Wikipedia:Peer review/Shakespeare's late romances/archive1

Shakespeare's late romances

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like some feed back on what more to add. I have covered many aspects of the plays, but I feel there are more areas to cover. Also, I'm worried that the writing feels a bit disjointed, and any suggestions on how to clean it up would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Deliirving (talk) 22:46, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Deliirving. Below I have listed some notes on the article, as requested. I have broken the review into notes by section, followed by ratings according to the Quantitative Article Quality Metric (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Assessment)

Lead Section

• Change last sentence to make "Shakespeare" possessive ("Shakespeare's)
• Also, in last sentence choose a different word from "things." What does "things" refer to?

Labeling and structure

• According to the Wikipedia style manual, headers should be written in sentence form, as are the article titles. With this in mind, don't capitalize "structure."
• 1st sentence: be careful about using words like "them" or "it," as it becomes confusing to the reader what you are referring to. Opt for more specific wording.
• I think the 2nd sentence may be broken into smaller sentences. What is the "its" whose the editors listed? By creating shorter sentences, you increase the clarity of the writing.
• When you speak of tragedy and comedy, are you referring specifically to Shakespeare's plays or the genre as a whole?

Defining characteristics

• You don't need to include commas and semicolons at the ends of the bullet points. The fact that you are using bullet points instructs the reader that you are making a list.

Tragicomedy

• Just an idea: what would happen if you changed the section header to something more specific, such as "Tragicomic influence"?
• When it says the romances are more tragicomic than the comedies, does it mean that romances were related more closely to tragicomedies or does it mean that the romances possessed more tragicomic elements than the comedies possessed? And once again, is this comedy as a genre or Shakespeare works?
• The second paragraph in this section wants a citation.

History

• This section often switches between futuristic verb tenses (as though Shakespeare is alive) and past tense verbs. As this is history, past tense is best suited.
• The comment about Blackfriars having a more sophisticated audience is interesting. Is there any research you can add as to why that was and how this is known?

Performances

• Is there any particular order that the information is presented? Perhaps listing productions by date would organizing.

Metric Rating

• Comprehensiveness: 7 (I think some expansion on the history surrounding the writing is necessary.)
• Sourcing: 4 (As noted above, there is one paragraph without citation.)
• Neutrality: 3 (You appear to provide contrasting viewpoints when possible, particularly in the criticism section.)
• Readability: 2 (Some minor edits are needed. Try reading the article aloud to catching sneaky typos.)
• Formatting: 2 (Just fix that header and you're good to go!)
• Illustrations: 1 (You picked a relevant image for the article, but it would be supported with more.)

Keep up the good work and let me know if you have any questions. Happy editing! Jcbjaw12 (talk) 15:34, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Dave, Other Jessie's edits were very thorough, and I second her feedback. In reference to the feedback you were seeking, I don't find the writing to be terribly disjointed at all. In terms of content I think you cover a lot and the only major thing I judge is missing is the potential influence of Shakespeare's biography on the writing of his later plays. Perhaps this could be added to the history section, which would then be 'history and biography'. The death of Shakespeare's son and his return to Stratford and time spent with his daughters before writing the late romances, for example may well have influenced the father/daughter relationships that appear in each. More specifics:

• I like the heading 'defining characteristics' and will add that to my own 'qualifiers' section by your advice
• I find your structuring of the article easy to follow and comprehensive
• Very effective notes/citations/sources
• You could add a modern visual for the performances section if you find one that suits, or you could add an image of Shakespeare, the folio or quartos, etc.

There is a lot of content and I believe all you really need is fine-tuning. Always Jessiechapman (talk) 16:54, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Nice work on the expansion. One thing you could do to improve the article would be to link a lot of the names in the Performances section. People like Samuel Phelps, Henry Irving, and most of the others have Wikipedia articles about them. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:39, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Comments from Tim riley

• General
  • The use of American spelling for this article is surprising. We usually stick to British spelling and grammar for British subjects and American spelling and grammar for American ones. An English colleague is currently doing the latter at an adjoining peer review of the John Barrymore article (peer review here), and I have worked with American colleagues on FAs on English topics with English spelling.
  • Punctuation: you need to be consistent in italicising the titles of plays.
  • Hyphens used as dashes as in the caption of the image should be either spaced en-dashes or unspaced em dashes.
• Lead
  • As it stands, the lead is much too sketchy. See WP:LEAD. All the important points you make in the main text should be briefly mentioned here. A good lead is usually three or four paragraphs in length. Uncontroversial statements in the lead that are followed up with cited material in the main text don't need citations. You could remove both the cites at present there.
  • "later plays, or final plays" – I'm not sure I can see any difference between the two terms.
• Plays
  • I'd like citations for all the dates in your list.
  • The Norton reference needs a citation with a page number.
• Defining characteristics
  • There is no character in The Winter's Tale called "Leonte"; the possessive of Leontes is Leontes' (American) or Leontes's (English)
  • "aren't" – too informal for an encyclopaedia
  • "re-uniting" – not hyphenated according to the OED
• Tragicomic influence
  • Not clear about the significance of your square brackets in the second bullet point
• History
  • "Elizabeth I reined" – you mean "reigned"; "reined" is what horses are.
  • "In addition, Shakespeare's health" – in addition to what?
  • "last single authored play" – translating this into English I take it you mean the last play he wrote on his own.
  • "It is also suggested" – by whom?
  • "The King's Men" or "The Kings Men" – you have both
• Criticism
  • This paragraph is rather short of citations. The second, third and fourth sentences all lack them.
  • "revulsion to" – should be "revulsion from".
  • "It is also believed" – by whom? Lots of people or only one?
• Film adaptations
  • If you have ambitions to get the article to Good Article standard you'll have to be brave and turn this list into ordinary prose. For some unfathomable reason Wikipedia insists of slabs of prose in preference to bulleted bite-size chunks. Not reader-friendly, but there it is. I think you may get away with two of the three earlier bulleted lists, but the Tragicomic influence section may have to be turned into prose too.
• References
  • This section is rather chaotic. It would be easier on your reader's eye to separate the citations from the sources, so that, e.g., ref 1 would read simply "Beaman, p. 1", and the full bibliographical details of the book would appear underneath, in the sources. See here for a very simple example. It's one of many ways of doing it, but it is found in a lot of articles. The Notes contain links to websites, and the page numbers of books used. The References are the books used.
  • You have multiple incidences of the same citation: e.g. refs 1, 8 and 11; you should combine them, which you do with <ref name=suchandsuch>''Reference details''</ref> for the first mention and then <ref name=suchandsuch/> for the others, as with Notes 1 and 9 in the Trois mouvements perpétuels example.
  • I don't believe your capitalisation of titles for one moment. See here and here, for example for the publishers' versions compared with yours.
  • Ref 31 – you should make the url of the online source into a clickable link, as in the example quoted above.
  • Ref 32 – an amateur blog does not meet Wikipedia's standards of reliability: see WP:RS.
  • ISBNs – some are missing, e.g. ref 21. You veer between 10- or 13-digit ISBNs, but we are bidden to go for the 13-digit versions nonetheless. See Wikipedia:ISBN. There is a splendid tool for converting 10s to 13s here. For older books, published before ISBNs came in, you should quote the OCLC number which you can easily get from WorldCat.

There's a lot of carping from me above, and so let me close by saying that I enjoyed this article, and that you have made an excellent start in expanding and improving it. – Tim riley talk 17:26, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Later: having discussed offline with an editor who has mentored similar WP student-editors, I am taking it on myself to put the above recommendations into effect. I hope this doesn't tread on anyone's toes. Tim riley talk 21:37, 8 December 2014 (UTC)