William Shakespeare: (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely
regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of
about 38 plays,
154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, the authorship of some of which is
uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those
of any other playwright.
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 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 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. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. 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, John
Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected
edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced
with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time."
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". 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.
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. He was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is
traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.
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.[14] He was the third
child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably
educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[16] a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his
home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely
similar, the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.
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. 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, and six months after the
marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May
1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried
11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre
scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the 'complaints bill' of a law case before the Queen's
Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589. Scholars refer to the years
between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". 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.
Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in
London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. 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. Little evidence substantiates such
stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
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
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. By then, he was sufficiently well known in
London 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.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, 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"). 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".
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.[38] 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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). 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. 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. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote
that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost
of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry
V,
though scholars doubt the sources of the information.
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. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe
Theatre there. 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.
Later years and death
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his
death. It is perhaps relevant that the London public playhouses were repeatedly closed for months at a time during
the extended outbreaks of the Plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),
which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and
Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612, Shakespeare was called as a witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, a
court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a
gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;
and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with
his son-in-law, John Hall. After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after
1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John
Fletcher,
who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two
daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith
had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s
death.
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter
Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of
her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without
marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died
without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will
scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his
estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my
second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. 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.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after
his death. 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.
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. 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, 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. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
dramatise the destructive results of weak or
corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.
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.
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. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear
to approve of rape, 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. A Midsummer
Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic
lowlife scenes. 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.The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,
the charming rural setting of As You Like
It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. 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. This period begins and ends with two tragedies:
Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius
Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of
drama. 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.
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". 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. 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.[98] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes
Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. 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". In Macbeth, the shortest
and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, 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. 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.
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. 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. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen,
probably with John Fletcher.
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. 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. 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". 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.
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.
After 1608, they performed at the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the
summer.
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.
The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in
Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. 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.
In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary
circumstances of pomp and ceremony".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.
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.Many of the plays had already appeared
in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded
twice to make four leaves.No evidence suggests that Shakespeare
approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and
surreptitious copies".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.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.
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.
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.
Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,
thep oems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust. 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. 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.
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. 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". Few analysts
believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended
sequence.
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".
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."
—Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.
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. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual
passion, procreation, death, and time.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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:
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
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". 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. 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. 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.
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all playwrights of the time, he
dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.
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. 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.
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.
Until Romeo and Juliet,
for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for
tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information
about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore
characters' minds. 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."
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.
Scholarsh ave 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. 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. 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,
and his use of language helped shape modern English. 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. Expressions such as "with
bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday
English speech.
Critical reputation
"He was not of an age, but for all time."
—Ben Jonson
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.[161] 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. And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer,
Gower and Spenser.
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.
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".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.By 1800, he
was firmly enshrined as the national poet. 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.
[168]
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.
In the 19th century, critical admiration
for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation."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".The Victorians produced his plays as lavish
spectacles on a grand scale.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.
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. 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. By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to
movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.
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.Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de
Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Several "group theories" have also been proposed. Only a small minority of
academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution, but interest in the subject, particularly
the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship,continues into the 21st century
Religion
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was
against the law.[183] 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. In
1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common
Catholic excuse. In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend
Easter communion in Stratford.Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his
plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove either way.
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, 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. 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,
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.
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