The Great Depression The Great Depression, the period between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, was the worst economic crisis in American history. During that time, millions of Americans lost their jobs and sank into poverty. By 1932, the United States was solidly in the…
Tag: SETTING
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Setting
Brown wrote this story in the early 1990s, a period of great social and political change in the United States. For example, personal computers and everyday use of the Internet were becoming more commonplace. By the early 1990s, the number of deaths from AIDS began increasing at an alarming rate, and calls became louder for…
Hamlet – Historical Background – Setting
Children’s Acting Companies Hamlet speaks about children’s acting companies with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in act 2, scene 2, when they explain to him that the players who are visiting Elsinore have been forced to travel because of the popularity of the newly emerging children’s acting companies. In fact, beginning in 1598, after a decade of…
Coriolanus – Historical Context – Setting
King James’s Attempts to Assert Absolute and Unitary Power In Shakespeare’s time, some members of the nobility believed that King James was attempting to assert his absolute power as governing monarch and was determined to undermine their rights, such as had been won in 1215 through the Magna Carta, in which King John surrendered some…
The Comedy Of Errors – Historical Background – Setting
Room and Board In general, aspects of the historical situation at the time of Shakespeare’s writing his play, and the historical period in which the play takes place, bear little relation to the plot. That is, in what was quite possibly his first dramatic effort, Shakespeare seemed to have been executing a sort of exercise…
As You Like It – Setting
Rural Life While the term urban would not be coined until 1619, at the beginning of the seventeenth century London was without doubt an essentially urban locale, with a total population of some two hundred thousand. Thus life in the city would have been remarkably different from life in the countryside, with the residents of…
As You Like It – Setting – Gender Roles
The way Shakespeare addresses gender roles in As You Like It reflects the widespread sexism of the Elizabethan era, and thus the topic merits discussion not only in the fictional but also in the historical context. In his Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, Russ McDonald offers an assessment of the state of gender relations: “That women…
Antony and Cleopatra – Historical Context
The Rise of Mark Antony The Roman general Mark Antony was born in Rome in approximately 83 B.C.E. As a young man he distinguished himself as a cavalry commander in Judea and Egypt. He was a military leader in the Gallic Wars of 58–50 B.C.E. and a staunch supporter of Julius Caesar. During the civil…
The Lamb by William Blake – Poetic Devices – Setting
“The Lamb” consists of two ten-line stanzas which pose a question and give an answer. Each stanza has five pairs of rhyming couplets, where the end word of one line rhymes with the next. Note that Blake often repeats a word to create this rhyme, creating a type of refrain, and twice employs the slant…
An Arundel Tomb – Historical Context
The Movement When Larkin wrote “An Arundel Tomb,” in 1956, he was one of a group of young poets in England known as the Movement. The term was first used in an article in the literary magazine The Spectator in 1954. Larkin’s name was not mentioned, since The Less Deceived, the volume that made him…