes to help in the butcher shop, where William supposedly killed calves “in a high style,” making a speech for the occasion. It was this legendary William Shakespeare whose Falstaff (in  1  and  2 Henry IV ) so pleased Queen Elizabeth that she demanded a play about Falstaff in love, and demanded that it be written in fourteen days (hence the existence of  The Merry Wives of Windsor ). It was this legendary Shakespeare who reached the top of his acting career in the roles of the Ghost in  Hamlet  and old Adam in  As You Like It —and who died of a fever contracted by drinking too hard at “a merry meeting” with the poets Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. This legendary Shakespeare is a rambunctious, undisciplined man, as attractively “wild” as his plays were seen by earlier generations to be. Unfortunately, there is no trace of evidence to support these wonderful stories.

Perhaps in response to the disreputable Shakespeare of legend—or perhaps in response to the fragmentary and, for some, all-too-ordinary Shakespeare documented by surviving records—some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford), and Christopher Marlowe. Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays is a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held. Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of Shakespeare’s life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an “important” person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good “grammar-school” education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater. How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world four centuries after his death is one of life’s mysteries—and one that will continue to tease our imaginations as we continue to delight in his plays and poems.

Further Reading

Baldwin, T. W.  William Shakspere’s Petty School.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943.

Baldwin here investigates the theory and practice of the petty school, the first level of education in Elizabethan England. He focuses on that educational system primarily as it is reflected in Shakespeare’s art.

Baldwin, T. W.  William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.  2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944.

Baldwin attacks the view that Shakespeare was an uneducated genius—a view that had been dominant among Shakespeareans since the eighteenth century. Instead, Baldwin shows, the educational system of Shakespeare’s time would have given the playwright a strong background in the classics, and there is much in the plays that shows how Shakespeare benefited from such an education.

Beier, A. L., and Roger Finlay, eds.  London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis.  New York: Longman, 1986.

Focusing on the economic and social history of early modern London, these collected essays probe aspects of metropolitan life, including “Population and Disease,” “Commerce and Manufacture,” and “Society and Change.”

Chambers, E. K.  William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems.  2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

Analyzing in great detail the scant historical data, Chambers’s complex, scholarly study considers the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare’s work is preserved.

Cressy, David.  Education in Tudor and Stuart England.  London: Edward Arnold, 1975.

This volume collects sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century documents detailing aspects of formal education in England, such as the curriculum, the control and organization of education, and the education of women.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine.  Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life.  London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

This biography, first published in 2001 under the title  Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life,  sets out to look into the documents from Shakespeare’s personal life—especially legal and financial records—and it finds there a man very different from the one portrayed in more traditional biographies. He is “ungentle” in being born to a lower social class and in being a bit ruthless and more than a bit stingy. As the author notes, “three topics were formerly taboo both in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money. I have been indelicate enough to give a good deal of attention to all three.” She examines “Shakespeare’s uphill struggle to achieve, or purchase, ‘gentle’ status.” She finds that “Shakespeare was strongly interested in intense relationships with well-born young men.” And she shows that he was “reluctant to divert much, if any, of his considerable wealth towards charitable, neighbourly, or altruistic ends.” She insists that his plays and poems are “great, and enduring,” and that it is in them “that the best of him is to be found.”

Dutton, Richard.  William Shakespeare: A Literary Life.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Not a biography in the traditional sense, Dutton’s very readable work nevertheless “follows the contours of Shakespeare’s life” as it examines Shakespeare’s career as playwright and poet, with consideration of his patrons, theatrical associations, and audience.

Honan, Park.  Shakespeare: A Life.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Honan’s accessible biography focuses on the various contexts of Shakespeare’s life—physical, social, political, and cultural—to place the dramatist within a lucidly described world. The biography includes detailed examinations of, for example, Stratford schooling, theatrical politics of 1590s London, and the careers of Shakespeare’s associates. The author draws on a wealth of established knowledge and on interesting new research into local records and documents; he also engages in speculation about, for example, the possibilities that Shakespeare was a tutor in a Catholic household in the north of England in the 1580s and that he acted particular roles in his own plays, areas that reflect new, but unproven and debatable, data—though Honan is usually careful to note where a particular narrative “has not been capable of proof or disproof.”

Potter, Lois.  The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography.  Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters “follow a chronological sequence,” each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright’s life. In the chapters that cover his playwriting years (5–17), each chapter focuses on events in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London (especially in the commercial theaters) while giving equal space to discussions of the plays and/or poems Shakespeare wrote during those years. Filled with information from Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical worlds, the biography also shares frequent insights into how modern productions of a given play can shed light on the play, especially in scenes that Shakespeare’s text presents ambiguously.

Schoenbaum, S.  William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Schoenbaum’s evidence-based biography of Shakespeare is a compact version of his magisterial folio-size  Shakespeare: A Documentary Life  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Schoenbaum structures his readable “compact” narrative around the documents that still exist which chronicle Shakespeare’s familial, theatrical, legal, and financial existence. These documents, along with those discovered since the 1970s, form the basis of almost all Shakespeare biographies written since Schoenbaum’s books appeared.

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Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy Representations, Interactions and Adaptations

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Description

This volume captures the diverse ways in which Shakespeare interacts with educational theory and practice. It explores the depiction of learning and education in the plays, the role of Shakespeare as pedagogue, and ways in which the teaching of Shakespeare can facilitate discussion of some of the urgent questions of modern times. The book offers a wide range of perspectives – historical, theoretical, theatrical. The Renaissance humanist learning underpinning Shakespeare’s own work is explored in essays that consider how the complexity of Shakespeare’s drama challenges early-modern pedagogical orthodoxies. From close analysis of individual, solitary reflection on Shakespeare’s writing, the book moves outward to engage with contemporary social issues around inclusivity, society, and the planet, demonstrating the many educational contexts in which Shakespeare is currently appropriated. Engaging with current questions of the value of literary study, the book testifies to the potentialities of an empowering Shakespearean pedagogy. Bringing together voices from a variety of institutions and from a wide range of educational perspectives, this volume will be essential reading for academics, researchers and post-graduate students of Shakespeare, literature in education, pedagogy and literary theory.

Table of Contents

Pamela Bickley is joint-author with Jenny Stevens of three Arden Shakespeare books and taught formerly at Royal Holloway, University of London Jenny Stevens is lecturer in English Literature at City Lit London, UK.

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Published August 01, 2024

Announcing the 2024-2025 Common Application for NYU

Billy Sichel

Assistant Vice President of Undergraduate Admissions

It’s August 1st and that means the application at NYU has officially opened. This year, we’ve made some pretty big changes to NYU’s Common Application to simplify the process for our applicants, and to help us learn a little more about you!

When you start NYU’s member questions on the Common App, you’ll see 6 sections that you’ll need to complete. We give you a little bit of a head start by checking off the “Writing” section. This section is optional – but also new and exciting! More on that later.

The General Information Section

In the “General” section, you’ll be asked a few questions about how you want us to handle your application – Early Decision I, Early Decision II, or Regular Decision? – and which campus you want to apply to. As you (hopefully!) already know, NYU has three degree-granting campuses: in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai. Our Common App will let you apply to any combination of our campuses.

Once you make your campus selections, an additional set of questions will show up that are specific to your campus(es) of interest. Nothing too tricky here! You’ll be able to tell us about your academic area of interest for each campus, and a few other quick-and-easy questions about program eligibility, housing preferences, etc. so that we’re ready for you if you are ultimately admitted.

The Academics Section

Once you have those sections squared away, you’ll move on to the Academics section. This section will walk you through the information we’ll need you to submit outside of the Common App itself. Nothing to do here, except confirm that you’re clear on the next steps and additional requirements.

The Optional Supplemental Question

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: The optional, pre-checked-off Writing section. Last year, we made the decision to update our supplemental question. However, what we heard from our applicants was that people really wanted to tell us more! But the thing is…we already know why NYU is a great place to spend your 4 years, so we thought: if you want to tell us more about your passion for NYU, let’s make the question about you .

The new writing question says:

“In a world where disconnection seems to often prevail, we are looking for students who embody the qualities of bridge builders—students who can connect people, groups, and ideas to span divides, foster understanding, and promote collaboration within a dynamic, interconnected, and vibrant global academic community. We are eager to understand how your experiences have prepared you to build the bridges of the future. Please consider one or more of the following questions  in your  essay :

What personal experiences or challenges have shaped you as a bridge builder?

How have you been a bridge builder in your school, community, or personal life?

What specific actions have you taken to build bridges between diverse groups, ideas, or cultures?

How do you envision being a bridge builder during your time at our university and beyond?”

So, if it feels right for you to tell us a little more about yourself in the application, we want to know where you will turn to for inspiration, and what experiences have shaped you and resonate with you. Four years at NYU will propel you into a future you might not even be able to imagine yet, but take a minute (if you want – it really is optional!) to tell us about the ideas that have gotten you to this point, and those that might shape you into the person you’re about to become.

These are just a few of the changes we have made this year, so make sure to carefully read each question carefully before you answer them. If you ever have any questions for us about our questions, we are always here to help . We wish you the best of luck this application season, and can’t wait to learn more about you!

More from Billy:

How to Approach the Common Application

There’s no wrong way to approach the Common Application, but here’s two different strategies you might want to choose from when you apply to NYU.

Submitting a Transfer Application to NYU

Everything you need and everything you need to know about the transfer process.

Why You Should Start Your Common Application Early

There are many benefits to getting an early start on your Common Application to NYU.

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Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers

Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro, and Andrea Roselli (eds.), Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers , Routledge, 2023, 260pp., $180.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032288567.

Reviewed by Andrew L. McFarland, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Over the last several decades conversations about dispositions (or powers) have been commonplace among philosophers. [1] According to dispositionalists, properties like fragility are said to have triggers (or stimulus conditions)—like dropping a glass onto the floor—that bring about their manifestations, e.g., breaking, cracking, shattering, etc. What’s more, triggers and manifestations are often claimed to play some sort of individuating role with respect to powers. These considerations raise a philosophical question. Are powers— fragility , flammability , solubility , and the like—ontologically simple or complex? If they are complex, can we understand them compositionally? For example, is breaking a part of the power of fragility ? Or is talk of parthood merely an instance of speaking with the vulgar? This thought-provoking collection of twelve essays edited by Christopher J. Austin, Anna Marmodoro, and Andrea Roselli, addresses the ontological complexity of dispositions. The editors partition the essays into three sections: Part 1, “Parts of Powers” discusses part-whole relations “within a power”; Part 2, “Composition of Powers”, discusses mereological relations “among powers”; Part 3, “Power Mereology in Science” is devoted to issues in the philosophy of science. For this review I will try to summarize some main takeaways from each essay and offer critical and constructive remarks where appropriate.

In their introduction, the editors motivate the discussion with the claim that the literature on powers and dispositions often assumes that powers are simple, fundamental entities. Further, they claim that multi-track accounts—accounts which say that powers are individuated by more than one type of stimulus/manifestation—only “organize the complex manifestation of certain powers into ‘tracks’ but do not explain how this complex manifestation derives from the power” (1). Austin expands on this criticism later in Ch. 3. Multi-tracking accounts only tell us about the “counterfactuals assigned to a single power” (63). This can tell us about the “truthmaking relations that power is involved in”, but “these relations are incapable of providing meaningful information about the nature of powers” (63). Thus, these accounts treat powers as “little more than ‘black boxes’ whose extrinsic complexity stems from a we-know-not-what intrinsic metaphysical foundation” (64).

The first two contributions, Aaron Cotnoir’s chapter, “Carving up the Network of Powers” (Ch. 1), and the second essay from Robert Koons, “Parts and Grounds of Powers” (Ch. 2), are by far the most formal and systematic of the essays.

Cotnoir develops a graph-theoretic network of powers that can—following Plato’s metaphor—be carved according to natural joints, and he considers three methods for carving this network: subcollection , clustering , and coordination . Meanwhile, Koons develops an approach on behalf of the “extreme nominalist” (42), which builds powers out of equivalence classes of conditional facts, and invokes a sui generis conditional that expresses “the fact that if a certain n- tuple of thing were in a certain condition A , some joint power of those things would manifest itself in outcome B ” (42). Both Cotnoir’s and Koons’ systems offer ways to assess the “naturalness” of the resulting complexes: Cotnoir suggests that “unnaturalness” can be measured by the degree of crosscutting between clusters, while Koons suggests a criterion for determining when entities are of the same natural kind.

In Ch. 3, “Complex Powers: Making Many One”, Christopher Austin identifies two ways in which powers can be regarded as complex: “polygeny”—the idea that for a power there can be “many distinct inputs which causally contribute toward the coming about of its manifestation” (61)—and “pleiotrophy”, “which occurs when a single power has many distinct manifestations which may produce from the obtaining of one or more distinct stimuli” (62). An account of the complexity of powers, Austin argues, must accommodate these varieties of complexity in telling a metaphysical story about when many powers become one. After critiquing the metaphysical inadequacy of multi-tracking accounts, he goes on to consider two strategies, essentialist and emergentist accounts, but concludes ultimately that neither of these approaches is satisfactory. However, the main lesson seems to be that an account of the unity of complex powers needs to fall somewhere between accepting mereological fusions and emergence.

In Ch. 4, “Powers as Mereological Lawmakers”, Michael Traynor takes a bottom-up approach about mereological laws. Traynor begins with two Inclusion Principles, along with remarks by George Molnar (2003), to generate an argument that powers can be parts of objects. He goes on to argue that “powers give rise to mereological laws” and considers implications for this claim with respect to debates about whether mereological laws (paralleling similar arguments about laws of nature) are metaphysically necessary or contingent.

Nicky Kroll’s essay, “Determinable Dispositions” (Ch. 5) forgoes a mereological approach altogether and instead assesses the complexity of dispositions in terms of the determinate / determinable relation. Kroll cites Quine’s (1956) observation that desires can be non-specific and goes on to argue that dispositions can be non-specific as well. He goes on to draw three lessons: (i) that determinable dispositions are distinct from multi-track dispositions; (ii) many alleged multi-track dispositions—fragility, irascibility, knowing French—are in fact determinable dispositions; (iii) standard arguments for the claim that a disposition is multi-track turn out to be invalid.

In Ch. 6, Sophie Allen distinguishes between cases of direct composition —the part and the whole are instantiated by the same individual—and cases of indirect composition —cases where an individual is a proper part of another. Allen gives several quite helpful examples, e.g., “The power to spring is part of the power to jump 7.5m.” (113), to make a compelling case that direct composition of powers takes place. However, she gives relatively short shrift to her criticisms of indirect composition. For example, one might appeal to Kathrin Koslicki (2008), whose hylomorphic mereology posits structural proper parts, as a way of \ responding to Allen’s worry about indirect composition violating extensionality.

In Ch. 7, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss explores the non-mereological issue of the logical complexity (i.e., disjunctive) of variables for interventionist models of causation. She argues that interventionist models should make use of disjunctive variables, like “1 if Person P consumes apples or apple products or does not take a pain killer; 0 otherwise”, but that these conflict with proposed definitions “intervention”. However, she claims that these problems can be addressed if interventionists take the values of variables to be properties that “confer conditional causal powers on their bearers” à la Sydney Shoemaker (1980).

In Ch. 8 Xi-Yang Guo and Matthew Tugby sketch and defend an account of collective instantiation analogous to plural instantiation. Key to their argument is the idea of distributive occurrences of predication and instantiation: G occurs distributively where “ the Fs are G is equivalent to each F is G ” (148). For example, “The students in my class are engaged” might distribute to “Each student in my class is engaged”. By contrast, a predicate like “make a star pattern” in “The lights make a star pattern” does not distribute, since the claim is not equivalent to “Each light makes a star pattern”. Thus, according to Guo and Tugby, “make a star pattern” is a non-distributive, collective predicate. However, I’m not so sure that denying distribution entails collectivity. Take examples of generics or bare plurals. “Mosquitos carry yellow fever” does not distribute to “Each mosquito carries yellow fever”. But it also seems incorrect to say that “carries yellow fever” is collectively predicated of the class of all mosquitos since only a couple of species are associated with carrying the disease. Collective predication/instantiation seems to require more than just being non-distributive.

Joaquim Giannotti’s Ch. 9 considers a special composition question about powers (an analogue to the special composition question for material objects), and argues that a modified version of Marmodoro’s (2017) answer is the best way to achieve a restricted (i.e., neither a nihilist nor a universalist) answer to when powers compose. Gianotti goes on to argue that this refined “Marmodoro Condition”, combined with other premises from quantum theory, yields the conclusion that there is an entity he calls the “powerful cosmos”, an object “composed of all the compossible fundamental powers instantiated across the universe” (168).

In Ch. 10 Michele Paolini Paoletti argues for the compatibility of a “naïve view of powers” and the idea that powers compose. According to Paoletti, the “naïve” view holds that there is a “strict, one-to-one correspondence between powers, their bearers, and their manifestations and activations, on the one hand, and the causes, effects, and causal processes on the other” (185). To close out the collection, the third and final section, Part 3, begins with Matteo Morganti’s (Ch. 11) essay, which explores a “Simple Theory” of property composition, where complex properties are “nothing over and above” their constituents, and argues that one can understand the properties of quantum entangled systems by invoking metaphysical coherentism. Simone Gozzano (Ch. 12) completes the collection by considering whether phenomenal states, like tasting white wine, can be considered complex dispositional properties composed of constituents like the experience of the taste of hay, or the taste of green apple. These are further decomposable into protophenomenal atoms, resulting in a picture that fits into current discussions about Russellian monism and panpsychism.

As one can see the essays display at times very different approaches to the question of the complexity of powers. As a result, the attempt to group certain essays into Parts 1, 2, and 3 is a little strained at times. For instance, Cotnoir’s piece on carving a network of powers seemed more appropriate for Part 2 about the relations between powers, while Allen’s might be a better fit for Part 1 on part-whole relations within a power. In a similar vein, it’s clear that not every essay in the collection is about the mereology of powers—notably Kroll approaches complex powers in terms of the determinable/determinate distinction, Hoffmann-Kolss is concerned with the logical complexity of variables for interventionism, Guo and Tugby sketch an account of collective instantiation, and Morganti explicitly says he’s not concerned with a mereological notion of composition and instead focuses on the factorizability of probabilities for entangled quantum systems. In this respect, the book’s subtitle, “Essays on the Mereology of Powers” is a bit of a misnomer; perhaps “Essays on the Metaphysical Complexity of Powers” would have been more appropriate. After all, understanding the ontological complexity of powers needn’t only be cashed out mereologically, and a research question like this may benefit from looking at the theoretical landscape in several divergent ways.

Overall, there’s much of interest to be gleaned from this book. It covers a wide range of approaches to the question of the metaphysical complexity of powers, both mereological and non-mereological alike. Despite some deviation from the editors’ stated goal of offering a mereological approach to the complexity of powers, I think the book can be framed as having a different and broader aim: to examine the ontological complexity of powers by offering a more metaphysically robust story, one that goes beyond merely saying that powers are individuated by their stimuli or manifestations. With this aim in mind, I think the book shows that there’s quite a bit of potentially fruitful philosophical ground here left to explore.

Koslicki, K. (2008). The Structure of Objects . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marmodoro, A. (2017). “Power Mereology: Structural Powers Versus Substantial Powers” in

Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation , Eds. M. Paolini Paoletti, F. Orilia, 110–129. New York: Routledge.

Molnar, G. (2003). Powers: A Study in Metaphysics . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Quine, W.V. (1956). “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”. Journal of Philosophy , 53 (5), 177–187.

Shoemaker, S. (1980). “Causality and Properties” in Time and Cause: Essays Presented to

Richard Taylor , Ed. P. Van Inwagen, Reidel: 109–136.

[1] I will follow the convention set by the editors and several contributors by using “power” and “disposition” interchangeably.

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First Opinion readers respond to essays on right to try lies, pharma execs, and more

By Patrick Skerrett Aug. 10, 2024

F irst Opinion is STAT’s platform for interesting, illuminating, and maybe even provocative articles about the life sciences writ large, written by biotech insiders, health care workers, researchers, and others.

To encourage robust, good-faith discussion about issues raised in First Opinion essays, STAT publishes selected Letters to the Editor received in response to them. You can submit a Letter to the Editor here , or find the submission form at the end of any First Opinion essay.

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“Give pharmaceutical execs the benefit of doubt — but they need to work for it,” by Fred D. Ledley

The author believes “the pharmaceutical industry can develop products that are affordable, universally available…without compromising their profits” and yet also contends that industry executives are not the monocled barons the media makes them out to be. How can both be true?

If the utopian vision Fred Ledley describes is so easily attainable, surely it is the malaise and greed of industry that prevents it. But, as he is quick to point out, that simply is not his experience — or a reality experienced by thousands of scientists, entrepreneurs, investors and yes, corporate executives, dedicated to bringing medicines to patients.

Instead of trying to square this circle, the commentary adds to a long line of other “observers” who insist there is a path to having it all. For example, the author points to his research , which concludes that “drug price negotiation provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) could have little or no impact on the number of drug approvals.”

Several other studies point to an opposite conclusion, including newly released data showing dozens of programs paused or stopped because of the IRA. That has certainly been the experience of those with ovarian cancer or those suffering from Stargardt’s disease .

A different report by Ledley and a colleague mistakenly concludes that cutting current drug prices won’t impact the funding for the early-stage companies, to which he attributes the bulk of new medicine development. This is a faulty argument that’s been seen time and again and it is a particularly tough sell now, when on the same day STAT published Ledley’s commentary it covered how sluggish the biotech VC scene is this year. A headline in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal similarly captured the trickle-down effects: “Big Pharma Cuts R&D, Sending Shudders Through Industry.”

As much as people want to demonize large pharma and champion small biopharma companies, that’s not how the ecosystem works. And this symbiotic relationship isn’t just inseverable, it is invaluable. It reflects decades, if not a century, of specialization of labor and efficient allocation of capital.

But Ledley writes that breaking these ties, and navigating hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue can be done if industry is “held accountable …” and by “executing effective strategic management and investment practices.”

If only it was so easy. The reality is that economics, like life, is governed by tradeoffs. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. Is it really that hard for all of us to admit that?

— John Stanford, Incubate Coalition

“Trump gave patients a ‘right to try’. It hasn’t helped them,” by Alison Bateman-House and Holly Fernandez Lynch

At the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump claimed that “Right to Try” had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. People living with terminal diseases that cannot yet be treated should not be lied to. It is sad that they are being used as pawns by unscrupulous politicians.

— Kim Meyers

“Mark Cuban’s company won’t fix drug costs, but it can still help rectify America’s drug shortages,” by Ezekiel J. Emanuel and John Connolly

I’m not sure if there’s a medical procedure code for “tall poppy syndrome” — the act of cutting down someone who has become successful or noteworthy — or not but this article is the embodiment of it. The authors create a ridiculously high standard that they argue Mark Cuban needs to achieve in order to “fix costs” while ignoring the fact that he is changing the conversation about the pricing of generic medications to payers, be they individuals, companies, or the government.

Roughly 90% of people have insurance and most of the time it works well to cover medications, especially common generics. However, if you find yourself among the 27 million uninsured Americans or the tens of millions in a high deductible plan, you may encounter a situation where you must pay cash for a generic medication. Many surveys have shown that this unexpected type of expense can be difficult. But what makes Cost Plus so interesting (and often revered) is that consumers know they’re not getting ripped off by a bunch of excessive markups. Who would buy milk at a store if marked up randomly by $40 when the store across the street priced it as usual?

If the country’s entire pharmacy-based reimbursement system went to Cost Plus for the roughly 6 billion generic prescriptions a year, it wouldn’t save that much if set at a price point of 10% to 20% over the true, net wholesale price (to the pharmacy). But the pharmacy pricing roulette game that many people experience is really frustrating and has no doubt led to early deaths and complications from lack of adherence.

I applaud Cuban for his leadership and risk-taking here. My advice is to ignore the critics who appear to be envious of your ability to capture so much attention and nudge the markets in an exciting new direction.

— Stephen Buck, CancerSurvivalRates.com

“PBMs aren’t opening access to lower-cost biosimilars. Reform is needed now,” by Juliana M. Reed

As Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and advocates from across the health care system have long known, pharmacy benefit managers are not doing nearly enough to ensure that biosimilars are accessible and affordable for patients.

This is a serious, and sometimes life-threatening, problem for the millions of Americans living with gastrointestinal diseases, such as Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. While biosimilar medications like infliximab are safe, effective, and clinically appropriate for many people, the pharmaceutical company rebates secured by PBMs for these drugs do not translate to reduced costs for the people who need them. Instead, these rebates are lining the pockets of PBMs, while patients pay exorbitant prices out-of-pocket for necessary medications.

These rebates don’t factor into the cost of biosimilars purchased by independent practices, meaning physicians lose money for each dose they provide to patients. Just to stay afloat, at a time when costs are rising across the board, practices are often forced to switch patients to other drugs (thereby starting a fresh round of prior authorization approvals from the patients’ insurance company) or refer them to hospitals or standalone infusion centers (often owned by private payers) — both settings where costs are higher and the continuity of care is disrupted.

As policymakers in Washington rightly consider putting up guardrails around PBMs, it is critical for them to regulate dangerous white bagging mandates, delink the list price of a biosimilar drug from PBMs’ compensation, and ensure that patient access to necessary infusions is not disrupted every time an insurer updates its formulary. Patient access and health depend on it.

— Dr. Maria T. Abreu, president of the American Gastroenterological Association, director of the Crohn’s & Colitis Center at the University of Miami Health System, and professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

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Patrick Skerrett is filling in as editor of First Opinion , STAT's platform for perspective and opinion on the life sciences writ large, and host of the First Opinion Podcast .

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A Former Monk Who Won Powerball Is Giving Millions to Theaters

Roy Cockrum has donated more than $25 million to 39 theaters, helping the Old Globe in San Diego stage the one Shakespeare play it had yet to produce.

By Robin Pogrebin

Reporting from San Diego.

When Roy Cockrum, a one-time struggling actor and a former monk, won a $259 million Powerball jackpot in 2014, he decided to splurge on something a bit out of the ordinary: supporting nonprofit theater.

He set up a foundation that has given away $25 million to 39 American theaters so far, which is why he found himself the other night at the Old Globe in San Diego. He was there to watch the premiere of a production he supported to help the theater reach a milestone: a large-scale staging of the only Shakespeare play it had yet to produce, an adaptation of the somewhat rarely performed three “ Henry VI ” plays.

“The question I put to artistic directors is, ‘Is there a project you’ve always dreamed of doing that you couldn’t afford?’” Cockrum, an apple-cheeked, snowy-haired 68-year-old, said in an interview. “To help artistic directors dream bigger than they would otherwise.”

At a time when nonprofit theaters across the country are struggling with rising costs, fewer subscribers, smaller audiences and dwindling corporate philanthropy, Cockrum’s generosity stands out.

“He’s an inspiration to other philanthropists at a time when our field is really struggling and where we need innovative ideas about philanthropy to try to move the field forward,” said Barry Edelstein , the Old Globe’s artistic director. “We’re not going to solve the structural financial problems facing the sector through Bernie Sanders-style $27 contributions. It’s going to take really significant infusions at the scale that Roy is doing them.”

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The Criterion Collection

• My Collection

The Criterion Closet 40

By Peter Becker

Aug 8, 2024

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The following is the introduction featured in   CC40,    a monumental forty-film box set that celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection.

O ver the past forty years, the Criterion Collection offices have played host to a huge network of directors, actors, writers, artists, musicians, technicians, and scholars of all kinds. Many come in to collaborate with us on Criterion special-edition releases, others to work on original productions for our streaming service, the Criterion Channel. Little by little, our offices have become a kind of unofficial hub for film folks visiting New York. Word spread, and soon people started stopping in just because they had heard there was something special about this place.

Whenever luminaries arrive, we like to give them a little tour. People seem to enjoy floating through corridors lined with huge vintage film posters and Criterion’s original work, then turning a corner into the art department, where the next, yet-to-be-unveiled designs are pinned up on the walls. Only a few steps away is a book-lined conference room that, on any given day, might have been transformed into a professional studio and set up for a two-camera shoot. Down the hall, past producers’ offices rife with the relics of previous releases, the editorial team works on essays, not far from the rooms where new video interviews and introductions are in postproduction and the finishing touches are being made to the picture and sound of a 4K master. Channel programming, social media, and customer service all work in the same space where a group of students or journalists might be waiting for a film to start in our screening room. We like showing that everything Criterion makes is a team effort, that it all emanates from this one place, that it all happens right here.

In the back of the office is a big, open, sunlit kitchen where there is a wall of hand-signed Fujifilm Instax portraits (like widescreen Polaroids) pinned on a white board in a huge grid. There’s Agnès Varda, Bill Hader, Barry Jenkins, William Friedkin, Willem Dafoe, Cate Blanchett and Todd Field, Juliette Binoche, Alexander Payne, Greta Gerwig, Bong Joon Ho, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Karina, Flying Lotus, Chloë Sevigny . . . It’s dizzying. The more you look, the more familiar faces you see. And while some of the photos were taken in the kitchen, most were taken in a tiny room, the inevitable last stop on the tour, the Criterion closet.

The people who visit us have one thing in common. They all love movies, and the Criterion product-storage closet is one of the most concentrated doses of cinephile inspiration anywhere on the planet. In something like sixty square feet are nearly two thousand gems of world cinema, from the silent period to the present day. And for as long as I can remember, we’ve wrapped up every visit to the office with a little offer: Is there anything you’re pining for? Would you like to visit the closet? No one leaves empty-handed.

We’ve had many memorable conversations in the closet over the years. Spurred by the presence of so much cinematic stimulation, our guests have opened up about their most formative film experiences in casual, intimate, off-the-cuff ways. Learning someone’s movie taste turns out to be a great way to get to know them personally: what breaks their heart or blows their mind, feeds their guilty pleasures or triggers their pet peeves. And then, of course, there are the stories, the behind-the-scenes tales and details too trivial to chase down for a formal supplemental feature but just delicious when shared between friends.

Guillermo del Toro was not the first person to raid the closet, but he was the first to do it on camera. The most passionate, generous, and hardworking film fan you’ll ever meet, Guillermo was excited to have us shoot his closet visit when he stopped by one day in September 2010. He was in and out in under three minutes, for the most part offering little more than brief exclamations of enthusiasm for each new choice. But watching the video after he left, we knew it was something special. “A very small robbery,” he said, before ducking out the door with a black Criterion tote bag full of his favorite films. And with this, the Criterion Closet Picks video was born.

Today, the Criterion Closet Picks videos have taken on a life of their own, accumulating millions of views on YouTube. Publicists have made the Criterion closet a stop on many art-house filmmakers’ publicity tours. Now, more often than not, the first thing people say when they come to the office is, “Where’s the closet?” and then, when they see it, “My gosh, it’s so small!” and then, “It really is just a closet!” Watching these movie lovers championing their favorites from the collection and discovering new things to watch has introduced a new generation to Criterion, and to the array of important classic and contemporary films that we have published over the decades.

When it came time to choose a theme for this commemorative collection in honor of our fortieth anniversary, in 2024, we struggled. How could we choose forty editions from among the 1,200 we had so carefully selected, each on its own terms, each for the story it had to tell? Gradually we realized that the answer was in the closet itself and all the passionate choices that had been made in that space. In a sense, the closet is the heart of the collection in the world, the sum of our work in all departments for forty years, gathered in one place—with all its potential energy intact and ready to be unleashed. No single curator could make this choice, but what if we were guided by the passions of all those inspiring visitors, by their curiosity and hunger to choose new film experiences or to tell the world about the films they love most?

When we gathered the list of the films most frequently selected from the closet, there was a palpable sigh of relief. Here was a selection we could all get behind, at once iconic and adventurous, not obvious in any way, featuring many of the finest films ever made, handpicked by nearly two hundred of the most creative and thoughtful people we know. These movies are accompanied by all of the special features from their stand-alone editions, including the essays that follow in this book. The result is the collection you have in your hands, a labor of love, an archive of the work of our community, and a very partial record of four decades of dedication to cinema.

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My Own Private Idaho ’s Outsider Twist on Shakespeare

Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.

By Shonni Enelow

How the Movies Captured Times Square’s Grimy Golden Age

During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy , Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.

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The High-Wire Energy of Great Ensemble Acting

At their best, movies that showcase a sizable collective of virtuosic actors can give you the feeling of a rich ecosystem being brought to life.

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A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.

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War on ESG investing must shift focus to proxy advisers

A group of officials from BlackRock, a multinational investment company, rings the closing bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square on July 25. Credit: AP/Seth Wenig

This guest essay reflects the views of Lee Zeldin, who represented part of Suffolk County in the House of Representatives from 2015-2023 and ran for governor of New York in 2022.

It wasn’t long ago that Wall Street and special interests thought they could force environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, policies into our workplace, retirements, and lives. Much to their disappointment, the American people didn’t fall in line with this ideology. Conservatives and other everyday people have fought back against ESG, and our collective efforts have caused Wall Street to rethink and retreat from the ESG scheme. But we shouldn’t take our foot off the gas just yet.

Factoring ESG into investment decisions is wrong for many reasons. From a financial standpoint, ESG funds bring worse returns for some investors. That makes it more difficult for those invested to reach their retirement goals. Everyone in the finance industry has a fiduciary duty to clients to act in their best interest and get the best returns. Yet in recent years, financial leaders have interpreted that to mean utilizing other people’s money in a way they believe is best and factoring in environmental and social factors when investing and voting shares during proxy season.

Those managing funds should stick to maximizing investor returns, not injecting politics into investment decisions by a Nassau County schoolteacher or Suffolk police officer.

The past several years of conservative criticism of ESG investing have caused asset managers to pause and often move away from it entirely. But we can’t take a victory lap yet because asset managers are only half the battle. We should remain vigilant about other shadow actors pushing this ideology, particularly proxy advisers.

Proxy advisers evaluate lengthy shareholder proposals and recommend which way to vote on how companies approach operations and policies. Individuals and money managers trust these professionals to recommend the best long-term return, and most vote in lockstep with their recommendations. And the largest proxy advisory firms continue to push ESG onto clients through shareholder votes.

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Generally, shareholders appear to be growing increasingly resistant; last year, ESG proposals only had a 5.1% passage rate.

Many asset managers deserve credit for walking back their support for ESG initiatives. A 2023 ShareAction report found that the "Big Four" asset managers listed in the report — BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and Fidelity — voted less favorably on ESG proposals than in the past. In fact, support for ESG resolutions hit a "new low," according to the report’s findings.

The same cannot be said for proxy advisers, who continue to overwhelmingly support ESG proposals; the largest such firms can sway proxy votes by as much as 30%.

In a small win pushing back against this ESG hegemony, BlackRock expanded its voting choice by introducing its own proxy service to its clients. One policy of this conservatively aligned investing choice prioritizes the wealth of investors, and specifically notes it steers clear of social or environmental goals.

This expansion of choice means increased competition in the industry and guarantees shareholders’ preferences will be met in their investment decisions. As a fiscal conservative, I know investors and consumers always benefit from more choices in the market, and they deserve to have their dollars match their values.

Hopefully, BlackRock’s initiative pushes other financial institutions and fund managers to offer more proxy options for their clients — including ones that push back against ESG.

We’re winning this battle. But to win the greater war, we need to shift the focus to proxy advisers, the real culprits in pushing the ESG agenda.

This guest essay reflects the views of Lee Zeldin, who represented part of Suffolk County in the House of Representatives from 2015-2023 and ran for governor of New York in 2022.

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