Shakespeare
International man of mystery
William Shakespeare
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April 23, 1564-1616
Greatest writer of English?
Bard of Avon
Stratford-upon-Avon
37 or 38 plays
154 sonnets, plus
Shakespeare in love?
• Married Anne Hathaway
Early life
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He was 18, she was 26
Six months later first child born
Three children, two of which were twins
Lived with his father, successful glove maker
Next eight years “lost years”
????????
Making plays in London
• Early 1590’s writing plays in London
• Successful as playwright, actor, and
shareholder of acting company
• Lord Chamberlain’s Men
• The King’s Men
• The Globe Theatre
• Blackfriar’s Theater
Elizabethan Age
• Favorite of Queen
Elizabeth I
• Shakespeare has strong
heroines, perhaps inspired
by Elizabeth
• First feminist? Portrayed
the virtues of strong
women who achieve their
goals
Jacobean Age
• King James I cultivated
and strong patron of
the arts
• Elevated Shakespeare’s
company even higher,
making the participants
gentlemen
Success
• Most popular acting company in London
• Spent much of time in London away from
family
• Later bought second most expensive house in
Stratford
Shakespeare’s house
Statue to Shakespeare
Monument to playwrights
I’m not dead yet.
• Died age 52 of fever? Typhus?
• "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a
merry meeting and it seems drank too hard,
for Shakespeare died of a fever there
contracted." ~ Vicar of Holy Trinity Church
Oh, maybe I am.
• Buried in Holy Trinity Church
Will’s last will
• Left his wife his “second-best bed”
• Hmm…
• Gave daughters, friends and relatives
everything else, which wasn’t all that much
• If he was so successful and famous, where did
all his money go?
• Did not arrange to have his plays printed or
mention them in his will
Signatures
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Willm Shakp
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William Shaksper
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Wm Shakspe
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William Shakspere
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Willm Shakspere
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By me William Shakspeare
Jonson’s praise
• This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With Nature, to outdo the life:
Oh, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass;
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.
– Ben Jonson, Lines on a Picture of Shakespeare.
Humanism
• Morality plays religious themes
• Shakespeare explores human, not divine dilemmas
• Shakespeare’s religious tolerance: “wonderful
philosophical impartiality” ~Coleridge
• Humanism: human experience as a way of knowing
self, nature, or God
• Value to each individual human life
• Villains have sympathy
Humanism
• No simplistic moral or theological narratives
• Explores emotions and moral choices faced by
secular men in extreme circumstances
• Renaissance: arts, sciences, Greek and Roman
culture
• Rapidly expanding knowledge and
extraordinary artistic production
• Artistic and moral movement
Shakespeare’s Plays
Comedies
• All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Cymbeline, The Comedy of Errors, Love's
Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, The
Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, The Two Gentlemen of
Verona, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale
Tragedies
• Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth,
Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus
Histories
• 1,2, and 3 Henry VI, 1 and 2 Henry IV, King John, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II,
Richard III
Theatre in London
• London 200,000 people 1590’s: high mortality, crime,
unsanitary conditions, crowding
• Young men from countryside, like Shakespeare
• Pickpockets, prostitutes, commoners, gentlemen,
foreign fashions, theater red-light district
• Most important cultural form English Renaissance
• Sophisticated audience, novelty, variety, complexity
Theatres
• Playwrights in demand
• Birth of modern theater
• Daytime performances: open-air, rain or shine,
rowdy
• Social classes mix freely
• Poor: yard front of stage, penny
• Richer: seats, higher up cost more
• 1609 indoor, winter, intimate, more expensive
Theatres
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Theater more respectable
Plague decimates 1/3 to 2/3 of city’s population
Playhouses breeding grounds, often closed
Afraid of political unrest, so licensed
Companies 15 plays/month
Several thousand during Shakespeare’s time
Bare stage; new play every day, so big sets
expensive, impractical
Theatre
• Costumes main expense, language and
imagination
• Cannon burned down Globe in 1613, no one
killed but one man’s breeches caught fire,
bottle of ale doused
• Trapdoors, deus ex machina, sword fights, jigs
and dances
• Men and boys played all roles; women
forbidden because “immoral”
Language
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Shared culture: Bible and mythology
Flexible language, no rules or standards
Shakespeare 25,000 different words
Average adult 7,000-10,000 words, 800 then
Shakespeare invented maybe 1,700 words
Language
• Social class, personality, mood and situation
• Prose or verse class or situation
• Heightened emotional state or formal poetic,
otherwise prose
• Romeo and Juliet meet and exchange a perfect sonnet
• Figurative language: metaphor, simile, personification,
puns, rhythm, meter, symbolism, layers of meaning
• Syntax: emphasis on which part of speech to
accentuate, whatever comes last
Poetry
• Shakespeare wrote poetry from 1592-94 when
plague shut down theatres in London
• Wanted to make name for himself
• Poetry considered more sophisticated and
gentlemanly than theatre
• Narrative poetry and sonnets
Sonnets
• Sonetto, little song
• Italian, Dante, Petrarch
• Earl of Surrey adapted rhyme scheme to
English, known as Shakespearean sonnet
• Time, Beauty, and Verse
• Very popular 1590’s
• Collection known as a sequence or cycle
Sonnets
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Sonnets 1-126 to a young man
127-152 to a dark lady
153-154 to Cupid
About procreation and immortality in verse
Beauty also immortalized, preserved in poetry
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”~Keats
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”~Keats
Unrequited love
• Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde,
and the idea of courtly love
• Evolution of feeling and thought toward the
beloved: enchanted, worshipful, confounded,
disenchanted, and combative
• Dark lady: eyes and hair of black
• Adulterous affair ending in frustration and
deception
Sonnets
• “For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee
bright/Who are as black as hell, as dark as
night”
• Young man having and affair with dark lady?
• Love triangle, and then competition, rival poet
• Sonnet’s formal structure challenged to create
within constraints
• Sound, meaning, and image combine
Sonnets
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Fourteen lines=three quatrains+one couplet
Quatrain=four lines
Couplet=two lines
Iambic pentameter=five feet
Turn=change of direction
• How to read a sonnet: follow the train of
thought, look for shifts of tone or direction
• Thought, followed by example, then
comparison
• Layers of meaning, metaphor, words
connected to each other
• Couplet reveals even deeper meaning
Origins and Sources
• Did not create stories, aside from Love’s
Labor’s Lost and The Tempest
• Holinshed: Chronicles of England Scotland and
Ireland, 1587: plot elements, character names,
and descriptions, but reshaped to suit
dramatic purposes
• Edward Hall: The Union of the Two Noble and
Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, 1548
Origins and Sources
• Boccaccio: Decameron, 1353; people fleeing
plague in Florence, bawdy and full of
innuendo
• Romances (long narrative in poetry or prose)
• Seneca: tragedies of deception and revenge
• Plutarch: Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans
Origins and Sources
• Ovid: Metamorphoses, poetry, mythological
• Plautus: comedic drama from Greek plays;
low-class characters that outwit upper-class
Impact of Shakespeare’s Plays
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Emotional impact
Use of language to reveal or convey character
Extremes of human experience
Complexity of character, motivation, real and
three dimensional
• Dialogue reveals a character through his or her
words, directly and indirectly
• Much dialogue poetry; no people did not speak
this way
Impact
• Racy stories appealing to common person as
well as educated; evolving London, cultures
and classes mixing
• Ben Jonson: “not of an age, but for all time”
• Coat of arms “Not without merit”
• Didn’t protect his plays for posterity
• Half of plays printed by time of his death, rest
by friends: First Folio
Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?
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Authorship controversy
Documents show he lived and wrote the plays
Playbills named him
Plays published after performance with his
name
• Shareholder in company who performed them
• Other famous people wrote about him
Conspiracy
• Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is
often the correct one
• Commoner, country boy, son of illiterate
tradesman and mother, never went to
university; must have been aristocrat
• But English Renaissance and others of that
time had similar backgrounds: Marlowe,
Jonson, Donne, Spenser
Bacon
• Sir Francis Bacon: Renaissance man, royal
court, prolific writer, philosophy, politics,
scientific method
• How would he have had time?
• Twain a proponent
de Vere
• Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford: education, courtly
knowledge of Elizabeth I, writer, poet, comedy,
military, life parallels many plots of plays; died 1604,
and Shakespeare did plays in 1609 and 1613
• Freud a proponent
Marlowe
• Christopher Marlowe: anti-Stratfordians,
literary professional, son of tradesman,
university degree, born same year as
Shakespeare, but already famous when S.
came to London in 1590’s
Marlowe
• 1593 charged with heresy as atheist and
“murdered” by men in British intelligence and
took up Shakespeare’s name as a cover
• Marlowe was a spy, so it’s suspicious
• Marlovians’ literary analysis say “fingerprint”
the same
• But stark differences in style and content,
though Shakespeare certainly influenced by
him
Yet more conspiracy
• Sir WalterRaleigh: explorer, poet, philosopher,
statesman, courtier lived until 1618, so
chronology fits, never wrote a play, but did
poetry
• Queen Elizabeth I herself?
Separated at birth?
You be the judge.
Who was Shakespeare?
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So, was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?
Does it matter?
Shakespeare in a minute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMkuUAD
WW2A
• Original pronunciation
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7
n9s
Catholic?
• Queen Elizabeth outlawed: fined, tortured and
killed if conspiring
• Parents Catholic, may have been hired as a
tutor in a Catholic household
• Hoghton’s will: instruments and costumes,
mentions a William Shakeshafte
• Catholics treated respectfully in his plays
• No solid evidence
Gay?
• Historians: no such concept at that time
• May not have spent much time with Anne, but
did have three children
• Theatre traditional venue for gays
• Shakespeare wrote love poetry to men
• But also to women
• Inconclusive
English Renaissance
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1485-1625
Rebirth of civilization
Started earlier in Italy (1350-1550)
Rejected “dark ages” of Medieval Europe
Revived learning of ancient Greece and Rome
Age of Exploration
Religious and political turmoil
Dates
• 1485 Henry VII first Tudor king
• 1500 Everyman first performed (morality play)
• 1534 Henry VIII Act of Supremacy, Church of
England formed
• 1547 Edward VI becomes king
• 1553 Mary I “Bloody Mary” becomes queen
• 1558 Elizabeth I “Virgin Queen” becomes
queen
Dates
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1563 20,000 Londoners die in plague
1564 Shakespeare born
1580 Francis Drake circumnavigates globe
1588 English navy defeats Spanish Armada
1594 Romeo and Juliet written
1599 Globe Theatre opens
1600 East India Company founded
Dates
• 1603 James I becomes king
• 1606 Guy Fawkes executed for Gunpowder
Plot
• 1611 King James Bible published
• 1625 James I dies
Exploration
• Thirst for knowledge
• Exploration by sea
• Navigation advanced by compass and
astronomical knowledge
• 1492 Columbus sailed the…
• 1497 John Cabot reached Newfoundland
Religion
• Renaissance spirit and nationalism,
questioning Church
• Corrupt officials, questionable teachings,
hierarchy
• Erasmus and Thomas More raised questions
of morality and religion, focus of Renaissance
• 1517 Martin Luther, German monk, whose
protest led to split with Catholics and
Protestant Reformation
Tudors
• 1485 Wars of the Roses over
• Monarchs consolidated power over nobles
and assured stability
• Henry VII rebuilt treasury, established law and
order, increased prestige of monarchy
• Henry VIII Catholic, Defender of the Faith,
against Martin Luther
• Catherine of Aragon no son
Tudors
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Henry VIII wants annulment, not granted
Marries Anne Boleyn
Pope excommunicates
Henry dissolves Catholic Church’s holdings in
England and creates Church of England
• Thomas More, author of Utopia and a friend
executed for not renouncing Catholicism
Tudors
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Henry VIII marries six times
Mary and Elizabeth half sisters
Jane Seymour had son Edward
Edward becomes king at age nine, dies at 15
English replaces Latin in church
Book of Common Prayer required for public
worship
• Protestantism more or less established
Queen Mary
• Mary I Catholic and restored Catholicism to
Church of England and Pope’s authority
• Ordered 300 Protestants executed, “Bloody
Mary” causing anti-Catholic sentiment
• Ruled five years and died
• Half sister Elizabeth rules
Elizabeth I
• Elizabethan Age
• One of longest-reigning English monarchs
• Ushered in era of English supremacy and
prosperity
• Renaissance education: Greek and Latin classics
and patron of the arts and writers
• Reestablished supremacy over Church
• Ended religious turmoil by compromises that
both sides could live with
Elizabeth I
• Mary Stuart Catholic cousin next in line for
throne
• Imprisoned by Elizabeth for 18 years, still
instigated plots
• Parliament insists on Mary’s execution, 1587
Stuarts
• 1603 James VI of Scotland named successor and
becomes James I of England
• Son of Mary Stuart, Stuart dynasty, Protestant
• Jacobean Era 1603-1625
• Patron of the arts
• Expanded world power of England
• Established Jamestown, Virginia 1607
• Power struggle with Parliament “Divine Right”
• Persecuted Puritans, founded Plymouth Colony 1620 due
to religious intolerance
Literature
• Narratives, poetry, dramas, and comedies
• Subtle and satirical criticisms of church and
monarchy
• Lyric poetry over Medieval narrative poetry
• Sonnet: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare
• Fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, abab,
cdcd, efef, gg rhyme scheme
• Pastoral poetry: Marlowe and Raleigh
Elizabethan Drama and Lit
• Christopher Marlowe popular 1580s
• Tamburlaine and The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus, dies at 30
• Of course, Shakespeare
• King James Bible 1620 “most monumental prose
achievement of the entire English Renaissance”
• Fifty-four laborers seven years to translate into English
• Shakespeare was one of them
• Most widely-quoted and influential work in English
• Shakespeare close behind