Morteza Lak
Abstract
The English Renaissance era has always been acknowledged as a unique arena for literary creativity in the periods that followed it. From the 45-year reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) to the end of King James’s monarchy, 1603-1625, English culture, art and literature experienced a range of ...
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The English Renaissance era has always been acknowledged as a unique arena for literary creativity in the periods that followed it. From the 45-year reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) to the end of King James’s monarchy, 1603-1625, English culture, art and literature experienced a range of brilliant, progressive changes that culminated in the appearing of leading figures as William Shakespeare, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in drama, and Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, among others, in poetry. These figures more or less enjoyed resonance in their 18th and 19th-century ancestors’ literary productions, nevertheless, Shakespeare’s influence was more extensive. William Wordsworth was a poet who benefited widely from Shakespeare’s style and dramatic poetics. Wordsworth, in the course of his literary career, produced only one play in which a variety of Shakespearean aesthetics and textual techniques can be traced. The current research employs a contrastive approach to examine the role of Shakespeare in Wordsworth’s authorial consciousness of writing his play The Borderers.