User:Brimckinney/sandbox

The Shoemaker's Holiday
The introduction is very disjointed and contains extraneous facts such as the payment made to "Thomas Dickers" or the prologue that was spoken before Queen Elizabeth (this detail should be under the performance history section). It needs to be more focused on basic details of the play.

The historical context section is pretty much entirely useless, as it doesn't make any meaningful connections between history and the play's meaning. It's all background that could be provided with links to other relevant Wikipedia articles.

The Major Characters section is problematic in that it doesn't list all of the important characters. Oatlely and the Lord Mayor, who drive a lot of the play's conflict, aren't mentioned. Other characters such as Margery, Firk, Hodge, and Hammon are also left out.

The Plot section has some mistakes such as calling Hammon a gentleman- he is called that in the play but would be better referred to as a citizen.

The Synopsis section could be reworked without acts and without the titles for scenes, which seem to be settings that are not present in our copy.

The themes and criticism sections are just pathetic. There are more than just the one theme of Class listed in the article. The criticism section cites one scholar and provides a quote from him- except without any context or explanation of what it means. It is also shown in isolation, with no mention of other writings on the play. The themes section also has an uncited quote.

The In Performance section only lists modern performances; this section should list the performance in front of the Queen mentioned in the first paragraph. Also, "performance" should be capitalized in the heading.

The references section has very few actual scholarly sources, and a few rather doubtful ones, such as shakespeareinamericancommunities.com

The Talk page has only three comments, one of which is unsigned and one of which is from somebody in our class. It is not a very popular topic, and is even rated Low-Importance by WikiProject Theatre.

The Spanish Tragedy
The introduction is good and stays on topic, giving reasons why it is an important play and how it influenced other writings.

The date section has multiple missing citations. The heading name is also not useful- it should maybe be "Date of Writing" or something.

The performance section probably also needs some more citations, as does the publication and authorship sections. All are pretty well written and seem comprehensive, but it's hard to tell without references.

More expansion could be done where the Additions section of the play is mentioned, like mentioning the data analysis work that was done that makes scholars think they were written by Shakespeare.

The Influences section has many citations, however the one of them (# 10) is perhaps over-represented.

Allusions is missing some citations.

The Characters section is just a copy of the cast list from the play, including people like "A HANGMAN" and "Two NOBLEMEN of Portugal". More useful would be to remove those nameless characters and give a little blurb about who each major character is. Also, the wording for the characters is preserved: Isabella is presently listed under Don Hieronimo as "His wife, ISABELLA". She should be listed as somthing like "Isabella- wife of Don Hieronimo and mother of Horatio".

The plot section is one long block and would benefit from being broken into acts.

The 1602 additions shouldn't reference "as noted above" but should be self contained. Also, an entire paragraph is in parenthesis, which is just unnecessary.

It seems that the Themes section may contain some personal analysis on the part of the author of the article. The Structure section may as well.

The Talk page isn't very extensive, but has a little more than "The Shoemaker's Holiday". It is ranked mid importance in WikiProject Theatre but only has a C quality.