Please adjust your browser screen for a full a view of the text and readability (simulate 8½ x 11 inch paper) . Correct the format errors in the sample paper below. Click the MLA Handbook numbers to link to format, content and punctuation guidelines. Check your answers with the Correction Menu. This tutorial provides a basic orientation to the principles and organization of the handbook. As additonal aides, the uncorrected and corrected texts may be dowloaded as Microsoft Word documents.
[Use the "Back / Forward" browser menu to return to your original place in the exercise]
3. 2. 7 g | 3. 4. 1 | 3. 5. 2 | 3. 5. 5 | 3. 6. 2 | 3. 7. 2 | 4. 5 | 4. 6 | 5. 4 | 5. 6. 1 | 5. 6. 3 | 5. 6. 4 | 5. 6. 7 | 5. 6. 8 | 5. 6. 13 | 5. 6. 15 | 5. 6. 20 | 5. 6. 25 | 5. 7. 2 | 5. 7. 5 | 5. 7. 6 | 5. 8. 1 | 5. 8. 7 | 5. 8. 11 | 5. 9. 2 | 5. 9. 2 c | 5. 9. 4 a | 5. 9. 9 k | 6. 2 | 6. 3 | 6. 4. 1 | 6. 4. 2 | 6. 4. 3 | 6. 4. 4 | 6. 4. 6 | 6. 4. 8 | 6. 4. 9 | 7. 2 | 7. 7. 2
Correction Menu | MLA Handbook Info
4. 6 1
John Jones
Grooms 4. 5
English 4. 5
4. 5
Only a small percentage of the plays (some 700) 3. 5. 2 written during the Golden
Age of Elizabethan drama (1590-1610) survive into print. (Nolan, 30) 6. 2 6. 3 6. 4. 2
Popular drama in the 1580's 3. 2. 7g existed as no more than the street professions
of clowns and jugglers performing the occasional dramatic interlude. (Nolan, 35) 6. 2 6. 3
6. 4. 2 As with the "bohemian" and "hippie" youth movements in New York, Los Angeles
San Francisco and other American cities during the 60's 3. 2. 7g 3. 5. 5 , bands of
reckless young people with working-class and college educations invaded this London urban
underworld and street culture in the latter half of the sixteenth century, living mostly by their
own wits and talents. In their early careers, they wrote for local actors of street plays, much
like the early Beatles, Orbison, Nelson and Holly 3. 4. 1 wrote material for other
more popular performers in Liverpool and Nashville before they received their big break in
the business (Interview) 5. 8. 7 6. 2 . The new lyric of age expresses a realism and candor rarely
seen in previous street ballads. William Shakespeare describes love as a steadfast and dedicated
event that endures despite all temporal hardship (619) 6. 4. 8 . Employing the vagabond actors
and performers living in the poorer back streets of London, they kindled an age of dramatic art
that blazed for one single twenty-year episode, leaving only a few names like Shakespeare etched
in the minds of the middle-class London merchants and consumers of that age (London) 6. 4. 4 .
the plays during the years of their performance (Critics) 5. 9. 2 c ; the critics of the time scoffed
at them (Hall 2,126) 6. 4. 3 . Future scholars of drama appreciated the Elizabethan era only as
4. 6 2
they were raking over the ashes of a vanished art form (Ardath, Online). 6. 4. 6 Even
Shakespeare had no candid biographer to chronicle the important details of his life.
(Shakespeare) 6. 4. 4 . Only a few church records survive with his name spelled six or seven
different ways in a time long before a stable language and dictionaries (English) 6. 4. 4 .
Only a few rough folios of lines to his plays written down some twenty years after his death
endure beyond his epoch. Surviving stage-notes indicate that he created some characters for
the talents of specific but now nameless actors and actresses (Evans 86) 5. 6. 4 6. 2 6. 3
6. 4. 2 - "A kingdom for a stage" (Henry V, I.3) 7. 7. 2 6. 4. 8 , a deluge afterwards
washing away any memory of the man Shakespeare into oblivion. We trace his life and art
only through the poetry and drama attributed to him.
each generation has revered the characters created by Shakespeare, despite the constraints of
Elizabethan dramatic style and language (Shakespeare Language) 5. 9. 2 6. 4. 2 . Over-studied and
over-simplified in many high school English classes in America, his characters pass into our
culture "to be or not be" (Hamlet, 3:25) 7. 7. 2 6. 4. 8 , as it were, vital to our own modern
predicament. (lecture) 5. 8. 11 6. 2 . As the Shakespearian actress Diana Riggs once
illuminated, modern readers with ears dull to the Elizabethan tongue, accustomed to American
fast-food English and decidedly unaccustomed to Shakespeare's flowery and obsolete
speeches, fail to understand the profound spectacle of King Lear as his fate emerges before
them on the modern stage (Riggs) 5. 8. 1 6. 4. 1 . A British critic of Shakespeare once
noted that King Lear studies the wages of personal and political power, transforming "brutal
arrogance into madness and then divine humility." (70) 6. 3 (author: Smith) 6. 4. 2 If so,
then such accounts appear no less true about Shakespeare's own artistic powers, which at the
age of 37, produced the brutal visage and behavior of Hamlet and then developed a series of
dark characters, culminating with the broken, mad character of Lear (shak-L) 6. 3 .
4. 6 3
Following his early plays, which juxtaposed the hardened boyish wisdom of Henry V 3. 6. 2
and the fantasy of A Midsummer Night's Dream 3. 6. 2, this enigmatic "dark period" of
Shakespeare's life saw the creation of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus and King Lear
3. 6. 2 (Geilgud) 5. 8. 1 6. 2 . Despite the ardent claims of 19th century 3. 5. 5 Romantics
that a tragic personal experience prefaces the advance of Shakespeare's tragic power, no
substantial proof exists for this mood in his work (Barry 82) 6. 2 ; however, a dark mood
permeates his writing in this period. As one scholar states:
The reader feels a dark strain, a far off-sound ... from dreaded histories, of great menThe setting of King Lear appears grim and dark, a world of terror and strangeness, harboring
and women caught in an older web of Destiny, wrecked by some flaw in themselves,
or rendered helpless amid a crushing environment of evil, and swept down by terrible
non-human forces on the remorseless flood of fate (Smith 125). 3. 7. 2, (82) 6. 3 (207-8)
Lear's struggle with his own nature and ending in insanity and death (Ardath, Hamlet)
6. 4. 6 . Despite the edification of a tale from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings
of Britain (Thorpe, 44) 6. 4. 2 , the tragic character of Lear overpowers the psyche of
playwright, actors, and audience. The intense level of tragic pathos and comedy running
through the dialogue between Lear and his Fool remains unrivaled in the history of drama
(James 14, Smith 84) 6. 4. 9 6. 2 . Scholars of drama still consider the awakening of Lear
from his madness Shakespeare's greatest dramatic achievement.
Smith, Logan Pearsall. "On Reading Shakespeare," February 20, 1989, New York
4. 6 4
Works Consulted 5. 4
Abernathy, Frances lecture Stephen F. Austin State University December 4, 1977
5. 8. 11Ardath, Ian "Searching for Ancient Actors." Traditio 2.7 (March 1991): 13 pp.
15 Apr. 2008. http://www.traditio.com/ardath/9054/march~91. 5. 9. 4aArdath, Ian, Geilgud and Hamlet, Stagecraft 15 February 1992, 46, 48-9. 110. 5. 6. 35. 7. 6Allen, Barry. Shakespeare, Shelley and the Romantic Reaction, New York, Granada Press:1958 5. 6. 1Benatar, Henry. "The Profound Lessons of Lear." Current Criticism of Shakespeare Martin
James, ed. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1979 105-119 5. 6. 7Cyber-Shakespeare Language Project. Ed. William Collins 2000 Cambridge Texts Archives
University of Cambridge. 28 Jan. 2003. http://www.cambu.edu/cslp 5. 9. 2"Elizabethan London." Folger's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare edition 1985 5. 6. 8
Elizabethan English. Folger's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare edition 1985 5. 6. 8
Evans, George D., Barbara Williford. The Shakespeare Companion New York: CharlesScribner's Sons, 1978 5. 6. 4Folgeroy, Malcom. Personal Web Site. Shakepeare's Critics Page.4 June 2003. http://www.oxon.uk.co/oxlit/folgeroy/critics.html 5. 9. 2 cGeoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain Lewis Thorpe, trans.,Hammondsmith: Penguin Classics, 1966 5. 6. 13Hall, Edward. The History Diaries Ed. M. Trumble in two volumes, London: Unwin,1928 5. 6. 15
4. 6 5
The Later Shakespeare. John Geilgud, narrator. John Atwater, writer and producer.
BBC Thames Special. KERA, Dallas-Ft.Worth. March 25, 1981. 5. 8. 1Logan, Paul "The Nature of Elizabethan Drama" Shakespeare Quarterly 14,3.4, (1986)
pp.29-45 5. 7. 2Riggs, Dianna, narr. Mute Cybelines: Shakespeare's Women. Dir. Anthony Hale. 2 episodes.PBS. WEBA, Boston. 26-27 Oct. 1985 5. 8. 1Rinehart, Thomas, Dr. Personal Interview February 27, 1990 5. 8. 7
Recome, Robert. "Re: Biography: Shakespeare." 6 July 1999.shak-L. Shaksper: The Global Electronic Conference. 27 June 1999. http://www.arts.ubc.ca/english/iemls/shak/shak-L.html 5. 9. 9 k
Shakespeare, William. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds." Schilb, Clifford. Making
Literature Matter. Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, 2006 5. 6. 7
Times: C23 5. 7. 5Who was Shakespeare? Pamphlet, New York: Folger Library, ?1974 5. 6. 20 5. 6. 25