William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's leading dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" or simply "the Bard". His surviving works, including collaborations, include some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, 3 long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, and they had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The company was later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, which has led to much speculation about his appearance, his personal life, his religious beliefs, and even fringe theories about whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, and they are regarded as some of the greatest works in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, which are considered among the finest works in English. In the last phase of his career, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances), such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and he collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime in editions of varying quality and accuracy. In 1623, however, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio. This collected edition of his dramatic works, published after his death, includes 36 of his plays. Its preface includes a poem by Ben Jonson, a rival of Shakespeare, who praised him with the now-famous words: "not of an age, but for all time".

Life

Main article: Life of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a glover, and Mary Arden. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and was probably educated at the King's New School there. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, and they had three children. After 1592, he was known as part of the London theatre scene. His plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company he was part of, which became the King's Men after James I became king. Shakespeare was also an actor and continued to act in his own and other plays.

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford, and he is thought to have retired to Stratford some years before his death. He died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52, and was buried in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford two days later. He left the bulk of his estate to his elder daughter, Susanna.

Plays

Most playwrights of his time worked with others at some point, and Shakespeare did so mostly early and late in his career. His first recorded works were Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a popularity of historical drama. Other early plays, such as Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, may also belong to this early time. His first histories drew on Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed and showed the harm done by weak or corrupt rule. The early plays were influenced by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Seneca, and the traditions of medieval drama. In the mid-1590s his comedies became more romantic, with A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice (which includes the moneylender Shylock), Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. He also wrote histories such as Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V, where Falstaff is a memorable character. This period also included the famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, which was based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.

In the early 1600s Shakespeare wrote the so-called problem plays, including Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well, along with many of his best known tragedies. Many critics think these tragedies show his greatest skill. Hamlet is probably the most analysed Shakespearean character, especially for his soliloquy beginning "To be or not to be; that is the question". In Othello and King Lear, the heroes are undone by hasty mistakes in judgement. In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of his tragedies, ambition leads Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to take the throne, and their own guilt destroys them. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, were called his most successful by T. S. Eliot. In his final period he wrote romances or tragicomedies, including Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and the collaboration Pericles, Prince of Tyre. These plays end with reconciliation and forgiveness. He also collaborated on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, sorted into comedies, histories, and tragedies. The critic Edward Dowden called some late comedies romances, and Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" in 1896 for four plays, including Hamlet. The Globe Theatre, built by the actors on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark, opened in 1599, and most of his greatest later plays were written for it. The company was renamed the King's Men in 1603, and Richard Burbage played the leading role in many first performances. In 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell published the First Folio, which contained 36 texts, and many earlier versions survive in differing forms, as described by Alfred Pollard and the bad quartos.

Poems

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

In 1593 and 1594, when theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the first, the innocent Adonis turns away the advances of Venus. In the second, the virtuous wife Lucrece is wronged by the lustful Tarquin. Inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and confusion that come from uncontrolled desire. Both were popular and often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third poem, A Lover's Complaint, was printed in the 1609 Sonnets, and most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote it. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under his name without his permission.

The Sonnets, published in 1609, were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not sure when each of the 154 sonnets was written, but they seem to have been written throughout his career for private readers. Francis Meres had already praised Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" in 1598. The collection seems to contain two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable desire for a married woman (the "dark lady"), and one about troubled love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It is unclear whether these people were real. The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", and it is not known who he was or whether Shakespeare approved the publication. The publisher was Thomas Thorpe. Critics praise the sonnets as a deep look at love, passion, death, and time, and William Wordsworth believed that in them "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The opening lines of Sonnet 18 begin, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

Style

Main article: Shakespeare's writing style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the traditional style of his day. The language was stylised and did not always grow naturally from the characters or the drama. The poetry uses long, sometimes elaborate metaphors, and much of it was written for actors to declaim rather than speak. Some critics feel the grand speeches in Titus Andronicus slow the action, and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.

Shakespeare soon began to adapt these traditional styles. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama, and Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. He mixed the old and new styles throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example. By the mid-1590s, in plays such as Richard II and A Midsummer Night's Dream, he had begun to write more natural poetry, tuning his metaphors to the needs of the drama. His standard form was blank verse, written in iambic pentameter: usually unrhymed, with ten syllables per line and a stress on every second syllable. His early blank verse often stopped at the end of lines, which risked monotony. Once he mastered it, he began to vary its flow, as in Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Critic A. C. Bradley described this later style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular." Shakespeare used run-on lines and irregular pauses, as in Macbeth, where the language moves quickly from one metaphor to another. Like other playwrights of his time, he took stories from sources such as Plutarch and Raphael Holinshed, reshaping each plot to show many sides of the story. In the late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style that emphasised the illusion of theatre.

Legacy

Influence

Main article: Shakespeare's influence

Shakespeare's work had a lasting impact on theatre and literature. He expanded what writers could do with characterisation, plot, language, and genre, and he used soliloquies to explore characters' minds. Poets such as the Romantic poets tried to revive his style, with little success. The critic George Steiner called English verse dramas from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Alfred, Lord Tennyson "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes," and John Milton praised him in verse. Novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens were also influenced by him, and Herman Melville's Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a tragic hero inspired by King Lear. Scholars have linked 20,000 pieces of music to his works, including Felix Mendelssohn's overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet. Giuseppe Verdi wrote operas based on Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. Painters such as the Pre-Raphaelites were inspired by him, and William Hogarth's painting of David Garrick playing Richard III helped establish theatrical portraiture in Britain. Filmmakers have also adapted his plays, including Akira Kurosawa with Throne of Blood and Ran, Max Reinhardt, Laurence Olivier with Hamlet, and Al Pacino with Looking For Richard. Orson Welles, who loved Shakespeare his whole life, directed and starred in Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, in which he played John Falstaff. His English language also shaped modern English: Samuel Johnson quoted him more than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, and phrases like "with bated breath" and "a foregone conclusion" entered everyday speech. His influence also grew in Germany, where his plays were widely translated from the 18th century, partly through the travelling theatre company of Abel Seyler, and became a "classic of the German Weimar era." Christoph Martin Wieland produced the first complete translations of his plays in any language. The Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, translated Macbeth into German, and Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, especially that of Hamlet. The actor Simon Callow writes that he "has something for everyone." According to Guinness World Records, Shakespeare remains the world's best-selling playwright, and his plays have been translated into over 80 languages, including Esperanto and Klingon. The Globe to Globe Festival in London (2012) staged all 37 plays in 37 languages, including Hamlet in Lithuanian and The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew by Habima Theatre, Israel's national theatre.

Critical reputation

Main articles: Reputation of William Shakespeare and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

He was not of an age, but for all time.

— Ben Jonson

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he was still praised. In 1598 the cleric and author Francis Meres called him "the most excellent" English playwright in both comedy and tragedy. The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge placed him alongside Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Edmund Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called him the "Soul of the age," even though Jonson had also remarked that Shakespeare "wanted art." After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, critics mostly ranked him below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, and Thomas Rymer criticised him for mixing comedy with tragedy. However, the poet and critic John Dryden admired him highly, saying "I love Shakespeare." During the 18th century, scholarly editions by Samuel Johnson and Edmond Malone added to his growing reputation, and by 1800 he was firmly seen as the national poet, known as the "Bard of Avon." His reputation also spread abroad, and writers such as Voltaire, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo championed him.

During the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised him, and August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th century, admiration often bordered on adulation, and Thomas Carlyle called him a "King Shakespeare." The Victorians staged his plays as grand spectacles. George Bernard Shaw mocked this worship as "bardolatry," claiming that the naturalism of Henrik Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare outdated. In the early 20th century, the modernist movement did not reject Shakespeare but used his work for the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists staged his plays, and the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht developed epic theatre under his influence. T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" made him truly modern, and Eliot, G. Wilson Knight, and the school of New Criticism encouraged close study of his imagery. Later critical approaches paved the way for post-modern studies, and Harold Bloom wrote that Shakespeare was "larger than Plato and than St. Augustine." In the 21st century, his reputation remains unmatched. Emma Smith of the University of Oxford called him "the world's greatest playwright" in 2019, and Dennis Kennedy of Trinity College Dublin noted in 2004 that he is "the most performed playwright in the world." Gary Taylor, co-editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare (2017), explained that many leading writers and readers over the last four centuries have considered him the best writer in English, or the greatest genius of all time.

Speculation

Main article: Shakespeare authorship question

Main article: Religious views of William Shakespeare

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

Main article: Portraits of Shakespeare

About 230 years after Shakespeare died, people began to doubt that he wrote the works attributed to him. Other possible writers include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Almost all Shakespeare experts see this as a fringe idea, though interest continues, especially in the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship. Shakespeare followed the official state religion, but his private beliefs are debated. Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula, and he was a confirmed member of the Church of England. Some scholars think his family were Catholics, which was against the law at the time. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a Catholic family, and his father, John Shakespeare, may have signed a Catholic statement of faith, but that document is now lost. Other authors say there is not enough evidence to be sure.

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18 he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Some readers think his sonnets show love for a young man, while others see intense friendship. The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets are addressed to a married woman. No written description of his appearance survives, and no evidence shows he commissioned a portrait. Some scholars think the Droeshout portrait, which Ben Jonson approved as a good likeness, and his Stratford monument give the best clues. Art historian Tarnya Cooper concluded that the Chandos portrait had the strongest claim to be a true portrait, after a three-year study supported by the National Portrait Gallery, London.