细读中华人民共和国宪法（第一章）

中华人民共和国宪法——亮点还是不少啊！原文在此：新华网

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第一章 总 纲

第一条 中华人民共和国是工人阶级领导的、以工农联盟为基础的人民民主专政的社会主义国家。

社会主义制度是中华人民共和国的根本制度。禁止任何组织或者个人破坏社会主义制度。

第二条
中华人民共和国的一切权力属于人民。

人民行使国家权力的机关是全国人民代表大会和地方各级人民代表大会。

人民依照法律规定，通过各种途径和形式，管理国家事务，管理经济和文化事业，管理社会事务。

第三条 中华人民共和国的国家机构实行民主集中制的原则。

全国人民代表大会和地方各级人民代表大会都由民主选举产生，对人民负责，受人民监督。

国家行政机关、审判机关、检察机关都由人民代表大会产生，对它负责，受它监督。

中央和地方的国家机构职权的划分，遵循在中央的统一领导下，充分发挥地方的主动性、积极性的原则。

第四条 中华人民共和国各民族一律平等。国家保障各少数民族的合法的权利和利益，维护和发展各民族的平等、团结、互助关系。禁止对任何民族的歧视和压迫，禁止破坏民族团结和制造民族分裂的行为。

国家根据各少数民族的特点和需要，帮助各少数民族地区加速经济和文化的发展。

各少数民族聚居的地方实行区域自治，设立自治机关，行使自治权。各民族自治地方都是中华人民共和国不可分离的部分。

【转】南方周末2009年年度人物——韩寒

话说韩寒被评为年度人物，我多少有点吃惊，但是也会理解。尽管我认为有的人更应该得到这个称号，例如艾、谭、刘，等等。不过韩寒也算是避开了政治敏感后最应该被选上的人了（也许）。当时我是投了身体维权者一票的。

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“14年前，在同学们还在看《红领巾报》的时候，我每周都要用可调配资产的十分之一来买《南方周末》，是这份报纸给了我最初的启蒙。14年后，就是这样了。我很荣幸。”——韩寒感言

出道十年，名满天下，仍是后生，韩寒被欣赏他的人开玩笑地称呼为“韩少”。这个称 呼隐含了戏谑的赞许之意，指他风流而自在，有品质，不是乏味的家伙。韩少是个作家，是中国唯一一位场地和拉力赛车的双料年度总冠军，是偶像，还是全球点击 量最高的博客的主人。他太有名，人们反而忽视了集这么多头衔于一身是何等不寻常。可是韩少真正成为广受尊重的韩寒，还是有一天他开通了博客，开始写作社会 评论，与时代共振。他的风格不羁的言论引发争议，又广受欢迎。于是有一天，最古板的人也意识到这不是个胡闹的年轻人，在那将近3亿的点击量背后，是一个形 象新颖的人道主义者在发出着自由的波长。

剥除伪装像呼吸一样自然

韩寒总是不在规定的框架之内，无论这框架是命令，还是习见。有一次他干脆在博客里用英文说，他要做的就是“干规定”。他认为这么做很自然，因为这些人们习焉不察的框架是荒谬的，不对的。

2006年3月，他在博客上引发“韩白之争”，攻击文坛的门阀之见，理不糙话糙，于是被抨击为“红卫兵”，陆川甚至说拿他的做法与“红卫兵的铜头皮带，再 一次抽到我父亲的脸上”相提并论。韩寒其后的作为证明这只是夸张其辞。他全无红卫兵的无知之态，头脑更决不受他人控制。

就像他在17岁成名时一样，每当他冒犯一个人，就等于冒犯一个有着私人关系和共同利益的群体。这狂妄本该激起更多愤慨，却再没有人接茬儿。安静，困惑。对 这个毛头小子的轻视不见了。如果说文坛的正统派仍坚持说韩寒没有在小说中证明自己有多么出色，这可能是对的，也可能只是基于现有的短视，但韩寒已经证明了 他的对手是多么虚弱。

这在韩少却是“练手”。这是一个预示，他将用同样的机智去戳破四处弥散而且更沉重的荒诞泡沫。

几年来，他在博客文章中评论社会热点话题，有“周老虎”事件、火炬传递风波、汶川地震、北京奥运、三聚氰胺事件、杭州飙车案、上海“钓鱼”事件等等，也有 较少人关注的新闻，选择什么话题，“一般以我看完新闻以后嘴巴微张为原则”。他只是受触动而写作。“至于从现实的角度促进公共生活的改善，这样说太严肃 了。看到一些现实事件的时候，我是一个懒人都忍不住充满了创作的欲望，你说这些事有多操蛋。”这些文章卓具影响力，尤其是在年轻人中间，乃至有人称之为 “80后的骄傲”，有人要选韩寒当市长，有人说“这个事情就等着韩寒评论了”。

“世界上逻辑分两种，一种是逻辑，一种是中国逻辑。”这是韩寒的妙语，也可视为他的全部时评文章的主题。他的机智，幽默，用简单的逻辑揭示事实的荒诞的能 力，对读者心理的熟稔，都相当耀目，至今仍被知识阶层低估着。这名松江二中7门功课不及格的留级生有一种自由生长、未受束缚的天分。他证明了很多人脑子里 以为天经地义的东西是毋需存在的。

韩寒使用的是一种接近口语的浅白汉语，凭借的是显明易懂的常理，他是一个善用“本来”的高手，是“以其知之所之，以养其知之所不知”的典范。在论述为什么 抵制家乐福并无意义的时候，他并没有引述任何关于民族主义的学理——他对学理全无兴趣，你也可以说他对此甚为无知。他总会把严肃的果核塞进可笑的果肉。他 率性，不端着，又不致失态，有着自然的分寸感。如果通读他的博客，苛刻的人也会惊讶于在每个逻辑细节，每个粗俗与有趣的交接点，每个自信到令人喜欢与自信 到惹人厌烦的边际，他几乎都做对了。

在文章中剥除一件事情的伪装对韩寒来说就像呼吸一样再自然不过。这些文章日积月累，产生了级数增长的影响力。他年轻，帅，有钱，经历传奇，酷，都为他的观点的传播提供了助燃剂。

2008年6月10日，上海，韩寒在杨浦区某赛车场表演炫目的车技。 　图/CFP

用调笑的声音说出肃穆的真理

2009年11月，他应邀去“世博论坛暨第四届嘉定汽车论坛”演讲，他说，“中国的大城市就是这样，毁灭100万个理想，用这100万个理想诞生出1到2 个新富。”陈丹青征求当地官员对韩寒发言的意见，当地官员说，其实他不知道韩寒这个人。会后大家友好握手，还一起吃了饭。韩寒的印象是，“其实很多的领导 和我们是两个资讯系统。”

韩寒常是被切割的对象。任何一个正襟危坐的地方都有很多人乐于和急于表明自己与韩寒没关系。一个文化人也会以对韩寒的轻蔑来暗示自己的水准和级别，至少表 明自己不流于俗。韩寒只是“黄口小儿”、“车夫”和“小公鸡”。他是对的，但他文笔不过尔尔，上不得台面，等等。他好像只适合赛车。韩寒对此反应冷淡，对 于“反智的先锋”之说，他说，我会争取做一个繁殖的先锋。

未被污染的穿透力是韩寒的大杀招。“曲士不可以语于道”，他却从未被各种场域扭曲和体制化。他站在常识这一边而无任何犹豫。“很简单，适合人类的就是适合世界的，除非你不是人。”

这才是让韩少真正像个“少”的地方，轻松、愉快、持平、坦荡，落笔于重大事件却有悠游之态。当很多时评家体会着责任重压的时候，他举重若轻；在别人自矜于 道德光泽的时候，他不当回事儿。他全无“进亦忧，退亦忧”的愁苦，也无“铁肩担道义”的凝重。一方面他早早跳脱了教育的桎梏，另一方面，名气、地位总是会 令匹配它们的人更放松自如，再一方面，松弛本来就是杰出者的特征。忘掉文学，就人而言，27年时间，韩寒的自我实现是现象级的。

这轻松也来自认识。在某种程度上开始享受目睹之事带来的刺激感和戏剧感之前，韩少也曾激愤过。“以前我很悲愤，当你看到矿难，你悲愤是人之常情，当我看到 五十次矿难，我觉得这就是一个悲剧。不过当你看到第一百次的时候，你会有点儿觉得这其实是个喜剧。”他说，“看这个国家的命运就像看一部电影一样。”

他会令人感到矛盾。你几乎不可能让他尊敬某个作家或者学者，甚至于你怀疑他根本不钦佩任何人，除了他自己。他的骄狂几乎是刺目的。你只是不能低估他的自由自在和不落窠臼的能量。

有趣，对于韩寒来说始终是排序第一的，然后才是公义。可是他也在此寄托了理想：“我希望我们真的安居乐业，没有人冤枉获罪，没有流血和牺牲，中国人真正意 义上被全世界所尊重，而不是光靠着我们短时间内少部分得到了财富的人在世界范围内挥霍而得来的假尊重。我希望我们真正能够强大起来。

鼓舞了无数的“自我”

“韩寒是什么呢？我觉得，他什么都不是。他只是我们经过异常泥泞的、曲折的、阴郁和黑暗的跋涉之后所看到的那一片平原。”艺术家艾未未说。

最终他要的是什么呢？一个精彩的人生，还是一个戏剧性的人生？韩少却说，“一个和谐的人生。”

这足以使我们对生命重新心怀感激之情；生命是公平的、是有可能的，善意不会因为我们曾经遭受的痛苦而丧失殆尽。韩寒身上散发出生命给予的快乐和祈愿，这些普通的愿望是我们每一天实实在在的情感。

过去十年，韩寒的崛起是一道标志性的景观。他从17岁开始搅动中国，人皆以为昙花一现，他却成长，变得强大，他以一种危险的方式获得成功，在社会挤压的罅 隙中开辟天地，在敌意中赢得尊敬。他言人所不能言，为人所不能为，他鼓舞了年轻人，鼓舞了梦想，鼓舞了无数的“自我”，甚至给这个古老的国家以身体力行的 教益。他的故事是过去十年中的美好的一部分。

Hemingway

Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is a giant of modern literature. Among twentieth-century American fiction writers, his work is most often compared to that of his contemporaries William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Combined with his outstanding short stories, Hemingway’s four major novels—The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952)—comprise a contribution to modern fiction that is far more substantial than Fitzgerald’s and that approximates Faulkner’s.
Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few years before Hemingway received this recognition, but their respective approaches to fiction are so dissimilar that this belated receipt says little or nothing about Hemingway’s stature relative to that of Faulkner. When set alongside Faulkner’s Mississippi novels, Hemingway’s major works feature simpler structures and narrative voices/personae.
As or more important, Hemingway’s style, with its consistent use of short, concrete, direct prose and of scenes consisting exclusively of dialogue, gives his novels and short stories a distinctive accessibility that is immediately identifiable with the author. Owing to the direct character of both his style and his life-style, there is a tendency to cast Hemingway as a “representative” American writer whose work reflects the bold, forthright and rugged individualism of the American spirit in action.
His own background as a wounded veteran of World War I, as an engaged combatant in the fight against Fascism/Nazism, and as a “he-man” with a passion for outdoor adventures and other manly pursuits reinforce this association.
But this identification of Hemingway as a uniquely American genius is problematic. Although three of his major novels are told by and/or through American men, Hemingway’s protagonists are expatriates, and his fictional settings are in France, Italy, Spain, and later Cuba, rather than America itself.
While Hemingway’s early career benefited from his connections with Fitzgerald and (more so) with American novelist Sherwood Anderson, his aesthetic is actually closer to that shared by the transplanted American poets that he met in Paris during the 1920s; T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, most crucially, Gertrude Stein. In this context, we must realize that Hemingway’s approach to the craft of fiction is direct but never blunt or just plain simple.
Hemingway’s text is the result of a painstaking selection process, each word performing an assigned function in the narrative. These choices of language, in turn, occur through the mind and experience of his novels’ central characters whether they serve explicitly as narrators of their experience or as focal characters from whose perspectives the story unfolds. The main working corollary of Hemingway’s “iceberg principle” is that the full meaning of the text is not limited to moving the plot forward: there is always a web of association and inference, a submerged reason behind the inclusion (or even the omission) of every detail.
We note, too, that although Hemingway’s novels usually follow a straightforward chronological progression as in the three days of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway does make use of summary accounts of the past, of memories related externally as stories, and of flashbacks. These devices lend further depth to his characters and create narrative structures that are not completely straightforward chronicles.
Hemingway is direct. But he is also quite subtle, and subtlety is not a trait that we ascribe to the American way. In the end, Hemingway is an international artist, a man who never relinquished his American identity but who entered new territories too broad and too deep to fit within the domain of any national culture.

William Faulkner’s writing and awards
On writing, Faulkner remarked, “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him”, in an interview with The Paris Review in 1956. Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, stated that, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
Faulkner’s most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and The Unvanquished (1938). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories: His first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including “A Rose for Emily,” “Red Leaves”, “That Evening Sun,” and “Dry September.” Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat.
Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist “pulp fiction”-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux as “the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story.” Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published as a young man. Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight’s Gambit.
Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his “minor” novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.

Reading William Faulkner’s short stories is an excellent way to approach his major works. Although his novels are better known and more widely read, many of the same characters and ideas found in them are introduced in his stories.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897, but soon thereafter his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, a site he would rename Jefferson in his fiction and would use as the setting for almost all of his novels and short stories.
Faulkner came from an old, proud, and distinguished Mississippi family, which included a governor, a colonel in the Confederate Army, and notable business pioneers. His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the “u” was added to Faulkner’s name by mistake when his first novel was published, and he retained the misspelling), emigrated from Tennessee to Mississippi during the first part of the nineteenth century. Colonel Falkner, who appears as Colonel John Sartoris in Faulkner’s fiction, had a distinguished career as a soldier, both in the Mexican War and the American Civil War. During the Civil War, his fiery temper caused him to be demoted from colonel to lieutenant colonel.
Falkner was heavily involved in events taking place during Reconstruction, the twelve years following the end of the Civil War in 1865, when the Union governed the secessional Confederate states before readmitting them. He killed several men during this time and became a rather notorious figure. With a partner, he oversaw the financing and construction of the first post-Civil War railroad in the South; then, after quarreling with his partner, the relationship dissolved. When this former business associate ran for the state legislature, Falkner ran against him and soundly defeated him.
Once asked how much he based his characterization of the genteel Colonel Sartoris on his great-grandfather, Faulkner responded:
“That’s difficult to say. That comes back to what we spoke of—the three sources the writer draws from—and I myself would have to stop and go page by page to see just how much I drew from family annals that I had listened to from these old undefeated spinster aunts that children of my time grew up with. Probably, well, the similarity of raising of that infantry regiment, that was the same, the—his death was about—was pretty close, pretty close parallel, but the rest of it I would have to go through to—page by page and remember, did I hear this or did I imagine this?”
What does not appear in Faulkner’s fiction is that during all of his great-grandfather’s projects and designs, the colonel took time to write one of the nation’s bestsellers, The White Rose of Memphis, which was published in book form in 1881. He also wrote two other novels, but only The White Rose of Memphis was successful.
Falkner was finally killed by one of his rivals, and his death was never avenged. Today, a statue of him stands in the Oxford, Mississippi, cemetery. Dressed in a Confederate uniform, he looks out over the region for which he fought so desperately and so valiantly. Only William Faulkner, of all the Falkner clan, is as distinguished and, ultimately, became more distinguished than his great-grandfather.
Faulkner’s personal life fits seemingly into the romantic cliché of what a writer’s life is like, and he often contributed deliberately to the various stories circulating about him. For example, in 1919, during the final months of World War I, he was rejected for service in the U.S. Armed Forces because he was too short. Not easily deterred, he went to Canada and was accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force, but World War I ended before he finished his training. Returning to Oxford, he adopted an English accent and walked around his hometown in a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform, which he had purchased, along with some medals to adorn the uniform.
To write about Faulkner’s personal life is to put oneself at risk of not being able to separate the facts from the imaginary life he conceived for himself. Critics generally agree that he did not graduate from high school, and that he dropped out of the University of Mississippi after a couple of years. He moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village at the invitation of an established Mississippi writer, Stark Young, who used his influence to get Faulkner a position as a bookstore clerk, but he returned to Oxford after a few months. He then traveled to New Orleans, where he got a job running a boat that carried bootleg liquor. There, he met the established American writer Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio. Observing the leisurely life Anderson led, Faulkner decided that he wanted to become a writer, and Anderson helped get his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), published—with the promise that he would never have to read it.
Because Soldiers’ Pay was not successful commercially, Faulkner again was forced to find employment. This time, however, he found an ideal job: He shipped out as a deck hand on a freighter bound for Europe, where he spent many weeks loafing about the Mediterranean, especially in France and in Italy. His own imaginative reports of his life abroad have never been corroborated.
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, a high-school sweetheart who had been married previously, and he began a period of serious writing. Over the next few years, three of his greatest novels-The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932)-were published. Despite his numerous publications, however, he still did not earn enough money to support his and Estelle’s lifestyle. In 1933, a daughter, Jill, was born, and by the mid-1930s, Faulkner was deeply troubled with debt: In addition to his own family and servants, he supported his brother Dean’s children after Dean died in a plane crash, in a plane Faulkner had bought for him.
Mounting financial problems forced Faulkner to publish short stories as quickly as he could, and he finally capitulated to the monetary rewards of working as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a thousand dollars a week. He hated the work, but he returned to it off and on during the 1930s, working long enough to pay off his significant debts, and then returning to Oxford, where he wrote at least three novels—Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Wild Palms (1939), and The Hamlet (1940), in addition to several short stories.
Despite Faulkner’s having produced some of the finest twentieth-century novels, his early works were never commercial successes; the exception is Sanctuary (1931), at first thought to be a sensational potboiler but later viewed otherwise. He struggled financially until the 1948 publication of Intruder in the Dust. The novel was made into a movie, filmed in Oxford, and Faulkner found himself an important figure in and around the town, the same town that earlier had spurned him, calling him such names as “Count No ‘Count.”
When Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, only one of his novels was in print. Almost overnight, he was acclaimed by critics, writers, teachers, and reporters. From being an obscure, backwoods country writer, he was catapulted suddenly to the highest echelons of literary achievement. He took advantage of this newfound acclaim by encouraging young writers not to quit their craft. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he seized the spotlight of worldwide attention “as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.”
In 1957, Faulkner accepted a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. There, in informal class settings, he answered many questions about his novels and his artistic vision. Although he sometimes confused aspects of one novel with another, his answers attest to his characters’ vibrant personalities and expand on his panoramic vision for the Yoknapatawpha saga.
In June 1962, Faulkner was thrown from his horse and injured his back. He suffered intense pain and was admitted to Wright’s Sanitarium, in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 5. The next day—ironically the date of the old Colonel’s birthday—he died, leaving behind him a body of work unsurpassed in twentieth-century literature.
Faulkner uses new techniques to express man’s position in the modern world. The complexity of his narrative structures mirrors the complex lives we lead. Most of his novels and short stories probe into the mores and morals of the South, which he was not hesitant to criticize. In his early fiction, Faulkner views despairingly man’s position in the universe. He briefly voices this same sense of futility and defeat in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” Man is a weak creature incapable of rising above his selfish needs.
In his latter works, however, Faulkner’s tone changes, and he emphasizes humankind’s survival. He believes human beings to be potentially great, affirming that “man shall not only endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” Penetrating deeply the psychological motivations for human beings’ actions, Faulkner concludes that hope remains for our salvation from despair
A brief introduction to William Faulkner
1897–1962, American novelist, b. New Albany, Miss., one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. Born into an old Southern family named Falkner, he changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner when he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, in 1924. Faulkner trained in Canada as a cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the Univ. of Mississippi in 1919–20, and lived in Paris briefly in 1925. In 1931 he bought a pre–Civil War mansion, “Rowanoak,” in Oxford, Miss., where he lived, a virtual recluse, for the rest of his life. As a writer Faulkner’s primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep South. Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi with a colorful history and a richly varied population. The county is a microcosm of the South as a whole, and Faulkner’s novels examine the effects of the dissolution of traditional values and authority on all levels of Southern society. One of his primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner’s novels treat the decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories including These 13 (1931), Go Down, Moses (1942), Knight’s Gambit (1949), and Big Woods (1955); and collections of essays and poems.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angle in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?

Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare
“Not of an age, but for all time”

William Shakespeare – Born 23rd April 1564 – Died 23rd April 1616

Born at Stratford Upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire, it is likely he was educated at Stratford Grammar School.

He probably began writing plays around 1592 and of the 38 plays that comprise the Shakespeare Canon, 36 were published in the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare wrote for nearly 20 years and at his height he probably completed as many as two or even three plays a year. Shakespeare probably retired from writing plays in 1613.

He died in 1616 at the age of 53 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Trinity. His gravestone which is thought to be the last thing he wrote bears the inscription –
Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here!
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
As copyright laws did not exist at this time, playwrights often borrowed plots and dialogues from other sources. It is thought that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were taken from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. There was no hesitation on the part of some playwrights including Shakespeare to take events, characters or lines from previous works. Partly to overcome this it wasn’t uncommon for plays not to be published until after the performances had finished. The versions sold were called quartos. About half of Shakespeare’s plays were first published in this way. The texts often differ from those of the First Folio; the variations may represent performance practise.

Shakespeare’s reputation grew steadily after his death. His plays are regularly performed all over the world in many different languages. His work is considered integral to the development of German literature and culture. In the U.K. we have the Royal Shakespeare Company dedicated to his work, and Shakespeare forms part of the national curriculum. Other playwrights have also used the plays as a basis for writing their own material. Because Shakespeare’s works are so widely known audiences are able to recognise politial allusions, coded into productions, and enjoy parodies and plays which are spin-offs from the originals such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Words of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 pictured above

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

In 1609 a collection of Shakespeare’s private sonnets was published, probably without his permission. They have led to speculations about his life, as they are addressed to at least one man and one woman.
The sonnets show a relationship with a younger man, probably of higher rank than Shakespeare, urge the young man to marry and breed, but become increasingly warm and affectionate.

The sonnets to the young woman show a passionate physical relationship, but one which Shakespeare also regrets:
‘The better angel is a man right fair
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill…’
(Sonnet 144).
The young man seems to have become involved with the woman, causing Shakespeare great pain.

There has been much speculation about their identities; the most likely candidates for the young man being the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. A. L. Rouse proposed Emilia Lanier, of a family of Italian Jews, mistress of Lord Hunston, patron of Shakespeare’s company to 1596 as the Dark Lady.

Shakespeare regularly visited his wife and family in Stratford, and may also have been involved with the wife of a tavern owner in Oxford, on the route from London. Her playwright son, Sir William Davenant, claimed Shakespeare as his father.

The Language of Shakespeare

To enjoy Shakespeare it is a good idea to not only read the play but to see it acted or to listen to it on an audio tape. The Shakespeare collection includes copies of most films of Shakespeare’s plays on videos, DVDs and sound recordings. Shakespeare used words not only to explain the plot but to create images and help us to understand the feelings of his characters.

For example a lot of the imagery used in Macbeth is concerned with blood –
“It will have blood, they say.
Blood will have blood.” III. iv. 122

Many of his words have now become part of our everyday speech.
“leapfrog”
“barefaced”
“lonely”

Probably everyone could quote from at least one of Shakespeares Works.

” There’s a method in my madness ” Hamlet, II. ii. 207-8

“Well the world’s your oyster now.” The Merry Wives of Windsor, II. ii. 4-5

Some words that he used have a different meaning today such as

“defend” meant to forbid
“fig” meant to insult
“sad” meant serious

Shakespeare usually wrote in blank verse so the lines do not have to rhyme. Those that do, tend to mark the end of the scene as there were no curtains on the stage. He used a lot of metaphors and similies. Some of the earlier plays are particularly lyrical; Romeo and Juliet includes whole sonnets in the text. The language and blank verse of his later plays became increasingly fluid, with his increased mastery of dramatic possibilities. Shakespeare was famed, in his own time, for his lyrical and passionate poems, particularly the Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.

From Farce through to Tragedy

Since Shakespeare’s death, his plays have almost continually been performed, and examined by those trying to understand their timeless appeal. The appeal of his plays lies in the strength of his characterisation. Shakespearean characters are neither all good nor all bad, and face dilemas such as jealousy or love in ways which audiences can relate to.

Shakespeare’s plays had their roots in Roman drama, which he probably studied at school, along with classical texts such as the poems of Ovid. He may also have been influenced by the great Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who was killed shortly after Shakespeare came to London. His early reputation was made by the plays based on fairly recent English history; the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, now known as the Wars of the Roses, and on light comedies which would have appealed to his aristocratic patrons. The tragic love story Romeo and Juliet was also written for this audience, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have been commissioned for a wedding.

In the Roman plays such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus Shakespeare used a classical setting to comment on political issues. Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V consider the responsibilities and burdens of the ruler. Around 1601 it is speculated that some personal tragedy deepened Shakespeare’s appreciation of the human condition, and the great tragedies followed; Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Timon of Athens represents an extraordinarily misogynstic view, but was written at the same time as the great love story Antony and Cleopatra. Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, later plays, commonly known as Romances, have themes of reconciliation and re-discovery of lost wives and daughters, while The Tempest, is often seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art.

Shakespeare was also influenced by the change in fashion which followed the accession of King James I. James’s interest in witchcraft and Scottish background led to Macbeth; the masques and dance in Cymbeline and The Tempest were also a response to the demands of the Court audience.

Shakespeare drew on a number of different sources for his writing. The primary source for the History plays and Macbeth was Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. The source for the Roman plays was North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. The text for the famous description of Cleopatra’s first meeting with Antony is drawn almost exactly from Plutarch:
Enobarbus:
‘…The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick…’

Shakespeare Lives On!
Birmingham has one of the world’s best collections of works by and about Shakespeare
including the remarkable Forrest Collection, the scrapbook collection acquired by
H. R. Forrest of Manchester in 1890, which includes The Tempest and Hamlet.

Birmingham Shakespeare Library was founded in 1864 by members of the local Shakespeare Club during celebrations to mark the quarter centenary of Shakespeare’s birth.

The aim, as stated by George Dawson, the President of the Club, was to build a collection containing as far as practicable

every edition and every translation of Shakespeare, all the commentators, good, bad and indifferent, in short, every book connected with the life and works of our great poet. I would add portraits and all the pictures etc. illustrative of his work

Almost a century and a half later, the Library contains copies of almost all the English language editions and criticism of the works of Shakespeare, background material on his life and times and on the theatre. There are also editions and criticism in 93 other languages. There is an extensive archive of production material including videos, DVDs and sound recordings, photographs, programmes, playbills, posters, printed music, reviews and scrapbooks of illustrations.
Hamlet is without question the most famous play in the English language. Probably written in 1601 or 1602, the tragedy is a milestone in Shakespeare’s dramatic development; the playwright achieved artistic maturity in this work through his brilliant depiction of the hero’s struggle with two opposing forces: moral integrity and the need to avenge his father’s murder.

Shakespeare’s focus on this conflict was a revolutionary departure from contemporary revenge tragedies, which tended to graphically dramatize violent acts on stage, in that it emphasized the hero’s dilemma rather than the depiction of bloody deeds. The dramatist’s genius is also evident in his transformation of the play’s literary sources–especially the contemporaneous Ur-Hamlet–into an exceptional tragedy. The Ur-Hamlet, or “original Hamlet,” is a lost play that scholars believe was written mere decades before Shakespeare’s Hamlet, providing much of the dramatic context for the later tragedy. Numerous sixteenth-century records attest to the existence of the Ur-Hamlet, with some references linking its composition to Thomas Kyd, the author of The Spanish Tragedy. Other principal sources available to Shakespeare were Saxo Grammaticus’s Historiae Danicae (circa 1200), which features a popular legend with a plot similar to Hamlet, and Francois de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, Extraicts des Oeuvres Italiennes de Bandel (7 Vols.; 1559-80), which provides an expanded account of the story recorded in the Historiae Danicae. From these sources Shakespeare created Hamlet, a supremely rich and complex literary work that continues to delight both readers and audiences with its myriad meanings and interpretations.

In the words of Ernest Johnson, “the dilemma of Hamlet the Prince and Man” is “to disentangle himself from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in evil passion, and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice.?From that dilemma of wrong feelings and right actions, he ultimately emerges, solving the problem by attaining a proper state of mind.” Hamlet endures as the object of universal identification because his central moral dilemma transcends the Elizabethan period, making him a man for all ages. In his difficult struggle to somehow act within a corrupt world and yet maintain his moral integrity, Hamlet ultimately reflects the fate of all human beings.