week 4

1  .A Midsummer Night Dream     《仲夏夜之夢》

 A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy written by William Shakespeare in 1595/96. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors  who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

2.The poet's eye

“The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven;

 and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, 

and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”

3.Marlowe-Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe-Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (1564-1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. 

Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse* and their overreaching protagonists.

Blank verse is poetry written with regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always in iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the 16th century", and Paul Fussell has estimated that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse".