Last Person 2 Post In This Thread Gets My Novation UltraNova

[skimpi]

im gonna come and post in this thread every 6 days

[oprs]

longest thread in dsf commence!

[wizeguy]

pretty decent, just working my ass off. had no time to produce at all. kinda blows.

you don't want the keyboard then

[wizeguy]

i doubt it will ever end tbh

[oprs]

maybe itll knock some life back into me!

[wizeguy]

don't worry mate you wont be winning it

[ariosa]

[oprs]

well, i am directly related to charlie sheen. so, in fact im always winning

[wizeguy]

haha

[wub]

War and Peace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from War & Peace)
This article is about the Tolstoy novel. For other uses, see War and Peace (disambiguation).
War and Peace
Cover to the English first edition
Author(s) Leo Tolstoy
Original title Война и миръ, (Voyná i mir, "Война и мир" in contemporary orthography)
Language Russian, with considerable French
Genre(s) Historical, Romance, War novel, Philosophical
Publisher Russkii Vestnik (series)
Publication date 1869
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audio book
Pages 1,225 (first Published edition) ; 1,475 (2006 paperback issue)
ISBN NA

War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, Pre-reform Russian: «Война и миръ») is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature.[1] It is regarded as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other work Anna Karenina (1873–1877).

War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. Portions of an earlier version of the novel, then known as The Year 1805,[2] were serialized in the magazine The Russian Messenger between 1865 and 1867. The novel was first published in its entirety in 1869.[3] Newsweek in 2009 ranked it top of its list of Top 100 Books.[4]

Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle."[5]
Contents
[hide]

1 Crafting the novel
1.1 Realism
2 Reception
3 Language
3.1 English translations
4 Background and historical context
5 Plot summary
5.1 Book/Volume One
5.2 Book/Volume Two
5.3 Book/Volume Three
5.4 Book/Volume Four
5.5 Epilogue in two parts
6 Principal characters in War and Peace
7 Adaptations
7.1 Film
7.2 Television
7.3 Opera
7.4 Theatre
7.5 Radio
7.6 Music
7.7 Full translations into English
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

[edit] Crafting the novel
Only known color photograph of the writer, taken at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908 by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky.
Tolstoy's notes from the ninth draft of War and Peace, 1864

War and Peace is famously long for a novel, though not the longest, and it is subdivided into four books or volumes, each with subparts containing many chapters.

Tolstoy came up with the title, and some of his themes, from an 1861 work of Proudhon: La Guerre et la Paix ('War and Peace' in French). Tolstoy had served in the Crimean War and written a series of short stories and novellas featuring scenes of war.

He began writing War and Peace in the year that he finally married and settled down at his country estate. The first half of the book was written under the name "1805".

During the writing of the second half, he read widely and acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations. However, Tolstoy developed his own views of history and the role of the individual within it.[6]

The novel can be generally classified as historical fiction. It contains elements present in many types of popular 18th and 19th century literature, especially the romance novel. War and Peace attains its literary status by transcending genres.

Tolstoy was instrumental in bringing a new kind of consciousness to the novel. His narrative structure is noted for its "god-like" ability to hover over and within events, but also in the way it swiftly and seamlessly portrayed a particular character's point of view.[7] His use of visual detail is often cinematic in its scope, using the literary equivalents of panning, wide shots and close-ups, to give dramatic interest to battles and ballrooms alike. These devices, while not exclusive to Tolstoy, are part of the new style of the novel that arose in the mid-19th century and of which Tolstoy proved himself a master.[8]
[edit] Realism

Tolstoy incorporated extensive historical research. He was also influenced by many other novels.[9] A veteran of the Crimean War, Tolstoy was quite critical of standard history, especially the standards of military history, in War and Peace. Tolstoy read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and combined more traditional historical writing with the novel form. He explains at the start of the novel's third volume his own views on how history ought to be written. His aim was to blur the line between fiction and history, in order to get closer to the truth, as he states in Volume II.

The novel is set 60 years earlier than the time at which Tolstoy wrote it, "in the days of our grandfathers", as he puts it. He had spoken with people who had lived through war during the French invasion of Russia in 1812, so the book is also, in part, accurate ethnography fictionalized. He read letters, journals, autobiographical and biographical materials pertaining to Napoleon and the dozens of other historical characters in the novel. There are approximately 160 real persons named or referred to in War and Peace.[10]
[edit] Reception
Front page of War and Peace, first edition, 1869 (Russian)

The first draft of War and Peace was completed in 1863. In 1865, the periodical Russkiy Vestnik published the first part of this early version under the title 1805. In the following year, it published more of the same early version. Tolstoy was dissatisfied with this version, although he allowed several parts of it to be published (with a different ending) in 1867, still under the same title "1805". He heavily rewrote the entire novel between 1866 and 1869.[11] Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstoya, wrote as many as seven separate complete manuscripts by hand before Tolstoy considered it again ready for publication.[12] The version that was published in Russkiy Vestnik had a very different ending from the version eventually published under the title War and Peace in 1869.

The completed novel was then called Voyna i mir (new style orthography; in English War and Peace).

The 1805 manuscript (sometimes referred to as "the original War and Peace") was re-edited and annotated in Russia in 1983 and since has been translated separately from the "known" version, to English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Albanian, and Korean. The fact that so many extant versions of War and Peace survive make it one of the best insights into the mental processes of a great novelist.

Russians who had read the serialized version were anxious to acquire the complete first edition, which included epilogues, and it sold out almost immediately. The novel was translated almost immediately after publication into many other languages.

Isaac Babel said, after reading War and Peace, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."[13] Tolstoy "gives us a unique combination of the 'naive objectivity' of the oral narrator with the interest in detail characteristic of realism. This is the reason for our trust in his presentation."[14]
[edit] Language
Cover of War and Peace, Italian translation, 1899

Although Tolstoy wrote most of the book, including all the narration, in Russian, significant portions of dialogue (including its opening paragraph) are written in French with characters often switching between the two languages. This reflected 19th century Russian aristocracy, where French, a foreign tongue, was widely spoken and considered a language of prestige and more refined than Russian.[15] This came about from the historical influence throughout Europe of the powerful court of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, leading to members of the Russian aristocracy being less competent in speaking their mother tongue. In War and Peace, for example, Julie Karagina, Princess Marya's friend, has to take Russian lessons in order to master her native language.

It has been suggested[16] that it is a deliberate literary device employed by Tolstoy, to use French to portray artifice and insincerity as the language of the theater and deceit while Russian emerges as a language of sincerity, honesty and seriousness. It displays slight irony that as Pierre and others socialize and use French phrases, they will be attacked by legions of Bonapartists in a very short time. It is sometimes used in satire against Napoleon. In the novel, when Pierre proposes to Hélène, he speaks to her in French — Je vous aime ('I love you'). When the marriage later emerges to be a sham, Pierre blames those French words.

The use of French diminishes as the book progresses and the wars with the French intensify, culminating in the capture and eventual burning of Moscow. The progressive elimination of French from the text is a means of demonstrating that Russia has freed itself from foreign cultural domination.[17] It is also, at the level of plot development, a way of showing that a once-admired and friendly nation, France, has turned into an enemy. By midway through the book, several of the Russian aristocracy, whose command of French is far better than their command of Russian, are anxious to find Russian tutors for themselves.
[edit] English translations

War and Peace has been translated into English on several occasions, starting with Clara Bell working from a French translation. The translators Constance Garnett and Louise and Aylmer Maude knew Tolstoy personally. Translations have to deal with Tolstoy’s often peculiar syntax and his fondness of repetitions. About 2% of War and Peace is in French; Tolstoy removed the French in a revised 1873 edition, only to restore it later.[17] Most translators follow Garnett retaining some French, Briggs uses no French, while Pevear-Volokhonsky and Amy Mandelker's revision of the Maude translation both retain the French fully.[17] (For a list of translations see below)
[edit] Background and historical context
In 1812 by the Russian artist Illarion Pryanishnikov

The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (from 1762–1796), when the royal court in Paris was the centre of western European civilization,[18] is still fresh in the minds of older people. Catherine, fluent in French and wishing to reshape Russia into a great European nation, made French the language of her royal court. For the next one hundred years, it became a social requirement for members of the Russian nobility to speak French and understand French culture.[18] This historical and cultural context in the aristocracy is reflected in War and Peace. Catherine's grandson, Alexander I, came to the throne in 1801 at the age of 24. In the novel, his mother, Marya Feodorovna, is the most powerful woman in the Russian court.

War and Peace tells the story of five aristocratic families — the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs, the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys—and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. The Bezukhovs, while very rich, are a fragmented family as the old Count, Kirill Vladimirovich, has fathered dozens of illegitimate sons. The Bolkonskys are an old established and wealthy family based at Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky, Nikolai Andreevich, served as a general under Catherine the Great, in earlier wars. The Moscow Rostovs have many estates, but never enough cash. They are a closely knit, loving family who live for the moment regardless of their financial situation. The Kuragin family has three children, who are all of questionable character. The Drubetskoy family is of impoverished nobility, and consists of an elderly mother and her only son, Boris, whom she wishes to push up the career ladder.

Tolstoy spent years researching and rewriting the book. He worked from primary source materials (interviews and other documents), as well as from history books, philosophy texts and other historical novels.[19] Tolstoy also used a great deal of his own experience in the Crimean War to bring vivid detail and first-hand accounts of how the Russian army was structured.[20]

The standard Russian text of War and Peace is divided into four books (fifteen parts) and an epilogue in two parts – one mainly narrative, the other thematic. While roughly the first half of the novel is concerned strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts, as well as one of the work's two epilogues, increasingly consist of essays about the nature of war, power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays into the story in a way that defies previous fictional convention. Certain abridged versions remove these essays entirely, while others, published even during Tolstoy's life, simply moved these essays into an appendix.
[edit] Plot summary

War and Peace has a large cast of characters, the majority of whom are introduced in the first book. Some are actual historical figures, such as Napoleon and Alexander I. While the scope of the novel is vast, it is centered around five aristocratic families. The plot and the interactions of the characters take place in the era surrounding the 1812 French invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic wars.[21]
[edit] Book/Volume One
Empress dowager, Maria Feodorovna, mother of reigning Tsar Alexander I, is the most powerful woman in the Russian royal court, in the historical setting of the novel.

The novel begins in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg, at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer — the maid of honour and confidante to the queen mother Maria Feodorovna. Many of the main characters and aristocratic families in the novel are introduced as they enter Anna Pavlovna's salon. Pierre (Pyotr Kirilovich) Bezukhov is the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, an elderly man who is dying after a series of strokes. Pierre is about to become embroiled in a struggle for his inheritance. Educated abroad at his father's expense following his mother's death, Pierre is essentially kindhearted, but socially awkward, and owing in part to his open, benevolent nature, finds it difficult to integrate into Petersburg society. It is known to everyone at the soirée that Pierre is his father's favorite of all the old count’s illegitimate children.

Also attending the soireé is Pierre's friend, the intelligent and sardonic Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, husband of Lise, the charming society favourite. Finding Petersburg society unctuous and disillusioned with married life after discovering his wife is empty and superficial, Prince Andrei makes the fateful choice to be an aide-de-camp to Prince Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov in the coming war against Napoleon.

The plot moves to Moscow, Russia's ancient city and former capital, contrasting its provincial, more Russian ways to the highly mannered society of Petersburg. The Rostov family are introduced. Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov has four adolescent children. Thirteen-year-old Natasha (Natalia Ilyinichna) believes herself in love with Boris Drubetskoy, a disciplined young man who is about to join the army as an officer. Twenty-year-old Nikolai Ilyich pledges his teenage love to Sonya (Sofia Alexandrovna), his fifteen-year-old cousin, an orphan who has been brought up by the Rostovs. The eldest child of the Rostov family, Vera Ilyinichna, is cold and somewhat haughty but has a good prospective marriage in a Russian-German officer, Adolf Karlovich Berg. Petya (Pyotr Ilyich) is nine and the youngest of the Rostov family; like his brother, he is impetuous and eager to join the army when of age. The heads of the family, Count Ilya Rostov and Countess Natalya Rostova, are an affectionate couple but forever worried about their disordered finances.

At Bald Hills, the Bolkonskys' country estate, Prince Andrei departs for war and leaves his terrified, pregnant wife Lise with his eccentric father Prince Nikolai Andreyevich Bolkonsky and his devoutly religious sister Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya.

The second part opens with descriptions of the impending Russian-French war preparations. At the Schöngrabern engagement, Nikolai Rostov, who is now conscripted as ensign in a squadron of hussars, has his first taste of battle. He meets Prince Andrei, whom he insults in a fit of impetuousness. Even more than most young soldiers, he is deeply attracted by Tsar Alexander's charisma. Nikolai gambles and socializes with his officer, Vasily Dmitrich Denisov, and befriends the ruthless and perhaps psychopathic Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov.
[edit] Book/Volume Two
Scene in Red Square, Moscow, 1801. Oil on canvas by Fedor Yakovlevich Alekseev.

Book Two begins in late 1805 with Nikolai Rostov briefly returning on home leave to Moscow. Nikolai finds the Rostov family facing financial ruin due to poor estate management. He spends an eventful winter at home, accompanied by his friend Denisov, his officer from the Pavlograd Regiment in which he serves. Natasha has blossomed into a beautiful young girl. Denisov falls in love with her, proposes marriage but is rejected. Although his mother pleads with Nikolai to find himself a good financial prospect in marriage, Nikolai refuses to accede to his mother's request. He promises to marry his childhood sweetheart, the dowry-less Sonya.

Pierre Bezukhov, upon finally receiving his massive inheritance, is suddenly transformed from a bumbling young man into the richest and most eligible bachelor in the Russian Empire. Despite rationally knowing that it is wrong, he proposes marriage with Prince Kuragin's beautiful and immoral daughter Hélène (Elena Vasilyevna Kuragina), to whom he is sexually attracted. Hélène, who is rumoured to be involved in an incestuous affair with her brother, the equally charming and immoral Anatol, tells Pierre that she will never have children with him. Hélène has an affair with Dolokhov, who mocks Pierre in public. Pierre loses his temper and challenges Dolokhov, a seasoned dueller and a ruthless killer, to a duel. Unexpectedly, Pierre wounds Dolokhov. Hélène denies her affair, but Pierre is convinced of her guilt and, after almost being violent to her, leaves her. In his moral and spiritual confusion, Pierre joins the Freemasons, and becomes embroiled in Masonic internal politics. Much of Book Two concerns his struggles with his passions and his spiritual conflicts to be a better man. Now a rich aristocrat, he abandons his former carefree behavior and enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an ethically imperfect world? The question continually baffles and confuses Pierre. He attempts to liberate his serfs, but ultimately achieves nothing of note.

Pierre is vividly contrasted with the intelligent and ambitious Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Andrei is inspired by a vision of glory to lead a charge of a straggling army. He suffers a near fatal artillery wound. In the face of death, Andrei realizes all his former ambitions are pointless and his former hero Napoleon (who rescues him in a horseback excursion to the battlefield) is apparently as vain as himself.

Prince Andrei recovers from his injuries in a military hospital and returns home, only to find his wife Lise dying in childbirth. He is stricken by his guilty conscience for not treating Lise better when she was alive and is haunted by the pitiful expression on his dead wife's face. His child, Nikolenka, survives.

Burdened with nihilistic disillusionment, Prince Andrei does not return to the army but chooses to remain on his estate, working on a project that would codify military behavior and help solve some of the problems of Russian disorganization that he believes were responsible for the loss of life in battle on the Russian side. Pierre comes to visit him and brings new questions: where is God in this amoral world? Pierre is interested in panentheism and the possibility of an afterlife.

Pierre's estranged wife, Hélène, begs him to take her back, and against his better judgment he does. Despite her vapid shallowness, Hélène establishes herself as an influential hostess in Petersburg society.

Prince Andrei feels impelled to take his newly written military notions to Petersburg, naively expecting to influence either the Emperor himself or those close to him. Young Natasha, also in Petersburg, is caught up in the excitement of dressing for her first grand ball, where she meets Prince Andrei and briefly reinvigorates him with her vivacious charm. Andrei believes he has found purpose in life again and, after paying the Rostovs several visits, proposes marriage to Natasha. However, old Prince Bolkonsky, Andrei's father, dislikes the Rostovs, opposes the marriage, and insists on a year's delay. Prince Andrei leaves to recuperate from his wounds abroad, leaving Natasha initially distraught. She soon recovers her spirits, however, and Count Rostov takes her and Sonya to spend some time with a friend in Moscow.

Natasha visits the Moscow opera, where she meets Hélène and her brother Anatol. Anatol has since married a Polish woman whom he has abandoned in Poland. He is very attracted to Natasha and is determined to seduce her. Hélène and Anatol conspire together to accomplish this plan. Anatol kisses Natasha and writes her passionate letters, eventually establishing plans to elope. Natasha is convinced that she loves Anatol and writes to Princess Maria, Andrei's sister, breaking off her engagement. At the last moment, Sonya discovers her plans to elope and foils them. Pierre is initially shocked and horrified at Natasha's behavior, but comes to realize he has fallen in love with her himself. During the time when the Great Comet of 1811–2 streaks the sky, life appears to begin anew for Pierre.

Prince Andrei accepts coldly Natasha's breaking of the engagement. He tells Pierre that his pride will not allow him to renew his proposal of marriage. Shamed by her near-seduction and at the realisation that Andrei will not forgive her, Natasha makes a suicide attempt and is left seriously ill.
[edit] Book/Volume Three
The Battle of Borodino, fought on September 7, 1812 and involving more than 250,000 troops and 70,000 casualties was a pivotal turning point in Napoleon's failed campaign to take Russia. It is vividly depicted in great detail through the plot and characters in War and Peace.
Painting by Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1822.

With the help of her family, especially Sonya, and the stirrings of religious faith, Natasha manages to persevere in Moscow through this dark period. Meanwhile, the whole of Russia is affected by the coming confrontation between Napoleon's troops and the Russian army. Pierre convinces himself through gematria that Napoleon is the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. Old prince Bolkonsky dies of a stroke while trying to protect his estate from French marauders. No organized help from any Russian army seems available to the Bolkonskys, but Nikolai Rostov turns up at their estate in time to help put down an incipient peasant revolt. He finds himself attracted to Princess Maria, but remembers his promise to Sonya.

Back in Moscow, the war-obsessed Petya manages to snatch a loose piece of the Tsar's biscuit outside the Cathedral of the Assumption; he finally convinces his parents to allow him to enlist.

Napoleon himself is a main character in this section of the novel and is presented in vivid detail, as both a thinker and would-be strategist. His toilette and his customary attitudes and traits of mind are depicted in detail. Also described are the well-organized force of over 400,000 French Army (only 140,000 of them actually French-speaking) which marches quickly through the Russian countryside in the late summer and reaches the outskirts of the city of Smolensk. Pierre decides to leave Moscow and go to watch the Battle of Borodino from a vantage point next to a Russian artillery crew. After watching for a time, he begins to join in carrying ammunition. In the midst of the turmoil he experiences firsthand the death and destruction of war. The battle becomes a hideous slaughter for both armies and ends in a standoff. The Russians, however, have won a moral victory by standing up to Napoleon's reputedly invincible army. For strategic reasons and having suffered grievous losses, the Russian army withdraws the next day, allowing Napoleon to march on to Moscow. Among the casualties are Anatol Kuragin and Prince Andrei. Anatol loses a leg, and Andrei suffers a grenade wound in the abdomen. Both are reported dead, but their families are in such disarray that no one can be notified.
[edit] Book/Volume Four
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Painting by Adolf Northern (1828-1876)

The Rostovs have waited until the last minute to abandon Moscow, even after it is clear that Kutuzov has retreated past Moscow and Muscovites are being given contradictory, often propagandistic, instructions on how to either flee or fight. Count Rostopchin is publishing posters, rousing the citizens to put their faith in religious icons, while at the same time urging them to fight with pitchforks if necessary. Before fleeing himself, he gives orders to burn the city. The Rostovs have a difficult time deciding what to take with them, but in the end, Natasha convinces them to load their carts with the wounded and dying from the Battle of Borodino. Unknown to Natasha, Prince Andrei is amongst the wounded.

When Napoleon's Grand Army finally occupies an abandoned and burning Moscow, Pierre takes off on a quixotic mission to assassinate Napoleon. He becomes an anonymous man in all the chaos, shedding his responsibilities by wearing peasant clothes and shunning his duties and lifestyle. The only people he sees while in this garb are Natasha and some of her family, as they depart Moscow. Natasha recognizes and smiles at him, and he in turn realizes the full scope of his love for her.

Pierre saves the life of a French officer who fought at Borodino, yet is taken prisoner by the retreating French during his attempted assassination of Napoleon, after saving a woman from being raped by soldiers in the French Army. He becomes friends with a fellow prisoner, Platon Karataev, a peasant with a saintly demeanor, who is incapable of malice. In Karataev, Pierre finally finds what he has been seeking: an honest person of integrity (unlike the aristocrats of Petersburg society) who is utterly without pretense. Pierre discovers meaning in life simply by living and interacting with him. After witnessing French soldiers sacking Moscow and shooting Russian civilians arbitrarily, Pierre is forced to march with the Grand Army during its disastrous retreat from Moscow in the harsh Russian winter. After months of trial and tribulation—during which the fever-plagued Karataev is shot by the French—Pierre is finally freed by a Russian raiding party, after a small skirmish with the French that sees the young Petya Rostov killed in action.

Meanwhile, Andrei, wounded during Napoleon's invasion, has been taken in as a casualty and cared for by the Rostovs, fleeing from Moscow to Yaroslavl. He is reunited with Natasha and his sister Maria before the end of the war. Having lost all will to live, he forgives Natasha in a last act before dying.

As the novel draws to a close, Pierre's wife Hélène dies ambiguously (some have speculated it was under some ignominous circumstances, as in an abortion attempt; translator Anthony Briggs speculates it was a heart attack). Pierre is reunited with Natasha, while the victorious Russians rebuild Moscow. Natasha speaks of Prince Andrei's death and Pierre of Karataev's. Both are aware of a growing bond between them in their bereavement. With the help of Princess Maria, Pierre finds love at last and, revealing his love after being released by his former wife's death, marries Natasha.
[edit] Epilogue in two parts

The first part of the epilogue begins with the wedding of Pierre and Natasha in 1813. It is the last happy event for the Rostov family, which is undergoing a transition. Count Rostov dies soon after, leaving his eldest son Nikolai to take charge of the debt-ridden estate.

Nikolai finds himself with the task of maintaining the family on the verge of bankruptcy. His abhorrence at the idea of marrying for wealth almost gets in his way, but finally in spite of rather than according to his mother's wishes, he marries the now-rich Maria Bolkonskaya and in so doing also saves his family from financial ruin.

Nikolai and Maria then move to Bald Hills with his mother and Sonya, whom he supports for the rest of their life. Buoyed by his wife's fortune, Nikolai pays off all his family's debts. They also raise Prince Andrei's orphaned son, Nikolai Andreyevich (Nikolenka) Bolkonsky.

As in all good marriages, there are misunderstandings, but the couples–Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Maria–remain devoted to their spouses. Pierre and Natasha visit Bald Hills in 1820, much to the jubilation of everyone concerned. There is a hint in the closing chapters that the idealistic, boyish Nikolenka and Pierre would both become part of the Decembrist Uprising. The first epilogue concludes with Nikolenka promising he would do something with which even his late father "would be satisfied..." (presumably as a revolutionary in the Decembrist revolt).

The second part of the epilogue contains Tolstoy's critique of all existing forms of mainstream history. He attempts to show that there is a great force behind history, which he first terms divine. He offers the entire book as evidence of this force, and critiques his own work. God, therefore, becomes the word Tolstoy uses to refer to all the forces that produce history, taken together and operating behind the scenes.
[edit] Principal characters in War and Peace
Main article: List of characters in War and Peace
War and Peace character tree

Count Pyotr Kirillovich (Pierre) Bezukhov — The large-bodied, ungainly, and socially awkward illegitimate son of an old Russian grandee. Pierre, educated abroad, returns to Russia as a misfit. His unexpected inheritance of a large fortune makes him socially desirable. Pierre is the central character and often a voice for Tolstoy's own beliefs or struggles.
Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky — A strong but cynical, thoughtful and philosophical aide-de-camp in the Napoleonic Wars.
Princess Maria Nikolayevna Bolkonskaya — A pious woman whose eccentric father attempted to give her a good education. The caring, nurturing nature of her large eyes in her otherwise thin and plain face are frequently mentioned.
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov — The pater-familias of the Rostov family; terrible with finances, generous to a fault.
Countess Natalya Rostova — Wife of Count Ilya Rostov, mother of the four Rostov children.
Countess Natalia Ilyinichna (Natasha) Rostova — A central character, introduced as "not pretty but full of life" and a romantic young girl, she evolves through trials and suffering and eventually finds happiness. She is an accomplished singer and dancer.
Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostov — A hussar, the beloved eldest son of the Rostov family.
Sofia Alexandrovna (Sonya) Rostova — Orphaned cousin of Vera, Nikolai, Natasha, and Petya Rostov.
Countess Vera Ilyinichna Rostova — Eldest of the Rostov children, she marries the German career soldier, Berg.
Pyotr Ilyich (Petya) Rostov — Youngest of the Rostov children.
Prince Vasily Sergeyevich Kuragin — A ruthless man who is determined to marry his children well, despite having doubts about the character of some of them.
Princess Elena Vasilyevna (Hélène) Kuragin — A beautiful and sexually alluring woman who has many affairs, including (it is rumoured) with her brother Anatole
Prince Anatol Vasilyevich Kuragin — Hélène's brother and a very handsome and amoral pleasure seeker who is secretly married yet tries to elope with Natasha Rostova.
Prince Ipolit Vasilyevich — The eldest and perhaps most dim-witted of the Kuragin children.
Prince Boris Drubetskoy — A poor but aristocratic young man driven by ambition, even at the expense of his friends and benefactors, who marries for money, rather than love, an heiress, Julie Karagina.
Princess Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskaya — The mother of Boris.
Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov — A cold, almost psychopathic officer, he ruins Nikolai Rostov by luring him into an outrageous gambling debt (by which he, Dolokhov, profits), he only shows love to his doting mother.
Adolf Karlovich Berg — A young Russian officer, who desires to be just like everyone else.
Anna Pavlovna Sherer — Also known as Annette, she is the hostess of the salon that is the site of much of the novel's action in Petersburg.
Maria Dmitryevna Akhrosimova — An older Moscow society lady, she is an elegant dancer and trend-setter, despite her age and size.
Amalia Evgenyevna Bourienne — A French woman who lives with the Bolkonskys, primarily as Princess Marya's companion.
Vasily Dmitrich Denisov — Nikolai Rostov's friend and brother officer, who proposes to Natasha.
Platon Krataev - The archetypal good Russian peasant, whom Pierre meets in the prisoner of war camp.
Napoleon I of France — the Great Man, whose fate is detailed in the book.
General Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov — Russian commander-in-chief throughout the book. His diligence and modesty eventually save Russia from Napoleon.[citation needed]
Osip Bazdeyev — the Freemason who interests Pierre in his mysterious group, starting a lengthy subplot.[citation needed]
Tsar Alexander I of Russia — He signed a peace treaty with Napoleon in 1807 and then went to war with him.

Many of Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace were based on real-life people known to Tolstoy himself. His grandparents and their friends were the models for many of the main characters, his great-grandparents would have been of the generation of Prince Vasilly or Count Ilya Rostov. Some of the characters, obviously, are actual historic figures.
[edit] Adaptations
[edit] Film

The first Russian film adaptation of War and Peace was the 1915 film Война и мир (Voyna i mir), directed by Vladimir Gardin and starring Gardin and the Russian ballerina Vera Karalli. It was followed in 1965 by the critically acclaimed four-part film version War and Peace, by the Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk, released individually in 1965-1967, and as a re-edited whole in 1968. This starred Lyudmila Savelyeva (as Natasha Rostova) and Vyacheslav Tikhonov (as Andrei Bolkonsky). Bondarchuk himself played the character of Pierre Bezukhov. The film was almost seven hours long; it involved thousands of actors, 120 000 extras, and it took seven years to finish the shooting, as a result of which the actors age changed dramatically from scene to scene. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for its authenticity and massive scale.[22] The film is considered the best screen version of the novel.

The novel has been adapted twice for cinema outside of Russia. The first of these was produced by F. Kamei in Japan (1947). The second was the 208-minute long 1956 War and Peace, directed by the American King Vidor. This starred Audrey Hepburn (Natasha), Henry Fonda (Pierre) and Mel Ferrer (Andrei). Audrey Hepburn was nominated for a BAFTA Award for best British actress and for a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a drama production.
[edit] Television

War and Peace (1972): The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) made a television serial based on the novel, broadcast in 1972-73. Anthony Hopkins played the lead role of Pierre. Other lead characters were played by Rupert Davies, Faith Brook, Morag Hood, Alan Dobie, Angela Down and Sylvester Morand. This version faithfully included many of Tolstoy's minor characters, including Platon Karataev (Harry Locke).,[23][24]

La guerre et la paix (2000): French TV production of Prokofiev's opera War and Peace, directed by François Roussillon. Robert Brubaker played the lead role of Pierre.[25]

War and Peace (2007): produced by the Italian Lux Vide, a TV mini-series in Russian & English co-produced in Russia, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. Directed by Robert Dornhelm, with screenplay written by Lorenzo Favella, Enrico Medioli and Gavin Scott. It features an international cast with Alexander Beyer playing the lead role of Pierre assisted by Malcolm McDowell, Clémence Poésy, Alessio Boni, Pilar Abella, J. Kimo Arbas, Ken Duken, Juozapas Bagdonas and Toni Bertorelli.[26]
[edit] Opera

Initiated by a proposal of the German director Erwin Piscator in 1938, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev composed his opera War and Peace (Op. 91, libretto by Mira Mendelson) based on this epic novel during the 1940s. The complete musical work premiered in Leningrad in 1955. It was the first opera to be given a public performance at the Sydney Opera House (1973).[27]
[edit] Theatre

The first successful stage adaptations of War and Peace were produced by Alfred Neumann and Erwin Piscator (1942, revised 1955, published by Macgibbon & Kee in London 1963, and staged in 16 countries since) and R. Lucas (1943).

A stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson, first produced in 1996 at the Royal National Theatre, was published that year by Nick Hern Books, London. Edmundson added to and amended the play[28] for a 2008 production as two 3-hour parts by Shared Experience, directed by Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale.[29] This was first put on at the Nottingham Playhouse, then toured in the UK to Liverpool, Darlington, Bath, Warwick, Oxford, Truro, London (the Hampstead Theatre) and Cheltenham.
[edit] Radio

The BBC Home Service broadcast an eight-part adaptation by Walter Peacock from January 17 to 7 February 1943 with two episodes on each Sunday. All but the last instalment, which ran for one and a half hours, were one hour long. Leslie Banks played Pierre while Celia Johnson was Natasha.

In December 1970, Pacifica Radio station WBAI broadcast a reading of the entire novel (the 1968 Dunnigan translation) read by over 140 celebrities and ordinary people.[30]

A dramatised full-cast adaptation in 20 parts, edited by Michael Bakewell, was broadcast by the BBC. Transmission Times: 30.12.1969 to 12.5.1970 Cast included: David Buck, Kate Binchy, Martin Jarvis

A dramatised full-cast adaptation in ten parts was written by Marcy Kahan and Mike Walker in 1997 for BBC Radio 4. The production won the 1998 Talkie award for Best Drama and was around 9.5 hours in length. It was directed by Janet Whitaker and featured Simon Russell Beale, Gerard Murphy, Richard Johnson, and others.[31]
[edit] Music

Composition by Nino Rota[32]

Referring to album notes, the first track "The Gates of Delirium", from the album Relayer, by the progressive rock group Yes, is said to be based loosely on the novel.[33]
[edit] Full translations into English

Clara Bell (from a French version) 1885–86
Nathan Haskell Dole 1898
Leo Wiener 1904
Constance Garnett (1904)
Aylmer and Louise Maude (1922–3)
Rosemary Edmonds (1957, revised 1978)
Ann Dunnigan (1968)
Anthony Briggs (2005)
Andrew Bromfield (2007), translation of the first completed draft, approx. 400 pages shorter than other English translations
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007)
Maude translation revised by Amy Mandelker, Oxford University Press (2010) ISBN 978-0199232765

[edit] See also
Russia portal
Novels portal

List of characters in War and Peace
List of historical novels
Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes, a cultural history of Russia using the name of the main female character[34]


[edit] References

^ Moser, Charles. 1992. Encyclopedia of Russian Literature. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 298–300.; Thirlwell, Adam. 2005. "A masterpiece in miniature." London: Guardian UK, October 8; Briggs, Anthony. 2005. "Introduction" to War and Peace. Penguin Classics.
^ Pevear, Richard (2008). "Introduction". War and Peace. Trans. Pevear; Volokhonsky, Larissa. New York City, New York: Vintage Books. pp. VIII–IX. ISBN 978-1400079988.
^ Knowles, A.V. Leo Tolstoy, Routledge 1997.
^ Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List, retrieved on 07 July 2009
^ Introduction?. Wordsworth Editions. 1993. ISBN 9781853260629. Retrieved 2009-03-24.
^ Feuer, Kathryn.
^ Emerson, Caryl. 1985. "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin", in PMLA, Vol 100, No 1, pp. 69-71. Modern Language Association.
^ Emerson, Caryl. 1985. Ibid, p. 68-69
^ Feuer, Kathryn B. 1996
^ Pearson and Volokhonsky op cit.
^ cf. Knowles 1997, Feuer 1996
^ Feuer 1996
^ "Introduction to War and Peace" by Richard Peaver in Peaver, Richard and Larissa Volokhonsky, War and Peace, 2008, Vintage Classics.
^ Greenwood, Edward Baker (1980). "What is War and Peace?". Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 83. ISBN 0416741304.
^ Flaitz, Jeffra (1988). The ideology of English: French perceptions of English as a world language. Walter de Gruyter. p. 3. ISBN 3110115492, 9783110115499. Retrieved 22 November 2010.
^ Figes, O, Tolstoy's Real Hero. NYRB 22 Nov 2007,pp 4-7.
^ a b c Figes O (November 22, 2007). "Tolstoy’s Real Hero". The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 18.
^ a b Inna, Gorbatov (2006). Catherine the Great and the French philosophers of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Grim. Academica Press,LLC. p. 14. ISBN 1933146036, 9781933146034. Retrieved 3 December 2010.
^ Feuer, Kathryn B. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, Cornell University Press, 1996 (First Edition)
^ Troyat, Henri. Tolstoy, a biography. Doubleday, 1967.
^ Randomhouse.com
^ IMDb.com
^ TV.com
^ IMDb.com
^ IMDb.com, "La guerre et la paix (TV 2000)". Retrieved 2011-04-23
^ IMDb.com
^ Sydney Opera House: History - highlights
^ Cavendish, Dominic (February 11, 2008). "War and Peace: A triumphant Tolstoy". The Daily Telegraph (London).
^ Sharedexperience.org.uk
^ Pacificaradioarchives.org
^ "Marcy Kahan Radio Plays". War And Peace (Radio Dramatization). Retrieved 2010-01-20.
^ Billboard.com
^ Yesworld.com
^ Books.google.com

[edit] External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
War and Peace
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: War and Peace

English audiorecording at LibriVox.org
English translation at gutenberg
Searchable version of the gutenberg text in multiple formats SiSU
War and Peace, complete text with accompanying audio.
Full text of War and Peace in modern Russian orthography
An audio version of Book 1 of War and Peace (other books are available through links).
A searchable online version of Aylmer Maude's English translation of War and Peace
SparkNotes Study Guide for "War and Peace"
Birth, death, balls and battles by Orlando Figes. This is an edited version of an essay found in the Penguin Classics new translation of War and Peace (2005).
Homage to War and Peace Searchable map, compiled by Nicholas Jenkins, of places named in Tolstoy's novel (2008).
Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars
The War and Peace Broadcast: 35th Anniversary, from Pacifica Radio Archives site
War and Peace at the Internet Book List
Radio documentary about 1970 marathon reading of War and Peace on WBAI, from Democracy Now! program, December 6, 2005
Discussion-Forum at Reading Group Guides

[hide]v · d · eWorks by Leo Tolstoy
Biography · Bibliography · Texts
Novels and
novellas

Childhood (1852) · Boyhood (1854) · Youth (1856) · Family Happiness (1859) · The Cossacks (1863) · War and Peace (1869) · Anna Karenina (1877) · The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) · The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) · Resurrection (1899) · The Forged Coupon (1911) · Hadji Murat (1912)
Short stories

"The Raid" (1852) · "The Wood-Felling" (1855) · "Sevastopol in December 1854" (1855) · "Sevastopol in May 1855" (1855) · "Sevastopol in August 1855" (1856) · "A Billiard-Marker's Notes" (1855) · "The Snowstorm" (1856) · "Two Hussars" (1856) · "A Landlord's Morning" (1856) · "Meeting a Moscow Acquaintance in the Detachment" (1856) · "Lucerne" (1857) · "Albert" (1858) · "Three Deaths" (1859) · "The Porcelain Doll" (1863) · "Polikúshka" (1863) · "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" (1872) · "The Prisoner in the Caucasus" (1872) · "The Bear-Hunt" (1872) · "What Men Live By" (1881) · "Memoirs of a Madman" (1884) · "Quench the Spark" (1885) · "Two Old Men" (1885) · "Where Love Is, God Is" (1885) · "Ivan the Fool" (1885) · "Evil Allures, But Good Endures" (1885) · "Wisdom of Children" (1885) · "Ilyás" (1885) · "The Three Hermits" (1886) · "Promoting a Devil" (1886) · "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886) · "The Grain" (1886) · "The Godson" (1886) · "Repentance" (1886) · "Croesus and Fate" (1886) · "Kholstomer" (1886) · "The Empty Drum" (1891) · "Françoise" (1892) · "A Talk Among Leisured People" (1893) · "Walk in the Light While There is Light" (1893) · "The Coffee-House of Surrat" (1893) · "Master and Man" (1895) · "Too Dear!" (1897) · "Father Sergius" (1898) · "Esarhaddon, King of Assyria" (1903) · "Work, Death, and Sickness" (1903) · "Three Questions" (1903) · "After the Ball" (1903) · "Feodor Kuzmich" (1905) · "Alyosha the Pot" (1905) · "What For?" (1906) · "The Devil" (1911)
Plays

The Power of Darkness (1886) · The First Distiller (1886) · The Fruits of Enlightenment (1891) · The Living Corpse (1900) · The Cause of it All (1910) · The Light Shines in Darkness
Non-fiction

A Confession (1882) · What I Believe (1884) · What Is to Be Done? (1886) · On Life (1887) · The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) · The Gospel in Brief (1896) · What Is Art? (1897) · What Is Religion? (1902) · A Calendar of Wisdom (1910)
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Tolstoyan movement · Yasnaya Polyana
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[wub]

Time
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Time (disambiguation).
The flow of sand in an hourglass can be used to keep track of elapsed time. It also concretely represents the present as being between the past and the future.

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects.[1] The temporal position of events with respect to the transitory present is continually changing; future events become present, then pass further and further into the past. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars. A simple definition states that "time is what clocks measure".

Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units. Time is used to define other quantities — such as velocity — so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.[2] An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy.

Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[3][4] Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[5] and Immanuel Kant,[6][7] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.

Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a prime motivation in navigation and astronomy. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time. Examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the international unit of time, the second, is defined in terms of radiation emitted by caesium atoms (see below). Time is also of significant social importance, having economic value ("time is money") as well as personal value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day and in human life spans.

Ray Cummings, an early writer of science fiction, wrote in 1922, "Time... is what keeps everything from happening at once",[8] a sentence repeated by scientists such as C. J. Overbeck,[9] and John Archibald Wheeler.[10][11]
Contents
[hide]

1 Temporal measurement
1.1 History of the calendar
1.2 History of time measurement devices
2 Definitions and standards
2.1 World time
2.2 Time conversions
2.3 Sidereal time
2.4 Chronology
3 Religion
3.1 Linear and cyclical time
3.2 Numeric and Divine time
4 Philosophy
4.1 Time as "unreal"
5 Physical definition
5.1 Classical mechanics
5.2 Spacetime
5.3 Time dilation
5.4 Relativistic time versus Newtonian time
5.5 Arrow of time
5.6 Quantised time
6 Time and the Big Bang
6.1 Speculative physics beyond the Big Bang
7 Time travel
8 Judgement of time
8.1 Biopsychology
8.2 Alterations
9 Use of time
10 See also
10.1 Books
10.2 Organizations
10.3 Miscellaneous arts and sciences
10.4 Miscellaneous units of time
11 References
12 Further reading
13 External links
13.1 Perception of time
13.2 Physics
13.3 Philosophy
13.4 Timekeeping
13.5 Miscellaneous

[edit] Temporal measurement

Temporal measurement, or chronometry, takes two distinct period forms: the calendar, a mathematical abstraction for calculating extensive periods of time,[12] and the clock, a physical mechanism that counts the ongoing passage of time. In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day, the calendar, for periods longer than a day. Increasingly, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously. The number (as on a clock dial or calendar) that marks the occurrence of a specified event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from a fiducial epoch — a central reference point.
[edit] History of the calendar
Main article: Calendar

Artifacts from the Palaeolithic suggest that the moon was used to calculate time as early as 6,000 years ago.[13] Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, either 12 or 13 lunar months (either 354 or 384 days). Without intercalation to add days or months to some years, seasons quickly drift in a calendar based solely on twelve lunar months. Lunisolar calendars have a thirteenth month added to some years to make up for the difference between a full year (now known to be about 365.24 days) and a year of just twelve lunar months. The numbers twelve and thirteen came to feature prominently in many cultures, at least partly due to this relationship of months to years.

The reforms of Julius Caesar in 45 BC put the Roman world on a solar calendar. This Julian calendar was faulty in that its intercalation still allowed the astronomical solstices and equinoxes to advance against it by about 11 minutes per year. Pope Gregory XIII introduced a correction in 1582; the Gregorian calendar was only slowly adopted by different nations over a period of centuries, but is today by far the one in most common use around the world.
[edit] History of time measurement devices
Horizontal sundial in Taganrog.
Main article: History of timekeeping devices
See also: Clock

A large variety of devices have been invented to measure time. The study of these devices is called horology.

An Egyptian device dating to c.1500 BC, similar in shape to a bent T-square, measured the passage of time from the shadow cast by its crossbar on a nonlinear rule. The T was oriented eastward in the mornings. At noon, the device was turned around so that it could cast its shadow in the evening direction.[14]

A sundial uses a gnomon to cast a shadow on a set of markings which were calibrated to the hour. The position of the shadow marked the hour in local time.

The most precise timekeeping devices of the ancient world were the water clock or clepsydra, one of which was found in the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep I (1525–1504 BC). They could be used to measure the hours even at night, but required manual upkeep to replenish the flow of water. The Greeks and Chaldeans regularly maintained timekeeping records as an essential part of their astronomical observations. Arab inventors and engineers in particular made improvements on the use of water clocks up to the Middle Ages.[15] In the 11th century, Chinese inventors and engineers invented the first mechanical clocks to be driven by an escapement mechanism.
A contemporary quartz watch

The hourglass uses the flow of sand to measure the flow of time. They were used in navigation. Ferdinand Magellan used 18 glasses on each ship for his circumnavigation of the globe (1522).[16] Incense sticks and candles were, and are, commonly used to measure time in temples and churches across the globe. Waterclocks, and later, mechanical clocks, were used to mark the events of the abbeys and monasteries of the Middle Ages. Richard of Wallingford (1292–1336), abbot of St. Alban's abbey, famously built a mechanical clock as an astronomical orrery about 1330.[17][18] Great advances in accurate time-keeping were made by Galileo Galilei and especially Christiaan Huygens with the invention of pendulum driven clocks.

The English word clock probably comes from the Middle Dutch word "klocke" which is in turn derived from the mediaeval Latin word "clocca", which is ultimately derived from Celtic, and is cognate with French, Latin, and German words that mean bell. The passage of the hours at sea were marked by bells, and denoted the time (see ship's bells). The hours were marked by bells in the abbeys as well as at sea.
Chip-scale atomic clocks, such as this one unveiled in 2004, are expected to greatly improve GPS location.[19]

Clocks can range from watches, to more exotic varieties such as the Clock of the Long Now. They can be driven by a variety of means, including gravity, springs, and various forms of electrical power, and regulated by a variety of means such as a pendulum.

A chronometer is a portable timekeeper that meets certain precision standards. Initially, the term was used to refer to the marine chronometer, a timepiece used to determine longitude by means of celestial navigation, a precision firstly achieved by John Harrison. More recently, the term has also been applied to the chronometer watch, a wristwatch that meets precision standards set by the Swiss agency COSC.

The most accurate timekeeping devices are atomic clocks, which are accurate to seconds in many millions of years,[20] and are used to calibrate other clocks and timekeeping instruments. Atomic clocks use the spin property of atoms as their basis, and since 1967, the International System of Measurements bases its unit of time, the second, on the properties of caesium atoms. SI defines the second as 9,192,631,770 cycles of that radiation which corresponds to the transition between two electron spin energy levels of the ground state of the 133Cs atom.

Today, the Global Positioning System in coordination with the Network Time Protocol can be used to synchronize timekeeping systems across the globe.

In medieval philosophical writings, the atom was a unit of time referred to as the smallest possible division of time. The earliest known occurrence in English is in Byrhtferth's Enchiridion (a science text) of 1010–1012,[21] where it was defined as 1/564 of a momentum (1½ minutes),[22] and thus equal to 15/94 of a second. It was used in the computus, the process of calculating the date of Easter.

As of 2006, the smallest unit of time that has been directly measured is on the attosecond (10−18 s) time scale, or around 1026 Planck times.[23][24][25]
[edit] Definitions and standards
Units of time Unit Size Notes
yoctosecond 10−24 s
zeptosecond 10−21 s
attosecond 10−18 s shortest time now measurable
femtosecond 10−15 s pulse time on fastest lasers
picosecond 10−12 s
nanosecond 10−9 s time for molecules to fluoresce
microsecond 10−6 s
millisecond 0.001 s
second 1 s SI base unit
minute 60 seconds
hour 60 minutes
day 24 hours
week 7 days Also called sennight
fortnight 14 days 2 weeks
lunar month 27.2–29.5 days Various definitions of lunar month exist.
month 28–31 days
quarter 3 months
year 12 months
common year 365 days 52 weeks + 1 day
leap year 366 days 52 weeks + 2 days
tropical year 365.24219 days[26] average
Gregorian year 365.2425 days[27] average
Olympiad 4 year cycle
lustrum 5 years Also called pentad
decade 10 years
Indiction 15 year cycle
generation 17–35 years approximate
jubilee (Biblical) 50 years
century 100 years
millennium 1,000 years
exasecond 1018 s roughly 32 billion years, more than twice
the age of the universe on current estimates
cosmological decade varies 10 times the length of the previous
cosmological decade, with CÐ 1 beginning
either 10 seconds or 10 years after the
Big Bang, depending on the definition.
See also: Time standard and Orders of magnitude (time)

The SI base unit for time is the SI second. From the second, larger units such as the minute, hour and day are defined, though they are "non-SI" units because they do not use the decimal system, and also because of the occasional need for a leap second. They are, however, officially accepted for use with the International System. There are no fixed ratios between seconds and months or years as months and years have significant variations in length.[28]

The official SI definition of the second is as follows:[28][29]

The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.

At its 1997 meeting, the CIPM affirmed that this definition refers to a caesium atom in its ground state at a temperature of 0 K.[28] Previous to 1967, the second was defined as:

the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.

The current definition of the second, coupled with the current definition of the metre, is based on the special theory of relativity, which affirms our space-time to be a Minkowski space.
[edit] World time

Time keeping is so critical to the functioning of modern societies that it is coordinated at an international level. The basis for scientific time is a continuous count of seconds based on atomic clocks around the world, known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Other scientific time standards include Terrestrial Time and Barycentric Dynamical Time.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the basis for modern civil time. Since January 1, 1972, it has been defined to follow TAI with an exact offset of an integer number of seconds, changing only when a leap second is added to keep clock time synchronized with the rotation of the Earth. In TAI and UTC systems, the duration of a second is constant, as it is defined by the unchanging transition period of the caesium atom.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is an older standard, adopted starting with British railroads in 1847. Using telescopes instead of atomic clocks, GMT was calibrated to the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the UK. Universal Time (UT) is the modern term for the international telescope-based system, adopted to replace "Greenwich Mean Time" in 1928 by the International Astronomical Union. Observations at the Greenwich Observatory itself ceased in 1954, though the location is still used as the basis for the coordinate system. Because the rotational period of Earth is not perfectly constant, the duration of a second would vary if calibrated to a telescope-based standard like GMT or UT—in which a second was defined as a fraction of a day or year. The terms "GMT" and "Greenwich Mean Time" are sometimes used informally to refer to UT or UTC.

The Global Positioning System also broadcasts a very precise time signal worldwide, along with instructions for converting GPS time to UTC.

Earth is split up into a number of time zones. Most time zones are exactly one hour apart, and by convention compute their local time as an offset from UTC or GMT. In many locations these offsets vary twice yearly due to daylight saving time transitions.
[edit] Time conversions

The following time conversions are accurate at the millisecond level. Some are exact while others have differences at the microsecond level.
System Description UT1 UTC TT TAI GPS
UT1 Mean Solar Time UT1 UTC = UT1 - DUT1 TT = UT1 + 32.184 s + LS - DUT1 TAI = UT1 - DUT1 + LS GPS = UT1 - DUT1 + LS - 19 s
UTC Civil Time UT1 = UTC + DUT1 UTC TT = UTC + 32.184 s + LS TAI = UTC + LS GPS = UTC + LS - 19 s
TT Terrestrial (Ephemeris) Time UT1 = TT - 32.184 s - LS + DUT1 UTC = TT - 32.184 s - LS TT TAI = TT - 32.184 s GPS = TT - 51.184 s
TAI Atomic Time UT1 = TAI + DUT1 - LS UTC = TAI - LS TT = TAI + 32.184 s TAI GPS = TAI - 19 s
GPS GPS Time UT1 = GPS + DUT1 - LS + 19 s UTC = GPS - LS + 19 s TT = GPS + 51.184 s TAI = GPS + 19 s GPS

Definitions:

LS = TAI - UTC = Leap Seconds from http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat
DUT1 = UT1 - UTC from http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/ser7.dat or http://maia.usno.navy.mil/search/search.html

[edit] Sidereal time

Sidereal time is the measurement of time relative to a distant star (instead of solar time that is relative to the sun). It is used in astronomy to predict when a star will be overhead. Due to the rotation of the earth around the sun a sidereal day is 4 minutes (1/366th) less than a solar day.
[edit] Chronology
Main article: Chronology

Another form of time measurement consists of studying the past. Events in the past can be ordered in a sequence (creating a chronology), and can be put into chronological groups (periodization). One of the most important systems of periodization is geologic time, which is a system of periodizing the events that shaped the Earth and its life. Chronology, periodization, and interpretation of the past are together known as the study of history.
[edit] Religion
Hindu units of time shown logarithmically
Further information: Time and fate deities
[edit] Linear and cyclical time
See also: Time Cycles and Wheel of time

Ancient cultures such as Incan, Mayan, Hopi, and other Native American Tribes, plus the Babylonians, Ancient Greeks, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and others have a concept of a wheel of time, that regards time as cyclical and quantic consisting of repeating ages that happen to every being of the Universe between birth and extinction.

In general, the Judaeo-Christian concept, based on the Bible, is that time is linear, beginning with the act of creation by God. The general Christian view is that time will end with the end of the world. Others suggest[who?] that time is like a ray, having a beginning but going on forever into the future.

In the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes, traditionally ascribed to Solomon (970–928 BC), time (as the Hebrew word עדן, זמן `iddan(time) zĕman(season) is often translated) was traditionally regarded as a medium for the passage of predestined events. (Another word, زمان" זמן" zman, was current as meaning time fit for an event, and is used as the modern Arabic and Hebrew equivalent to the English word "time".)

There is an appointed time (zman) for everything. And there is a time (’êth) for every event under heaven–
A time (’êth) to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing.
A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away.
A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace. – Ecclesiastes 3:1–8


[edit] Numeric and Divine time

The Greek language denotes two distinct principles, Chronos and Kairos. The former refers to numeric, or chronological, time. The latter, literally "the right or opportune moment," relates specifically to metaphysical or Divine time. In theology, Kairos is qualitative, as opposed to quantitative.
[edit] Philosophy
Main articles: Philosophy of space and time and Temporal finitism

Two distinct viewpoints on time divide many prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[4] An opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of actually existing dimension that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead an intellectual concept (together with space and number) that enables humans to sequence and compare events.[30] This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[5] and Immanuel Kant,[6][7] holds that space and time "do not exist in and of themselves, but ... are the product of the way we represent things", because we can know objects only as they appear to us.

The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction and rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4320 million years.[31] Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides and Heraclitus, wrote essays on the nature of time.[32] Plato, in the Timaeus, identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle, in Book IV of his Physica defined time as the number of change with respect to before and after.

In Book 11 of his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo ruminates on the nature of time, asking, "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He begins to define time by what it is not rather than what it is,[33] an approach similar to that taken in other negative definitions. However, Augustine ends up calling time a “distention” of the mind (Confessions 11.26) by which we simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation.

In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning, medieval philosophers and theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning. This view is shared by Abrahamic faiths as they believe time started by creation, therefore the only thing being infinite is God and everything else, including time, is finite.

Isaac Newton believed in absolute space and absolute time; Leibniz believed that time and space are relational.[34] The differences between Leibniz's and Newton's interpretations came to a head in the famous Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence.

Time is not an empirical concept. For neither co-existence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation a priori. Without this presupposition we could not represent to ourselves that things exist together at one and the same time, or at different times, that is, contemporaneously, or in succession.
“
”
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. Vasilis Politis (London: Dent., 1991), p.54.

Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, described time as an a priori intuition that allows us (together with the other a priori intuition, space) to comprehend sense experience.[35] With Kant, neither space nor time are conceived as substances, but rather both are elements of a systematic mental framework that necessarily structures the experiences of any rational agent, or observing subject. Kant thought of time as a fundamental part of an abstract conceptual framework, together with space and number, within which we sequence events, quantify their duration, and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows," that objects "move through," or that is a "container" for events. Spatial measurements are used to quantify the extent of and distances between objects, and temporal measurements are used to quantify the durations of and between events. (See Ontology).

Henri Bergson believed that time was neither a real homogeneous medium nor a mental construct, but possesses what he referred to as Duration. Duration, in Bergson's view, was creativity and memory as an essential component of reality.[36]

According to Martin Heidegger we do not exist inside time, "we are time". Hence, the relationship to the past is a present awareness of "having been", which allows the past to exist in the present. The relationship to the future is the state of anticipating a potential possibility, task, or engagement. It is related to the human propensity for caring and being concerned, which causes "being ahead of oneself" when thinking of a pending occurrence. Therefore, this concern for a potential occurrence also allows the future to exist in the present. The present becomes an experience, which is qualitative instead of quantitative. Heidegger seems to think this is the way that a linear relationship with time, or temporal existence, is broken or transcended.[37] We are not stuck in sequential time. We are able to remember the past and project into the future - we have a kind of random access to our representation of temporal existence --- we can, in our thoughts, step out of (ecstasis) sequential time.[38]
[edit] Time as "unreal"

In 5th century BC Greece, Antiphon the Sophist, in a fragment preserved from his chief work On Truth held that: "Time is not a reality (hypostasis), but a concept (noêma) or a measure (metron)." Parmenides went further, maintaining that time, motion, and change were illusions, leading to the paradoxes of his follower Zeno.[39] Time as an illusion is also a common theme in Buddhist thought.[40][41]

J. M. E. McTaggart's 1908 The Unreality of Time argues that, since every event has the characteristic of being both present and not present (i.e. future or past), that time is a self-contradictory idea (see also The flow of time).

These arguments often center around what it means for something to be "unreal". Modern physicists generally consider time to be as "real" as space, though others such as Julian Barbour in his book The End of Time, argue that quantum equations of the universe take their true form when expressed in the timeless configuration spacerealm containing every possible "Now" or momentary configuration of the universe, which he terms 'platonia'.[42] (See also: Eternalism (philosophy of time).)
[edit] Physical definition
Classical mechanics
\mathbf{F} = m \mathbf{a}
Newton's Second Law
History of classical mechanics · Timeline of classical mechanics
Branches[show]
Formulations[show]
Fundamental concepts[hide]
Space · Time · Velocity · Speed · Mass · Acceleration · Gravity · Force · Impulse · Torque / Moment / Couple · Momentum · Angular momentum · Inertia · Moment of inertia · Reference frame · Energy · Kinetic energy · Potential energy · Mechanical work · Virtual work · D'Alembert's principle
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v · d · e
Main article: Time in physics

From the age of Newton to Einstein's profound reinterpretation of the physical concepts associated with time and space, time was considered to be "absolute" and to flow "equably" (to use the words of Newton) for all observers.[43] Non-relativistic classical mechanics is based on this Newtonian idea of time.

Einstein, in his special theory of relativity,[44] postulated the constancy and finiteness of the speed of light for all observers. He showed that this postulate, together with a reasonable definition for what it means for two events to be simultaneous, requires that distances appear compressed and time intervals appear lengthened for events associated with objects in motion relative to an inertial observer.

Einstein showed that if time and space is measured using electromagnetic phenomena (like light bouncing between mirrors) then due to the constancy of the speed of light, time and space become mathematically entangled together in a certain way (called Minkowski space) which in turn results in Lorentz transformation and in entanglement of all other important derivative physical quantities (like energy, momentum, mass, force, etc.) in a certain 4-vectorial way (see special relativity for more details).
[edit] Classical mechanics

In non-relativistic classical mechanics, Newton's concept of "relative, apparent, and common time" can be used in the formulation of a prescription for the synchronization of clocks. Events seen by two different observers in motion relative to each other produce a mathematical concept of time that works pretty well for describing the everyday phenomena of most people's experience. In the late nineteenth century, physicists encountered problems with the classical understanding of time, in connection with the behaviour of electricity and magnetism. Einstein resolved these problems by invoking a method of synchronizing clocks using the constant, finite speed of light as the maximum signal velocity. This led directly to the result that observers in motion relative to one another will measure different elapsed times for the same event.
Two-dimensional space depicted in three-dimensional spacetime. The past and future light cones are absolute, the "present" is a relative concept different for observers in relative motion.
[edit] Spacetime
Main article: Spacetime

Time has historically been closely related with space, the two together comprising spacetime in Einstein's special relativity and general relativity. According to these theories, the concept of time depends on the spatial reference frame of the observer, and the human perception as well as the measurement by instruments such as clocks are different for observers in relative motion. The past is the set of events that can send light signals to the observer; the future is the set of events to which the observer can send light signals.
[edit] Time dilation
Relativity of simultaneity: Event B is simultaneous with A in the green reference frame, but it occurred before in the blue frame, and will occur later in the red frame.
Main article: Time dilation

Einstein showed in his thought experiments that people travelling at different speeds, while agreeing on cause and effect, will measure different time separations between events and can even observe different chronological orderings between non-causally related events. Though these effects are typically minute in the human experience, the effect becomes much more pronounced for objects moving at speeds approaching the speed of light. Many subatomic particles exist for only a fixed fraction of a second in a lab relatively at rest, but some that travel close to the speed of light can be measured to travel further and survive much longer than expected (a muon is one example). According to the special theory of relativity, in the high-speed particle's frame of reference, it exists, on the average, for a standard amount of time known as its mean lifetime, and the distance it travels in that time is zero, because its velocity is zero. Relative to a frame of reference at rest, time seems to "slow down" for the particle. Relative to the high-speed particle, distances seem to shorten. Even in Newtonian terms time may be considered the fourth dimension of motion; but Einstein showed how both temporal and spatial dimensions can be altered (or "warped") by high-speed motion.

Einstein (The Meaning of Relativity): "Two events taking place at the points A and B of a system K are simultaneous if they appear at the same instant when observed from the middle point, M, of the interval AB. Time is then defined as the ensemble of the indications of similar clocks, at rest relatively to K, which register the same simultaneously."

Einstein wrote in his book, Relativity, that simultaneity is also relative, i.e., two events that appear simultaneous to an observer in a particular inertial reference frame need not be judged as simultaneous by a second observer in a different inertial frame of reference.
[edit] Relativistic time versus Newtonian time
Views of spacetime along the world line of a rapidly accelerating observer in a relativistic universe. The events ("dots") that pass the two diagonal lines in the bottom half of the image (the past light cone of the observer in the origin) are the events visible to the observer.

The animations visualise the different treatments of time in the Newtonian and the relativistic descriptions. At the heart of these differences are the Galilean and Lorentz transformations applicable in the Newtonian and relativistic theories, respectively.

In the figures, the vertical direction indicates time. The horizontal direction indicates distance (only one spatial dimension is taken into account), and the thick dashed curve is the spacetime trajectory ("world line") of the observer. The small dots indicate specific (past and future) events in spacetime.

The slope of the world line (deviation from being vertical) gives the relative velocity to the observer. Note how in both pictures the view of spacetime changes when the observer accelerates.

In the Newtonian description these changes are such that time is absolute: the movements of the observer do not influence whether an event occurs in the 'now' (i.e. whether an event passes the horizontal line through the observer).

However, in the relativistic description the observability of events is absolute: the movements of the observer do not influence whether an event passes the "light cone" of the observer. Notice that with the change from a Newtonian to a relativistic description, the concept of absolute time is no longer applicable: events move up-and-down in the figure depending on the acceleration of the observer.
[edit] Arrow of time
Main article: Arrow of time

Time appears to have a direction – the past lies behind, fixed and immutable, while the future lies ahead and is not necessarily fixed. Yet for the most part the laws of physics do not specify an arrow of time, and allow any process to proceed both forward and in reverse. This is generally a consequence of time being modeled by a parameter in the system being analyzed, where there is no "proper time": the direction of the arrow of time is arbitrary. The exceptions include the Second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy must increase over time (see Entropy); the cosmological arrow of time, which points away from the Big Bang, and the radiative arrow of time, caused by light only traveling forwards in time (see light cone). In particle physics, the violation of CP symmetry implies that there should be a small counterbalancing time asymmetry to preserve CPT symmetry. The standard description of measurement in quantum mechanics is also time asymmetric (see Measurement in quantum mechanics). At the macroscopic level, some events do not seem reversible; some events in movies seem preposterous when played backwards, such as dye mixed in water separating out over time, and people inhaling over birthday cakes to light the candles.
[edit] Quantised time
See also: Chronon

Time quantization is a hypothetical concept. In the modern established physical theories (the Standard Model of Particles and Interactions and General Relativity) time is not quantized.

Planck time (~ 5.4 × 10−44 seconds) is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. Current established physical theories are believed to fail at this time scale, and many physicists expect that the Planck time might be the smallest unit of time that could ever be measured, even in principle. Tentative physical theories that describe this time scale exist; see for instance loop quantum gravity.
[edit] Time and the Big Bang

Stephen Hawking in particular has addressed a connection between time and the Big Bang. In A Brief History of Time and elsewhere, Hawking says that even if time did not begin with the Big Bang and there were another time frame before the Big Bang, no information from events then would be accessible to us, and nothing that happened then would have any effect upon the present time-frame.[45] Upon occasion, Hawking has stated that time actually began with the Big Bang, and that questions about what happened before the Big Bang are meaningless.[46][47][48] This less-nuanced, but commonly repeated formulation has received criticisms from philosophers such as Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer J. Adler.[49][50]

Scientists have come to some agreement on descriptions of events that happened 10−35 seconds after the Big Bang, but generally agree that descriptions about what happened before one Planck time (5 × 10−44 seconds) after the Big Bang are likely to remain pure speculation.
[edit] Speculative physics beyond the Big Bang
A graphical representation of the expansion of the universe with the inflationary epoch represented as the dramatic expansion of the metric seen on the left.

While the Big Bang model is well established in cosmology, it is likely to be refined in the future. Little is known about the earliest moments of the universe's history. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems require the existence of a singularity at the beginning of cosmic time. However, these theorems assume that general relativity is correct, but general relativity must break down before the universe reaches the Planck temperature, and a correct treatment of quantum gravity may avoid the singularity.[51]

There may also be parts of the universe well beyond what can be observed in principle. If inflation occurred this is likely, for exponential expansion would push large regions of space beyond our observable horizon.

Some proposals, each of which entails untested hypotheses, are:

models including the Hartle–Hawking boundary condition in which the whole of space-time is finite; the Big Bang does represent the limit of time, but without the need for a singularity.[52]
brane cosmology models[53] in which inflation is due to the movement of branes in string theory; the pre-big bang model; the ekpyrotic model, in which the Big Bang is the result of a collision between branes; and the cyclic model, a variant of the ekpyrotic model in which collisions occur periodically.[54][55][56]
chaotic inflation, in which inflation events start here and there in a random quantum-gravity foam, each leading to a bubble universe expanding from its own big bang.[57]

Proposals in the last two categories see the Big Bang as an event in a much larger and older universe, or multiverse, and not the literal beginning.
[edit] Time travel
Main article: Time travel
See also: Time travel in fiction and Grandfather paradox

Time travel is the concept of moving backwards and/or forwards to different points in time, in a manner analogous to moving through space, and different from the normal "flow" of time to an earthbound observer. In this view, all points in time (including future times) "persist" in some way. Time travel has been a plot device in fiction since the 19th century. Travelling backwards in time has never been verified, presents many theoretic problems, and may be an impossibility. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is known as a time machine.

A central problem with time travel to the past is the violation of causality; should an effect precede its cause, it would give rise to the possibility of temporal paradox. Some interpretations of time travel resolve this by accepting the possibility of travel between parallel realities or universes.

Theory would point toward there having to be a physical dimension in which one could travel to, where the present (i.e. the point which one is leaving) would exist at a fixed point relative in either the past or future. Seeing as this theory would be dependent upon the theory of a multiverse, it is uncertain how or if it would be possible to just prove the possibility of time travel.

Another solution to the problem of causality-based temporal paradoxes is that such paradoxes cannot arise simply because they have not arisen. As illustrated in numerous works of fiction, free will either ceases to exist in the past or the outcomes of such decisions are predetermined. As such, it would not be possible to enact the grandfather paradox because it is a historical fact that your grandfather was not killed before his child (your parent) was conceived. This view simply holds that history is an unchangeable constant. More elaboration on this view can be found in the Novikov self-consistency principle.
[edit] Judgement of time
Main article: Time perception

The specious present refers to the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present. The experienced present is said to be ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present, it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The term specious present was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, and later developed by William James.[58]
[edit] Biopsychology

The brain's judgement of time is known to be a highly distributed system, including at least the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping.

Psychoactive drugs can impair the judgement of time. Stimulants can lead both humans and rats to overestimate time intervals,[59][60] while depressants can have the opposite effect.[61] The level of activity in the brain of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine may be the reason for this.[62]

Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations.
[edit] Alterations

In addition to psychoactive drugs, judgements of time can be altered by temporal illusions (like the kappa effect[63] ), age,[64] and hypnosis.[65] The sense of time is impaired in some people with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and attention deficit disorder.

Psychologists assert that time seems to go faster with age, but the literature on this age-related perception of time remains controversial.[66] As an example, one day to an eleven-year-old person would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. According to such an interpretation, a day would appear much longer to a young child than to an adult, even though the measure of time is the same.[original research?]
[edit] Use of time
See also: Time management and Time discipline

In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others. Arlie Russell Hochschild and Norbert Elias have written on the use of time from a sociological perspective.

The use of time is an important issue in understanding human behaviour, education, and travel behaviour. Time use research is a developing field of study. The question concerns how time is allocated across a number of activities (such as time spent at home, at work, shopping, etc.). Time use changes with technology, as the television or the Internet created new opportunities to use time in different ways. However, some aspects of time use are relatively stable over long periods of time, such as the amount of time spent traveling to work, which despite major changes in transport, has been observed to be about 20–30 minutes one-way for a large number of cities over a long period of time.

Time management is the organization of tasks or events by first estimating how much time a task will take to be completed, when it must be completed, and then adjusting events that would interfere with its completion so that completion is reached in the appropriate amount of time. Calendars and day planners are common examples of time management tools.

A sequence of events, or series of events, is a sequence of items, facts, events, actions, changes, or procedural steps, arranged in time order (chronological order), often with cause and effect relationships among the items.[67][68][69] Because of causality, cause precedes effect, or cause and effect may appear together in a single item, but effect never precedes cause. A sequence of events can be presented in text, tables, charts, or timelines. The description of the items or events may include a timestamp. A sequence of events that includes the time along with place or location information to describe a sequential path may be referred to as a world line.

Uses of a sequence of events include stories,[70] historical events (chronology), directions and steps in procedures,[71] and timetables for scheduling activities. A sequence of events may also be used to help describe processes in science, technology, and medicine. A sequence of events may be focused on past events (e.g., stories, history, chronology), on future events that need to be in a predetermined order (e.g., plans, schedules, procedures, timetables), or focused on the observation of past events with the expectation that the events will occur in the future (e.g., processes). The use of a sequence of events occurs in fields as diverse as machines (cam timer), documentaries (Seconds From Disaster), law (choice of law), computer simulation (discrete event simulation), and electric power transmission[72] (sequence of events recorder). A specific example of a sequence of events is the timeline of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
[edit] See also
Book icon Book: Time
Wikipedia books are collections of articles that can be downloaded or ordered in print.
MontreGousset001.jpg Time portal
Time's mortal aspect is personified in this bronze statue by Charles van der Stappen

Term (time)
Horology
Kairos

[edit] Books

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
About Time by Paul Davies
An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

[edit] Organizations

Leading scholarly organizations for researchers on the history and technology of time and timekeeping

Antiquarian Horological Society – AHS (United Kingdom)
Chronometrophilia (Switzerland)
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chronometrie – DGC (Germany)
National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors - NAWCC (United States of America)

[edit] Miscellaneous arts and sciences

Anachronistic
Date and time notation by country
List of cycles
Network Time Protocol (NTP)
Nonlinear (arts)
Philosophy of physics
Rate (mathematics)


[edit] Miscellaneous units of time

Fiscal year
Half-life
Hexadecimal time
Season
Tithi
Unix epoch

[edit] References

[GV1]

Well, at least Wub is contributing with educational, and informative, responses :p

[wub]

William Shakespeare
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Shakespeare)
This article is about the poet and playwright. For other persons of the same name, see William Shakespeare (disambiguation). For other uses of "Shakespeare", see Shakespeare (disambiguation).
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William Shakespeare

The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Born Baptised 26 April 1564 (birth date unknown)
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died 23 April 1616 (aged 52)
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation Playwright, poet, actor
Literary movement English Renaissance theatre
Spouse(s) Anne Hathaway (m. 1582–1616)
Children

Susanna Hall
Hamnet Shakespeare
Judith Quiney

Relative(s)

John Shakespeare (father)
Mary Shakespeare (mother)

Signature

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[1] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".[2][nb 2] His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,[nb 3] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[3]

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[4]

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[5][nb 4] His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".[6] In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Contents
[hide]

1 Life
1.1 Early life
1.2 London and theatrical career
1.3 Later years and death
2 Plays
2.1 Performances
2.2 Textual sources
3 Poems
3.1 Sonnets
4 Style
5 Influence
6 Critical reputation
7 Speculation about Shakespeare
7.1 Authorship
7.2 Religion
7.3 Sexuality
7.4 Portraiture
8 List of works
8.1 Classification of the plays
8.2 Works
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Bibliography
13 External links
14 Related information

Life
Main article: Shakespeare's life
Early life

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.[7] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day.[8] This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616.[9] He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.[10]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[11] a free school chartered in 1553,[12] about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England,[13] and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27 November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.[14] The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,[15] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[16] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[17] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[18]

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".[19] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.[20] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[21] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[22] Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.[23] No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.[24]
London and theatrical career

"All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
—As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42[25]

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.[26] He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.[27]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,[28] but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the "university wits").[29] The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here Johannes Factotum—"Jack of all trades"— means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".[28][30]

Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks.[31] From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.[32] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.[33]

In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.[34] In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.[35]

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.[36] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).[37] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.[38] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played.[39] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.[40] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.[41] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V,[42] though scholars doubt the sources of the information.[43]

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.[44] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[45] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.[46]
Later years and death

Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death;[47] but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time,[48] and Shakespeare continued to visit London.[47] In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[49] In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;[50] and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.[51]
Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon.

After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.[52] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[53] who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.[54]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616[55] and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,[56] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.[57]

In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna.[58] The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".[59] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.[60] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.[61] Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically.[62] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[63] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[64]

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.[65] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:[66]
Shakespeare's grave.

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.[67]

Modern spelling:

"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,"
"To dig the dust enclosed here."
"Blessed be the man that spares these stones,"
"And cursed be he who moves my bones."[66]

Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[68] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[69]

Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Plays
Main articles: Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's collaborations

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.[70] Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,[71] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.[72] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[73] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[74] The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.[75] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.[76] Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[77] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.[78]
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain.

Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies.[79] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.[80] Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.[81] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,[82] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.[83] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.[84] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;[85] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.[86] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".[87]
Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.[88] Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question".[89] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.[90] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.[91] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.[92] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".[93] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,[94] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.[95] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.[96]

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.[97] Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.[98] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[99]
Performances
Main article: Shakespeare in performance

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.[100] After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.[101] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".[102] When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.[103] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.[104]
The reconstructed Globe Theatre, London.

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.[105] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.[106] The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."[107]

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.[108] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.[109] He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.[110] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".[111] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.[111]
Textual sources
Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.[112] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.[113] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".[114] Alfred Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.[115] Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.[116] In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.[117]
Poems

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.[118] Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,[119] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.[120] Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects.[121] The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.[122]
Sonnets
Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets
Title page from 1609 edition of Shake-Speares Sonnets.

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.[123] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends".[124] Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.[125] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".[126] The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."
—Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.[127]

It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.[128] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.[129]
Style
Main article: Shakespeare's style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.[130] The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.[131]

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.[132] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.[133] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
Pity by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.[134] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:[135]

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8[135]

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".[136] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.[137] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.[137] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.[138]

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.[139] Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.[140] He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.[141] As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.[142]
Influence
Main article: Shakespeare's influence
Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. By Henry Fuseli, 1793–94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.[143] Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.[144] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.[145] His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."[146]

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear.[147] Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.[148] Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German.[149] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,[150] and his use of language helped shape modern English.[151] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.[152] Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.[153]
Critical reputation
Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

"He was not of an age, but for all time."
—Ben Jonson[154]

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise.[155] In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.[156] And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser.[157] In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".
A recently garlanded statue of William Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, Chicago, typical of many created in the 19th and early 20th century.

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.[158] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare".[159] For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.[160] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.[161] In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.[162]

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.[163] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.[164] "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".[165] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.[166] The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.[167]

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.[168] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.[169] By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.[170][171]
Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Main article: Shakespeare authorship question

Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.[172] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.[173] Several "group theories" have also been proposed.[174] Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution,[175] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.[176]
Religion
Main article: Shakespeare's religion

Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was against the law.[177] Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity.[178] In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.[179] In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.[179] Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove either way.[180]
Sexuality
Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. However, over the centuries readers have pointed to Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than sexual love.[181] At the same time, the 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.[182]
Portraiture
Main article: Portraits of Shakespeare

There is no written description of Shakespeare's physical appearance and no evidence that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,[183] and his Stratford monument provide the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people.[184][185]
List of works
Further information: William Shakespeare bibliography and Chronology of Shakespeare's plays
Classification of the plays
The Plays of William Shakespeare. By Sir John Gilbert, 1849.

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and tragedies.[186] Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with scholars agreed that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their composition.[187] No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, his term is often used.[188] These plays and the associated Two Noble Kinsmen are marked with an asterisk (*) below. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet.[189] "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays."[190] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.[191] The other problem plays are marked below with a double dagger (‡).

Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a dagger (†) below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as apocrypha.
Works

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

All's Well That Ends Well ‡
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure ‡
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles, Prince of Tyre *†
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest *
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen *†
The Winter's Tale *



Histories

Main article: Shakespearean history

King John
Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, Part 1 †
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII †



Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

Romeo and Juliet
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus †
Timon of Athens †
Julius Caesar
Macbeth †
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida ‡
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline *

Poems

Shakespeare's sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim[nb 5]
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Lover's Complaint



Lost plays

Love's Labour's Won
The History of Cardenio †



Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

Arden of Faversham
The Birth of Merlin
Edward III
Locrine
The London Prodigal
The Puritan
The Second Maiden's Tragedy
Sir John Oldcastle
Thomas Lord Cromwell
A Yorkshire Tragedy
Sir Thomas More

[show]v · d · eEarly editions of William Shakespeare's works
See also
Portal icon Poetry portal
Portal icon Shakespeare portal

World Shakespeare Bibliography
Wikipedia Books: William Shakespeare

Notes

^ Dates follow the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan, but with the start of year adjusted to 1 January (see Old Style and New Style dates). Under the Gregorian calendar, adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on 3 May (Schoenbaum 1987, xv).
^ The "national cult" of Shakespeare, and the "bard" identification, dates from September 1769, when the actor David Garrick organised a week-long carnival at Stratford to mark the town council awarding him the freedom of the town. In addition to presenting the town with a statue of Shakespeare, Garrick composed a doggerel verse, lampooned in the London newspapers, naming the banks of the Avon as the birthplace of the "matchless Bard" (McIntyre 1999, 412–432).
^ The exact figures are unknown. See Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
^ Individual play dates and precise writing span are unknown. See Chronology of Shakespeare's plays for further details.
^ The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name in 1599 without his permission, includes early versions of two of his sonnets, three extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, several poems known to be by other poets, and eleven poems of unknown authorship for which the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved (Wells et al. 2005, 805)

References

^ Greenblatt 2005, 11; Bevington 2002, 1–3; Wells 1997, 399.
^ Dobson 1992, 185–186
^ Craig 2003, 3.
^ Shapiro 2005, xvii–xviii; Schoenbaum 1991, 41, 66, 397–98, 402, 409; Taylor 1990, 145, 210–23, 261–5
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 270–71; Taylor 1987, 109–134.
^ Bertolini 1993, 119.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 14–22.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 24–6.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 24, 296; Honan 1998, 15–16.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 23–24.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 62–63; Ackroyd 2006, 53; Wells et al. 2005, xv–xvi
^ Baldwin 1944, 464.
^ Baldwin 1944, 164–84; Cressy 1975, 28, 29.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 77–78.
^ Wood 2003, 84; Schoenbaum 1987, 78–79.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 93.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 94.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 224.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 95.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 97–108; Rowe 1709.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 144–45.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 110–11.
^ Honigmann 1999, 1; Wells et al. 2005, xvii
^ Honigmann 1999, 95–117; Wood 2003, 97–109.
^ Wells et al. 2005, 666
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 287, 292
^ Greenblatt 2005, 213.
^ a b Greenblatt 2005, 213; Schoenbaum 1987, 153.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 176.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 151–52
^ Wells 2006, 28; Schoenbaum 1987, 144–46; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 59.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 184.
^ Chambers 1923, 208–209.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 67–71.
^ Bentley 1961, 36.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 188; Kastan 1999, 37; Knutson 2001, 17
^ Adams 1923, 275
^ Wells 2006, 28.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 200.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 200–201.
^ Rowe 1709.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 357; Wells et al. 2005, xxii
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 202–3.
^ Honan 1998, 121.
^ Shapiro 2005, 122.
^ Honan 1998, 325; Greenblatt 2005, 405.
^ a b Ackroyd 2006, 476.
^ Honan 1998, 382–83.
^ Honan 1998, 326; Ackroyd 2006, 462–464.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 272–274.
^ Honan 1998, 387.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 279.
^ Honan 1998, 375–78.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 276.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 25, 296.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 287.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 292, 294.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 304.
^ Honan 1998, 395–96.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 8, 11, 104; Schoenbaum 1987, 296.
^ Chambers 1930, Vol. 2: 7, 9, 13; Schoenbaum 1987, 289, 318–19.
^ Charles Knight, 1842, in his notes on Twelfth Night, quoted in Schoenbaum 1991, 275.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 483; Frye 2005, 16; Greenblatt 2005, 145–6.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 301–3.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 306–07; Wells et al. 2005, xviii
^ a b "Bard's 'cursed' tomb is revamped", BBC News, 28 May 2008. Retrieved 23 April 2010.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 306.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 308–10.
^ National Portrait Gallery, Searching for Shakespeare, NPG publications, 2006
^ Thomson, Peter, "Conventions of Playwriting". in Wells & Orlin 2003, 49.
^ Frye 2005, 9; Honan 1998, 166.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 159–61; Frye 2005, 9.
^ Dutton & Howard 2003, 147.
^ Ribner 2005, 154–155.
^ Frye 2005, 105; Ribner 2005, 67; Cheney 2004, 100.
^ Honan 1998, 136; Schoenbaum 1987, 166.
^ Frye 2005, 91; Honan 1998, 116–117; Werner 2001, 96–100.
^ Friedman 2006, 159.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 235.
^ Wood 2003, 161–162.
^ Wood 2003, 205–206; Honan 1998, 258.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 359.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 362–383.
^ Shapiro 2005, 150; Gibbons 1993, 1; Ackroyd 2006, 356.
^ Wood 2003, 161; Honan 1998, 206.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 353, 358; Shapiro 2005, 151–153.
^ Shapiro 2005, 151.
^ Bradley 1991, 85; Muir 2005, 12–16.
^ Bradley 1991, 94.
^ Bradley 1991, 86.
^ Bradley 1991, 40, 48.
^ Bradley 1991, 42, 169, 195; Greenblatt 2005, 304.
^ Bradley 1991, 226; Ackroyd 2006, 423; Kermode 2004, 141–2.
^ McDonald 2006, 43–46.
^ Bradley 1991, 306.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 444; McDonald 2006, 69–70; Eliot 1934, 59.
^ Dowden 1881, 57.
^ Dowden 1881, 60; Frye 2005, 123; McDonald 2006, 15.
^ Wells et al. 2005, 1247, 1279
^ Wells et al. 2005, xx
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxi
^ Shapiro 2005, 16.
^ Foakes 1990, 6; Shapiro 2005, 125–31.
^ Foakes 1990, 6; Nagler 1958, 7; Shapiro 2005, 131–2.
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxii
^ Foakes 1990, 33.
^ Ackroyd 2006, 454; Holland 2000, xli.
^ Ringler 1997, 127.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 210; Chambers 1930, Vol. 1: 341.
^ Shapiro 2005, 247–9.
^ a b Wells et al. 2005, 1247
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxvii
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv
^ Pollard 1909, xi.
^ Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv; Pollard 1909, xi; Maguire 1996, 28.
^ Bowers 1955, 8–10; Wells et al. 2005, xxxiv–xxxv
^ Wells et al. 2005, 909, 1153
^ Rowe 2006, 21.
^ Frye 2005, 288.
^ Rowe 2006, 3, 21.
^ Rowe 2006, 1; Jackson 2004, 267–294; Honan 1998, 289.
^ Rowe 2006, 1; Honan 1998, 289; Schoenbaum 1987, 327.
^ Wood 2003, 178; Schoenbaum 1987, 180.
^ Honan 1998, 180.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 268.
^ Honan 1998, 180; Schoenbaum 1987, 180.
^ Shakespeare 1914.
^ Schoenbaum 1987, 268–269.
^ Wood 2003, 177.
^ Clemen 2005a, 150.
^ Frye 2005, 105, 177; Clemen 2005b, 29.
^ Brooke, Nicholas, "Language and Speaker in Macbeth", 69; and Bradbrook, M.C., "Shakespeare's Recollection of Marlowe", 195: both in Edwards, Ewbank & Hunter 2004.
^ Clemen 2005b, 63.
^ Frye 2005, 185.
^ a b Wright 2004, 868.
^ Bradley 1991, 91.
^ a b McDonald 2006, 42–6.
^ McDonald 2006, 36, 39, 75.
^ Gibbons 1993, 4.
^ Gibbons 1993, 1–4.
^ Gibbons 1993, 1–7, 15.
^ McDonald 2006, 13; Meagher 2003, 358.
^ Chambers 1944, 35.
^ Levenson 2000, 49–50.
^ Clemen 1987, 179.
^ Steiner 1996, 145.
^ Bryant 1998, 82.
^ Gross, John, "Shakespeare's Influence" in Wells & Orlin 2003, 641–2..
^ Paraisz 2006, 130.
^ Cercignani 1981.
^ Crystal 2001, 55–65, 74.
^ Wain 1975, 194.
^ Johnson 2002, 12; Crystal 2001, 63.
^ Jonson 1996, 10.
^ Dominik 1988, 9; Grady 2001b, 267.
^ Grady 2001b, 265; Greer 1986, 9.
^ Grady 2001b, 266.
^ Grady 2001b, 269.
^ Dryden 1889, 71.
^ Grady 2001b, 270–27; Levin 1986, 217.
^ Dobson 1992 Cited by Grady 2001b, 270.
^ Grady cites Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1733); Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795); Stendhal's two-part pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare (1823–5); and Victor Hugo's prefaces to Cromwell (1827) and William Shakespeare (1864). Grady 2001b, 272–274.
^ Levin 1986, 223.
^ Sawyer 2003, 113.
^ Carlyle 1907, 161.
^ Schoch 2002, 58–59.
^ Grady 2001b, 276.
^ Grady 2001a, 22–6.
^ Grady 2001a, 24.
^ Grady 2001a, 29.
^ Drakakis 1985, 16–17, 23–25
^ McMichael & Glenn 1962.
^ Gibson 2005, 48, 72, 124.
^ McMichael & Glenn 1962, p. 56.
^ Did He or Didn’t He? That Is the Question, The New York Times, 22 April 2007
^ Kathman, David, "The Question of Authorship" in Wells & Orlin 2003, 620, 625–626; Love 2002, 194–209; Schoenbaum 1991, 430–40.
^ Pritchard 1979, 3.
^ Wood 2003, 75–8; Ackroyd 2006, 22–3.
^ a b Wood 2003, 78; Ackroyd 2006, 416; Schoenbaum 1987, 41–2, 286.
^ Wilson 2004, 34; Shapiro 2005, 167.
^ Casey; Pequigney 1985; Evans 1996, 132.
^ Fort 1927, 406–414.
^ Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare, National Portrait Gallery, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 48; 57.
^ Pressly, William L. "The Ashbourne Portrait of Shakespeare: Through the Looking Glass." Shakespeare Quarterly. 1993: pp. 54–72.
^ David Piper" O Sweet Mr. Shakespeare I'll Have His Picture: The Changing Image of Shakespeare's Person, 1600–1800, National Portrait Gallery, Pergamon Press, 1980.
^ Boyce 1996, 91, 193, 513..
^ Kathman, David, "The Question of Authorship" in Wells & Orlin 2003, 629; Boyce 1996, 91.
^ Edwards 1958, 1–10; Snyder & Curren-Aquino 2007.
^ Schanzer 1963, 1–10.
^ Boas 1896, 345.
^ Schanzer 1963, 1; Bloom 1999, 325–380; Berry 2005, 37.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter (2006), Shakespeare: The Biography, London: Vintage, ISBN 9780749386559.
Adams, Joseph Quincy (1923), A Life of William Shakespeare, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, OCLC 1935264.
Baer, Daniel (2007), The Unquenchable Fire, Xulon Press, ISBN 9781604773279.
Baldwin, T. W. (1944), William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greek, 1, Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, OCLC 359037.
Barber, C. L. (1964), Shakespearian Comedy in the Comedy of Errors, England: College English 25.7.
Bate, Jonathan (2008), The Soul of the Age, London: Penguin, ISBN 978-0-670-91482-1.
Bentley, G. E. (1961), Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 0313250421, OCLC 356416.
Berry, Ralph (2005), Changing Styles in Shakespeare, London: Routledge, ISBN 0415353165.
Bertolini, John Anthony (1993), Shaw and Other Playwrights, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN 027100908X.
Bevington, David (2002), Shakespeare, Oxford: Blackwell, ISBN 0631227199.
Bloom, Harold (1999), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York: Riverhead Books, ISBN 157322751X.
Boas, F. S. (1896), Shakspere and His Predecessors, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Bowers, Fredson (1955), On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, OCLC 2993883.
Boyce, Charles (1996), Dictionary of Shakespeare, Ware, Herts, UK: Wordsworth, ISBN 1853263729.
Bradford, Gamaliel Jr. (February 1910), "The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare", Modern Language Notes 25 (2).
Bradley, A. C. (1991), Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, London: Penguin, ISBN 0140530193.
Brooke, Nicholas (1998), "Introduction", in Shakespeare, William; Brooke, Nicholas (ed.), The Tragedy of Macbeth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-283417-7.
Bryant, John (1998), "Moby Dick as Revolution", in Levine, Robert Steven, The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 052155571X.
Bryson, Bill (2007), Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, Harper Collins, ISBN 0060740221.
Burns, Edward (2000), "Introduction", in Shakespeare, William; Burns, Edward (ed.), King Henry VI, Part 1, London: Arden Shakespeare, Thomson, ISBN 1903436435.
Carlyle, Thomas (1907), Adams, John Chester, ed., On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, ISBN 140694419X, OCLC 643782.
Casey, Charles (Fall 1998), "Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy", College Literature 25 (3), archived from the original on 16 May 2007, retrieved 2 May 2007.
Cercignani, Fausto, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation, Oxford, University Press (Clarendon Press), 1981.
Chambers, E. K. (1923), The Elizabethan Stage, 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press, ISBN 0198115113, OCLC 336379.
Chambers, E. K. (1944), Shakespearean Gleanings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0849205069, OCLC 2364570.
Chambers, E. K. (1930), William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, ISBN 0198117744, OCLC 353406.
Cheney, Patrick Gerard (2004), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521527341.
Clemen, Wolfgang (2005a), Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays, New York: Routledge, ISBN 0415352789.
Clemen, Wolfgang (2005b), Shakespeare's Imagery, London: Routledge, ISBN 0415352800.
Clemen, Wolfgang (1987), Shakespeare's Soliloquies, London: Routledge, ISBN 0415352770.
Cooper, Tarnya (2006), Searching for Shakespeare, National Portrait Gallery and Yale Center for British Art: Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300116113.
Craig, Leon Harold (2003), Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and "King Lear", Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ISBN 0802086055.
Cressy, David (1975), Education in Tudor and Stuart England, New York: St Martin's Press, ISBN 0713158174, OCLC 2148260.
Crystal, David (2001), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521401798.
Dillon, Janette (2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare's Tragedies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521858178.
Dobson, Michael (1992), The making of the national poet, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780198183235.
Dominik, Mark (1988), Shakespeare–Middleton Collaborations, Beaverton, OR: Alioth Press, ISBN 0945088019.
Dowden, Edward (1881), Shakspere, New York: Appleton & Co., OCLC 8164385.
Drakakis, John (1985), Drakakis, John, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, New York: Meuthen, ISBN 0416368603.
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Dutton, Richard; Howard, Jean (2003), A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Histories, Oxford: Blackwell, ISBN 0631226338.
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0 (number)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Zero)
"Zero" redirects here. For other uses, see Zero (disambiguation).
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0

−1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 →

List of numbers — Integers

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 →
Cardinal 0, zero, "oh" (play /ˈoʊ/), nought, naught, nil.
Ordinal 0th, zeroth, noughth
Factorization 0
Divisors all numbers
Arabic ٠,0
Bengali ০
Devanāgarī ०
Chinese 零, 〇
Japanese 零, 〇
Khmer ០
Thai ๐
Binary 0
Octal 0
Duodecimal 0
Hexadecimal 0

0 (zero; play /ˈziːroʊ/ zeer-oh) is both a number[1] and the numerical digit used to represent that number in numerals. It fulfills a central role in mathematics as the additive identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic structures. As a digit, 0 is used as a placeholder in place value systems. In the English language, 0 may be called zero, nought or (US) naught(play /ˈnɔːt/), nil, or "o". Informal or slang terms for zero include zilch and zip.[2] Ought or aught (play /ˈɔːt/), have also been used.[3]
Contents
[hide]

1 Etymology
2 History
2.1 Early history
2.2 History of zero
3 As a number
4 As a year label
5 Names and symbols
5.1 Rules of Brahmagupta
5.2 Zero as a decimal digit
6 In mathematics
6.1 Elementary algebra
6.2 Other branches of mathematics
6.3 Related mathematical terms
7 In science
7.1 Physics
7.2 Chemistry
8 In computer science
9 In other fields
10 Notes
11 References
12 See also
13 External links

Etymology

The word "zero" came via French zéro from Venetian zero, which (together with cipher) came via Italian zefiro from Arabic صفر, ṣafira = "it was empty", ṣifr = "zero", "nothing".[4]
History
Early history

By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from about 700 BC), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges.[5]

The Babylonian placeholder was not a true zero because it was not used alone. Nor was it used at the end of a number. Thus numbers like 2 and 120 (2×60), 3 and 180 (3×60), 4 and 240 (4×60), looked the same because the larger numbers lacked a final sexagesimal placeholder. Only context could differentiate them.

Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero.

The concept of zero as a number and not merely a symbol for separation is attributed to India where by the 9th century AD practical calculations were carried out using zero, which was treated like any other number, even in case of division.[6][7] The Indian scholar Pingala (circa 5th-2nd century BC) used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), making it similar to Morse code.[8][9] He and his contemporary Indian scholars used the Sanskrit word śūnya to refer to zero or void.
History of zero
The back of Olmec Stela C from Tres Zapotes, the second oldest Long Count date yet discovered. The numerals 7.16.6.16.18 translate to September, 32 BC (Julian). The glyphs surrounding the date are thought to be one of the few surviving examples of Epi-Olmec script.

The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar developed in south-central Mexico and Central America required the use of zero as a place-holder within its vigesimal (base-20) positional numeral system. Many different glyphs, including this partial quatrefoil—MAYA-g-num-0-inc-v1.svg—were used as a zero symbol for these Long Count dates, the earliest of which (on Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas) has a date of 36 BC.[10] Since the eight earliest Long Count dates appear outside the Maya homeland,[11] it is assumed that the use of zero in the Americas predated the Maya and was possibly the invention of the Olmecs. Many of the earliest Long Count dates were found within the Olmec heartland, although the Olmec civilization ended by the 4th century BC, several centuries before the earliest known Long Count dates.

Although zero became an integral part of Maya numerals, it did not influence Old World numeral systems.

Quipu, a knotted cord device, used in the Inca Empire and its predecessor societies in the Andean region to record accounting and other digital data, is encoded in a base ten positional system. Zero is represented by the absence of a knot in the appropriate position.

The use of a blank on a counting board to represent 0 dated back in India to 4th century BC.[12]

In China, counting rods were used for decimal calculation since the 4th century BC including the use of blank spaces. Chinese mathematicians understood negative numbers and zero, some mathematicians used 無入, 空, 口 for the latter, until Gautama Siddha introduced the symbol 0.[13][14] The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, which was mainly composed in the 1st century AD, stated "[when subtracting] subtract same signed numbers, add differently signed numbers, subtract a positive number from zero to make a negative number, and subtract a negative number from zero to make a positive number."[15]

By 130 AD, Ptolemy, influenced by Hipparchus and the Babylonians, was using a symbol for zero (a small circle with a long overbar) within a sexagesimal numeral system otherwise using alphabetic Greek numerals. Because it was used alone, not just as a placeholder, this Hellenistic zero was perhaps the first documented use of a number zero in the Old World. However, the positions were usually limited to the fractional part of a number (called minutes, seconds, thirds, fourths, etc.)—they were not used for the integral part of a number. In later Byzantine manuscripts of Ptolemy's Syntaxis Mathematica (also known as the Almagest), the Hellenistic zero had morphed into the Greek letter omicron (otherwise meaning 70).

Another zero was used in tables alongside Roman numerals by 525 (first known use by Dionysius Exiguus), but as a word, nulla meaning "nothing", not as a symbol. When division produced zero as a remainder, nihil, also meaning "nothing", was used. These medieval zeros were used by all future medieval computists (calculators of Easter). The initial "N" was used as a zero symbol in a table of Roman numerals by Bede or his colleague around 725.

In 498 AD, Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata stated that "Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam" or place to place in ten times in value, which is the origin of the modern decimal-based place value notation.[16]

The oldest known text to use a decimal place-value system, including a zero, is the Jain text from India entitled the Lokavibhâga, dated 458 AD. This text uses Sanskrit numeral words for the digits, with words for zero such as the Sanskrit word for "void" or "empty", shunya.[17] The first known use of special glyphs for the decimal digits that includes the indubitable appearance of a symbol for the digit zero, a small circle, appears on a stone inscription found at the Chaturbhuja Temple at Gwalior in India, dated 876 AD.[18][19] There are many documents on copper plates, with the same small o in them, dated back as far as the sixth century AD, but their authenticity may be doubted.[5]

The Hindu-Arabic numerals and the positional number system were introduced around 500 AD, and in 825 AD, it was introduced by a Persian scientist, al-Khwārizmī,[20] in his book on arithmetic. This book synthesized Greek and Hindu knowledge and also contained his own fundamental contribution to mathematics and science including an explanation of the use of zero.

It was only centuries later, in the 12th century, that the Arabic numeral system was introduced to the Western world through Latin translations of his Arithmetic.
As a number

0 is the integer immediately preceding 1. In most cultures, 0 was identified before the idea of negative things (quantities) that go lower than zero was accepted. Zero is an even number,[21] because it is divisible by 2. 0 is neither positive nor negative. By some definitions 0 is also a natural number, and then the only natural number not to be positive. Zero is a number which quantifies a count or an amount of null size.

The value, or number, zero is not the same as the digit zero, used in numeral systems using positional notation. Successive positions of digits have higher weights, so inside a numeral the digit zero is used to skip a position and give appropriate weights to the preceding and following digits. A zero digit is not always necessary in a positional number system, for example, in the number 02. In some instances, a leading zero may be used to distinguish a number.
As a year label
Main article: 0 (year)

In the BC calendar era, the year 1 BC is the first year before AD 1; no room is reserved for a year zero. By contrast, in astronomical year numbering, the year 1 BC is numbered 0, the year 2 BC is numbered −1, and so on.[22]
Names and symbols
Main articles: Names for the number 0 and Symbols for zero

In 976 AD the Persian encyclopedist Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi, in his "Keys of the Sciences", remarked that if, in a calculation, no number appears in the place of tens, then a little circle should be used "to keep the rows". This circle the Arabs called صفر ṣifr, "empty". That was the earliest mention of the name ṣifr that eventually became zero.[20]

Italian zefiro already meant "west wind" from Latin and Greek zephyrus; this may have influenced the spelling when transcribing Arabic ṣifr.[23] The Italian mathematician Fibonacci (c.1170–1250), who grew up in North Africa and is credited with introducing the decimal system to Europe, used the term zephyrum. This became zefiro in Italian, which was contracted to zero in Venetian.

As the decimal zero and its new mathematics spread from the Arab world to Europe in the Middle Ages, words derived from ṣifr and zephyrus came to refer to calculation, as well as to privileged knowledge and secret codes. According to Ifrah, "in thirteenth-century Paris, a 'worthless fellow' was called a '... cifre en algorisme', i.e., an 'arithmetical nothing'."[23] From ṣifr also came French chiffre = "digit", "figure", "number", chiffrer = "to calculate or compute", chiffré = "encrypted". Today, the word in Arabic is still ṣifr, and cognates of ṣifr are common in the languages of Europe and southwest Asia.
Text figures 036.svg

The modern numerical digit 0 is usually written as a circle or ellipse. Traditionally, many print typefaces made the capital letter O more rounded than the narrower, elliptical digit 0.[24] Typewriters originally made no distinction in shape between O and 0; some models did not even have a separate key for the digit 0. The distinction came into prominence on modern character displays.[24]

A slashed zero can be used to distinguish the number from the letter. The digit 0 with a dot in the center seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 displays and has continued with the some modern computer typefaces such as Andalé Mono. One variation uses a short vertical bar instead of the dot. Some fonts designed for use with computers made one of the capital-O–digit-0 pair more rounded and the other more angular (closer to a rectangle). A further distinction is made in falsification-hindering typeface as used on German car number plates by slitting open the digit 0 on the upper right side. Sometimes the digit 0 is used either exclusively, or not at all, to avoid confusion altogether.
Rules of Brahmagupta

The rules governing the use of zero appeared for the first time in Brahmagupta's book Brahmasputha Siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe),[25] written in 628 AD. Here Brahmagupta considers not only zero, but negative numbers, and the algebraic rules for the elementary operations of arithmetic with such numbers. In some instances, his rules differ from the modern standard. Here are the rules of Brahmagupta:[25]

The sum of zero and a negative number is negative.
The sum of zero and a positive number is positive.
The sum of zero and zero is zero.
The sum of a positive and a negative is their difference; or, if their absolute values are equal, zero.
A positive or negative number when divided by zero is a fraction with the zero as denominator.
Zero divided by a negative or positive number is either zero or is expressed as a fraction with zero as numerator and the finite quantity as denominator.
Zero divided by zero is zero.

In saying zero divided by zero is zero, Brahmagupta differs from the modern position. Mathematicians normally do not assign a value to this, whereas computers and calculators sometimes assign NaN, which means "not a number." Moreover, non-zero positive or negative numbers when divided by zero are either assigned no value, or a value of unsigned infinity, positive infinity, or negative infinity. Once again, these assignments are not numbers, and are associated more with computer science than pure mathematics, where in most contexts no assignment is done.
Zero as a decimal digit
See also: History of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system

Positional notation without the use of zero (using an empty space in tabular arrangements, or the word kha "emptiness") is known to have been in use in India from the 6th century. The earliest certain use of zero as a decimal positional digit dates to the 5th century mention in the text Lokavibhaga. The glyph for the zero digit was written in the shape of a dot, and consequently called bindu ("dot"). The dot had been used in Greece during earlier ciphered numeral periods.

The Hindu-Arabic numeral system (base 10) reached Europe in the 11th century, via the Iberian Peninsula through Spanish Muslims, the Moors, together with knowledge of astronomy and instruments like the astrolabe, first imported by Gerbert of Aurillac. For this reason, the numerals came to be known in Europe as "Arabic numerals". The Italian mathematician Fibonacci or Leonardo of Pisa was instrumental in bringing the system into European mathematics in 1202, stating:

After my father's appointment by his homeland as state official in the customs house of Bugia for the Pisan merchants who thronged to it, he took charge; and in view of its future usefulness and convenience, had me in my boyhood come to him and there wanted me to devote myself to and be instructed in the study of calculation for some days. There, following my introduction, as a consequence of marvelous instruction in the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the knowledge of the art very much appealed to me before all others, and for it I realized that all its aspects were studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, with their varying methods; and at these places thereafter, while on business. I pursued my study in depth and learned the give-and-take of disputation. But all this even, and the algorism, as well as the art of Pythagoras, I considered as almost a mistake in respect to the method of the Hindus (Modus Indorum). Therefore, embracing more stringently that method of the Hindus, and taking stricter pains in its study, while adding certain things from my own understanding and inserting also certain things from the niceties of Euclid's geometric art. I have striven to compose this book in its entirety as understandably as I could, dividing it into fifteen chapters. Almost everything which I have introduced I have displayed with exact proof, in order that those further seeking this knowledge, with its pre-eminent method, might be instructed, and further, in order that the Latin people might not be discovered to be without it, as they have been up to now. If I have perchance omitted anything more or less proper or necessary, I beg indulgence, since there is no one who is blameless and utterly provident in all things. The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ... any number may be written.[26][27]

Here Leonardo of Pisa uses the phrase "sign 0", indicating it is like a sign to do operations like addition or multiplication. From the 13th century, manuals on calculation (adding, multiplying, extracting roots, etc.) became common in Europe where they were called algorismus after the Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī. The most popular was written by Johannes de Sacrobosco, about 1235 and was one of the earliest scientific books to be printed in 1488. Until the late 15th century, Hindu-Arabic numerals seem to have predominated among mathematicians, while merchants preferred to use the Roman numerals. In the 16th century, they became commonly used in Europe.
In mathematics
Elementary algebra

The number 0 is the smallest non-negative integer. The natural number following 0 is 1 and no natural number precedes 0. The number 0 may or may not be considered a natural number, but it is a whole number and hence a rational number and a real number (as well as an algebraic number and a complex number).

The number 0 is neither positive nor negative and appears in the middle of a number line. It is neither a prime number nor a composite number. It cannot be prime because it has an infinite number of factors and cannot be composite because it cannot be expressed by multiplying prime numbers (0 must always be one of the factors).[28] Zero is, however, even (see parity of zero).

The following are some basic (elementary) rules for dealing with the number 0. These rules apply for any real or complex number x, unless otherwise stated.

Addition: x + 0 = 0 + x = x. That is, 0 is an identity element (or neutral element) with respect to addition.
Subtraction: x − 0 = x and 0 − x = −x.
Multiplication: x · 0 = 0 · x = 0.
Division: 0⁄x = 0, for nonzero x. But x⁄0 is undefined, because 0 has no multiplicative inverse (no real number multiplied by 0 produces 1), a consequence of the previous rule; see division by zero.
Exponentiation: x0 = x/x = 1, except that the case x = 0 may be left undefined in some contexts; see Zero to the zero power. For all positive real x, 0x = 0.

The expression 0⁄0, which may be obtained in an attempt to determine the limit of an expression of the form f(x)⁄g(x) as a result of applying the lim operator independently to both operands of the fraction, is a so-called "indeterminate form". That does not simply mean that the limit sought is necessarily undefined; rather, it means that the limit of f(x)⁄g(x), if it exists, must be found by another method, such as l'Hôpital's rule.

The sum of 0 numbers is 0, and the product of 0 numbers is 1. The factorial 0! evaluates to 1.
Other branches of mathematics

In set theory, 0 is the cardinality of the empty set: if one does not have any apples, then one has 0 apples. In fact, in certain axiomatic developments of mathematics from set theory, 0 is defined to be the empty set. When this is done, the empty set is the Von Neumann cardinal assignment for a set with no elements, which is the empty set. The cardinality function, applied to the empty set, returns the empty set as a value, thereby assigning it 0 elements.
Also in set theory, 0 is the lowest ordinal number, corresponding to the empty set viewed as a well-ordered set.
In propositional logic, 0 may be used to denote the truth value false.
In abstract algebra, 0 is commonly used to denote a zero element, which is a neutral element for addition (if defined on the structure under consideration) and an absorbing element for multiplication (if defined).
In lattice theory, 0 may denote the bottom element of a bounded lattice.
In category theory, 0 is sometimes used to denote an initial object of a category.
In recursion theory, 0 can be used to denote the Turing degree of the partial computable functions.

Related mathematical terms

A zero of a function f is a point x in the domain of the function such that f(x) = 0. When there are finitely many zeros these are called the roots of the function. See also zero (complex analysis) for zeros of a holomorphic function.
The zero function (or zero map) on a domain D is the constant function with 0 as its only possible output value, i.e., the function f defined by f(x) = 0 for all x in D. A particular zero function is a zero morphism in category theory; e.g., a zero map is the identity in the additive group of functions. The determinant on non-invertible square matrices is a zero map.
Several branches of mathematics have zero elements, which generalise either the property 0 + x = x, or the property 0 × x = 0, or both.

In science
Physics

The value zero plays a special role for many physical quantities. For some quantities, the zero level is naturally distinguished from all other levels, whereas for others it is more or less arbitrarily chosen. For example, on the Kelvin temperature scale, zero is the coldest possible temperature (negative temperatures exist but are not actually colder), whereas on the Celsius scale, zero is arbitrarily defined to be at the freezing point of water. Measuring sound intensity in decibels or phons, the zero level is arbitrarily set at a reference value—for example, at a value for the threshold of hearing. In physics, the zero-point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may possess and is the energy of the ground state of the system.
Chemistry

Zero has been proposed as the atomic number of the theoretical element tetraneutron. It has been shown that a cluster of four neutrons may be stable enough to be considered an atom in its own right. This would create an element with no protons and no charge on its nucleus.

As early as 1926, Professor Andreas von Antropoff coined the term neutronium for a conjectured form of matter made up of neutrons with no protons, which he placed as the chemical element of atomic number zero at the head of his new version of the periodic table. It was subsequently placed as a noble gas in the middle of several spiral representations of the periodic system for classifying the chemical elements.
In computer science

The most common practice throughout human history has been to start counting at one, and this is the practice in early classic computer science programming languages such as Fortran and COBOL. However, in the late 1950s LISP introduced zero-based numbering for arrays while Algol 58 introduced completely flexible basing for array subscripts (allowing any positive, negative, or zero integer as base for array subscripts), and most subsequent programming languages adopted one or other of these positions. For example, the elements of an array are numbered starting from 0 in C, so that for an array of n items the sequence of array indices runs from 0 to n−1. This permits an array element's location to be calculated by adding the index directly to address of the array, whereas 1 based languages precalculate the array's base address to be the position one element before the first.

There can be confusion between 0 and 1 based indexing, for example Java's JDBC indexes parameters from 1 although Java itself uses 0-based indexing.

In databases, it is possible for a field not to have a value. It is then said to have a null value. For numeric fields it is not the value zero. For text fields this is not blank nor the empty string. The presence of null values leads to three-valued logic. No longer is a condition either true or false, but it can be undetermined. Any computation including a null value delivers a null result. Asking for all records with value 0 or value not equal 0 will not yield all records, since the records with value null are excluded.

A null pointer is a pointer in a computer program that does not point to any object or function. In C, the integer constant 0 is converted into the null pointer at compile time when it appears in a pointer context, and so 0 is a standard way to refer to the null pointer in code. However, the internal representation of the null pointer may be any bit pattern (possibly different values for different data types).

In mathematics − 0 = 0 = + 0, both −0 and +0 represent exactly the same number, i.e., there is no "negative zero" distinct from zero. In some signed number representations (but not the two's complement representation used to represent integers in most computers today) and most floating point number representations, zero has two distinct representations, one grouping it with the positive numbers and one with the negatives; this latter representation is known as negative zero.
In other fields

In some countries and some company phone networks, dialing 0 on a telephone places a call for operator assistance.
DVDs that can be played in any region are sometimes referred to as being "region 0"
Roulette wheels usually feature a "0" space (and sometimes also a "00" space), whose presence is ignored when calculating payoffs (thereby allowing the house to win in the long run).
In Formula One, if the reigning World Champion no longer competes in Formula One in the year following their victory in the title race, 0 is given to one of the drivers of the team that the reigning champion won the title with. This happened in 1993 and 1994, with Damon Hill driving car 0, due to the reigning World Champion (Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost respectively) not competing in the championship.

Notes

^ Russel, Bertrand (1942). Principles of mathematics (2 ed.). Forgotten Books. p. 125. ISBN 1-440-05416-9., Chapter 14, page 125
^ Catherine Soanes, ed (2001) (Hardback). The Oxford Dictionary, Thesaurus and Wordpower Guide. Maurice Waite, Sara Hawker (2nd ed.). New York, United States: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-860373-3.
^ aught at etymonline.com
^ Merriam Webster online Dictionary
^ a b Kaplan, Robert. (2000). The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^ Bourbaki, Nicolas (1998). Elements of the History of Mathematics. Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer-Verlag. 46. ISBN 3-540-64767-8.
^ Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (2007), entry algebra
^ Binary Numbers in Ancient India
^ Math for Poets and Drummers (pdf, 145KB)
^ No long count date actually using the number 0 has been found before the 3rd century AD, but since the long count system would make no sense without some placeholder, and since Mesoamerican glyphs do not typically leave empty spaces, these earlier dates are taken as indirect evidence that the concept of 0 already existed at the time.
^ Diehl, p. 186
^ Robert Temple, The Genius of China, A place for zero; ISBN 1-85375-292-4
^ 「零」字考與陳雲林會長來台
^ 對中國傳統筆算之探討
^ The statement in Chinese, found in Chapter 8 of The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art is 正負術曰: 同名相除，異名相益，正無入負之，負無入正之。其異名相除，同名相益，正無入正之，負無入負之。The word 無入 used here, for which zero is the standard translation by mathematical historians, literally means: no entry. The full Chinese text can be found at wikisource:zh:九章算術.
^ Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, translated by Walter Eugene Clark.
^ Ifrah, Georges (2000), p. 416.
^ Feature Column from the AMS
^ Ifrah, Georges (2000), p. 400.
^ a b Will Durant, 'The Story of Civilization', Volume 4, The Age of Faith, pp. 241.
^ Lemma B.2.2, The integer 0 is even and is not odd, in Penner, Robert C. (1999). Discrete Mathematics: Proof Techniques and Mathematical Structures. World Scientific. p. 34. ISBN 9810240880.
^ Steel, Duncan (2000). Marking time: the epic quest to invent the perfect calendar. John Wiley & Sons. p. 113. ISBN 0-471-29827-1. "In the B.C./A.D. scheme there is no year zero. After 31 December 1 BC came AD 1 January 1. ... If you object to that no-year-zero scheme, then don't use it: use the astronomer's counting scheme, with negative year numbers."
^ a b Georges Ifrah. The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. Wiley (2000). ISBN 0-471-39340-1.
^ a b R. W. Bemer. "Towards standards for handwritten zero and oh: much ado about nothing (and a letter), or a partial dossier on distinguishing between handwritten zero and oh". Communications of the ACM, Volume 10, Issue 8 (August 1967), pp. 513–518.
^ a b Algebra with Arithmetic of Brahmagupta and Bhaskara, translated to English by Henry Thomas Colebrooke, London1817
^ Sigler, L., Fibonacci's Liber Abaci. English translation, Springer, 2003.
^ Grimm, R.E., "The Autobiography of Leonardo Pisano", Fibonacci Quarterly 11/1 (February 1973), pp. 99–104.
^ Reid, Constance (1992). From zero to infinity: what makes numbers interesting (4th ed.). Mathematical Association of America. p. 23. ISBN 9780883855058.

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

Barrow, John D. (2001) The Book of Nothing, Vintage. ISBN 0-09-928845-1.
Diehl, Richard A. (2004) The Olmecs: America's First Civilization, Thames & Hudson, London.
Ifrah, Georges (2000) The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer, Wiley. ISBN 0-471-39340-1.
Kaplan, Robert (2000) The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seife, Charles (2000) Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Penguin USA (Paper). ISBN 0-14-029647-6.
Bourbaki, Nicolas (1998). Elements of the History of Mathematics. Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-64767-8.
Isaac Asimov article "nothing counts" in "Asimov on Numbers" Pocket Books, 1978

See also

Grammatical number
Number theory
Peano axioms
Zeroth (Zero as an ordinal number)

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: 0 (number)
Look up zero in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Zero

A History of Zero
Zero Saga
The History of Algebra
Edsger W. Dijkstra: Why numbering should start at zero, 192 (PDF of a handwritten manuscript)
"My Hero Zero" Educational children's song in Schoolhouse Rock!

Zero on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
Texts on Wikisource:
Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Zero". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
"Zero". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.

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Chess
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Western board game. For other chess games or other uses, see Chess (disambiguation).
Page semi-protected
Chess A selection of black and white chess pieces on a chequered surface.
From left to right: a white king, a black rook, a black queen, a white pawn, a black knight, and a white bishop
Players 2
Setup time About 1 minute
Playing time Casual games usually last 10 to 60 minutes; tournament games last anywhere from about ten minutes (blitz chess) to six hours or longer.
Random chance None
Skills required Tactics, strategy

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.

Each player begins the game with sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, and eight pawns, each of these types of pieces moving differently. Pieces are used to attack and capture the opponent's pieces. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent's king by placing it under threat of capture ("check") which cannot be avoided. In addition to checkmate, the game can be won by the voluntary resignation of one's opponent, which may occur when too much material is lost, or if checkmate appears unavoidable. A game may result in a draw in several ways, and neither player wins. The course of the game is divided in three phases. The beginning of the game is called the opening (with the development of pieces). The opening yields to the phase called the middlegame. The last phase is the endgame, generally characterised by the disappearance of queens.

The first official World Chess Champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, claimed his title in 1886; the current World Champion is Viswanathan Anand from India. In addition to the World Championship, there are the Women's World Championship, the Junior World Championship, the World Senior Championship, the Correspondence Chess World Championship, the World Computer Chess Championship, and Blitz and Rapid World Championships. The Chess Olympiad is a popular competition among teams from different nations. Online chess has opened amateur and professional competition to a wide and varied group of players. Chess is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee, and international chess competition is sanctioned by the FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs or World Chess Federation). There are also many chess variants that have different rules, different pieces, and different boards.

Commencing in the second half of the 20th century computers have been programmed to play chess with increasing success to the point where home computers can play chess at a very high level. In the past two decades computer analysis has contributed significantly to chess theory as understood by human players, particularly in the endgame. The computer program Deep Blue was the first machine player to overcome a reigning World Chess Champion when it defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.
Contents
[hide]

1 Rules
1.1 Setup
1.2 Movement
1.3 Castling
1.4 En passant
1.5 Promotion
1.6 Check
1.7 End of the game
1.8 Time control
2 Notation for recording moves
3 Strategy and tactics
3.1 Fundamentals of tactics
3.2 Fundamentals of strategy
3.3 Opening
3.4 Middlegame
3.5 Endgame
4 History
4.1 Predecessors
4.2 Origins of the modern game (1000–1850)
4.3 Birth of a sport (1850–1945)
4.4 Post-war era (1945 and later)
5 Place in culture
5.1 Pre-modern
5.2 Modern
6 Chess composition
6.1 Example
7 Competitive play
7.1 Organization of competitions
7.2 Titles and rankings
8 Publications
9 Mathematics and computers
10 Psychology
10.1 Chess and intelligence
11 Variants
12 See also
13 Notes
13.1 Footnotes
13.2 Citations
14 References
15 Further reading
16 External links

Rules
Main article: Rules of chess

The official rules of chess are maintained by the World Chess Federation. Along with information on official chess tournaments, the rules are described in the FIDE Handbook, Laws of Chess section.[1]
Setup
Pieces at the start of a game
Solid white.svg a b c d e f g h Solid white.svg
8 black rook black knight black bishop black queen black king black bishop black knight black rook 8
7 black pawn black pawn black pawn black pawn black pawn black pawn black pawn black pawn 7
6 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 6
5 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 5
4 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 4
3 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 3
2 white pawn white pawn white pawn white pawn white pawn white pawn white pawn white pawn 2
1 white rook white knight white bishop white queen white king white bishop white knight white rook 1
Solid white.svg a b c d e f g h Solid white.svg
Initial position: first row: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, and rook; second row: pawns

Chess is played on a square board of eight rows (called ranks and denoted with numbers 1 to and eight columns (called files and denoted with letters a to h) of squares. The colors of the sixty-four squares alternate and are referred to as "light squares" and "dark squares". The chessboard is placed with a light square at the right-hand end of the rank nearest to each player, and the pieces are set out as shown in the diagram, with each queen on its own color.

The pieces are divided, by convention, into white and black sets. The players are referred to as "White" and "Black", and each begins the game with sixteen pieces of the specified color. These consist of one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns.
Movement

White always moves first. After the initial move, the players alternately move one piece at a time (with the exception of castling, when two pieces are moved). Pieces are moved to either an unoccupied square or one occupied by an opponent's piece, which is captured and removed from play. With the sole exception of en passant, all pieces capture opponent's pieces by moving to the square that the opponent's piece occupies. A player may not make any move that would put or leave his king under attack. If the player to move has no legal moves, the game is over; it is either a checkmate—if the king is under attack—or a stalemate—if the king is not.

Each chess piece has its own style of moving. In the diagrams, the dots mark the squares where the piece can move if no other pieces (including one's own piece) are on the squares between the piece's initial position and its destination.

The king moves one square in any direction. The king has also a special move which is called castling and involves also moving a rook.
The rook can move any number of squares along any rank or file, but may not leap over other pieces. Along with the king, the rook is involved during the king's castling move.
The bishop can move any number of squares diagonally, but may not leap over other pieces.
The queen combines the power of the rook and bishop and can move any number of squares along rank, file, or diagonal, but it may not leap over other pieces.
The knight moves to any of the closest squares that are not on the same rank, file, or diagonal, thus the move forms an "L"-shape, two squares vertically and one square horizontally or two squares horizontally and one square vertically. The knight is the only piece that can leap over other pieces.
The pawn may move forward to the unoccupied square immediately in front of it on the same file; or on its first move it may advance two squares along the same file provided both squares are unoccupied; or it may move to a square occupied by an opponent's piece which is diagonally in front of it on an adjacent file, capturing that piece. The pawn has two special moves: the en passant capture and pawn promotion.

Moves of a king
Solid white.svg a b c d e f g h Solid white.svg
8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 __ d7 __ e7 __ f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 __ d6 __ e6 black circle f6 black circle g6 black circle h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 __ e5 black circle f5 white king g5 black circle h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 __ d4 __ e4 black circle f4 black circle g4 black circle h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 __ g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 __ g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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Moves of a rook
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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 black circle e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 __ d7 black circle e7 __ f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 __ d6 black circle e6 __ f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 black circle b5 black circle c5 black circle d5 black rook e5 black circle f5 black circle g5 black circle h5 black circle 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 __ d4 black circle e4 __ f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 black circle e3 __ f3 __ g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 __ d2 black circle e2 __ f2 __ g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 black circle e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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Moves of a bishop
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8 a8 black circle b8 __ c8 __ d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 black circle h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 black circle c7 __ d7 __ e7 __ f7 black circle g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 black circle d6 __ e6 black circle f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 white bishop e5 __ f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 black circle d4 __ e4 black circle f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 black circle c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 black circle g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 black circle b2 __ c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 __ g2 black circle h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 black circle 1
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Moves of a queen
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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 black circle e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 black circle 8
7 a7 black circle b7 __ c7 __ d7 black circle e7 __ f7 __ g7 black circle h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 black circle c6 __ d6 black circle e6 __ f6 black circle g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 black circle d5 black circle e5 black circle f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 black circle b4 black circle c4 black circle d4 black queen e4 black circle f4 black circle g4 black circle h4 black circle 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 black circle d3 black circle e3 black circle f3 __ g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 black circle c2 __ d2 black circle e2 __ f2 black circle g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 black circle b1 __ c1 __ d1 black circle e1 __ f1 __ g1 black circle h1 __ 1
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Moves of a knight
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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 __ d7 __ e7 __ f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 black circle d6 __ e6 black circle f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 black circle c5 __ d5 __ e5 __ f5 black circle g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 __ d4 black knight e4 __ f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 black circle c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 black circle g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 black circle d2 __ e2 black circle f2 __ g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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Moves of a pawn
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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 cross e8 black circle f8 cross g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 __ d7 __ e7 white pawn f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 __ d6 __ e6 __ f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 cross b5 black circle c5 cross d5 __ e5 __ f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 white pawn c4 __ d4 __ e4 __ f4 black circle g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 __ e3 cross f3 black circle g3 cross h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 white pawn g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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* Pawns can optionally move two squares forward instead of one on their first move only. They capture diagonally (black x's); they cannot capture with their normal move (black circles). Pawns are also involved in the special move called en passant.
Castling
Examples of castling
Main article: Castling

Once in every game, each king is allowed to make a special move, known as castling. Castling consists of moving the king two squares along the first rank toward a rook (which is on the player's first rank[note 1]) and then placing the rook on the last square the king has just crossed. Castling is permissible only if all of the following conditions hold:[2]

Neither of the pieces involved in castling may have been previously moved during the game.
There must be no pieces between the king and the rook.
The king may not currently be in check, nor may the king pass through squares that are under attack by enemy pieces, nor move to a square where it is in check.

En passant
Examples of pawn moves: promotion (left) and en passant (right)
Main article: En passant

When a pawn advances two squares and there is an opponent's pawn on an adjacent file next to its destination square, then the opponent's pawn can capture it en passant (in passing), and move to the square the pawn passed over. However, this can only be done on the very next move, or the right to do so is lost. For example, if the black pawn has just advanced two squares from g7 to g5, then the white pawn on f5 can take it via en passant on g6 (but only on white's next move).
Promotion
Main article: Promotion (chess)

When a pawn advances to the eighth rank, as a part of the move it is promoted and must be exchanged for the player's choice of queen, rook, bishop, or knight of the same color. Usually, the pawn is chosen to be promoted to a queen, but in some cases another piece is chosen; this is called underpromotion. In the diagram on the right, the pawn on c7 can be advanced to the eighth rank and be promoted to an allowed piece. There is no restriction placed on the piece that is chosen on promotion, so it is possible to have more pieces of the same type than at the start of the game (for example, two queens).
Check
Main article: Check (chess)
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8 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 8
7 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 7
6 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 6
5 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 5
4 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 4
3 black king black king black king black king black king black king black king black king 3
2 black king black king white rook black king black king black king black king black king 2
1 black king black king black king black king white king black king black king black king 1
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The black king is being checked by the white rook.

When a king is under immediate attack by one or two of the opponent's pieces, it is said to be in check. A response to a check is a legal move if it results in a position where the king is no longer under direct attack (that is, not in check). This can involve capturing the checking piece; interposing a piece between the checking piece and the king (which is possible only if the attacking piece is a queen, rook, or bishop and there is a square between it and the king); or moving the king to a square where it is not under attack. Castling is not a permissible response to a check. The object of the game is to checkmate the opponent; this occurs when the opponent's king is in check, and there is no legal way to remove it from attack. It is illegal for a player to make a move that would put or leave his own king in check.
End of the game

Although the objective of the game is to checkmate the opponent, chess games do not have to end in checkmate — either player may resign which is a win for the other player. It is considered bad etiquette to continue playing when in a truly hopeless position.[3] If it is a game with time control, a player may run out of time and lose, even with a much superior position. Games also may end in a draw (tie). A draw can occur in several situations, including draw by agreement, stalemate, threefold repetition of a position, the fifty-move rule, or a draw by impossibility of checkmate (usually because of insufficient material to checkmate). As checkmate from some positions cannot be forced in fewer than 50 moves (such as in the pawnless chess endgame and two knights endgame), the fifty-move rule is not applied everywhere,[note 2] particularly in correspondence chess.
White is in checkmate
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8 a8 black king b8 black king c8 black king d8 black king e8 black king f8 black king g8 black king h8 black king 8
7 a7 black king b7 black king c7 black king d7 black king e7 black king f7 black king g7 black king h7 black king 7
6 a6 black king b6 black king c6 black king d6 black king e6 black king f6 black king g6 black king h6 black king 6
5 a5 black king b5 black king c5 black king d5 black king e5 black king f5 black king g5 black king h5 black king 5
4 a4 black king b4 black king c4 black king d4 black king e4 black king f4 black king g4 black king h4 black king 4
3 a3 black king b3 black king c3 black king d3 black king e3 black bishop f3 black bishop g3 black king h3 black king 3
2 a2 black king b2 black king c2 black king d2 black king e2 black king f2 black king g2 black king h2 black king 2
1 a1 black king b1 black king c1 black king d1 black king e1 black king f1 black king g1 black king h1 white king 1
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White is in checkmate. He cannot escape from being attacked by the Black king and bishops.
Stalemate
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8 a8 black king b8 black king c8 black king d8 black king e8 black king f8 black king g8 black king h8 black king 8
7 a7 black king b7 black king c7 black king d7 black king e7 black king f7 black king g7 black king h7 black king 7
6 a6 black king b6 black king c6 white queen d6 black king e6 black king f6 black king g6 black king h6 black king 6
5 a5 black king b5 black king c5 black king d5 black king e5 black king f5 black king g5 black king h5 black king 5
4 a4 black king b4 black king c4 white king d4 black king e4 black king f4 black king g4 black king h4 black king 4
3 a3 black king b3 black king c3 black king d3 black king e3 black king f3 black king g3 black king h3 black king 3
2 a2 black king b2 black king c2 black king d2 black king e2 black king f2 black king g2 black king h2 black king 2
1 a1 black king b1 black king c1 black king d1 black king e1 black king f1 black king g1 black king h1 black king 1
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Stalemate if Black is to move. The position is not checkmate, and since Black cannot move, the game is a draw.
Time control
A modern digital chess clock

Besides casual games without any time restriction, chess is also played with a time control, mostly by club and professional players. If a player's time runs out before the game is completed, the game is automatically lost (provided his opponent has enough pieces left to deliver checkmate). The duration of a game ranges from long games played up to seven hours to shorter rapid chess games, usually lasting 30 minutes or one hour per game. Even shorter is blitz chess, with a time control of three to fifteen minutes for each player, and bullet chess (under three minutes). In tournament play, time is controlled using a game clock that has two displays, one for each player's remaining time.
Notation for recording moves
Naming the squares in algebraic chess notation
Main article: Chess notation

Chess games and positions are recorded using a special notation, most often algebraic chess notation.[5] Abbreviated (or short) algebraic notation generally records moves in the format "abbreviation of the piece moved – file where it moved – rank where it moved." For example, Qg5 means "queen moves to the g-file and 5th rank (that is, to the square g5). If there are two pieces of the same type that can move to the same square, one more letter or number is added to indicate the file or rank from which the piece moved, e.g. Ngf3 means "knight from the g-file moves to the square f3". The letter P indicating a pawn is not used, so that e4 means "pawn moves to the square e4".

If the piece makes a capture, "x" is inserted before the destination square. Thus Bxf3 means "bishop captures on f3". When a pawn makes a capture, the file from which the pawn departed is used in place of a piece initial, and ranks may be omitted if unambiguous. For example, exd5 (pawn on the e-file captures the piece on d5) or exd (pawn on e-file captures something on the d-file).
"Scholar's mate"

If a pawn moves to its last rank, achieving promotion, the piece chosen is indicated after the move, for example e1Q or e1=Q. Castling is indicated by the special notations 0–0 for kingside castling and 0–0–0 for queenside castling. A move that places the opponent's king in check usually has the notation "+" added. Checkmate can be indicated by "#" (occasionally "++", although this is sometimes used for a double check instead). At the end of the game, "1–0" means "White won," "0–1" means "Black won," and "½–½" indicates a draw.[6]

Chess moves can be annotated with punctuation marks and other symbols. For example "!" indicates a good move, "!!" an excellent move, "?" a mistake, "??" a blunder, "!?" an interesting move that may not be best, or "?!" a dubious move, but not easily refuted.[7]

For example, one variant of a simple trap known as the Scholar's mate, animated in the picture to the right, can be recorded:

e4 e5
Qh5?! Nc6
Bc4 Nf6??
Qxf7# 1–0

Strategy and tactics

Chess strategy consists of setting and achieving long-term goals during the game – for example, where to place different pieces – while tactics concentrate on immediate maneuver. These two parts of the chess-playing process cannot be completely separated, because strategic goals are mostly achieved by the means of tactics, while the tactical opportunities are based on the previous strategy of play. A game of chess is normally divided into three phases: opening, typically the first 10 moves, when players move their pieces to useful positions for the coming battle; then middlegame; and last the endgame, when most of the pieces are gone, kings typically take a more active part in the struggle, and pawn promotion is often decisive.
Fundamentals of tactics
Main article: Chess tactics
Mikhail Botvinnik vs. Mikhail Yudovich[8]
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8 black rook black king black bishop black king black king black rook black king black king 8
7 black king black pawn __ black knight black queen black king black bishop black king 7
6 black king black knight black pawn __ black pawn black king black king black pawn 6
5 black pawn black king black king black king black king black king __ __ 5
4 __ __ __ white pawn white knight __ __ __ 4
3 __ white pawn __ __ white bishop __ __ black king 3
2 black king black king white queen black king white bishop white pawn white pawn white pawn 2
1 black king black king white rook white rook black king black king white king black king 1
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After sacrificing a piece to expose Black's king, Botvinnik played 1. Bh5+ and Yudovich resigned, as mate is inevitable: 1...Kxh5 2.Ng3+ Kh4 3.Qe4+ Rf4 4.Qxf4#, 1...Kf5 2.g4#, or 1...Kh7 2.Nf6+ double check Kh8 3.Qh7#.

In chess, tactics in general concentrate on short-term actions – so short-term that they can be calculated in advance by a human player or by a computer. The possible depth of calculation depends on the player's ability. In quiet positions with many possibilities on both sides, a deep calculation is more difficult and may not be practical, while in "tactical" positions with a limited number of forced variations where much less than the best move would lose quickly, strong players can calculate long sequences of moves.

Simple one-move or two-move tactical actions – threats, exchanges of material, and double attacks – can be combined into more complicated combinations, sequences of tactical maneuvers that are often forced from the point of view of one or both players.[9] Theoreticians described many elementary tactical methods and typical maneuvers; for example, pins, forks, skewers, batteries, discovered attacks (especially discovered checks), zwischenzugs, deflections, decoys, sacrifices, underminings, overloadings, and interferences.[10]

A forced variation that involves a sacrifice and usually results in a tangible gain is called a combination.[9] Brilliant combinations – such as those in the Immortal Game – are considered beautiful and are admired by chess lovers. A common type of chess exercise, aimed at developing players' skills, is showing players a position where a decisive combination is available and challenging them to find it.[11]
Fundamentals of strategy
Main article: Chess strategy

Chess strategy is concerned with evaluation of chess positions and with setting up goals and long-term plans for the future play. During the evaluation, players must take into account numerous factors such as the value of the pieces on the board, control of the center and centralization, the pawn structure, king safety, and the control of key squares or groups of squares (for example, diagonals, open files, and dark or light squares).
An example of visualizing pawn structures
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8 a8 black rook b8 __ c8 black bishop d8 __ e8 black rook f8 __ g8 black king h8 __ 8
7 a7 black pawn b7 black pawn c7 __ d7 black knight e7 __ f7 black pawn g7 black bishop h7 black pawn 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 black pawn d6 white rook e6 __ f6 black knight g6 black pawn h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 __ e5 black pawn f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 white pawn d4 __ e4 white pawn f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 white knight d3 __ e3 white bishop f3 white knight g3 __ h3 white pawn 3
2 a2 white pawn b2 white pawn c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 white pawn g2 white pawn h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 white king d1 __ e1 __ f1 white bishop g1 __ h1 white rook 1
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After 12...Re8 in Tarrasch–Euwe[12]...

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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 black pawn b7 black pawn c7 __ d7 __ e7 __ f7 black pawn g7 __ h7 black pawn 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 black pawn d6 __ e6 __ f6 __ g6 black pawn h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 __ e5 black pawn f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 white pawn d4 __ e4 white pawn f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 __ g3 __ h3 white pawn 3
2 a2 white pawn b2 white pawn c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 white pawn g2 white pawn h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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...and its pawn skeleton (the "Rauzer formation")

The most basic step in evaluating a position is to count the total value of pieces of both sides.[13] The point values used for this purpose are based on experience; usually pawns are considered worth one point, knights and bishops about three points each, rooks about five points (the value difference between a rook and a bishop or knight being known as the exchange), and queens about nine points. The king is more valuable than all of the other pieces combined, since its checkmate loses the game. But in practical terms, in the endgame the king as a fighting piece is generally more powerful than a bishop or knight but less powerful than a rook.[14] These basic values are then modified by other factors like position of the piece (for example, advanced pawns are usually more valuable than those on their initial squares), coordination between pieces (for example, a pair of bishops usually coordinate better than a bishop and a knight), or the type of position (knights are generally better in closed positions with many pawns while bishops are more powerful in open positions).[15]

Another important factor in the evaluation of chess positions is the pawn structure (sometimes known as the pawn skeleton), or the configuration of pawns on the chessboard.[16] Since pawns are the least mobile of the chess pieces, the pawn structure is relatively static and largely determines the strategic nature of the position. Weaknesses in the pawn structure, such as isolated, doubled, or backward pawns and holes, once created, are often permanent. Care must therefore be taken to avoid these weaknesses unless they are compensated by another valuable asset (for example, by the possibility of developing an attack).[17]
Opening
Main article: Chess opening

A chess opening is the group of initial moves of a game (the "opening moves"). Recognized sequences of opening moves are referred to as openings and have been given names such as the Ruy Lopez or Sicilian Defence. They are catalogued in reference works such as the Encyclopaedia of Chess Openings. There are dozens of different openings, varying widely in character from quiet positional play (for example, the Réti Opening) to very aggressive (the Latvian Gambit). In some opening lines, the exact sequence considered best for both sides has been worked out to more than 30 moves.[18] Professional players spend years studying openings and continue doing so throughout their careers, as opening theory continues to evolve.

The fundamental strategic aims of most openings are similar:[19]

Development: This is the technique of placing the pieces (particularly bishops and knights) on useful squares where they will have an optimal impact on the game.
Control of the center: Control of the central squares allows pieces to be moved to any part of the board relatively easily, and can also have a cramping effect on the opponent.
King safety: It is critical to keep the king safe from dangerous possibilities. A correctly timed castling can often enhance this.
Pawn structure: Players strive to avoid the creation of pawn weaknesses such as isolated, doubled, or backward pawns, and pawn islands – and to force such weaknesses in the opponent's position.

Most players and theoreticians consider that White, by virtue of the first move, begins the game with a small advantage. This initially gives White the initiative.[20] Black usually strives to neutralize White's advantage and achieve equality, or to develop dynamic counterplay in an unbalanced position.
Middlegame
Main article: Chess middlegame

The middlegame is the part of the game which starts after the opening. There is no clear line between the opening and the middlegame, but typically the middlegame will start when most pieces have been developed. (Similarly, there is no clear transition from the middlegame to the endgame; see start of the endgame.) Because the opening theory has ended, players have to form plans based on the features of the position, and at the same time take into account the tactical possibilities of the position.[21] The middlegame is the phase in which most combinations occur. Combinations are a series of tactical moves executed to achieve some gain. Middlegame combinations are often connected with an attack against the opponent's king; some typical patterns have their own names; for example, the Boden's Mate or the Lasker–Bauer combination.[22]

Specific plans or strategic themes will often arise from particular groups of openings which result in a specific type of pawn structure. An example is the minority attack, which is the attack of queenside pawns against an opponent who has more pawns on the queenside. The study of openings is therefore connected to the preparation of plans that are typical of the resulting middlegames.[23]

Another important strategic question in the middlegame is whether and how to reduce material and transition into an endgame (i.e. simplify). Minor material advantages can generally be transformed into victory only in an endgame, and therefore the stronger side must choose an appropriate way to achieve an ending. Not every reduction of material is good for this purpose; for example, if one side keeps a light-squared bishop and the opponent has a dark-squared one, the transformation into a bishops and pawns ending is usually advantageous for the weaker side only, because an endgame with bishops on opposite colors is likely to be a draw, even with an advantage of a pawn, or sometimes even with a two-pawn advantage.[24]
Endgame
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8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 black king d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 __ 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 white pawn d7 __ e7 __ f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 __ b6 __ c6 __ d6 white king e6 __ f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 __ e5 __ f5 __ g5 __ h5 __ 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 __ d4 __ e4 __ f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 __ g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 __ g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
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An example of zugzwang: the side which is to make a move is at a disadvantage.
Main article: Chess endgame

The endgame (or end game or ending) is the stage of the game when there are few pieces left on the board. There are three main strategic differences between earlier stages of the game and endgame:[25]

During the endgame, pawns become more important; endgames often revolve around attempting to promote a pawn by advancing it to the eighth rank.
The king, which has to be protected in the middlegame owing to the threat of checkmate, becomes a strong piece in the endgame. It is often brought to the center of the board where it can protect its own pawns, attack the pawns of opposite color, and hinder movement of the opponent's king.
Zugzwang, a disadvantage because the player has to make a move, is often a factor in endgames but rarely in other stages of the game. For example, the diagram on the right is zugzwang for both sides, as with Black to move he must play 1...Kb7 and let White promote a pawn after 2.Kd7; and with White to move he must allow a draw by 1.Kc6 stalemate or lose his last pawn by any other legal move.

Endgames can be classified according to the type of pieces that remain on board. Basic checkmates are positions in which one side has only a king and the other side has one or two pieces and can checkmate the opposing king, with the pieces working together with their king. For example, king and pawn endgames involve only kings and pawns on one or both sides and the task of the stronger side is to promote one of the pawns. Other more complicated endings are classified according to the pieces on board other than kings, such as the "rook and pawn versus rook endgame".
History
Main article: History of chess
Predecessors
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8 a8 b8 c8 d8 e8 f8 g8 h8 8
7 a7 b7 c7 d7 e7 f7 g7 h7 7
6 a6 b6 c6 d6 e6 f6 g6 h6 6
5 a5 b5 c5 d5 e5 f5 g5 h5 5
4 a4 b4 c4 d4 e4 f4 g4 h4 4
3 a3 b3 c3 d3 e3 f3 g3 h3 3
2 a2 b2 c2 d2 e2 f2 g2 h2 2
1 a1 b1 c1 d1 e1 f1 g1 h1 1
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Ashtāpada, the uncheckered 8x8 board, sometimes with special marks, on which Chaturanga was played.
Iranian chess set, glazed fritware, 12th century, New York Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chess is commonly believed to have originated in northwest India during the Gupta empire,[26][27][28][29] where its early form in the 6th century was known as caturaṅga (Sanskrit: four divisions [of the military] – infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively). The earliest evidence of chess is found in the neighboring Sassanid Persia around 600, where the game came to be known under the name chatrang. Chatrang is evoked inside three epic romances written in Pahlavi (Middle Persian). Chatrang was taken up by the Muslim world after the Islamic conquest of Persia (633–644), where it was then named shatranj, with the pieces largely retaining their Persian names. In Spanish "shatranj" was rendered as ajedrez ("al-shatranj"), in Portuguese as xadrez, and in Greek as zatrikion (which comes directly from the Persian chatrang), but in the rest of Europe it was replaced by versions of the Persian shāh ("king"), which was familiar as an exclamation and became the English words "check" and "chess".[note 3] Murray theorized that Muslim traders came to European seaports with ornamental chess kings as curios before they brought the game of chess.[28]

The game reached Western Europe and Russia by at least three routes, the earliest being in the 9th century. By the year 1000 it had spread throughout Europe.[30] Introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in the 10th century, it was described in a famous 13th-century manuscript covering shatranj, backgammon, and dice named the Libro de los juegos. Another theory contends that chess arose from the game xiangqi (Chinese Chess) or one of its predecessors,[31] although this has been contested.[32]
Origins of the modern game (1000–1850)
Knights Templar playing chess, Libro de los juegos, 1283
A tactical puzzle from Lucena's 1497 book

Around 1200, the rules of shatranj started to be modified in southern Europe, and around 1475, several major changes made the game essentially as it is known today.[30] These modern rules for the basic moves had been adopted in Italy and Spain.[33][34] Pawns gained the option of advancing two squares on their first move, while bishops and queens acquired their modern abilities. The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece towards the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece;[35] consequently modern chess was referred to as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess".[36] These new rules quickly spread throughout western Europe. The rules about stalemate were finalized in the early 19th century. To distinguish it from its predecessors, this version of the rules is sometimes referred to as western chess[37] or international chess.[38]

Writings about the theory of how to play chess began to appear in the 15th century. The Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez (Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess) by Spanish churchman Luis Ramirez de Lucena was published in Salamanca in 1497.[34] Lucena and later masters like Portuguese Pedro Damiano, Italians Giovanni Leonardo Di Bona, Giulio Cesare Polerio and Gioachino Greco, and Spanish bishop Ruy López de Segura developed elements of openings and started to analyze simple endgames.
François-André Danican Philidor, 18th-century French chess master

In the 18th century, the center of European chess life moved from the Southern European countries to France. The two most important French masters were François-André Danican Philidor, a musician by profession, who discovered the importance of pawns for chess strategy, and later Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais, who won a famous series of matches with the Irish master Alexander McDonnell in 1834.[39] Centers of chess activity in this period were coffee houses in big European cities like Café de la Régence in Paris and Simpson's Divan in London.[40][41]

As the 19th century progressed, chess organization developed quickly. Many chess clubs, chess books, and chess journals appeared. There were correspondence matches between cities; for example, the London Chess Club played against the Edinburgh Chess Club in 1824.[42] Chess problems became a regular part of 19th-century newspapers; Bernhard Horwitz, Josef Kling, and Samuel Loyd composed some of the most influential problems. In 1843, von der Lasa published his and Bilguer's Handbuch des Schachspiels (Handbook of Chess), the first comprehensive manual of chess theory.
Birth of a sport (1850–1945)
The "Immortal Game", Anderssen-Kieseritzky, 1851

The first modern chess tournament was held in London in 1851 and was won by German Adolf Anderssen, relatively unknown at the time. Anderssen was hailed as the leading chess master and his brilliant, energetic attacking style became typical for the time, although it was later regarded as strategically shallow.[43][44] Sparkling games like Anderssen's Immortal game and Evergreen game or Morphy's Opera game were regarded as the highest possible summit of the chess art.[45]

Deeper insight into the nature of chess came with two younger players. American Paul Morphy, an extraordinary chess prodigy, won against all important competitors (except Howard Staunton, who refused to play), including Anderssen, during his short chess career between 1857 and 1863. Morphy's success stemmed from a combination of brilliant attacks and sound strategy; he intuitively knew how to prepare attacks.[46] Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz later described how to avoid weaknesses in one's own position and how to create and exploit such weaknesses in the opponent's position.[47] The scientific approach and positional understanding of Steinitz revolutionized the game. Steinitz was the first to break a position down into its components.[48] Before Steinitz, players brought their queen out early, did not completely develop their other pieces, and mounted a quick attack on the opposing king, which either succeeded or failed. The level of defense was poor and players did not form any deep plan.[49] In addition to his theoretical achievements, Steinitz founded an important tradition: his triumph over the leading German master Johannes Zukertort in 1886 is regarded as the first official World Chess Championship. Steinitz lost his crown in 1894 to a much younger player, the German mathematician Emanuel Lasker, who maintained this title for 27 years, the longest tenure of all World Champions.[50]
Chess Players in late 19th Century Istanbul, by Stanisław Chlebowski.

It took a prodigy from Cuba, José Raúl Capablanca (World Champion 1921–27), who loved simple positions and endgames, to end the German-speaking dominance in chess; he was undefeated in tournament play for eight years, until 1924. His successor was Russian-French Alexander Alekhine, a strong attacking player who died as the World champion in 1946. He briefly lost the title to Dutch player Max Euwe in 1935 and regained it two years later.[51]

Between the world wars, chess was revolutionized by the new theoretical school of so-called hypermodernists like Aron Nimzowitsch and Richard Réti. They advocated controlling the center of the board with distant pieces rather than with pawns, which invited opponents to occupy the center with pawns, which become objects of attack.[52]

After the end of the 19th century, the number of master tournaments and matches held annually quickly grew. Some sources state that in 1914 the title of chess grandmaster was first formally conferred by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch, and Marshall, but this is a disputed claim.[note 4] The tradition of awarding such titles was continued by the World Chess Federation (FIDE), founded in 1924 in Paris. In 1927, the Women's World Chess Championship was established; the first to hold the title was Czech-English master Vera Menchik.[53]
Post-war era (1945 and later)
Wehrmacht soldiers playing chess, France, 1943

After the death of Alekhine, a new World Champion was sought. FIDE, who have controlled the title since then (except for one interruption), ran a tournament of elite players. The winner of the 1948 tournament, Russian Mikhail Botvinnik, started an era of Soviet dominance in the chess world. Until the end of the Soviet Union, there was only one non-Soviet champion, American Bobby Fischer (champion 1972–1975).[54] Botvinnik revolutionized opening theory. Previously Black strove for equality, to neutralize White's first-move advantage. As Black, Botvinnik strove for the initiative from the beginning.[55] In the previous informal system of World Championships, the current champion decided which challenger he would play for the title and the challenger was forced to seek sponsors for the match. FIDE set up a new system of qualifying tournaments and matches. The world's strongest players were seeded into Interzonal tournaments, where they were joined by players who had qualified from Zonal tournaments. The leading finishers in these Interzonals would go on the "Candidates" stage, which was initially a tournament, and later a series of knock-out matches. The winner of the Candidates would then play the reigning champion for the title. A champion defeated in a match had a right to play a rematch a year later. This system operated on a three-year cycle. Botvinnik participated in championship matches over a period of fifteen years. He won the world championship tournament in 1948 and retained the title in tied matches in 1951 and 1954. In 1957, he lost to Vasily Smyslov, but regained the title in a rematch in 1958. In 1960, he lost the title to the 23-year-old Latvian prodigy Mikhail Tal, an accomplished tactician and attacking player. Botvinnik again regained the title in a rematch in 1961.

Following the 1961 event, FIDE abolished the automatic right of a deposed champion to a rematch, and the next champion, Armenian Tigran Petrosian, a genius of defense and a strong positional player, held the title for two cycles, 1963–1969. His successor, Boris Spassky from Russia (champion 1969–1972), was able to win in both positional and sharp tactical style.[56] The next championship, the so-called Match of the Century, saw the first non-Soviet challenger since World War II, American Bobby Fischer, who defeated his Candidates opponents by unheard-of margins and clearly won the world championship match. In 1975, however, Fischer refused to defend his title against Soviet Anatoly Karpov when FIDE did not meet his demands, and Karpov obtained the title by default.[57] Fischer modernized many aspects of chess, especially by extensively preparing openings.[58]

Karpov defended his title twice against Viktor Korchnoi and dominated the 1970s and early 1980s with a string of tournament successes.[59] Karpov's reign finally ended in 1985 at the hands of Garry Kasparov, another Soviet player from Baku, Azerbaijan. Kasparov and Karpov contested five world title matches between 1984 and 1990; Karpov never won his title back.[60] In 1993, Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short broke with FIDE to organize their own match for the title and formed a competing Professional Chess Association (PCA). From then until 2006, there were two simultaneous World Champions and World Championships: the PCA or Classical champion extending the Steinitzian tradition in which the current champion plays a challenger in a series of many games, and the other following FIDE's new format of many players competing in a tournament to determine the champion. Kasparov lost his Classical title in 2000 to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.[61] The World Chess Championship 2006 reunified the titles. Kramnik beat the FIDE World Champion Veselin Topalov and became the undisputed World Chess Champion.[62] In September 2007, he lost the title to Viswanathan Anand of India, who won the championship tournament in Mexico City. Anand defended his title in the revenge match of 2008.[63]
Place in culture
Noble chess players, Germany, c. 1320
Main article: Chess in the arts and literature
Pre-modern

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, chess was a part of noble culture; it was used to teach war strategy and was dubbed the "King's Game".[64] Gentlemen are "to be meanly seene in the play at Chestes", says the overview at the beginning of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528, English 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby), but chess should not be a gentleman's main passion. Castiglione explains it further:

And what say you to the game at chestes? It is truely an honest kynde of enterteynmente and wittie, quoth Syr Friderick. But me think it hath a fault, whiche is, that a man may be to couning at it, for who ever will be excellent in the playe of chestes, I beleave he must beestowe much tyme about it, and applie it with so much study, that a man may assoone learne some noble scyence, or compase any other matter of importaunce, and yet in the ende in beestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game. Therfore in this I beleave there happeneth a very rare thing, namely, that the meane is more commendable, then the excellency.[65]

Two kings and two queens from the Lewis chessmen at the British Museum

Many of the elaborate chess sets used by the aristocracy have been lost, but others partially survive, such as the Lewis chessmen.

Chess was often used as a basis of sermons on morality. An example is Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium sive super ludo scacchorum ('Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess'), written by an Italian Dominican monk Jacobus de Cessolis c. 1300. This book was one of the most popular of the Middle Ages.[66] The work was translated into many other languages (the first printed edition was published at Utrecht in 1473) and was the basis for William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse (1474), one of the first books printed in English.[67] Different chess pieces were used as metaphors for different classes of people, and human duties were derived from the rules of the game or from visual properties of the chess pieces:[68]

The knyght ought to be made alle armed upon an hors in suche wyse that he haue an helme on his heed and a spere in his ryght hande/ and coueryd wyth his sheld/ a swerde and a mace on his lyft syde/ Cladd wyth an hawberk and plates to fore his breste/ legge harnoys on his legges/ Spores on his heelis on his handes his gauntelettes/ his hors well broken and taught and apte to bataylle and couerid with his armes/ whan the knyghtes ben maad they ben bayned or bathed/ that is the signe that they shold lede a newe lyf and newe maners/ also they wake alle the nyght in prayers and orysons vnto god that he wylle gyue hem grace that they may gete that thynge that they may not gete by nature/ The kynge or prynce gyrdeth a boute them a swerde in signe/ that they shold abyde and kepe hym of whom they take theyr dispenses and dignyte.[69]

Known in the circles of clerics, students, and merchants, chess entered into the popular culture of Middle Ages. An example is the 209th song of Carmina Burana from the 13th century, which starts with the names of chess pieces, Roch, pedites, regina...[70]
Modern

During the Age of Enlightenment, chess was viewed as a means of self-improvement. Benjamin Franklin, in his article "The Morals of Chess" (1750), wrote:

"The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn: I. Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action [...] II. Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: – the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations [...] III. Caution, not to make our moves too hastily [...]"[71]

Through the Looking-Glass: the Red King is snoring. Illustration by John Tenniel

With these or similar hopes, chess is taught to children in schools around the world today. Many schools host chess clubs, and there are many scholastic tournaments specifically for children. Tournaments are held regularly in many countries, hosted by organizations such as the United States Chess Federation and the National Scholastic Chess Foundation.[72]
A large-sized chess game is made available on a seasonal basis inside the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland.

Chess is often depicted in the arts; significant works where chess plays a key role range from Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess to Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll to The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig and Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense. The thriller film Knight Moves is about a chess grandmaster who is accused of being a serial killer. Chess is featured in films like Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players.

In the video game Killer 7, the protagonist and the antagonist frequently play chess together; in the survival horror game Deadly Premonition, chess is the theme of a puzzle.

Chess is also present in the contemporary popular culture. For example, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter plays "Wizard's Chess", while the characters of Star Trek prefer "Tri-Dimensional Chess". The hero of Searching for Bobby Fischer struggles against adopting the aggressive and misanthropic views of a real chess grandmaster.[73] Chess has been used as the core theme of a musical, Chess, by Tim Rice, Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson.

Approximately 600 million people worldwide know how to play chess.[74]
Chess composition
Main article: Chess problem

Chess composition is the art of creating chess problems (the problems themselves are sometimes also called chess compositions). A person who creates such problems is known as a chess composer.[75] There are many types of chess problems. The two most important are:

Directmates: white to move first and checkmate black within a specified number of moves against any defense. These are often referred to as "mate in n" – for example "mate in three" (a three-mover).[76]
Studies: orthodox problems in which the stipulation is that white to play must win or draw. Almost all studies are endgame positions.[77]

Chess composition is a distinct branch of chess sport, and tournaments (or tourneys) exist for both the composition and solving of chess problems.[78]
Example
Richard Réti
Ostrauer Morgenzeitung 4 December 1921
Solid white.svg a b c d e f g h Solid white.svg
8 a8 __ b8 __ c8 __ d8 __ e8 __ f8 __ g8 __ h8 white king 8
7 a7 __ b7 __ c7 __ d7 __ e7 __ f7 __ g7 __ h7 __ 7
6 a6 black king b6 __ c6 white pawn d6 __ e6 __ f6 __ g6 __ h6 __ 6
5 a5 __ b5 __ c5 __ d5 __ e5 __ f5 __ g5 __ h5 black pawn 5
4 a4 __ b4 __ c4 __ d4 __ e4 __ f4 __ g4 __ h4 __ 4
3 a3 __ b3 __ c3 __ d3 __ e3 __ f3 __ g3 __ h3 __ 3
2 a2 __ b2 __ c2 __ d2 __ e2 __ f2 __ g2 __ h2 __ 2
1 a1 __ b1 __ c1 __ d1 __ e1 __ f1 __ g1 __ h1 __ 1
Solid white.svg a b c d e f g h Solid white.svg
White to play and draw
Main article: Réti endgame study

This is one of the most famous chess studies; it was published by Richard Réti in 1921. It seems impossible to catch the advanced black pawn, while the black king can easily stop the white pawn. The solution is a diagonal advance, which brings the king to both pawns at the same time: 1.Kg7! h4 2.Kf6! Kb6 (or 2...h3 3.Ke7 and the white king can support its pawn) 3. Ke5!! (now the white king comes just in time to support his pawn, or catch the black one) 3...h3 4. Kd6 draw.[79]
Competitive play
Organization of competitions

Contemporary chess is an organized sport with structured international and national leagues, tournaments, and congresses. Chess's international governing body is FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs). Most countries have a national chess organization as well (such as the US Chess Federation and English Chess Federation) which in turn is a member of FIDE. FIDE is a member of the International Olympic Committee,[80] but the game of chess has never been part of the Olympic Games; chess does have its own Olympiad, held every two years as a team event.
The current World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand (left) playing chess against his predecessor Vladimir Kramnik

The current World Chess Champion is Viswanathan Anand of India.[81] The reigning Women's World Champion is Hou Yifan from China. The world's highest rated female player, Judit Polgár, has never participated in the Women's World Chess Championship, instead preferring to compete with the leading men and maintaining a ranking among the top male players.[82]

Other competitions for individuals include the World Junior Chess Championship, the European Individual Chess Championship, and the National Chess Championships. Invitation-only tournaments regularly attract the world's strongest players. Examples include Spain's Linares event, Monte Carlo's Melody Amber tournament, the Dortmund Sparkassen meeting, Sofia's M-tel Masters, and Wijk aan Zee's Tata Steel tournament.

Regular team chess events include the Chess Olympiad and the European Team Championship. The 38th Chess Olympiad was held 2008 in Dresden, Germany; Armenia won the gold in the unrestricted event for the second time in a row after Turin 2006, and Georgia took the top medal for the women. The World Chess Solving Championship and World Correspondence Chess Championships include both team and individual events.

[skimpi]

well, i am directly related to charlie sheen. so, in fact im always winning

Ghey

[dj2slo]

[oprs]

imposter knell above me