About-
|
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
|
|
Nationality
|
English
|
|
Period
|
English Renaissance
|
|
Spouse(s)
|
Anne Hathaway (m. 1582–1616
|
|
Children
|
Susanna Hall
Hamnet
Shakespeare
Judith Quiney
|
|
Relative(s)
|
John Shakespeare (father)
Mary
Shakespeare (mother
|
William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 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 brought
up 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 aplaying company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the
King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49,
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. TheRomantics, 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
1.
Life
1.1
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 grammar curriculum was standardised by
royal decree throughout England,[13]and the school would have provided an intensive
education in Latin grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[14]
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 on 27 November 1582. The next day two of
Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded
the marriage.[15] 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,[16] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a
daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[17]
Twins, son Hamnet and daughterJudith,
followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[18] Hamnet died
of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[19]
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".[20] Biographers attempting to
account for this period have reported manyapocryphal 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.[21] Another
18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the
horses of theatre patrons in London.[22] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a
country schoolmaster.[23] 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.[24] Little evidence substantiates such stories other than
hearsaycollected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the
Lancashire area.[25]
1.2London 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[26]
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.[27] 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.[28]
Scholars differ on the exact
meaning of these words,[29] but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of
reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such
asChristopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the "university
wits").[30] The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh,
tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare'sHenry 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".[29][31]
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.[32] From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed by only
the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including
Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35] 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.[36]
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.[37] 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).[38] 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.[39] 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.[40] In 1610, John
Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly"
roles.[41] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost
of Hamlet's father.[42] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As
You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V,[43] though scholars doubt the
sources of the information.[44]
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.[45] He moved
across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the
Globe Theatre there.[46] 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 named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and
other headgear.[47]
1.3Later years and death
Rowe was the first biographer to
pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before
his death;[48] but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time,[49] and
Shakespeare continued to visit London.[48]
In 1612, Shakespeare was called as a
witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage
settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[50]
In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the
former Blackfriars priory;[51] and from November 1614 he was in London for several
weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
After 1606–1607, Shakespeare
wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.[53] His last
three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[54] who succeeded
him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.[55]
Shakespeare died on 23 April
1616[56] and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a
physician, John Hall, in 1607,[57] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two
months before Shakespeare’s death.[58]
In his will, Shakespeare left
the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna.[59] The terms
instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her
body".[60] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died
without marrying.[61] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice
but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.[62] Shakespeare's
will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third
of his estate automatically.[63] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my
second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[64] 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.[65]
Shakespeare was buried in the
chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.[66] 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:[67]
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
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.[68]
(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 that moves my bones.)
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.[69] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First
Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published. Shakespeare has been commemorated
in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in
Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
2
Plays
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.[71] 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,[72] 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.[73] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael
Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[74] dramatise the
destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a
justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[75] 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.[76] 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.[77] Like The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[78] the Shrew's
story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes
troubles modern critics and directors.
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.[80] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic
lowlife scenes.[81] 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.[82] The wit and
wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,[83]
the charming rural setting of AsYou
Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete
Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.[84]
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.[85] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo
and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence,
love, and death;[86] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's
1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new
kind of drama.[87] 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".
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.[89] 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 which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".[90] 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.[91] 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.[92] In Othello,
the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders
the innocent wife who loves him.[93] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic
error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture
and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest
daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers
neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".[94] In Macbeth,
the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,[95]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.[96] In this play,
Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major
tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra andCoriolanus, contain some of
Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies
by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.
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.[98] 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.[99]Shakespeare
collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher
2.1 Performances
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.[101]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.[102] 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".[103] 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.[104] 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.
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.[106] After 1608,
they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the
Globe during the summer.[107] 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."
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.[109] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant
Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing,
among other characters.[110] 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.[111] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was
set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".[112] 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.[112]
2.2 Textual sources
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.[113]
Many of the plays had already appeared in
quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make
four leaves.[114] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these
editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious
copies".[115] 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.[116] 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 ownpapers.[117] 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.[118]
3 Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the
theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative
poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonisand 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.[119] Influenced
by Ovid'sMetamorphoses,[120] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that
result from uncontrolled lust.[121] 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.[122]
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.
3.1 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.[124] 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".[125] Few analysts
believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.[126] 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".[127]
"Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."
—Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet
18.[128]
The 1609 edition was dedicated
to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the
poems. 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.[129] Critics
praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love,
sexual passion, procreation, death, and time
4. 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.[131] 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.[132]
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.[133] 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.[134] 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.[135] 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:[136]
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[136]
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".[137] 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.[138] 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.[138] 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.[139]
Shakespeare combined poetic
genius with a practical sense of the theatre.[140] Like all playwrights of the
time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.[141] 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.[142] 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.[143]
4. Influence
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.[144] Until Romeo
and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for
tragedy.[145] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information
about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters'
minds.[146] His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted
to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George
Steinerdescribed all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as
"feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."[147]
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.[148] 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.[149] Shakespeare
has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the
Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artistHenry Fuseli, a friend of William
Blake, even translated Macbeth into German.[150] The
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular
that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.[151]
In Shakespeare's day, English
grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,[152] and his use
of language helped shape modern English.[153]
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.[154] Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant
of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have
found their way into everyday English speech.[155]
5.Critical reputation
"He was not of an age, but
for all time."
—Ben Jonson[156]
Shakespeare was not revered in
his lifetime, but he received his share of praise.[157] 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.[158] And the
authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered
him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser.[159] 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".
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.[160] 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".[161] 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.[162] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.[163] 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.[164]
During the Romantic era,
Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor
Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegeltranslated his plays in the
spirit of German Romanticism.[165] In the 19th century, critical admiration for
Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.[166] "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".[167] The
Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.[168] 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.[169]
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 Brechtdevised 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.[170] 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.[171] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to
movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American
studies, and queer studies.[172][173]
6.Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Around 230 years after
Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the
works attributed to him.[174] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis
Bacon,Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.[175] Several
"group theories" have also been proposed.[176] Only a small
minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional
attribution,[177] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian
theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.[178]
Religion
Some scholars claim that members
of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was
against the law.[179] 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.[180] In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare
had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic
excuse.[181] In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears
on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.[181] Scholars
find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but
the truth may be impossible to prove either way.[182]
Sexuality
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. Over the centuries some readers have posited that Shakespeare's
sonnets are autobiographical,[183] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young
man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather
than sexual love.[184] The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets,
addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.[
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. Over the centuries some readers have posited that Shakespeare's
sonnets are autobiographical,[183] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young
man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship
rather than sexual love.[184] The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets,
addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.[
Portraiture
No written contemporary
description of Shakespeare's physical appearance survives, and no evidence
suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving,
which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,[186] 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 mis-attributions, repaintings and
relabelling of portraits of other people
7 List of works
Classification of the plays
Shakespeare's works include the
36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their
folio classification as comedies, historiesand tragedies.[188] 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.[189] 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 themtragicomedies, his term is often used.[190] 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 andHamlet.[191] "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."[192] The term,
much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet
is definitively classed as a tragedy.[193]
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.
7 Works
1 Comedies -
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
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 †
Poems
Shakespeare's sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Lover's Complaint
Lost plays
Love's Labour's Won
The History of Cardenio
