📚Macbeth
📇Author: William Shakespear
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1624
🌬Genre: #tragedy

📝Summary:
Macbeth dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power.

🔮Interesting Facts:
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.

🔎Background:
Shakespeare's source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. 


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📚Hamlet
📇Author: William Shakespear
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1599-1601
🌬Genre: #tragedy

📝Summary:
Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.

🔮Interesting Facts:
Hamlet is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others". It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words.

🔎Background:
Its story was derived from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, as subsequently retold by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier Elizabethan play known today as the Ur-Hamlet, though some scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet that exists today.


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📚The Tempest
📇Author: William Shakespear
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1610-1611
🌬Genre: #tragicomedy

📝Summary:
After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants: Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit.

🔮Interesting Facts:
It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, and family. In Act IV, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-a-play, and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language.

🔎Background:
Although The Tempest is listed in the First Folio as the first of Shakespeare's comedies, it deals with both tragic and comic themes, and modern criticism has created a category of romance for this and others of Shakespeare's late plays.


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📚King Lear
📇Author: William Shakespear
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1603-1606
🌬Genre: #tragedy

📝Summary:
King Lear relinquishes his power and land to two of his daughters. He becomes destitute and insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations. 

🔮Interesting Facts:
The play was often revised after the English Restoration for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone, but since the 19th century Shakespeare's original play has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements.

🔎Background:
Shakespeare's play is based on various accounts of the semi-legendary Brythonic figure Leir of Britain, whose name has been linked by some scholars to the Brythonic god Lir/Llŷr, though in actuality the names are not etymologically related.


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📚Richard III
📇Author: William Shakespeare
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1597
🌬Genre: #historical_play

📝Summary:
Young Richard of Gloucester uses the chaos of the Wars of the Roses to begin his unscrupulous climb to power. Despite being manifestly unfit to govern, he seizes the crown, as King Richard III. But how does he do it?

🔮Interesting Facts:
It is the second longest play in the Shakespearean canon and is the longest of the First Folio, whose version of Hamlet, otherwise the longest, is shorter than its quarto counterpart. The play is often abridged for brevity, and peripheral characters removed.

🔎Background:
It is labelled a history in the First Folio, and is usually considered one, but it is sometimes called a tragedy, as in the quarto edition. Richard III concludes Shakespeare's first tetralogy (also containing Henry VI, Part 1, Henry VI, Part 2, and Henry VI, Part 3) and depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England.

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