(Newswire.net — April 23, 2014) Bournemouth, DORSET — St George’s Day is not an official holiday in the UK but is the feast day of Saint George and is celebrated with the still popular Shakespeare. This is due to the fact that each new generation always finds something to love in his work.
According to Professor Giddens, of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, “He is our best poet and our most important one, so for that reason we should remember him once a year. I think what makes him so long–lived is he has this fantastic ability to appeal to a variety of different people.
Readers can get what they want to get out of it. For example young lovers will always identify with Romeo and Juliet whereas many people find as they get older they identify with aspects of King Lear and that idea of isolation and aging.”
The Cambridge University Press has announced they are working with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust aiming to provide web content like blog articles that are exclusive making it more relevant to students of this generation.
The winner of the People’s Choice vote in Visit England’s Hall of Fame Campaign was William Shakepeare who being the nation’s bard is also the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. Between 1589 and 1613 is where he produced the majority of his known work, which in his early plays were comedies and histories. He wrote tragedies considered to be some of the best written in English literature such as Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth.
In his own day Shakespeare was a respected playwright and poet. His reputation took off to rise to its present popular level from the 19th century where the Romantics loved his genius and the Victorians are said to have worshipped him.
Stratford Upon Avon’s Shakespeare company at the Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres bring his plays alive while in London there is the famous open-air Shakespeare’s Globe where there is always great interaction between the actors and the audience.
On an even wider scale in 1989 there was a revival of Shakespeare on screen from the success of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.
But in 1998 the box office smash movie that won Oscars, Shakespeare in Love was a massive hit as Tom Stoppard’s clever screenplay had an extremely strong connection between the Elizabethan theatre and modern Hollywood that the film contrived to turn Shakespeare into a celebrity.
It made him our contemporary at precisely the moment when culture was taken over by a
rage for the now, a cult of the new.
So to be or not to be, today many happy returns to Shakespeare on St George’s Day.
Sources:
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/News/ST-GEORGES-DAY-On-450th-anniversary-of-William-Shakespeares-birth-Cambridge-experts- discuss-his-enduring-popularity-20140423063031.htm
http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/11163730.19_of_England___s_greatest_claims_to_fame_on_St_George___s_Day/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/10777409/Shakespeares-450th-birthday-Now-all-the-world-is- his-stage.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Georges_Day