Help with Shakespeare...

Hey everyone,

I'm currently writing an essay for my history research project
for my final exams in school,
the essay is part of the over all mark I'm going to
get in History and I would like to do well on it.

I thought to myself the examiner is going to have a billion
essays to correct on Hitler and the USSR and Irish history,
etc, etc, etc,
(all of these are interesting, of course, just a bit common)

So I wanted to blow the examiner away with an utterly fabulous
topic, Shakespeare.

I spoke to my teacher and its a good choice, its historical enough
and so i got to work on it;

I completed my first draft on how he influenced the English language
and I got on pretty well.
However, it was to vague.

I need to narrow it down, something about his influence on us,
Influences on him, I'm also interested on how he influenced
John Keats.
Or even stepping away from influences,
has anyone got any interesting ideas?

I would love to hear any at all about what you think
I could do for my Shakespeare project.

Thank you.

I don't know much about Shakespeare, but here's an interesting blip.

Did you know that, while a lot of people call Shakespeare's language
old English, it isn't true? Old English was spoken many years before
his time and sounded very little like the English of today.

No, the famous playwright used the same language as the King James Bible.

I was just learning about Shakespeare today in English.

Though, i can't answer the questions that you asked. It is late right now, very late, so I can't say much now.

Shakespeare was very much interested in human psychology, and he seemed to have a fascination with death. But that obsession hit close to home when his son Hamnet died at the mere age of eleven. It devastated him, as their would be no one to inherit his land when he died.

Shakespeare career ended when the Globe burned down. He retired soon after that incident. I'll be sure and check in once I learn more about him, and when it isn't 1 in the morning.

Maybe try writing about how Shakespeare took most of his plots and ideas from pre-existing stories (Folk tales, poems, songs, historical situations etc).

You could also look at some of Shakespeare's contemporaries (Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe etc), and talk about why none of them are as well known as Shakespeare is.

I've always wanted to write an essay on the nature of Shakespearean villains. I find that the villains are some of the most well constructed characters in the plays, and that they receive a considerable amount of characterization compared with the good guys.

Hah, I wrote a research paper about Shakespeare's lost play! That was fun.

Anyway, about Shakespeare's language, I don't know much (naturally since I'm not the one researching this), but I do know that Shakespeare had a knack for creating words. Many of the words he used in his plays are used today. And he created a bunch of them too, so you could definitely talk about that. If you google it, you'll find a bunch of pages just listing the words he had created. It's pretty cool!