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Spektrum Shake-speare

Schule und Unterricht 134 Activities 1. Modern publications often stress the fact that actors in Elizabethan times had a very low status, but this is only one half of the truth when we look at the biography of the sonnet-writer. Sum up what deeply troubled Shake- speare when writing this sonnet with the unforgettable line «Thence co- mes it that my name receives a brand.» 2. This is a prose version of sonnet 111. It contains four mistakes. Find them out and correct them: On my behalf, my friend, you scold the goddess Fortune whose changeability influenced my doings that proved so hurtful and left no other means of living to me than those created by the public stage where I learnt to behave pro- perly in public. It is this connection with the public stage that has brought me into disre- pute and has impregnated my habits no more than the dye impregnates the hand of the dyer, whose hand takes on the colour of the material he is wor- king with. Then lament me and wish that I may renew myself, and I, against my will, shall be a patient pleased to obey; I shall swallow any bitter medicine in any quantity to cure my illness and not refuse to be punished over and over again to correct myself steadily. Have compassion for me, but I cannot certify that your compassion will be sufficient to put me back on the right path. 3. Analyse the meaning and function of the powerful imagery used in l. 5, ll. 6–7 and ll. 9–10. THE NARRATIVE UNTERLYING SONNET 111 Again, together with sonnet 110, sonnet 111 tells us a story about the author’s life.And again, together with some sociohistorical information and a particu- lar piece of documentary evidence the story, inasfar as we can reasonably expect to uncover it, points to another author than William Shakespeare to whom the authorship is generally attributed. Why?

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