In Shakespeare’s time, marriages were usually arranged. A love match was unusual, and even more unusual was a woman choosing her prospective groom. Bertram’s objection to marrying Helena is rooted in these traditions. Because he is a count, he would have expected to marry someone of a similar status, not a commoner with neither wealth…
Tag: Culture
Literary culture at the time of writing All’s Well That Ends Well
Shakespeare based much of All’s Well That Ends Well on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of one hundred novellas wrapped around a frame story. Boccaccio was a Florentine writer of the fourteenth century who wrote in the Italian vernacular, thereby making the Decameron popular among the middle class, as opposed to scholars who shunned anything…
Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan on the Relationship Between Media Technology and Culture
Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams have made key contributions to our understanding of media and its relationship to society and culture. McLuhan, in particular, has been an influential thinker on the subject and his ideas continue to be debated to this day. McLuhan’s work laid emphasis on how media is not an exclusive domain, but…