William Shakespeare

The famous Chandos portrait that is believed to be of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (Baptized April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright. Shakespeare has the reputation as one of the greatest writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as being one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists. Indeed, some critics have raised their praise of him to the level of “bardolatry.”

Shakespeare wrote his works between 1586 and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are often uncertain. Shakespeare is 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 there has been much speculation and debate about whether someone else wrote his plays and poetry.

Early life

William Shakespeare was born in and lived on Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman and alderman, and 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 as his birthday. This date is convenient as 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. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Hathaway, who was 25, was seven years his senior. Two neighbors of Anne posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There was some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably as Anne was three months pregnant.

File:Shakspeare signature.jpg

Shakespeare's signature, from his will

After his marriage, Shakespeare left no traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. 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.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London. Around this time he evidently had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country." (The italicized line parodies the phrase "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part III.)

In addition to being a playwright, Shakespeare was also an actor and, eventually, part-owner of a playing company known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men. The company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the King's Men.

In 1596 Shakespeare's son Hamnet died; some suspect that his death was part of the inspiration behind Hamlet. Other possible inspirations for Hamlet include the death of his father and the imprisonment of Lord Southampton, both of which happened around the time the play was written, in 1601.

By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in his Humor by Ben Jonson. Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and to own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years

Shakespeare's last two plays were written in 1613, after which he appears to have retired to Stratford. He died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 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

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^[11]), 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: Early comedies and histories (such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV, Part I), Middle period (which includes his most famous tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear), and Shakespeare's 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 negative issues as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and egotism. 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 and 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 Shakespeare's textual problem, often noted with his plays. This means that several of the plays have different textual versions. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions also stem from printers' errors, compositors' misreadings or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardized spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, further adding to the transcribers' confusion. Modern scholars also believe Shakespeare revised his plays throughout the years, which could lead 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 are 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 theater cannot be overestimated. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature, he also transformed English theater by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterization, plot, action, language and genre.^[12] His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theater, permitting it to be admired by intellectuals as well as by those seeking pure entertainment.

Theater was changing when Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Previously, the commonest forms of popular English theater were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes that 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).^[13] Meanwhile, at the universities, academic plays were being staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, often performed in Latin, placed a greater emphasis on poetic dialog but emphasized lengthy speechifying over physical stage 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 theater. Their plays blended the old morality drama with academic theater 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.

Shakespeare and religion

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

Over the years, there have been a number of speculations about the religious beliefs of William Shakespeare. While little direct evidence exists, circumstantial evidence suggests that Shakespeare's family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was Catholic, though there is disagreement over whether he in fact was.

Shakespeare's family

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, and recusancy laws made Catholicism illegal. Some historians maintain that in Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed faith. Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery. Although the tract document itself has been lost, 20th century evidence has linked Malone's reported wording of the tract definitively to a testament written by Charles Borromeo and circulated by Edmund Campion, copies of which still exist in Italian and English. John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant. Then again, avoiding creditors may have merely been a convenient pretext for a recusant's avoidance of the established church's services.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. In 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion in a Protestant service, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent. Archdeacon Richard Davies, an 18th century Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst".

Shakespeare's schooling

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathisers, and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit. Thomas Jenkins, who succeeded Hunt as teacher in the grammar school, was a student of Edmund Campion at St. John's College, Oxford. Jenkins's successor at the grammar school in 1579, John Cottam, was the brother of Jesuit priest Thomas Cottam. A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, joined the Jesuits at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytising along with Thomas Cottam.

John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster, a tale augmented in the 20th century with the theory that his employer might have been Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a prominent Catholic landowner who left money in his will to a certain "William Shakeshafte", referencing theatrical costumes and paraphernalia. Shakespeare's grandfather Richard had also once used the name Shakeshafte. Ackroyd adds that study of the marginal notes in the Hoghton family copy of Edward Hall's Chronicles, an important source for Shakespeare's early histories, shows that they were in "probability" in Shakespeare's writing.

Catholic sympathies

Shakespeare's marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith in the town of Temple Grafton a few miles from Stratford. In 1586 the crown named Frith, who maintained the appearance of Protestantism, as a Roman Catholic priest. Some surmise Shakespeare wed in Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament. He was thought to have rushed his marriage ceremony, Anne was 3 months pregnant.

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, one historian, Clare Asquith, has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', the people pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.

Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted. The 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only his Catholicism, but whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Stephen Greenblatt suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives. An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.

Greenblatt makes the case that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth refers to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet after his execution in 1606. He allows, however, that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation rather than any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause—indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Shakespeare was likely aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley as well as the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.

Notes and references

	William Shakespeare and his works
General information	Biography | Style | influence | Reputation | Religion | Sexuality | Shakespearean Authorship Question
Tragedies	Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Hamlet | Julius Caesar | King Lear | Macbeth | Othello | Romeo and Juliet | Timon of Athens | Titus Andronicus | Troilus and Cressida
Comedies	All's Well That Ends Well | As You Like It | The Comedy of Errors | Cymbeline | 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, Prince of Tyre | The Taming of the Shrew | The Tempest | Twelfth Night, or What You Will | The Two Gentlemen of Verona | The Two Noble Kinsmen | The Winter's Tale
Histories	King John | Richard II | Henry IV, Part 1 | Henry IV, Part 2 | Henry V | Henry VI, part 1 | Henry VI, part 2 | Henry VI, part 3 | Richard III | Henry VIII
Poems	Sonnets | Venus and Adonis | The Rape of Lucrece | The Passionate Pilgrim | The Phoenix and the Turtle | A Lover's Complaint
Apocrypha and Lost Plays	Edward III | Sir Thomas More | Cardenio (lost) | Love's Labour's Won (lost) | The Birth of Merlin | Locrine | The London Prodigal | The Puritan | The Second Maiden's Tragedy | Richard II, Part I: Thomas of Woodstock | Sir John Oldcastle | Thomas Lord Cromwell | A Yorkshire Tragedy | Fair Em | Mucedorus | The Merry Devil of Edmonton | Arden of Faversham | Edmund Ironside | Vortigern and Rowena
Other play information	Shakespeare's plays | Shakespeare in performance | Chronology of Shakespeare plays | Oxfordian chronology | Shakespeare on screen | BBC Television Shakespeare | Titles based on Shakespeare | List of characters | Problem Plays | List of historical characters | Ghost characters

Reputation

Shakespeare's reputation has grown considerably through the years. During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642–1660, the new Restoration theater 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 seventeenth 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 theater. By the early nineteenth 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 nineteenth 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 of course provoked a negative reaction. In the twenty-first 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

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. Many questions pertaining to his sudden wealth, lack of a library left to his family and lack of any correspondence or evidence of a literary life after he returns to Stratford also contribute to the speculation.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, the playwright Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Francis Baconbecame the most prominent alternative candidates for authorship of the Shakespeare canon. Other more fanciful proposals have included Sir Walter Raleigh and the highly learned Queen Elizabeth herself. Most Shakespeare scholars consider the arguments against Shakespeare's authorship to be baseless, and attribute the debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of Shakespeare's life. Still, many questions remain about Shakespeare's education, his unequaled mastery of the English language, and profound understanding of the human heart and its complex motivations.

Shakespeare's works has raised the question of Shakespeare's sexuality in recent years. Some 26 of the sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the "Dark Lady"), but 126 are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focuses 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. Elizabethans also frequently wrote about friendship in more intense language than is common today. The etiquette of chivalry and brotherly love was also in evidence at that time.

Bibliography

Comedies

• The Tempest
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice'
• As You Like It
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Twelfth Night or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• The Two Noble Kinsmen

Histories

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, Part I
• Henry IV, Part II
• Henry V
• Henry VI, Part I
• Henry VI, Part II
• Henry VI, Part III
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

Tragedies

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

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won
• Cardenio

Poems

• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim
• ”The Phoenix and the Turtle”
• A Lover's Complaint

Apocrypha

• Edward III
• Sir Thomas More

Notes

1. ^  The Spelling and Pronunciation of Shakespeare's Name by David Kathman. Access date: Dec. 22, 2006.
2. ^  Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Access date: Dec. 22, 2006.
3. ^  Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare's Reading. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0198711697
4. ^  Miola.
5. ^  Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy.

Further reading

• Anderson, Mark. 2005. Shakespeare by Another Name: Biography of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare. New York: Gotham Books. ISBN 1592401031
• Burgess, Anthony. 1964. Nothing Like The Sun. Reissue edition, 1996. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 039331507X

Fictionalized biography.

• Burgess, Anthony. 1970. Shakespeare. New edition, 2002. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0786709723
• Durst, Mose. 2001. Shakespeare's Plays: A Study of Friendship and Love. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Corporation. ISBN 1401033652
• Fields, Bertram. 2005. Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0060775599
• Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0393050572
• Pemble, John. 2005. Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France. London: Hambledon & London. ISBN 1852854529

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare — complete works and a full concordance
• British Library; Original 93 copies in quarto
• Classic-literature.co.uk
• Works by William Shakespeare. Project Gutenberg
• Upenn.edu online books page for Shakespeare
• Chapter-indexed, searchable versions of Shakespeare's works
• Touchstone - UK Shakespeare collections
• Four works in online form
• Full text of plays erroneously attributed to Shakespeare
• The original shakespeare.com
• Essay on Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens
• Shakespeare's plays and poems in audio and video
• The Illustrated Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare Forums
• Shakespeare Online
• National Geographic Article about Shakespeare's Coinages
• Poetry Archive: 430 poems of William Shakespeare
• Shakespeare on Film Bibliography (via U.C. Berkeley)

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