Margreta de Grazia FRSL (born 1946), Emerita Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, is a scholar of Early Modern studies.
De Grazia received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her MA and PhD from Princeton University in English Renaissance studies.
De Grazia taught at the University of New Mexico and at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Center.
The Royal Society of Literature elected her as a Fellow in 2021. [1]
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his attempts to exact revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother. Hamlet is considered among the "most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language", with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others". It is widely considered one of the greatest plays of all time. Three different early versions of the play are extant: the First Quarto ; the Second Quarto ; and the First Folio. Each version includes lines and passages missing from the others.
Macbeth is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I, Macbeth most clearly reflects his relationship with King James, patron of Shakespeare's acting company. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies; and modern scholars recognise a fourth category, romance, to describe the specific types of comedy that appear in Shakespeare's later works.
The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England during the late 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. As in most of the rest of Northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later within the Northern Renaissance. Renaissance style and ideas were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. Many scholars see its beginnings in the early 16th century during the reign of Henry VIII. Others argue the Renaissance was already present in England in the late 15th century.
Stephen Booth was a professor of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a leading Shakespearean scholar.
Sonnet 54 is one of 154 sonnets published in 1609 by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is considered one of the Fair Youth sequence. This sonnet is a continuation of the theme of inner substance versus outward show by noting the distinction between roses and canker blooms; only roses can preserve their inner essence by being distilled into perfume. The young man's essence or substance can be preserved by verse.
A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.
Shakespeare's editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.
Gary Taylor is an American academic, Robert Lawton Distinguished University Professor of English at Florida State University, author of numerous books and articles, and joint editor of The Oxford Shakespeare, The Oxford Middleton, and "The New Oxford Shakespeare."
Sonnet 127 of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609) is the first of the Dark Lady sequence, called so because the poems make it clear that the speaker's mistress has black hair and eyes and dark skin. In this poem the speaker finds himself attracted to a woman who is not beautiful in the conventional sense, and explains it by declaring that because of cosmetics one can no longer discern between true and false beauties, so that the true beauties have been denigrated and out of favour.
From its premiere at the turn of the 17th century, Hamlet has remained Shakespeare's best-known, most-imitated, and most-analyzed play. The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Sigmund Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex. Even within the narrower field of literature, the play's influence has been strong. As Foakes writes, "No other character's name in Shakespeare's plays, and few in literature, have come to embody an attitude to life ... and been converted into a noun in this way."
Modern dress is a term used in theatre and film to refer to productions of plays from the past in which the setting is updated to the present day, but the text is left relatively unchanged. For example, Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet uses a relatively unaltered text of Shakespeare's play but updates the setting to contemporary America.
Carla Mazzio, an American literary and cultural critic, specializes in early modern literature in relationship to the history of science, medicine, and health, the history of language, media technologies, and the printed book, and the history of speech pathologies with a focus on the harmful social construction of the “inarticulate” person or community. Her research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
The tragic play Macbeth by William Shakespeare has appeared and been reinterpreted in many forms of art and culture since it was written in the early 17th century.
Jeffrey A. Masten is an American academic specializing in Renaissance English literature and culture and the history of sexuality. He is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles. Masten's book Queer Philologies was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book in the field of early modern drama by the journal SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in English Literature for 2022.
Patrick Gerard Cheney is an American scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University.
Eric Rasmussen is an American scholar, academic and author. He is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada.
Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality is a nonfiction book written by Marjorie Garber and was originally published by Methuen Publishing in 1987.