The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to tell their story more clearly. This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and ultimately physical competition of their debate--contrasting Tarquins speeches with Lucreces eloquent appeals to his better nature. In the second objective, his triumph must have outstripped all expectation. Bensons much-discussed modification of the text of the Sonnets indicates at least a certain level of anxiety about the gender of the characters in the poems. While some literature falls into clear designations of literature or not literature, most works are open to debate. Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg Address is known to every American schoolchild. As illustrated in the somewhat silly example above, one way we can define what constitutes literature is by identifying what is definitely not literature. Definition & Elements of a Novel - HubPages Bacon, Katie. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeares name first appeared on the title page of his playsRichard II and a revised edition of Romeo and Juliet. While the second image appears to be produced with a simple doodle, and quickly composed, the first indicates more complexity, attention-to-detail, and craft. Many novelscertainly all the worlds great novelsare literature, but there are thousands that are not so considered. The Dialogues of Plato (4th century bc) are written with great narrative skill and in the finest prose; the Meditations of the 2nd-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are a collection of apparently random thoughts, and the Greek in which they are written is eccentric. A Shakespearean tragedy is a play written by Shakespeare himself or a play written by a different author but in the style of Shakespeare. How Caliban, The Tempest, and a poets exile became the perfect storm for a first book. No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse. Dont turn the page until you have written them down. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. I have replicated this experiment dozens of times in the classroom, and, in most classes, the vast majority of what students have been taught are Literary Masterworks are written by (pardon my colloquialism) dead white males. College of Marin, 2008. Shakespeares father, John Shakespeare, moved to Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a prominent figure in the towns business and politics. Part of what makes analyzing literature so fun is that it means the definition of literature is always up for debate! The speaker refers to the friend as rose, my love, lover, and sweet love, and many commentators have demonstrated the repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). Literature | Definition, Characteristics, Genres, Types, & Facts The historically validated interpretationfor Shakespeares readers, descendants of Brutus in New Troyis figured by Brutus, who pluckd the knife from Lucreces side. He steps forward, casting off his reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at Lucreces death into a determination to publish Tarquins foul offense and change the political system.