William Shakespeare

Template:AIDnom William Shakespeare (baptised April 26 1564 - died April 23 (New style: May 3) 1616) was an English poet and playwright. He wrote about thirty-eight plays, a collection of sonnets, and a variety of other poems. Already a popular writer in his own lifetime, his work became increasingly celebrated after his death and has been adulated by numerous prominent cultural figures through the centuries. Shakespeare now has a reputation as the greatest writer in the English language, as well as one of the greatest in Western literature, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. In addition, Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the literature and history of the English-speaking world, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is often considered the English, or arguably the British, national poet and is sometimes referred to as the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard") or the "Swan of Avon".

Shakespeare is believed to have produced most of his work between 1586 and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are often uncertain. He is counted among the very few playwrights who have excelled in both tragedy and comedy, and his plays combine popular appeal with complex characterisation, poetic grandeur and philosophical depth.

Shakespeare's works have been translated into every major living language, and his plays are continually performed all around the world. In addition, many quotations and neologisms from his plays have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages. Over the years, many people have speculated about Shakespeare's life, raising questions about his sexuality, whether he was secretly Catholic, and debating whether someone else wrote some or all of his plays and poetry.

William Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery), in the Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed.

Life

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life

William Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, and Shake-speare, due to the fact that spelling in Elizabethan times was not fixed and absolute) was born in Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman and alderman from Snitterfield, and of Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. Shakespeare's baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year. Because baptisms were performed within a few days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 (May 3 on the Gregorian calendar) as his birthday. This date provides a convenient symmetry because Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616.

Shakespeare probably attended King Edward VI Grammar School in central Stratford. While the quality of Elizabethan-era grammar schools was uneven, the school probably would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. It is presumed that the young Shakespeare attended this school, since as the son of a prominent town official he was entitled to do so (although this cannot be confirmed because the school's records have not survived). At the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Two neighbours of Anne posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably because Anne was three months pregnant.

Shakespeare's signature, from his will

After his marriage, Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. Indeed, the late 1580s are known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susannah, was baptised at Stratford. Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died in 1596.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London and had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (The italicised line parodies the phrase, "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.) By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour written by Ben Jonson.

Soon after this Shakespeare became an actor, writer and finally part-owner of a playing company, known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men — the company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, in this case the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the King's Men.

Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years

Shakespeare's last two plays were written in 1613, after which he appears to have retired to Stratford. He died on April 23 1616, at the age of fifty-two. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters, Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John Hall, but there are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today.

File:Shakespeare effigy.jpg

Shakespeare's funerary monument. It was commissioned by his son-in-law and wife in 1623. It is believed to be one of the closest depictions of Shakespeare by people who knew him.

Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel not on account of his fame as a playwright but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440 (a considerable sum of money at the time). A monument placed by his family on the wall nearest his grave features a bust of him posed in the act of writing. Each year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing hand of the bust.

He is believed to have written the epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones,

But cursed be he that moves my bones.

Works

Plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

A number of Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. He wrote tragedies, histories, comedies and romances, which have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed around the world.

As was normal in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and reworked earlier stories and historical material. For example, Hamlet (c. 1601) is probably a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is an adaptation of an earlier play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North), and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles.

Shakespeare's plays tend to be placed into three main stylistic groups: his early comedies and histories (such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV, Part 1), his middle period (which includes his most famous tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear), and his later romances (such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest). The earlier plays range from broad comedy to historical nostalgia, while the middle-period plays tend to be grander in terms of theme, addressing such issues as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and ambition. By contrast, his late romances feature redemptive plotlines with ambiguous endings and the use of magic and other fantastical elements. However, the borders between these genres are never clear.

Image of Shakespeare from the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays

Some of Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos, but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published by two actors who had been in Shakespeare's company: John Hemings and William Condell. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic of the First Folio. It is at this point that stage directions, punctuation and act divisions enter his plays, setting the trend for further future editorial decisions. Modern criticism has also labelled some of his plays "problem plays" or tragi-comedies, as they elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. The term "romances" has also been preferred for the later comedies.

There are many controversies about the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays. In addition, the fact that Shakespeare did not produce an authoritative print version of his plays during his life accounts for part of the textual problem often noted with his plays, which means that for several of the plays there are different textual versions. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions also stem from printers' errors, compositors' misreadings or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, contributing further to the transcribers' confusions. Modern scholars also believe Shakespeare revised his plays throughout the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play.

Sonnets

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 poems that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. All but two first appeared in the 1609 publication entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets; numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim.

The conditions under which the sonnets were published is unclear. The 1609 text is dedicated to one "Mr. W. H.", who is described as "the only begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. It is not known who this man was although there are many theories. In addition, it is not known whether the publication of the sonnets was authorised by Shakespeare. The poems were probably written over a period of several years.

Other poems

In addition to his sonnets, Shakespeare also wrote several longer narrative poems, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and A Lover's Complaint. These poems appear to have been written either in an attempt to win the patronage of a rich benefactor (as was common at the time) or as the result of such patronage. For example, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were both dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

In addition, Shakespeare wrote the short poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. The anthology The Passionate Pilgrim was attributed to him upon its first publication in 1599, but in fact only five of its poems are by Shakespeare and the attribution was withdrawn in the second edition.

Style

Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square London

Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on literature. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature, he also transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterisation, plot, action, language, and genre. His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theatre, permitting it to be admired by intellectuals as well as by those seeking pure entertainment.

Theatre was changing when Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes who validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over evil. The characters and plot situations are symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have been exposed to this type of play (along with mystery plays and miracle plays). Meanwhile, at the universities, academic plays were being staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, often performed in Latin, used a more exact and academically respectable poetic style than the morality plays, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action.

By the late 1500s the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe began to revolutionise theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with academic theatre to produce a new secular form. The new drama had the poetic grandeur and philosophical depth of the academic play and the bawdy populism of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple moral allegories. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare took these changes to a new level, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it meant to be human.

Reputation

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

Shakespeare's reputation has grown considerably since his own time. During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642–1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. As with other older playwrights, Shakespeare's plays were mercilessly adapted by later dramatists for the Restoration stage with little of the reverence that would later develop.

Beginning in the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright (and, to a lesser extent, poet). Initially this reputation focused on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theatre. By the early 19th century, though, Shakespeare began hitting peaks of fame and popularity. During this time, theatrical productions of Shakespeare provided spectacle and melodrama for the masses and were extremely popular. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge then raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry (from bard + idolatry), in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. In the middle to late 19th century, Shakespeare also became an emblem of English pride and a "rallying-sign", as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British Empire.

This reverence has provoked a negative reaction. In the 21st century most inhabitants of the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, and there is a common association of his work with boredom and incomprehension and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture, an ironic fate considering Shakespeare's target audiences. At the same time, Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright and are frequently adapted into film.

See also: Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

Speculations about Shakespeare

Identity

Main article: Shakespearean authorship

Over the years such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon actually produced the works attributed to him. These claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them, although their advocates also point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history. Most professional scholars consider the argument baseless, and attribute the debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of Shakespeare's life.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, became the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, after having been identified in the 1920s. Oxford partisans note the similarities between the Earl's life, and events and sentiments depicted in the plays and sonnets. The principal hurdle for the Oxfordian theory is the evidence that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after their candidate's death, but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to have written the works of Shakespeare. It has been speculated that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was faked for various reasons and that Marlowe went into hiding, subsequently writing under the name of William Shakespeare. Sir Francis Bacon is another proposed author for the Shakespeare works. Besides having travelled to the countries of the plays, he could also read the Shakespeare sources in their original Greek, Italian, Hebrew, or French. He described himself as a "Concealed Poet" and is the only known person having evidence of owning at least two manuscripts of the Shakespeare plays. In addition, having lived until 1626 he was one of two authorship candidates that was living during the continued revisions of the plays between 1616 (the year of William Shakespeare's death) up until their publication in 1623. Arguments against his authorship contend that Bacon didn't have the time to write so many plays and that his scholarly writing style was too different from the imaginative style of a playwright.

A question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.

Religion

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement had finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church after decades of uncertainty. In the following years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, including recusancy laws that made Catholicism illegal. There is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics, but whether Shakespeare himself was is a matter of considerable debate, and cannot be proven absolutely.

The strongest evidence for recusancy in Shakespeare's family is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the rafters of Shakespeare's Birthplace in the eighteenth century, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmund Malone. However, the tract has since been lost, and its authenticity cannot be proven. Shakespeare's father was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant .

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire . In 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. Archdeacon Richard Davies, an Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst". Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth were Catholic sympathisers , and Simon Hunt, likely one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit .

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, a number of works maintain that Shakespeare was Catholic. For example, in some historians maintain that Shakespeare lived in a society where there was substantial and widespread, yet quiet, resistance to the newly imposed faith and that Shakespeare was part of this resistance, his own works being the best evidence of his faith. One historian who writes on this subject, Clare Asquith, claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', the people pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.

Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted. The Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only that he might be Catholic, but whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which ... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Stephen Greenblatt, of Harvard, suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives . An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in "The Phoenix and the Turtle", and sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview. However, these may have been continuations of old literary conventions rather than determined Catholicism just as the Robin Hood ballads continued to have friars in them after the Reformation.

Shakespeare's plays sometimes criticise Catholicism either. The Porter's speech in Macbeth is a criticism of the equivocation of Father Garnett after it became topical in 1606 due to his execution .

Sexuality

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

The content of Shakespeare's works has raised the question of whether he may have been bisexual. It should be noted that the question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" in a modern sense is anachronistic, as the concepts of homosexuality and bisexuality as identities did not emerge until the 19th century; while sodomy was a crime in the period, there was no word for an exclusively homosexual identity (see History of homosexuality). Elizabethans also frequently wrote about friendship in more intense language than is common today.

Although twenty-six of the sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady"), one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focus on the young man's beauty, has been interpreted as evidence for Shakespeare's bisexuality, although others interpret them as referring to intense friendship, not sexual love. Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical, but mere fiction, so that the "speaker" of the Sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. Despite these alternative interpretations, many readers have suspected otherwise. For example, in 1954, C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" (although he added that they are not the poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature."

Many readers have found similar evidence in the plays. The most commonly cited example is a number of comedies such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It, which contain comic situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device that exploits the fact that in Shakespeare's day women's roles were played by boys. While the situations thus presented are heterosexual in terms of the story, the stage image of men wooing and kissing may well have been titillating to those of a homosexual orientation, and while other dramatists occasionally used the same device, Shakespeare seems to have had an exceptional preference for it, using it in five of his plays.

See also

• Shakespeare's life
• Shakespeare's reputation
• Shakespeare's plays
• Shakespeare's sonnets
• Complete Works of Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's late romances
• Chronology of Shakespeare plays
• Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare's wife)
• Elizabethan era
• Elizabethan theatre
• Globe Theatre
• Shakespeare on screen
• List of Shakespearean characters
• List of English words invented by Shakespeare

Bibliography

The following list separates the plays according to their classification in the First Folio, the first published edition of Shakespeare's plays. Today, some of the comedies are usually considered as a separate subgenre, the 'romances' or tragicomedies; these plays are highlighted with an asterisk (*).

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedies

• The Tempest*
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• As You Like It
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Twelfth Night or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale*
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre* (not included in the First Folio)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen* (not included in the First Folio)
• Cymbeline*

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean 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

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

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

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
• Cardenio

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

• Edward III
• Sir Thomas More

Further reading

• Mark Anderson, Shakespeare by Another Name (2005). Biography of Edward de Vere
• Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun (1964). Fictionalised biography
• Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (1970). Biography
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004). Biography
• Bertram Fields, Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare (2005)
• John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (2005)
• Shakespeare on Film Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). Literary Criticism
• Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (2003) Historical background, BBC Books, ISBN 0-563-52141-4 (paperback). This work is a companion to the television series of the same title.
• Peter Ackroyd "Shakespeare-The Biography" (2005)

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare includes the complete works, an advanced search function, a complete concordance, and some statistics about the works.
• Study Guides for all the plays and poems
• British Library; Original 93 copies in quarto
• Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• Works by William Shakespeare at Project Gutenberg
• Upenn.edu online books page for Shakespeare
• Chapter-indexed, searchable versions of Shakespeare's works
• Touchstone - UK Shakespeare collections
• Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project at University of Guelph
• Full text of plays erroneously attributed to Shakespeare
• "Sonnets 29, 40, 55, 100, 106, 116" Creative Commons audio recording.
• Essay on Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens
• Shakespeare's plays and poems in audio and video
• The Illustrated Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare Forums
• Shakespeare into BSL
• The Shakespeare Wiki
• Shakespeare Online
• National Geographic Article About Shakespeare's Coinages
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Full Text
• The Love Poems of William Shakespeare