William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised April 26, 1564 - died April 23 ( New style: May 3) 1616) was an English poet and playwright. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, as well as one of the greatest in Western literature, and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.
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 characterisation, 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, because spelling in Elizabethan times was not fixed and absolute) was born in Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-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 neighbours 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'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 honour 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.
- To dig the dust enclosed here.
Works
Plays
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 round 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 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 never clear.
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 by two actors who had been in Shakespeare's company; John Hemings and William Condell. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic of the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays " problem plays" as they elude easy categorisation, 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' misreadings or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardised 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 authorised 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 characterisation, 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 and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture, an ironic fate considering Shakespeare's target audiences. At the same time, Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright and are frequently adapted into film.