William Shakespeare—an introduction
William Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery), in the famous Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed.
William Shakespeare (baptized May 7, 1564 – May 3, 1616) was an English poet and
playwright. Shakespeare is considered by many to be the greatest writer in the English
language, as well as one of the greatest in Western literature, and one of the world's preeminent dramatists.
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 characterization, 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, quotations from his plays
have passed into everyday usage in many 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.
Life
Early life
William Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, and Shake-speare, due to the
fact that Elizabethan spelling was very erratic) was born in Henley Street, in Stratfordupon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a
successful tradesman and alderman, 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 4 on the
Gregorian calendar) as his birthday. This date provides a convenient symmetry because
Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616.
As the son of a prominent town official, Shakespeare was entitled to attend King Edward
VI Grammar School in central Stratford, which may have provided an intensive
education in Latin grammar and literature. Also, mainstream scholars assume that
Shakespeare was a student at the Stratford Free School, since he would have been entitled
to attend it, and textbooks used at the Stratford Free School are alluded to in the plays. At
the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26, on November 28, 1582 at Temple
Grafton, near Stratford. Two neighbors of Anne posted bond that there were no
impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the
ceremony, presumably due to the fact that Anne was three months pregnant.
After his marriage, William 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 baptized at Stratford. A son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were
baptized on February 2, 1585.
Later years
Shakespeare
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 52. 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.
Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He
was granted the honor 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 bust of him placed by his family on the wall nearest his grave
shows 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
Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square London
A number of Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the
English language and in Western literature. His plays cover tragedy, history, and comedy
and have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being
continually performed all around the world.
As was normal in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other
playwrights and recycled older 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 older 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, Romeo and
Juliet and King Lear), and his later romances (such as The Winter's Tale and The
Tempest). The earlier plays tend to be more light-hearted, while the middle-period plays
tend to be darker, addressing such issues as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and egotism.
By contrast, his late romances feature a redemptive plotline with a happy ending and the
use of magic and other fantastical elements. However, the borders between these groups
are extremely blurry.
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. The
traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic
of the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays "problem
plays" as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic
conventions, and has introduced the term "romances" 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'
misreading or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age
before standardized 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
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
authorized 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
Shakespeare's impact on modern theatre cannot be overestimated. 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 characterization, 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 revolutionize 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
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 1642–60, 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. At the same time,
Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other
playwright and are frequently adapted into film.
Speculations about Shakespeare
Identity
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 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.
A related 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
Several decades before Shakespeare's birth, the English Crown severed the country's
church from the Roman Catholic Church. In the following years, extreme pressure was
placed on England's Catholics to convert to the protestant Church of England, with
recusancy laws used to help enforce this conversion.
Some evidence suggests that Shakespeare may have been secretly Catholic. There is no
question that Shakespeare had many family members, patrons and friends who were
Catholic and that he grew up in a hotbed of recusancy, with nearly conclusive evidence
that both Shakespeare’s father John Shakespeare and his daughter Susannah were
recusant Catholics. His mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and
determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. Archdeacon Richard Davies (d. 1708), 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
sympathizers and may have been hired by his father. Simon Hunt, likely one of
Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.
A number of scholarly works maintain that Shakespeare was Catholic, such as
Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare by Clare
Asquith. Asquith maintains 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. Lady Magdalen Montague, a well known Catholic and a bulwark of English
Catholicism was a prominent patron of the Bard, and is even found within his plays
Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale and Comedy of Errors.
Asquith says the Bard would use terms such as "high" to refer to Catholic characters and
"low" to refer to the Protestant--referring to their altars--and "light" or "fair" to refer to
Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garb. Asquith
detected 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 scaffold 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. Asquith says Shakespeare also used this code.
Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted, though
some consider it a growing consensus. The Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only
that he might be other than 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 Turtle", sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit Edmund Campion in
"Twelfth Night" and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.
Sexuality
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 did not
emerge until the 19th century; while sodomy was a crime in the period, there was no
word for an exclusively homosexual identity so 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.