![Rugby Action - 'Offload' & 'Basketball Pass'!! [CurrieRugby3.wmv]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110524205754im_/http://cdn1.wn.com/vp/i/75/8dc6f525ccb53a.jpg "Rugby Action - 'Offload' & 'Basketball Pass'!! [CurrieRugby3.wmv]")
| Caption | South African Victor Matfield takes a lineout against New Zealand in 2006. |
|---|---|
| Union | International Rugby Board |
| Nickname | Rugger |
| First | Early 19th century (early forms)1845 (first written rules) |
| Contact | Full Contact |
| Team | 15 |
| Mgender | Separate competitions |
| Category | Team sport, Outdoor |
| Equipment | Rugby ball |
| Olympic | 1900, 1908, 1920 & 1924 |
Rugby union is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. It is played with an oval-shaped ball on a field up to long and wide with H-shaped goal posts on each goal line.
The International Rugby Board (IRB) has been the governing body for rugby union since its formation in 1886. Currently, 115 national unions are members of the IRB. In 1995, the IRB removed restrictions on payments to players, making the game openly professional at the highest level for the first time.
The Rugby World Cup, first held in 1987, takes place every four years, with the winner of the tournament receiving the Webb Ellis Cup. The Six Nations in Europe and the Tri Nations in the southern hemisphere are major international competitions held annually. Major domestic competitions include the Top 14 in France, the Aviva Premiership in England, the Currie Cup in South Africa, and the ITM Cup in New Zealand. Other transnational competitions include the Magners League, originally involving Irish, Scottish and Welsh teams and now Italian teams as well; Super Rugby (previously Super 12 and Super 14), involving South African, Australian and New Zealand teams; and the Heineken Cup, involving the top European teams from their respective domestic competitions.
Significant events in the early development of rugby football were the production of the first set of written laws at Rugby School in 1845, the Blackheath Club's decision to leave the Football Association in 1863 and the formation of the Rugby Football Union in 1871. By 1881 both Ireland and Wales had representative teams, and in 1883 the first international competition, the Home Nations Championship had begun. 1883 also saw the first rugby sevens tournament at Melrose—the Melrose Sevens, which is still held annually. Five years later two important overseas tours took place; a British Isles team visited Australia and New Zealand—although a private venture, it laid the foundations for future British and Irish Lions tours; and the 1888 New Zealand Native team brought the first overseas team to British spectators.
Between 1905 and 1908, all three major Southern Hemisphere rugby countries sent their first touring teams to the Northern Hemisphere: Dave Gallaher's New Zealand in 1905, followed by Paul Roos's South Africa in 1906 and then Herbert Moran's Australia in 1908. All three teams brought new styles of play, fitness levels and tactics, and were far more successful than critics had expected. 1905 also saw the first French internationals.
The years during the First World War saw an end of international rugby union games and union-sponsored club matches, but competitions continued with service teams such as the New Zealand Army team. The Second World War saw an end of international matches from most countries, though Italy, Germany and Romania played a limited number of games, and Cambridge and Oxford continued their annual University Match.
In 1973 the first officially sanctioned international sevens tournament took place at Murrayfield, as part of the Scottish Rugby Union centenary celebrations. In 1987 the first Rugby World Cup was held in New Zealand and Australia, and the inaugural winners were New Zealand. The first World Cup Sevens tournament was held at Murrayfield in 1993.
Rugby union was an amateur sport until the IRB declared the game 'open' in 1995, removing restrictions on payments to players. However, the pre-1995 period of rugby union was marked by frequent accusations of "shamateurism", including an investigation in Britain by a House of Commons Select committee.
Rugby union is played between two teams, each of which starts the match with 15 players on the field. During the match, players may be replaced (for injury) or substituted (for tactical reasons). A player who has been replaced may not rejoin play unless he was temporarily replaced to have bleeding controlled; a player who has been substituted may return temporarily, to replace a player who has a blood injury, or permanently, if he is replacing a front-row forward. In international matches, up to seven replacements are allowed; in domestic or cross-border tournaments, at the discretion of the responsible national union(s), the number may be increased to eight, of whom three must be sufficiently trained and experienced to provide cover for the three front row positions. Players in a team are divided into eight forwards (two more than in rugby league) and seven backs. Forwards are generally bigger and stronger, and take part in the scrum and lineout, while backs are generally smaller but faster, more agile and often the main points scorers for the team.
The field of play on a rugby pitch is as near as possible to a maximum of 100m long, and 70m wide. There are several lines crossing it, notably the half way line, the goal line/try line (on which the goal posts are located), the "twenty two", which is 22m from the goal line, and the dead ball line, which ideally is at least 10m but not more than 22m behind the goal line. The values of each of these scoring methods have been changed over the years. The team which scores more points wins the game.
At the beginning of the game, the captains and the referee toss a coin to decide which team will kick off first. Play then starts with a drop kick, with the players chasing the ball into the opposition's territory, and the other side trying to retrieve the ball and advance it back. If the player with the ball is tackled, frequently a ruck will result.
Forward passing (throwing the ball ahead to another player) is not allowed. The ball can be passed laterally or backwards, but cannot be thrown forward. The ball tends to be moved forward in three ways—by kicking, by a player running with it and passing it to a teammate who continues the run, or within a scrum or maul. Unlike in American football, "blocking" is not allowed, so only the player with the ball may be tackled or rucked. When a ball is knocked forward by a player with his/her arms, a "knock-on" is committed, and play is restarted with a scrum.
When the ball leaves the side of the field, a lineout is awarded against the team which last touched the ball. The lineout is usually awarded at the position where the ball left the field of play but if the ball is kicked directly into touch from outside the "twenty-two", or if a team plays the ball back into its own "twenty-two" and the ball is then kicked directly into touch, the lineout is awarded at a point opposite where the ball was kicked. To form a lineout, players from each team line up in parallel lines, at least 1m apart and at least 5m from the sideline; a player (usually, but not necessarily, the hooker) from the team that was awarded the lineout throws the ball down the gap between the two lines of players, who can jump or be lifted in an attempt to secure possession of the ball. Lineouts are one of the chief differences between the two rugby codes, as they do not occur in rugby league.
Games are divided into 40-minute halves, with a break in the middle. The sides exchange ends of the field after the half-time break. Stoppages for injury or to allow the referee to take disciplinary action, do not count as part of the playing time, so that the elapsed time is usually longer than 80 minutes. Unlike in many other sports, there are no "time outs". The referee is responsible for keeping time, even when—as in many professional tournaments—he is assisted by an official time-keeper. If time expires while the ball is in play, the game continues until the ball is 'dead', and only then will the referee blow the whistle to signal half-time or full-time; but if the referee awards a penalty or free-kick, the game continues.
Tries are scored between the goal line and the dead ball line. The goal line is treated as part of the in-goal area and a try can be scored if the ball is grounded with any part of it touching the goal line. The dead ball line is out of play, and a ball that touches or crosses the dead ball line, or that is held by a player who touches or crosses the dead ball line, is out of play.
Rugby goalposts are H-shaped, and consist of two poles, 5.6m apart, connected by a horizontal crossbar 3m above the ground. Unlike some other sports there are no goalkeepers, and the section underneath the crossbar has no special meaning. The original pitch dimensions were in imperial units, but have since been converted to the metric system.
There are three match officials: a referee, and two assistant referees. The latter, formerly known as touch judges, had the primary function of indicating when the ball had gone "into touch"; their role has been expanded and they are now expected to assist the referee in a number of areas, such as watching for foul play and checking off-side lines. In addition, for matches in high level competitions, there is often a television match official (TMO; popularly called the "video referee"), to assist with certain decisions, linked up to the referee by radio. The referees have a system of hand signals to indicate their decisions.
Common offences include tackling above the shoulders, collapsing a scrum, ruck or maul, not releasing the ball when on the ground, or being off-side. The non-offending team has a number of options when awarded a penalty: a "tap" kick, when the ball is kicked a very short distance from hand, allowing the kicker to regather the ball and run with it; a punt, when the ball is kicked a long distance from hand, for field position; a place-kick, when the kicker will attempt to score a goal; or a scrum. Players may be sent off (signalled by a red card) or temporarily suspended ("sin-binned") for ten minutes (yellow card) for foul play or repeated infringements, and may not be replaced.
The most basic items of equipment for a game of rugby union are the ball itself, a rugby shirt (also known as a "jersey"), rugby shorts, socks, and boots, which have soles with studs to allow grip on the turf of the pitch. The studs may be either metal or plastic but must not have any sharp edges or ridges.
Protective equipment is optional and strictly regulated. The most common items are mouthguards, which are worn by almost all players, and are compulsory in some rugby-playing nations. Other protective items that are permitted include a scrum cap; thin (not more than 10 mm thick), non-rigid shoulder pads, and shin guards; which are worn underneath socks. Bandages or tape can be worn to support or protect injuries; some players wear tape around the head to protect the ears in scrums and rucks. Female players may also wear chest pads.
Fingerless gloves (grip gloves) are sometimes worn to improve players' grip on the ball.
It is the responsibility of the match officials to check players' clothing and equipment before a game to ensure that it conforms to the laws of the game.
Six continental associations, which are members of the IRB form the next level of administration; these are:
SANZAR (South Africa, New Zealand and Australia Rugby) is a joint venture of the South African Rugby Union, the New Zealand Rugby Union and the Australian Rugby Union, which operates the Super Rugby and Tri Nations competitions.
National unions oversee rugby union within individual countries. These are affiliated both to the IRB and with their respective regional association.
Rugby union has established itself as a popular sport for both spectators and participants, particularly in Australia, Argentina, Cook Islands, England, Fiji, France, Georgia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, New Zealand, Niue, Namibia, Romania, Samoa, Scotland, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Tonga, and Wales.
Other places with lasting traditions in rugby football, as a minority sport in most cases, include Andorra, Barbados, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Malaysia, Moldova, Morocco, The Netherlands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tunisia, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, the United States, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
In April 2010 Lithuania broke the record of consecutive international wins previously held by New Zealand and South Africa,which was 17 consecutive wins against tier 1 nations, with their 18th win in tier 2 in a match against Serbia.
The United States are the most recent Olympic gold medalists; an American team stacked with American football players won the event at the Paris Olympics in 1924, which was the last year rugby union was played at the games. Large numbers of players are active in North America, and the USA regularly qualify for World Cups, while Canada has participated at every World Cup.
Japan, also a country with many registered players, will host the 2019 World Cup. It will be the first country outside of traditional playing areas to host the event, and is viewed by the IRB as an opportunity for rugby union to extend its reach,
The International Rugby Board (IRB), founded in 1886, governs the sport worldwide and also publishes the game's laws and rankings. There are currently 95 full members and eight associate member countries. According to IRB figures, rugby union is played in over 100 countries spanning six continents by men and women of all ages. The IRB controls the Rugby World Cup, the Women's Rugby World Cup, Rugby World Cup Sevens, IRB Sevens World Series, Junior World Championship, Junior World Trophy, Nations Cup and the Pacific Nations Cup. It holds votes to decide where all of these events shall be held, except in the case of the Sevens World Series. For that competition, the IRB contracts with several national unions to hold individual events.
Records of women's rugby football go back to the late 19th century, with the first documented source being Emily Valentine's writings, stating that she set up a rugby team in Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, Ireland in 1887. Although there are reports of early women's matches in New Zealand and France, one of the first notable games to prove primary evidence was the 1917 war-time encounter between Cardiff Ladies and Newport Ladies; a photo of which shows the Cardiff team before the match at the Cardiff Arms Park. In the past 30 years the game has grown in popularity among female athletes, and, according to England's RFU, is now played in over 80 countries.
The English Rugby Football Union for Women (RFUW) was founded in 1983, and is the oldest formally organised national governing body for women's rugby.
The Tri Nations is an annual international series held between the southern hemisphere teams of , and . These teams have dominated world rankings in recent years and some consider the Tri Nations to be the toughest competition in international rugby. The Tri Nations was initially played on a home and away basis with the three nations playing each other twice. In 2006 a new system was introduced where each nation plays the others three times, though in 2007 the teams played each other only twice, as it was a World Cup year.
Especially since 's strong performances in the 2007 World Cup, a number of commentators believed they should join the Tri-Nations. This was first seriously proposed for the 2008 tournament, then for 2010, but came much closer to reality after the 2009 Tri Nations tournament, when SANZAR (South Africa, New Zealand and Australian Rugby) extended an official invitation to the Unión Argentina de Rugby (UAR) to join an expanded Four Nations tournament in 2012. This move has generally been met with great approval from all parties involved. The invitation is subject to certain conditions, like the guaranteed availability of Argentina's top players, most of whom play professional club rugby in Europe at present.
Amidst all the international competitions there are also various Test matches and series, often as part of tours by national teams, which generally take place from September to December and from June to August.
Rugby in the 1924 Olympic Games was the first Olympic Games that featured film highlights of the rugby matches. Some consider the US victory over France as one of the biggest upsets in sports history. Vintage footage from the gold medal match can be found in the documentary A Giant Awakens: the Rise of American Rugby">A Giant Awakens: the Rise of American Rugby.
Rugby sevens has been played at the Commonwealth Games since 1998 and on 9 October 2009, the International Olympic Committee voted with a majority of 81 to 8 that rugby union be reinstated as an Olympic sport in at least the 2016 and 2020 games, but in the sevens, 4-day tournament format. This is something the rugby world has aspired to for a long time and Bernard Lapasset, president of the International Rugby Board, said the Olympic gold medal would be considered to be "the pinnacle of our sport" (Rugby Sevens).
The first Women's Rugby World Cup was held in Wales in 1991, and was won by the United States. The second tournament took place in 1994, and since that date the competition has been held every four years. The New Zealand Women's team have won the last four World Cups (1998, 2002, 2006, 2010).
As well as the Women's Rugby World Cup there are also other regular tournaments, including a Six Nations, run in parallel to the men's competition.
Besides the full-contact, 15-a-side code, other variants exist:
Other less formal variants include beach rugby, snow rugby, and street rugby.
between the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota (1902). Earlier forms of the game had a more obvious kinship with their rugby equivalents.]]
Rugby union football, and its immediate ancestor rugby football, has had a strong influence on several other sports.
The Gridiron codes, American football and Canadian football, are derived from early forms of rugby. Confusingly, in Canada, Canadian football has also frequently been referred to as "rugby football", Tom Wills, the founding father of Australian Rules, also attended Rugby School.
Swedish football was a code whose rules were a mix of the association football rules and the rugby football rules. Some played the game with a round ball, while others played with an oval ball. It is no longer played.
Rugby lends its name to wheelchair rugby (also known as "quad rugby" or "murderball"), but the sport is more strongly influenced by wheelchair basketball, ice hockey and handball than rugby union. Likewise, the sport of underwater rugby, is related to rugby in little more than name.
* Category:Ball games Category:Former Olympic sports Category:Sports originating in England Category:Team sports Category:Football codes
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | William Shakespeare |
|---|---|
| Caption | The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London. |
| Birthdate | Baptised 26 April 1564 (birth date unknown) |
| Birthplace | Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England |
| Deathdate | 23 April 1616 (aged 52) |
| Deathplace | Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Susanna HallHamnet ShakespeareJudith Quiney |
| Occupation | Playwright, poet, actor |
| Signature | William Shakepeare Signature.svg |
| Movement | English Renaissance theatre}} |
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare probably was educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
, in Stratford-upon-Avon.]] At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27 November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times, and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..." |- | style="text-align: left;" | As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42. |} It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene:
...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself. The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene’s target.
Greene’s attack is the first recorded mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks. From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the information.
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
in Stratford-upon-Avon.]] After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:
::Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, ::To digg the dvst encloased heare. ::Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, ::And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published. Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.
, c. 1786. Tate Britain.]] Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.]] In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question". Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
, London.]] After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision. Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". Alfred Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers. In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.
{| class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:23em; max-width: 25%;" cellspacing="5" | style="text-align: left;" | "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..." |- | style="text-align: left;" | Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. |}
The production of Shakespeare's Sonnets was in some way influenced by the Italian sonnet: it was popularised by Dante and Petrarch and refined in Spain and France by DuBellay and Ronsard. Shakespeare probably had access to these last two authors, and read English poets as Richard Field and John Davies. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".]] Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
:Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting :That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay :Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly— :And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know :Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
:Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8 In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.
Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all playwrights of the time, Shakespeare dramatised stories from sources such as Petrarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.
{| class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 25%;" cellspacing="0" | style="text-align: left;" | "He was not of an age, but for all time." |- | style="text-align: right;" | Ben Jonson |}
Shakespeare was never revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art". He was also recognised highly by James I by making them his 'Kings Men'.
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo. In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible". The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern. Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare. By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.
Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to emerge about the authorship of the works attributed to him. Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Several "group theories" have also been proposed. Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution, but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory, continues into the 21st century. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ on its authenticity. In 1591, the authorities reported that John had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse. In 1606, William's daughter Susanna was listed among those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.
Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. However, over the centuries readers have pointed to Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than sexual love. At the same time, the twenty-six so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.
Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a dagger (†) below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as apocrypha.
; Comedies
; Histories
; Tragedies
; Poems
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== Related information ==
Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:English poets Category:English Renaissance dramatists Category:People from Stratford-upon-Avon Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes Category:People of the Tudor period Category:Sonneteers Category:1564 births Category:1616 deaths Category:16th-century actors Category:16th-century English people Category:17th-century English people
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | George Hook |
|---|---|
| Caption | George Hook on the cover of his autobiography |
| Birth date | May 19, 1941 |
| Birth place | Cork |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Other names | The Alpha Male |
| Education | Rathmines College of Commerce |
| Employer | Denis O'Brien |
| Occupation | Journalist and Radio Broadcaster |
| Spouse | Ingrid Hook |
| Children | Alison, George junior and Michelle |
| Website | www.georgehook.com |
Hook has had a number of jobs, beginning as a temporary clerk for CIÉ, and later becoming a travelling salesman for the Burroughs Corporation (now Unisys). He also ran a catering business for over twenty years. He coached London Irish, Connacht, and St. Benildus College, as well as the American National Team in the 1987 Rugby World Cup.
Hook's radio show on Newstalk 106 'The Right Hook' is a popular evening drive-time programme. Hook appears as a rugby pundit on RTÉ on a regular basis and appeared as a judge on RTE celebrity dancing show 'Jigs & Reels'. He has also been parodied in The State of Us.
In 2005, he published an autobiography, "Time Added On".
In 2009, he visited the impoverished Caribbean island nation of Haiti where he was moved to tears by the plight of the poor people who lived there so much that he organised a recruitment drive to get volunteers to go there on a house building week. The next day a vicious earthquake struck Haiti. After the earthquake Hook was heard to say: "It is a godforsaken place. God has literally forsaken it." Following the January 2010 earthquake. Hook urged his radio listeners to donate money.
Hook is also the patron of 'Comber - for a future without orphanages' an Irish charity working in Romania since 1990, of which his daughter Michelle McGill, is on the board of directors. The charity provides homes in the community for adults with disabilities who grew up in institutions and orphanages
2009 Six Nations:
"My predictions for this match [Ireland vs France] make Gethsemane look like Butlins."
"If this was the Italian Premier league there would be an investigation in the refereeing."
"If they say 'We knew Italy would be hard to beat', I'll vomit on my Jaffa Cakes."
"France haven't been beaten like that since Hitler marched down the Champs-Élysées."
2008 Six Nations:
"Eddie O'Sullivan is the Edith Piaf of Rugby."
"If Eddie O'Sullivan had retreated to the Führerbunker, World War 2 would still be going on."
Category:1941 births Category:Living people Category:Irish journalists Category:Irish radio personalities Category:Irish television personalities Category:People from County Cork Category:Irish rugby union coaches Category:Irish sports broadcasters
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
