Shakespeare Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 1

Shakespeare - Essay Example Shakespeare wrote the second series of history plays at the peak of his career, roughly around 1595-1599, covering the history from around 1398-1420. Although the events he writes about occurred around two centuries before his time, but Shakespeare expected his audience to be familiar with the characters and events he was describing. The rise and fall of kings and the battles between the houses were woven into the cultural fabric of England and formed and integral part of country's patriotic legends and national mythology. The specific details of important historical events have obscured with the passage of time and thus, the heroes and battles of an event are to a degree, cloaked in myth. The plays innovatively mix history and comedy, moving from lofty scenes of kings and battles to base scenes showing ruffians engaging in robberies and drinking. The strength of the plays is its remarkable richness, a variety of textures and a fascinatingly ambiguous take on history as well as on political motivation. Shakespeare drew on a number of sources for writing his history plays as he did in almost all of his work Since it is not possible to know Shakespeare's beliefs, attitude and the methodology he used in writing his plays, we can only hypothesize on the basis of his textual evidence regarding his authorial intentions and the underlying didactic message found in the second tetralogy