England has been the birthplace of most of the great English-language theater written throughout history. Most of the plays in England that are truly famous have something in common. They usually come from a playwright(剧作家) with several famous plays.
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is considered the most famous British playwright. Shakespeare has a large catalog(目录) of tragedies, comedies and history plays, and each category is home to some of the most famous plays ever written. Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Julius Caesar are all tragedies and performed in theaters around the world every year. Famous comedies include A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. In the history category, Richard Ⅲ and Henry Ⅴ are very famous.
Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw
Several hundred years after Shakespeare, English people began to enjoy the works of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Wilde’s plays are still popular now, and The Importance of Being Earnest is both performed and studied extremely frequently. A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband are among his other famous works. Shaw and Wilde were born within a few years of each other, but Shaw was a much more productive writer. His most famous plays include Pygmalion and Candida. Shaw’s plays are loved so much that an entire theater company is devoted to performing his work in Niagara-on-the-Lake in southern Ontario.
Harold Pinter
The plays of Harold Pinter certainly have an international presence. His writing was so widely recognized for its importance that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2005. Pinter is especially known for his style of writing. Many of his plays such as Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter and his first play, The Room, are extremely well known.
小题1:The writer wrote this passage to .
A．advise us to spend more time enjoying plays
B．explain why England has so many wonderful plays
C．tell us about some famous British playwrights and their works
D．tell us the differences among some British playwrights小题2:What do the works in the underlined part in Paragraph 2 have in common?
A．They are all Shakespeare’s early works.
B．They are all tragedies written by Shakespeare.
C．They are all Shakespeare’s famous comedies.
D．They all belong to the history category of Shakespeare’s plays.小题3:Which of the following plays were most probably written in the same period of time?
A．The Dumb Waiter and A Woman of No Importance.
B．Richard Ⅲ and A Woman of No Importance.
C．An Ideal Husband and Candida.
D．Candida and Betrayal.小题4:Who was mentioned in this passage that he had received the Nobel Prize because of his writing?
A．William Shakespeare.
B．Oscar Wilde.
C．George Bernard Shaw.
D．Harold Pinter.
