When Queen Elizabeth I died without leaving a direct heir, the throne of England went to James I, who ruled at the same time Scotland as James VI. He believed in the divine right of kings to rule and in the subjection of Parliament to the king's will. Moreover, he imposed as requisite to hold public office the conformity of a person to the rites of Anglican Church. In result of it, Catholics and Puritans were excluded. For this reason, English Catholics organized the Gunpowder Plot , so-called because they tried to blow up the king and Parliament session. The plot was denounced and Catholics were executed. Meanwhile, Puritans were persecuted and a group of them, called the Pilgrim Fathers, sailed to America, where they founded New Plymouth in Massachusetts. Charles I, James I 's son and  successor, continued his father's policy. He dissolved Parliament and ruled the country as an absolute monarch. Foreign difficulties obliged king to establish a Parliament in April 1640 fo...

Hello everyone! Oggi tratto una delle tragedie più significative di Shakespeare ed uno dei casi più ecletanti di femminicidio nella letteratura inglese: Othello.  Nel seguente link pubblico una recensione in powerpoint su questa opera teatrale. Cliccare qui 👇. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NPg2hWHutTUoXf6Fk4H4SNLiT9eSFGcq/view?usp=drivesdk

The plot The king of Denmark is dead. Queen Gertrude has almost married the dead king's brother Claudius. The dead king's son Hamlet, prince of Denmark, meets his father's ghost on the battlements of Elsinore Castle; the ghost tells his son that Claudius is guilty of his murder and asks Hamlet to take revenge. Hamlet pretends to be mad in order to gain time and observe the behaviour of king and queen. The king's confusion seems to confirm the ghost's revelation: king Claudius is guilty of murdering Hamlet's father. However, Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, king's adviser and Ophelia's father (Hamlet's lover). Ophelia doesn't understand Hamlet's behaviour. She, thinking he doesn't love her anymore, goes insane and drowns herself in a river.  Laertes, Ophelia's brother, swears revenge and challenges Hamlet to a duel in throne room. King Claudius manipulates Laertes to carry out his own plan to murder Hamlet: he creates two poisoned s...

Women and love The central theme of Shakespeare's tragedies is the obsessive desire for love and power. In this type of play Shakespeare's heroines have an active role. Juliet, who loved absolutely Romeo, found the strenght to oppose her parents and relatives. Women and power In the eternal struggle for power that goes on in world history and everyday society, Shakespeare's heroines don't display stereotyped femal behaviour. For example, in Macbeth , Lady Macbeth isn't a complement to her husband, but rather the driving force of the play; she has a deeply desire for power. Shakespeare stresses this aspect of her personality, often, making her wish she was a man. Fathers and daughters Shakespeare's daughters aren't weak submissive creatures, despite the social conditions which dictated that women were legally bound to their fathers or husbands. For example, in King Lear , the daughter openly defies her father's authority, refusing to admit her love for hi...

The collected edition of Shakespeare's plays came out in 1623, after the poet's death. This first edition is traditionally called The First Folio , which contains 36 plays  sorted by literary genre: comedies, historical plays and tragedies. In according to plays, we may divided Shakespeare's career into four periods: the years of apprenticeship; the history plays and love comedies; the great tragedies and the dark comedies; the romances. In the first phase he experimented with all the major dramatic genres: history plays: they treat events of English history ( Henry VI , Richard III ); tragedy of horror: he took as a model to follow Seneca's Latin tragedies (an example is Romeo and Juliet ); refined love comedy ( The two gentlemen of Verona ). In the second phase of his career, Shakespeare wrote the history plays and the love comedies. Shakespeare's history plays treat politics as an eternal struggle for power, love and property. They set in a crucial period of Engl...

The sonnet was introduced to England by a group of Court poets during the reign of Henry VIII. They translated or adapted it from Petrarch, whose Canzoniere was the   model for Renaissance poets. Most 16 th   century sonnet collections are addressed to to the mythical lady of the Petrarchan tradition: a woman who is both real and ideal, full of the highest physical and spiritual qualities. A great technical innovation by English Renaissance poets was to change the metrical structure of the sonnet from Petrarch's pattern (two quatrains and two tercets) to the so called Elizabethan sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet). Thus, they created the pattern which was later adopted by William Shakespeare and, for this reason, they were called Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet. One of the most representative Renaissance English poets was William Shakespeare. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets were written between 1593 and 1598 and had as addressee the young Earl of Southam...

Contesto storico in cui si affermano le nuove tecnologie L’attività sportiva è da sempre ritenuta una delle attività sociali in grado di generare il più alto tasso di aggregazione, caratteristica peculiare dovuta, soprattutto, alla capacità degli atleti di trasmettere empatia e passione a tutti gli uomini (sportivi e non) attraverso il loro comportamento. Fin dai tempi delle prime Olimpiadi, nell'antica Grecia, la pratica sportiva si è ben presto trasformata in un’attività di forte interesse nell’ opinione pubblica e nell’antica Roma, con la locuzione “Panem et circenses” (Pane e giochi circensi), essa diventò, insieme alle altre attività ludiche, uno strumento importante per   attrarre e mantenere il consenso popolare nei confronti dell’imperatore. L’attività fisica, inoltre, è stata sempre accolta dall’opinione pubblica non solo come un momento di aggregazione sociale, ma anche come strumento di propaganda. Con l’avvento del Fascismo che proclamava nell’ottobre 1922 la salita al...