Deconstruction is a literary approach which looks very closely at the language and logic of texts by breaking them down into smaller parts. Like a building is "constructed," texts like novels, short stories, or films are "constructed" or built by their creators. In order to understand how these texts are constructed, we examine their smaller parts closely.
The first part of this sentence focuses upon the complete works of William Shakespeare. As you know, Shakespeare...
Deconstruction is a literary approach which looks very closely at the language and logic of texts by breaking them down into smaller parts. Like a building is "constructed," texts like novels, short stories, or films are "constructed" or built by their creators. In order to understand how these texts are constructed, we examine their smaller parts closely.
The first part of this sentence focuses upon the complete works of William Shakespeare. As you know, Shakespeare composed numerous plays and poems and his complete works are extensive.
The next part of the sentence - the verb clause "went through" - suggests that there was a process to the creation of Shakespeare's complete works. It is true that there was a process of gathering Shakespeare's works together both during and after his death. When Shakespeare died, only about half of his plays had been published. Scholars are not entirely sure of the order in which his plays were written, nor are they certain who wrote some of the plays with which he is sometimes credited. Most of the plays were gathered in stages into folios; we speak of the "First Folio," for example, to describe the early publication of some specific plays such as As You Like It and Julius Caesar.
The final part of the sentence focuses on the changes (or versions) that Shakespeare's plays and poems underwent during this process. Like most authors, Shakespeare revised his work so we have different versions of some plays. We can compare different copies of the plays to determine how they "evolved" over time. The collection of these documents also changed over time. For example, the Second Folio, published a few years after the First Folio, contained some corrections to the first. Therefore, the complete works of this author took time to collect and there are different versions (iterations) of these collections.
The link gives further information about Shakespeare and the publication of his different writings over time. The Folger Shakespeare Library is dedicated to the study of his life and works.
No comments:
Post a Comment