Name: ________________________
Date: ___________
World Literature DBQ
Who Was This Man, Shakespeare?
Hook: What do you know to be TRUE and FACTUAL about William Shakespeare?
Background: More than two hundred years ago, in a sentiment much repeated ever since, the historian George Steevens observed that
all we know of William Shakespeare is contained within a few scanty facts: that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a
family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died. That wasn’t quite true then and
it is even less so now, but it is not all that far from the truth either. After four hundred years of dedicated hunting, researchers have
found about a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family—baptismal records, title deeds, tax
certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records—it was a litigious age), and so on. That’s quite a
good number as these things go, but deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the
business of a person’s life, but almost nothing about the emotions of it…
What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays—all of them but one or two—thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues
Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death—the justly revered
First Folio. It cannot be overemphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of
sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive, and even printed plays are
far more often missing than not. Of the approximately three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the
time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theaters by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80 percent are known only
by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the thirty-eight by Shakespeare himself—about 15
percent of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion. – Bill Bryson
Prompt: Shakespeare was the ideal Renaissance man.
Task:




Examine each document in the DBQ
Use the Bucketing technique to group documents
Use the Chicken Foot Graphic Organizer to create your Thesis
Write an Essay to answer the prompt
o 1-2 pages; 4 paragraphs
o 3-5 quotes from documents. Cite with author’s last name.
Document 1:
Definition of “Renaissance man” according to the Oxford
English Dictionary:
Syllabification: Ren·ais·sance man
Pronunciation: /ˈrenəˌsäns man/
Noun. A person with many talents or areas of knowledge.
Document 2: Excerpt from Baldassare Castiglione in “The
Book of the Courtier” (1528) describing the Renaissance man
Let the man we are seeking be very bold, stern, and always
among the first, where the enemy are to be seen; and in every
other place, gentle, modest, reserved, above all things
avoiding ostentation [showiness] and that impudent [bold]
self-praise by which men ever excite hatred and disgust in all
who hear them… I would have him more than passably
accomplished in letters, at least in those studies that are called
the humanities, and conversant not only with the Latin
language but for Greek, for the sake of the many different
things that have been admirably written therein. Let him be
well versed in the poets, and not less in the orators and
historians, and also proficient in writing verse and pose.
Document 3: Excerpt is from “A History of Europe from 1378
to 1494” by W.T. Waugh (1932) describing the Renaissance
man (Humanists)
It has become evident that there was no suspension of
intellectual life in medieval Europe. If there was a Revival of
Learning, it occurred about the year A.D. 1000, since human
knowledge has never ceased to advance. It cannot even be said
that the Humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
revived the study of the classics. Scholars had been nourished
on the centuries for the centuries. In the first place, the
classical writer most studied in the Middle Ages was A Greek,
Aristotle… And actually the medieval scholars of western
Europe were acquainted with most of the Latin authors
familiar to us. The merits of the artists and the influence of the
Humanist scholars must be acknowledged. But one must
beware of exaggerating the practical results of their work. It is
undeniable that very few people knew or cared anything about
the sayings or doings of the Humanists… [and] the plain fact
remains that the masterpieces of Renaissance sculpture can
have been seen by few, those of the Renaissance painting by
fewer. And in those days, unless you actually saw them, you
could not tell what they were like.
Document 4:
Shakespeare’s funerary monument; Holy Trinity Church,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK (1616)
The epitaph reads:
IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE
MARONEM,TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET,
OLYMPUS HABET
The first line translates as "A Pylian in judgment, a Socrates in
genius, a Maro in art," comparing Shakespeare to Nestor the
wise King of Pylus, to the Greek philosopher Socrates, and to
the Roman poet Virgil Maro. The second reads, "The earth
buries him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him,"
referring to Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods.
The English poem reads:
STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST?
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH
HATH PLAST WITH IN THIS MONVMENT
SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME, QVICK NATVRE DIDE:
WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE, FAR MORE,
THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATH WRITT, LEAVES
LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.
Which translates into:
Stay Passenger, why go you by so fast?
Read if thou can, whom envious Death hath plast
Within this monument Shakespeare: with whom
Quick nature died: whose name does deck this tomb
Far more than cost: since all that he has written
Leaves living art, but page to serve his wit.
Document 5: Excerpt from Bill Bryon’s All the World’s a Stage (2008)
It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his
comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his
other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving,
and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things—as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.
They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all
possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only
what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it. Another scholar, Charlton Hinman, managed to identify individual compositors
who worked on the typesetting of Shakespeare’s plays. By comparing preferences of spelling—whether a given compositor used go or
goe, chok’d or choakte, lantern or lanthorn, set or sett or sette, and so on—and comparing these in turn with idiosyncrasies of
punctuation, capitalization, line justification, and the like, he and others have identified nine hands at work on the First Folio. It has
been suggested, quite seriously, that thanks to Hinman’s detective work we know more about who did what in Isaac Jaggard’s London
workshop than Jaggard did himself.
Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession. A glance through the indexes of the many scholarly
journals devoted to him and his age reveals such dogged investigations as “Linguistic and Informational Entropy in Othello,” “Ear
Disease and Murder in Hamlet,” “Poisson Distributions in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” “Shakespeare and the Quebec Nation,” “Was
Hamlet a Man or a Woman?” and others of similarly inventive cast.
The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. In the British Library catalog, enter “Shakespeare” as author
and you get 13,858 options (as opposed to 455 for “Marlowe,” for instance), and as subject you get 16,092 more. The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the
rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly, the most exhaustive of
bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works—books, monographs, other studies—every year.
Document 6: Excerpt from History of the English Language and Literature by Friedrich Julius Bierbaum (1883)
Shakespeare lived in a time when the romantic spirit was melting with the modern, idealism with realism. In
him these features were most felicitously blended together. He, like a sorcerer with his magic wand, raised the
drama from its rude beginnings to the height of its perfection. His dramatic capacity was vast and multiform; it
consisted first, in his great creative power: his conceptions are as multifarious as those of nature, none
resembling the other, wherefore he has not unaptly been called “thousand souled Shakespeare”; secondly, in his
unrivalled power of delineating characters, which do not represent types of whole classes, but distinct,
independent individualities, with their proper virtues and vices, not exposed in declamatory speeches, but
consistently drawn from their actions, which are quite in conformity with their thoughts, passions, inclinations,
and surrounding conditions. Most exquisite are his female characters for depth and delicacy. Thirdly, his
imaginative strength is not less powerful, being an inexhaustible source of all possible situations, complications,
and conditions, even of the abnormal, unreal and supernatural: “He shows the whole world and humanity as in a
mirror” and seizes the peculiarities of every age, country, and condition. Next to be mentioned is his unrivalled
knowledge of the human heart. He traces the human passions from the softest to the wildest, the most secret
emotions and the most hidden motives, as well as the wild furies and terrors of the outraged soul and the
agonizing heart. Finally, his langauge must be pointed out as being in the highest degree dramatic, flexible, and
characteristic. Thought and word are flowing into one another in perfect harmony; it is, besides, “rich in words
of new senses.”
Thus Shakespeare’s capactities and merits may be called universal, though he is not exempt from faults, which
were mostly occasioned by the notions, customs, errors, prejudices, and the rude tastes of his time, whose
influene he could not escape. These blemishes are chiefly to be met with in his lanugage, which is not seldom
coarse, obscure, and obsolete, and especially in his earlier pieces, infected by bombstic expressions and
euphuistic conceits; he is particularly fond of indulging in affected, over-refined thoughts and in plays on
words. His manifold anachronisms, however, are quite immaterial to the matchless character of his works.
Document 7: Excerpt from “A Letter from George Bernard Shaw” (1906)
As you know, I have striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare's philosophy, to the
superficiality and second-handedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his
snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence
claimed for him.... The preface to my "Three Plays for Puritans" contains a section headed "Better than
Shakespeare?" which is, I think, the only utterance of mine on the subject to be found in a book.... There is at
present in the press a new preface to an old novel of mine called "The Irrational Knot." In that preface I define
the first order in Literature as consisting of those works in which the author, instead of accepting the current
morality and religion ready-made without any question as to their validity, writes from an original moral
standpoint of his own, thereby making his book an original contribution to morals, religion, and sociology, as
well as to belles letters. I place Shakespeare with Dickens, Scott, Dumas père, etc.,[167] in the second order,
because, though they are enormously entertaining, their morality is ready-made; and I point out that the one
play, "Hamlet," in which Shakespeare made an attempt to give as a hero one who was dissatisfied with the
ready-made morality, is the one which has given the highest impression of his genius, although Hamlet's revolt
is unskillfully and inconclusively suggested and not worked out with any philosophic competence.
Document 8: Excerpt from Shakespeare and the Classics: Plutarch, Ovid and Inspiration by Andrew Phillips & Patrick Hunt (2010)
The comment from poet and playwright Ben Jonson is from his Eulogy of Shakespeare, conveying that the Bard “had small Latin and
less Greek.” [1] While Jonson’s remarks may have been fairly accurate for the Elizabethan standards of the time, there is growing
internal evidence that Shakespeare in fact possessed a considerable command of both Latin and Greek and a surprisingly deep
comprehension of Classics. Shakespeare not only probably translated some of the ancient texts for his own purposes and projects, but
he was also sufficiently well versed in the classics to have borrowed inspiration from a range of classical sources from history to
poetry and drama…
That Shakespeare borrowed much from the classics and classical texts, including Ovid and Plutarch as major sources, but also from
Livy, Plautus, Sappho, and other ancient writers is not challenged. The authors of this article believe that not only was Shakespeare’s
knowledge of Latin probably sufficient to translate some of his sources or at least peruse them keenly in the original Latin, but he also
regularly borrowed copiously from ancient texts and re-told the great histories and stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Shakespeare used the classics across a wide spectrum, and indeed it is impossible to imagine what he would have produced had he not
relied so heavily on the classics. In doing so, he contributed an enormously important new wealth to the history of literature: he helped
to popularize and retain many of the classical stories and traditions that without his help may have shriveled from public recognition
altogether in English. Instead, Classics as a whole influenced the work of William Shakespeare more than any one other literary
collection, including the Bible, and vice versa. More than any other, Shakespeare kept the Classics alive.
Shakespeare’s education deserves better press than Ben Jonson’s summary. A little background is helpful, indeed that is all we have.
Because the King’s New School records were lost, possibly in a fire, the “Anti-Stratfordians” are correct in stating no documentation
exists for Shakespeare’s education. But it is also fairly easy to affirm that the local grammar school Shakespeare would have attended
into his mid-teens was the 1553-chartered King’s New School, also known as King Edward VI Grammar School, where the children
of prominent Stratford citizens – like John Shakespeare and his wife Mary Arden – were its students and where Latin grammar was a
compulsory component. Like all children of a similar background and upbringing, Shakespeare would have been drilled extensively
with the purpose of teaching him not only how to read Latin “but to write and speak it as well”. [8]
Some evidence for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Latin and the classics in general lies in his quotations from and fondness for texts of
the poet Ovid. Ovid, by many accounts, was “Shakespeare’s favorite author”, [15] and the one source which many critics liken the
most to Shakespeare: “By studying Shakespeare’s reading of Ovid we may come to a remarkably full – though not, of course,
complete – picture of the sort of artist that Shakespeare was”. [16] Shakespeare’s affection for Ovid is apparent to those who read
Shakespeare’s works with an eye for classical influences, and it is this gleaning of Ovid that well-educated members of Shakespeare’s
audiences would have noticed with relative ease.
Like his reuse of Ovid, Shakespeare also studied Plutarch deeply. Looking at the entire collection of the works of William
Shakespeare, one glance across his titles gives a true sense to just how deep classical influences like Plutarch reach with
Shakespeare’s creations. Much has long been published on Shakespeare’s ample use of Thomas North’s 1579 edition of
Plutarch’s Lives. [18] Among his plays, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Pericles, Timon of Athens and Titus
Andronicus all have classical references within their names as well as ancient sources for narratives. Timon of Athens also derives
much from Plutarch’s Antony; moreover Titus Andronicus may owe something to Plutarch’s Scipioand
Seneca’s Thyestes and Hippolytus. [21] Additionally, a number of plays, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have classical
characters and sub-plots that penetrate the main focus of the play. It is also most likely that Shakespeare knew William Adlington’s
1566 translation of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass as a source text for A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream and ‘Titania’ is also used as a name
three times in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III.173, XIV 382 and 438). [22]
At the very root of the classical tradition of the Humanists lies the essence of what makes us human. This goal of capturing and
displaying this same essence is what Shakespeare initially pursued in his youth, which once he had begun his career caused him to
“read omnivorously and blend what he had absorbed into his work with awesome power and subtlety”. [34] The same reasons that we
read Shakespeare and enjoy it so much to this day are the same why Shakespeare sought the classics when compiling his various
works. We as readers so readily see ourselves in the works of Shakespeare, whether in the passions and emotions of a Macbeth or a
Prince Hamlet, or the sheer joy and humor captured in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because these stories also distill the very essence
of our lives and what it means to exist in our world. As Muir and others have noted, even the transformation of Bottom into a donkey
is a well-known borrowing from The Golden Ass of Apuleius (circa AD 150) where the protagonist Lucius is likewise bestialized for
his errant explorations in magic. Among others, Giordano Bruno also utilized the theme of transformation from ass to man. [35] Not
only do we respect Shakespeare for his work in of itself, but also more importantly we enjoy Shakespeare because in spite of the years
that separate us from the age of Elizabethan England we feel that Shakespeare personally addresses us in his various works, a kinship
that is as much psychological as literary. This kinship from one age to another is one of the marks of genius. Just as translating a work
from a different language can be difficult to retain its essence, creating something truly immortal people can read and enjoy – no
matter where or when they lived – is an impressive feat. Ovid spoke to Shakespeare the same way Shakespeare speaks to us: with a
clear understanding of the many nuances and paradoxes that complete our humanity.
Whether in a character like Titus Andronicus eroding before our eyes, a story within a story like Pyramus and Thisbe, or in the plot of
an entire tragedy, one does not need to look far to see Shakespeare’s use of the classics. He also did it in a way to make the classics
accessible, removing the prestige associated with the academic nature of the classics as a discipline. By doing so he committed his
works to the preservation of the same immortal questions first asked by the ancients, and did it in a way that the average person could
see and appreciate.
Bucketing – Getting Ready to Write
Look over all the documents and organize them into the buckets below. Your buckets will become your
body paragraphs.
Bucket 1: Talents
Bucket 2: Areas of Knowledge
Thesis Development
One the chicken foot graphic organizer below, write your thesis and your main topics. You thesis
supports or refutes the prompt. The topics are created from your bucket labels.
Example Supporting Thesis: Shakespeare was an ideal Renaissance man because he possessed a vast
amount of talent and used a wide range of classical knowledge.
Example Refuting Thesis: Shakespeare was not an ideal Renaissance man because he lacked talent and
education.