English Knowledge

🎭 William Shakespeare 🎭 (bapt. 26 April 1564 – Died 23 April 1616) William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Here are some of his greatest plays.

📗 Doctor Faustus ✍️ Thomas Mann - 1947 Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann’s last great novel, first published in 1947, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend. Mann’s protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, is one of the most significant characters in the literature of our era, for it is in him that Mann centers the tragedy of Germany’s seduction by evil. This modern Faust is a great artist: Leverkühn is a musical genius who trades body and soul in a Mephistophelian bargain for twenty-four years of triumph as the world’s greatest composer. He is isolated, brilliant, a radical experimenter who both plays and thinks at the very edges of artistic possibility. The story of his life becomes an apocalyptic narrative of his country's moral collapse as it surges into the catastrophe of World War II.

📗 Kim ✍️ Rudyard Kipling - 1901 Filled with lyrical, exotic prose and nostalgia for Rudyard Kipling’s native India, Kim is widely acknowledged as the author’s greatest novel and a key element in his winning the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. Kim, orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor white mother, and the lama, an old ascetic priest, are on a quest. Kim was born and raised in India and plays with the slum children as he lives on the streets, but he is white, a sahib, and wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism; while the priest must find redemption from the Wheel of Things. Kim celebrates their friendship and their journeys in a beautiful but hostile environment, capturing the opulence of the exotic landscape and the uneasy presence of the British Raj.