William Shakespeare

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• Born: 23 April 1564
• Birthplace: Stratford-upon-Avon, England
• Died: 23 April 1616
• Best Known As: The famed author of Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare is the grand literary figure of the Western world. During England's Elizabethan period he wrote dozens of plays which continue to dominate world theater 400 years later. Shakespeare handled high drama, romance and slapstick comedy with equal ease, and so famous are his words that his quotes, from "To be or not to be" to "Parting is such sweet sorrow," take up more than 70 pages in the latest editions of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. His works rival the King James Bible (also produced in the 1600s) as a source of oft-quoted English phrases. Shakespeare is known as "the Bard of Avon," in a nod to his birthplace, and many of his plays were originally performed in the famous Globe Theater in London. Among his best-known plays are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and MacBeth. He is also known for his poetry, especially his sonnets.

So mighty was Shakespeare's output that some scholars insist another, greater mind must have written some or all of his plays. (Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere have all been candidates.) But this theory has never been proved... Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582. Their daughter Susannah was born in 1583, and the twins Judith and Hamnet were born in 1585. Hamnet died in 1596... Shakespeare's precise birthdate is not known; he was baptized on 26 April 1564, and over time 23 April has become the accepted date of birth, in part because he also died on 23 April in 1616.

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616). The Elizabethan playwright's work came to American stages relatively early, although there have since been notable peaks and valleys in his popularity with playgoers and producers. The first Shakespearean play performed on an American stage was probably Richard III, which Thomas Kean acted in New York in 1750 and may have played earlier in Philadelphia. Kean and his partner Walter Murray did not use Shakespeare's actual text but rather Colley Cibber's version. Indeed, the use of Restoration and 18th‐century redactions of virtually all of Shakespeare's plays was commonplace as much in America as in London until well into the last half of the 19th century. For the remainder of the 18th century and the very early years of the next, the Shakespearean repertory of the time was presented as part of the regular season by the stock companies that dominated the various American theatrical centers. However, with the appearance of noted tragedians such as Cooper, Cooke, and Edmund Kean, and the rise of the star system, the great actors began to tour. They generally toured alone, accepting whatever supporting casts and scenery local playhouses offered. Not until after the Civil War did great tragedians such as Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett begin to travel with specially selected companies and their own scenery. These touring ensembles peaked at the turn of the century, notably with the company headed by Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern. The productions of the great itinerant ensembles, as well as those mountings by distinguished stock companies from Burton's through Daly's, were, according to modern standards, top‐heavy with elaborate scenery. In the 20th century the rise of a more blatant commercialism on Broadway, the growth of an audience not steeped in older traditions, and perhaps simply a surfeit of Shakespeare caused a gradual dropping off of productions. Thereafter, most noted productions were mounted as occasional vehicles for special stars. To some extent collegiate playhouses compensated for this falling away. About the time of World War I, Shakespearean productions also discarded their sumptuous settings, relying thereafter primarily on more suggestive sets and imaginative lighting. These changes came about as much for aesthetic reasons as for commercial ones. In the 1930s and beyond Shakespearean festivals were established from Oregon to Connecticut, and many of the rarely performed works, no longer deemed profitable in mainstream theatres, were offered here along with the more famous plays. Starting in the 1950s there was an increase in the number of productions, the result of what would become the New York Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan and the development of regional theatres across the country, most of which would include one of the Bard's works on a regular basis. Today the only Shakespeare productions on Broadway are those boasting stars or coming from a renowned international troupe, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company. In an ambitious move, producer Joseph Papp offered the entire canon beginning in 1988 and not completed until 1997, six years after his death.

The following Shakespeare plays each have their own entry: Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry IV, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. As for the other works, a thumbnail history in America follows.

All's Well That Ends Well had been performed on rare occasions by collegiate and regional theatres, but the New York Shakespeare Festival gave it its professional premiere, as far as the city was concerned, when it included it in the 1966 season in Central Park. In 1983 the Royal Shakespeare Company offered a critically acclaimed mounting, set at the time of World War I, that marked its first appearance in a Broadway theatre. The Comedy of Errors was first done at the Park Theatre in 1804, but its most memorable American revival was the free‐wheeling version offered with William H. Crane and Stuart Robson in 1878 and again in 1885. It has been performed intermittently since but is probably most familiar to playgoers through the Rodgers and Hart musical version, The Boys from Syracuse (1938), which employed only a single line of the text. Perhaps even more removed was a Lincoln Center production in 1987 that retained Shakespeare's text but was performed by the juggling Flying Karamazov Brothers as a onering circus. Coriolanus was presented initially at Philadelphia's Southwark Theatre in 1767 and it remained popular with all the classic tragedians, including Edwin Forrest and John McCullough, and is still revived with some regularity. Christopher Walken was particularly praised as the Roman emperor in a 1988 Public Theatre mounting. Cymbeline had its American premiere at the Southwark Theatre in 1767 with Miss Cheer as Imogen and the younger Hallam as Posthumus. Never very popular, it nonetheless provided successful vehicles for Adelaide Neilson and Viola Allen but has rarely been revived in modern times. Cooper was apparently the first American Henry V at the Park Theatre in 1804. One of the least popular of the plays for many years, it saw new life in the 1960s and 1970s when presented as an antiwar piece. The three parts of the history Henry VI have been presented in America only on collegiate and festival stages or the occasional mounting by a visiting company. The pageant play Henry VIII was first offered to New York in 1799. Although infrequently done, it was part of the season mounted in 1946 by the American Repertory Theatre with Victor Jory as Henry, Eva Le Gallienne as Katharine of Aragon, and Walter Hampden as Cardinal Wolsey. King John was first mounted at the Southwark Theatre in 1768 with Douglass in the title role, but it has never been popular with American playgoers, although such celebrated performers as McCullough and Modjeska have starred in revivals.

Love's Labours Lost was not produced in New York until Daly's celebrated 1874 mounting, and it continues as one of the plays least‐often resurrected. The earliest known American presentation of the dark comedy Measure for Measure is in 1818 in New York with performances by Mr. and Mrs. John Barnes. Adelaide Neilson headed a memorable 1880 mounting, although critical reaction to the play itself as “repulsively immoral” may explain the relative infrequency of Victorian stagings. The changing moral climate in the 1950s and 1960s was probably a factor in the increasing revivals of Measure for Measure, especially at Canada's Shakespeare Festival and some intriguing productions at the Public Theatre. Stagings of Pericles have pretty much been confined to collegiate and festival theatres. Richard II was first offered to New York by James W. Wallack in 1819. It is one of the rare Shakespearean plays that has proved far more popular in the 20th century than it was earlier. Noteworthy among contemporary revivals was Maurice Evans's 1937 production, to which he returned on several later occasions. The Tempest was first presented in 1770 at the Southwark Theatre in Dryden's redaction, and it was many years before a faithful rendering was presented. A movement toward textual accuracy was seen in one of the great 19th‐century productions, that of William E. Burton in 1854 with Charles Fisher as Prospero and Burton as Caliban. Besides restoring much, although not all, of the original text, Burton employed music by Arne, Purcell, and, somewhat anachronistically, Halévy and emphasized pictorial spectacle. By contrast, a notable modern version, staged by Margaret Webster in 1945 with Arnold Moss as Prospero and Canada Lee as Caliban, while rearranging the original text at some major points, offered relatively lean, suggestive settings and costumes and employed modern music by David Diamond. More recent New York Prosperos of note have been Sam Waterston in 1974, Frank Langella in 1989, and Patrick Stewart in 1995. Timon of Athens was a surprise success for the National Actors Theatre in 1993, with Brian Bedford giving a commanding performance in the title role. Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida have been almost wholly in collegiate and festival theatres, although the Old Vic offered the latter in its 1956 visit. Ellen and Charles Kean were the first performers to offer Americans The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which they acted during their 1846 visit. Daly staged a major revival in 1895. While rarely mounted since, except at collegiate and festival productions, it provided the source of a successful musical of the same name (minus the “the”) in 1971. Produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, it employed rock music; some highly objectionable, scatological lyrics; and a mixture of modern, skeletonized settings with period costuming. The Winter's Tale was called Florizel and Perdita when it was first presented in 1795. Its most successful 19th‐century revival was that of Mary Anderson, who assumed the roles of both Hermione and Perdita. A 1946 Theatre Guild revival was short‐lived.

• Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
• Born: ca. 1564 04 23
• Died: ca. 1616 04 23

Biography

One of the greatest writers of all time, Shakespeare, the peerless poet of the Sonnets and the creator of such dramatic masterpieces as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, is a playwright of paradigmatic originality. In his discussion of the Western literary canon, critic Harold Bloom declared: "Shakespeare and Dante are the center of the Canon because they excel all other Western writer in cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention." However, one could go a step further and suggest that Shakespeare defines the Western canon because he transcends it. If Shakespeare, as Ben Jonson declared, "was not of an age, but for all time," the great dramatist, one could argue, spoke to the ultimate concerns of humankind, regardless of period or cultural tradition. For example, Hamlet, which has been performed all over the world, probes the ultimate mysteries of life and death, describing the protagonist's search for glimpses of higher meaning in his chaotic existence, a struggle every human being deeply understands. What certainly distinguishes Shakespeare from other dramatists, in addition to his boundless linguistic inventiveness and extraordinary descriptive power, is a prodigious imagination, which enabled him to create characters that appear, owing to their tremendous life force, out of place in the world of fiction. While there is always something artificial about literary characters, "Shakespeare's characters," according to Émile Legouis, "whether good or bad, whether moving among the realities of history or among the most romantic happenings, have an unfailing humanity which makes them plausible and keeps them within the orbit of our sympathy."

Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon, attended school, married young, and went to London, around 1585, without his family, to seek his fortune. Already known as an actor and playwright in 1592, he published his Venus and Adonis, a long poem, the following year. In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a group which was renamed the King's Men after James I ascended the throne. He became a partner in the recently-founded Globe Theatre a few years later. In 1609, the King's Men leased Blackfriars Theatre, which served a more cultivated audience. A successful businessman, Shakespeare invested in real estate, attaining a level of prosperity which afforded him a comfortable retirement. He died in 1616.

Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre consists of thirty-eight plays, including several immortal masterpieces, such as Richard III (1593), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1595), Julius Caesar (1599), Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), King Lear, Macbeth (1606), and The Tempest (1611).

Shakespeare's works have inspired much music: hundreds of operas, including masterpieces such as Verdi's Otello, many songs, and incidental music, exemplified by Mendelssohn's brilliant A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like music, Shakespeare's art is universal; like music, his artistic universe convincingly undermines the tacit assumption that imaginary worlds lack the substantiality we blindly assign to reality. Finally, Shakespeare profoundly understood the heavenly nature of music, as evidenced by this passage from his Merchant of Venice (V. 1):

"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with the patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings

Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubims;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."







~ Zoran Minderovic, All Music Guide

The English playwright, poet, and actor William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of English writers and one of the most extraordinary creators in human history.

The most crucial fact about William Shakespeare's career is that he was a popular dramatist. Born 6 years after Queen Elizabeth I had ascended the throne, contemporary with the high period of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare had the good luck to find in the theater of London a medium just coming into its own and an audience, drawn from a wide range of social classes, eager to reward talents of the sort he possessed. His entire life was committed to the public theater, and he seems to have written nondramatic poetry only when enforced closings of the theater made writing plays impractical. It is equally remarkable that his days in the theater were almost exactly contemporary with the theater's other outstanding achievements - the work, for example, of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.

Shakespeare was born on or just before April 23, 1564, in the small but then important Warwickshire town of Stratford. His mother, born Mary Arden, was the daughter of a landowner from a neighboring village. His father, John, son of a farmer, was a glove maker and trader in farm produce; he had achieved a position of some eminence in the prosperous market town by the time of his son's birth, holding a number of responsible positions in Stratford's government and serving as mayor in 1569. By 1576, however, John Shakespeare had begun to encounter the financial difficulties which were to plague him until his death in 1601.

Though no personal documents survive from Shakespeare's school years, his literary work shows the mark of the excellent if grueling education offered at the Stratford grammar school (some reminiscences of Stratford school days may have lent amusing touches to scenes in The Merry Wives of Windsor). Like other Elizabethan schoolboys, Shakespeare studied Latin grammar during the early years, then progressed to the study of logic, rhetoric, composition, oration, versification, and the monuments of Roman literature. The work was conducted in Latin and relied heavily on rote memorization and the master's rod. A plausible tradition holds that William had to discontinue his education when about 13 in order to help his father. At 18 he married Ann Hathaway, a Stratford girl. They had three children (Susanna, 1583-1649; Hamnet, 1585-1596; and his twin, Judith, 1585-1662) and who was to survive him by 7 years. Shakespeare remained actively involved in Stratford affairs throughout his life, even when living in London, and retired there at the end of his career.

The years between 1585 and 1592, having left no evidence as to Shakespeare's activities, have been the focus of considerable speculation; among other things, conjecture would have him a traveling actor or a country schoolmaster. The earliest surviving notice of his career in London is a jealous attack on the "upstart crow" by Robert Greene, a playwright, professional man of letters, and profligate whose career was at an end in 1592 though he was only 6 years older than Shakespeare. Greene's outcry testifies, both in its passion and in the work it implies Shakespeare had been doing for some time, that the young poet had already established himself in the capital. So does the quality of Shakespeare's first plays: it is hard to believe that even Shakespeare could have shown such mastery without several years of apprenticeship.

Early Career

Shakespeare's first extant play is probably The Comedy of Errors (1590; like most dates for the plays, this is conjectural and may be a year or two off), a brilliant and intricate farce involving two sets of identical twins and based on two already-complicated comedies by the Roman Plautus. Though less fully achieved, his next comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591), is more prophetic of Shakespeare's later comedy, for its plot depends on such devices as a faithful girl who educates her fickle lover, romantic woods, a girl dressed as a boy, sudden reformations, music, and happy marriages at the end. The last of the first comedies, Love's Labour's Lost (1593), is romantic again, dealing with the attempt of three young men to withdraw from the world and women for 3 years to study in their king's "little Academe," and their quick surrender to a group of young ladies who come to lodge nearby. If the first of the comedies is most notable for its plotting and the second for its romantic elements, the third is distinguished by its dazzling language and its gallery of comic types. Already Shakespeare had learned to fuse conventional characters with convincing representations of the human life he knew.

Though little read and performed now, Shakespeare's first plays in the popular "chronicle," or history, genre are equally ambitious and impressive. Dealing with the tumultuous events of English history between the death of Henry V in 1422 and the accession of Henry VII in 1485 (which began the period of Tudor stability maintained by Shakespeare's own queen), the three "parts" of Henry VI (1592) and Richard III (1594) are no tentative experiments in the form: rather they constitute a gigantic tetralogy, in which each part is a superb play individually and an integral part of an epic sequence. Nothing so ambitious had ever been attempted in England in a form hitherto marked by slapdash formlessness.

Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus (1593), reveals similar ambition. Though its chamber of horrors - including mutilations and ingenious murders - strikes the modern reader as belonging to a theatrical tradition no longer viable, the play is in fact a brilliant and successful attempt to outdo the efforts of Shakespeare's predecessors in the lurid tradition of the revenge play.

When the theaters were closed because of plague during much of 1593-1594, Shakespeare looked to nondramatic poetry for his support and wrote two narrative masterpieces, the seriocomic Venus and Adonis and the tragic Rape of Lucrece, for a wealthy patron, the Earl of Southampton. Both poems carry the sophisticated techniques of Elizabethan narrative verse to their highest point, drawing on the resources of Renaissance mythological and symbolic traditions.

Shakespeare's most famous poems, probably composed in this period but not published until 1609, and then not by the author, are the 154 sonnets, the supreme English examples of the form. Writing at the end of a brief, frenzied vogue for sequences of sonnets, Shakespeare found in the conventional 14-line lyric with its fixed rhyme scheme a vehicle for inexhaustible technical innovations - for Shakespeare even more than for other poets, the restrictive nature of the sonnet generates a paradoxical freedom of invention that is the life of the form - and for the expression of emotions and ideas ranging from the frivolous to the tragic. Though often suggestive of autobiographical revelation, the sonnets cannot be proved to be any the less fictions than the plays. The identity of their dedicatee, "Mr. W. H.," remains a mystery, as does the question of whether there were real-life counterparts to the famous "dark lady" and the unfaithful friend who are the subject of a number of the poems. But the chief value of these poems is intrinsic: the sonnets alone would have established Shakespeare's preeminence among English poets.

Lord Chamberlain's Men

By 1594 Shakespeare was fully engaged in his career. In that year he became principal writer for the successful Lord Chamberlain's Men - one of the two leading companies of actors; a regular actor in the company; and a "sharer," or partner, in the group of artist-managers who ran the entire operation and were in 1599 to have the Globe Theater built on the south bank of the Thames. The company performed regularly in unroofed but elaborate theaters. Required by law to be set outside the city limits, these theaters were the pride of London, among the first places shown to visiting foreigners, and seated up to 3,000 people. The actors played on a huge platform stage equipped with additional playing levels and surrounded on three sides by the audience; the absence of scenery made possible a flow of scenes comparable to that of the movies, and music, costumes, and ingenious stage machinery created successful illusions under the afternoon sun.

For this company Shakespeare produced a steady outpouring of plays. The comedies include The Taming of the Shrew (1594), fascinating in light of the first comedies since it combines with an Italian-style plot, in which all the action occurs in one day, a more characteristically English and Shakespearean plot, the taming of Kate, in which much more time passes; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), in which "rude mechanicals," artisans without imagination, become entangled with fairies and magic potions in the moonlit woods to which young lovers have fled from a tyrannical adult society; The Merchant of Venice (1596), which contributed Shylock and Portia to the English literary tradition; Much Ado about Nothing (1598), with a melodramatic main plot whose heroine is maligned and almost driven to death by a conniving villain and a comic subplot whose Beatrice and Benedick remain the archetypical sparring lovers; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599), held by tradition to have been written in response to the Queen's request that Shakespeare write another play about Falstaff (who had appeared in Henry IV), this time in love; and in 1600 the pastoral As You Like It, a mature return to the woods and conventions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, perhaps the most perfect of the comedies, a romance of identical twins separated at sea, young love, and the antics of Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch.

Shakespeare's only tragedies of the period are among his most familiar plays: Romeo and Juliet (1596), Julius Caesar (1599), and Hamlet (1601). Different from one another as they are, these three plays share some notable features: the setting of intense personal tragedy in a large world vividly populated by what seems like the whole range of humanity; a refusal, shared by most of Shakespeare's contemporaries in the theater, to separate comic situations and techniques from tragic; the constant presence of politics; and - a personal rather than a conventional phenomenon - a tragic structure in which what is best in the protagonist is what does him in when he finds himself in conflict with the world.

Continuing his interest in the chronicle, Shakespeare wrote King John (1596), despite its one strong character a relatively weak play; and the second and greater tetralogy, ranging from Richard II (1595), in which the forceful Bolingbroke, with an ambiguous justice on his side, deposes the weak but poetic king, through the two parts of Henry IV (1597), in which the wonderfully amoral, fat knight Falstaff accompanies Prince Hal, Bolingbroke's son, to Henry V (1599), in which Hal, become king, leads a newly unified England, its civil wars temporarily at an end but sadly deprived of Falstaff and the dissident lowlife who provided so much joy in the earlier plays, to triumph over France. More impressively than the first tetralogy, the second turns history into art. Spanning the poles of comedy and tragedy, alive with a magnificent variety of unforgettable characters, linked to one another as one great play while each is a complete and independent success in its own right - the four plays pose disturbing and unanswerable questions about politics, making one ponder the frequent difference between the man capable of ruling and the man worthy of doing so, the meaning of legitimacy in office, the value of order and stability as against the value of revolutionary change, and the relation of private to public life. The plays are exuberant works of art, but they are not optimistic about man as a political animal, and their unblinkered recognition of the dynamics of history has made them increasingly popular and relevant in our own tormented era.

Three plays of the end of Elizabeth's reign are often grouped as Shakespeare's "problem plays," though no definition of that term is able successfully to differentiate them as an exclusive group. All's Well That Ends Well (1602) is a romantic comedy with qualities that seem bitter to many critics; like other plays of the period, by Shakespeare and by his contemporaries, it presents sexual relations between men and women in a harsh light. Troilus and Cressida (1602), hardest of the plays to classify generically, is a brilliant, sardonic, and disillusioned piece on the Trojan War, unusually philosophical in its language and reminiscent in some ways of Hamlet. The tragicomic Measure for Measure (1604) focuses more on sexual problems than any other play in the canon; Angelo, the puritanical and repressed man of ice who succumbs to violent sexual urges the moment he is put in temporary authority over Vienna during the duke's absence, and Isabella, the victim of his lust, are two of the most interesting characters in Shakespeare, and the bawdy city in which the action occurs suggests a London on which a new mood of modern urban hopelessness is settling.

King's Men

Promptly upon his accession in 1603, King James I, more ardently attracted to theatrical art than his predecessor, bestowed his patronage upon the Lord Chamberlain's Men, so that the flag of the King's Men now flew over the Globe. During his last decade in the theater Shakespeare was to write fewer but perhaps even finer plays. Almost all the greatest tragedies belong to this period. Though they share the qualities of the earlier tragedies, taken as a group they manifest new tendencies. The heroes are dominated by passions that make their moral status increasingly ambiguous, their freedom increasingly circumscribed; similarly the society, even the cosmos, against which they strive suggests less than ever that all can ever be right in the world. As before, what destroys the hero is what is best about him, yet the best in Macbeth or Othello cannot so simply be commended as Romeo's impetuous ardor or Brutus's political idealism (fatuous though it is). The late tragedies are each in its own way dramas of alienation, and their focus, like that of the histories, continues to be felt as intensely relevant to the concerns of modern men.

Othello (1604) is concerned, like other plays of the period, with sexual impurity, with the difference that that impurity is the fantasy of the protagonist about his faithful wife. Iago, the villain who drives Othello to doubt and murder, is the culmination of two distinct traditions, the "Machiavellian" conniver who uses deceit in order to subvert the order of the polity, and the Vice, a schizophrenically tragicomic devil figure from the morality plays going out of fashion as Shakespeare grew up. King Lear (1605), to many Shakespeare's masterpiece, is an agonizing tragic version of a comic play (itself based on mythical early English history), in which an aged king who foolishly deprives his only loving daughter of her heritage in order to leave all to her hypocritical and vicious sisters is hounded to death by a malevolent alliance which at times seems to include nature itself. Transformed from its fairy-tale-like origins, the play involves its characters and audience alike in metaphysical questions that are felt rather than thought.

Macbeth (1606), similarly based on English chronicle material, concentrates on the problems of evil and freedom, convincingly mingles the supernatural with a representation of history, and makes a paradoxically sympathetic hero of a murderer who sins against family and state - a man in some respects worse than the villain of Hamlet.

Dramatizing stories from Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (both written in 1607-1608) embody Shakespeare's bitterest images of political life, the former by setting against the call to Roman duty the temptation to liberating sexual passion, the latter by pitting a protagonist who cannot live with hypocrisy against a society built on it. Both of these tragedies present ancient history with a vividness that makes it seem contemporary, though the sensuousness of Antony and Cleopatra, the richness of its detail, the ebullience of its language, and the seductive character of its heroine have made it far more popular than the harsh and austere Coriolanus. One more tragedy, Timon of Athens, similarly based on Plutarch, was written during this period, though its date is obscure. Despite its abundant brilliance, few find it a fully satisfactory play, and some critics have speculated that what we have may be an incomplete draft. The handful of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote between 1604 and 1608 comprises an astonishing series of worlds different from one another, created of language that exceeds anything Shakespeare had done before, some of the most complex and vivid characters in all the plays, and a variety of new structural techniques.

A final group of plays takes a turn in a new direction. Commonly called the "romances," Pericles (1607), Cymbeline (1609), The Winter's Tale (1611), and The Tempest (1611) share their conventions with the tragicomedy that had been growing popular since the early years of the century. Particularly they resemble in some respects plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher for the private theatrical company whose operation the King's Men took over in 1608. While such work in the hands of others, however, tended to reflect the socially and intellectually narrow interests of an elite audience, Shakespeare turned the fashionable mode into a new kind of personal art form. Though less searing than the great tragedies, these plays have a unique power to move and are in the realm of the highest art. Pericles and Cymbeline seem somewhat tentative and experimental, though both are superb plays. The Winter's Tale, however, is one of Shakespeare's best plays. Like a rewriting of Othello in its first acts, it turns miraculously into pastoral comedy in its last. The Tempest is the most popular and perhaps the finest of the group. Prospero, shipwrecked on an island and dominating it with magic which he renounces at the end, may well be intended as an image of Shakespeare himself; in any event, the play is like a retrospective glance over the plays of the 2 previous decades.

After the composition of The Tempest, which many regard as an explicit farewell to art, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, returning to London to compose Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613; neither of these plays seems to have fired his imagination. In 1616, at the age of 52, he was dead. His reputation grew quickly, and his work has continued to seem to each generation like its own most precious discovery. His value to his own age is suggested by the fact that two fellow actors performed the virtually unprecedented act in 1623 of gathering his plays together and publishing them in the Folio edition. Without their efforts, since Shakespeare was apparently not interested in publication, many of the plays would not have survived.

Further Reading

Alfred Harbage, ed., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (1969), is a sound one-volume text with useful introductions and bibliographies. For editions of individual plays the New Arden Shakespeare, in progress, is the best series. The authoritative source for biographical information is Sir Edmund K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols., 1930). Reliable briefer accounts are Marchette G. Chute's highly readable Shakespeare of London (1949) and Gerald E. Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (1961).

The body of Shakespeare criticism is so large that selection must be arbitrary. Augustus Ralli, A History of Shakespeare Criticism (2 vols., 1932), is a guide through the thickets of the past. Ronald Berman, A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays (1965), provides helpfully annotated bibliographies. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, edited by Terence Hawkes (1959), offers invaluable and influential criticism by a great romantic poet, and A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904), remains one of the indispensable books. Twentieth-century criticism can be sampled in Leonard F. Dean, Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism (1957; rev. ed. 1967), and Norman Rabkin, Approaches to Shakespeare (1964). Other noteworthy studies include G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedy (1930; 5th rev. ed. 1957); Derek A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1938; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1968); Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939); Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1946-1947), edited by M. St. Clare Byrne (4 vols., 1954); John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957; 2d ed. 1962); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959); L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (1959); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1967); and Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1969).

Studies of the theaters are in C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre (1953), and A.M. Nagler, Shakespeare's Stage (1958); and of the staging, in Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609 (1962). The standard account of the audience is Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (1941). The best account of early Renaissance drama is in Frank P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée, eds., Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 4 (1969). Oscar J. Campbell and Edward G. Quinn, eds., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966), is a compendious handbook.

For more information on William Shakespeare, visit Britannica.com.

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). Dramatist and poet. Baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564, William was the son of John Shakespeare, a glovemaker and prominent Stratford citizen who became mayor and justice of the peace during William's childhood. He was educated at the Stratford grammar school, and married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a successful local farmer, eight years his senior (and already pregnant at the wedding), in 1582. He started as an actor, continued as a playwright, and developed as an administrator and entrepreneur: by the time of his death, on 23 April 1616, he had established his status as a major shareholder in the King's Men, the principal acting company of his time, and was a successful and wealthy man.

Shakespeare wrote approximately forty-two plays. Quotations from Shakespeare remain an often unwitting part of everyday speech; productions of his plays remain hugely popular, both in theatres and in the cinema. His earliest plays are mostly comedies and histories—The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew are probably the very earliest. He wrote the first play (known as 2 Henry VI) in the four-play cycle known as the ‘first tetralogy’ in 1591, completing it with the best known of his earlier histories, Richard III, the following year.

The first tetralogy preceded Shakespeare's attachment to the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594; it was for that company, and for their first playhouse, the Theatre, that he wrote the ‘second tetralogy’, his most popular group of history plays—Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. Both tetralogies attest to the lasting impact on English society of the Wars of the Roses. The move to the new Globe theatre in 1598-9 marked a new phase in Shakespeare's writing career and the demise of the Shakespearian history play ‘proper’. For the Globe, Shakespeare turned to other genres, writing his mature comedies (As You Like It and Twelfth Night) and his major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth), as well as his later tragicomedies or romances (Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest).

The Lord Chamberlain's Men had become the King's Men at James I's accession, and played regularly at court. King Lear andMacbeth, for example, by depicting dark alternatives, acknowledge the role of James I in reunifying Britain, and both Lear and Cymbeline delve far back into mythical British history in search of complex political resonances.

Shakespeare wrote at a unique period in the history of the British theatre—for the range of his audiences, for the cultural resonance of theatrical institutions—and his plays cannot fairly be dismissed as ‘mere’ fiction or entertainment. It is a commonplace of current literary criticism that Shakespearian drama both responded to and shaped public perspectives on history and politics at a time of considerable, and hugely productive, cultural anxiety, ‘shaping fantasies’ for a developing nation-state.

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English playwright, poet, director, and actor, who uses forms of the word ‘fairy’ in at least ten of his plays, as well as in Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare mentions elves in five plays; nymphs in eight plays, Venus and Adonis, The Passionate Pilgrim, and the Sonnets; sprites or supernatural spirits in 20 plays, Venus and Adonis, Troilus and Cressida, and The Rape of Lucrece; goblins and hobgoblins in five plays. These references, as well as marked presence of fairies in the works of Spenser, Drayton, and Lyly, among many other contemporaries, indicate that fairy folk and legends were familiar to Shakespeare's audience.

In The Anatomy of Puck, thus far the longest recent study of Shakespeare's general use of fairy material, K. M. Briggs maintains that the Elizabethan era was a golden age of fairy lore. She ascribes this to an increasing number of yeoman writers who had learned fairy lore from their ancestors and felt freer to articulate it in an age less intimidated by fears of heresy. Briggs hints at, but does not elaborate upon, the tenor of humanism and humanists who, like Marlowe's Dr Faustus, were intrigued by opportunities to tinker with the supernatural. The alchemical and necromantic interests of such scholars are but further evidence of a growing fascination with the human power to affect, even to command, the universe. In such an atmosphere, fairies, sprites, and elves were more innocent familiars than devils, while nymphs and nature spirits evoked ancient Greek and Roman beliefs harmonious with the taste for the classical past.

With rare exceptions, however, the origins of Shakespeare's fairy lore remain uncertain. Celtic legend is the most frequently invoked, though often questionable, source. Perhaps the Shakespearian fairy with the clearest genealogy is Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose avatar is Auberon, the fairy king of Huon de Bordeaux, a 15th‐century romance.

Generally, Shakespeare's fairies serve as light embellishments with a strong appeal for audiences. Pageantry, so entrancing to Elizabethan ceremony and theatre, was enhanced by the addition of glittering creatures with magic powers. As Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates so well, portrayals of fairies were highly effective in creating the atmosphere desirable in masques.

Shakespeare's fairies appeared in several sizes and guises: in a stature equal to that of very young children, as full‐sized or even outsized mortals, as miniature creatures, as hobgoblins, as good and as evil spirits. In general, however, fairies in the literature of this period were meant to be charming figures of fun, and the frequent appearance of full‐length portraits of wicked fairies was, with rare exceptions (see Morgan le Fay), a later phenomenon.

Most of Shakespeare's references to fairies are brief. There are three notable exceptions: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Outstandingly fey among Shakespeare's plays is, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream, two of whose chief characters are Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies. The same play features Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. His appeal to generations of theatregoers may be attributed to his mischief‐making charm as a hobgoblin or his philosophical unmasking of ‘What fools these mortals be’. In this play, the actions of fairies both divide and unify three worlds—the dreamworld, the world of the fairies, and the world of ordinary mortal affairs. The intervention of the fairies in the lives of mortals is part of the dreamworld that unites the lovers with their desired partners and solves all the problems in the play, partly by potions and spells, but ultimately by means of the fairy ex machina.

The Tempest is densely populated with strange creatures, some of whom are fairy‐like, but some of whom, like Caliban, seem to challenge or even defy classification. Prospero, the typical humanist scholar, spends too much time on his books. Becoming a wizard king, he conjures Ariel, the airy spirit whom many call an elemental. ‘As swift as thought’, Ariel can make his master's wishes come true, creating illusions, charming mortals and monsters alike, and controlling the weather. The air surrounding the island is ‘full of spirits’, as Caliban, the resident monster and colonial, complains. The play's masque includes goddesses like Iris and features a pageant of supernaturals.

The tiniest of all Shakespeare's fairies is Mab, recognized in Shakespeare's England as queen of the fairies. In Romeo and Juliet she drives a nutshell coach drawn by ants and small enough to light on suitors' noses. She is touted here for her ability to make men dream of love and courtship.

Perhaps the strongest Shakespearian proof that fairies were conventional enough in the lore and literature of the era to be mocked and parodied appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here the fairies, though the size of children and ruled by an adult‐sized queen, are not real fairies. Briggs has pointed out how faithfully these false fairies reflect popular beliefs. They carry torches of glow worms and rattles for fairy bells. Like good legendary fairies of their era, they dance around in a circle and control the order of things. But the ultimate Shakespearian evidence of the fairy fashion may be that Macbeth's witches know the traditional terpsichorean kinship of fairies and witches. Both witches and fairies dance, as the witches sing, like ‘elves and fairies in a ring’.

Bibliography

• Blount, Dale M., “‘Modifications in Occult Folklore as a Comic Device in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream’”, Fifteenth‐Century Studies, 9 (1984).
• Briggs, Katherine M., The Anatomy of Puck (1959).
• Levy, Michael‐Marc, “‘The Transformations of Oberon: The Use of Fairies in Seventeenth Century Literature’” (Diss., University of Minnesota, 1982).
• Milward, Peter, ‘Fairies in Shakespeare's Later Plays’, English Language and Literature, 22 (1985).
• Tave, Stuart M., Lovers, Clowns and Fairies: An Essay on Comedies (1993).

— Judith S. Neaman

Shakespeare, William, was known only uncertainly and indirectly in Germany in his lifetime, though some plays were performed by the Englische Komödianten, probably in unauthentic versions and later in crude vernacular adaptations. He is first mentioned by name in Germany, in a short list, by D. G. Morhof (1682), who candidly admits ignorance of his works. A further second-hand reference was made in 1708 by B. Feind (1678-1721) in Gedancken von der Opera. J. J. Bodmer in the preface to Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740) couples him with Milton, but spells him ‘Saspar’. J. C. Gottsched, who wrote against him, appears to have known him little better, and in the first half of the 18th c. the general attitude (second-hand and influenced by French views) was that Shakespeare was ignorant of the rules of drama and was not worthy of serious consideration.

The first to take another view, and one based on knowledge, was J. E. Schlegel in Vergleichung Shakespears und Andreas Gryphs (1741), which was prompted by the appearance of the first German translation of a Shakespearian play Julius Caesar (in alexandrine verse) by C. W. von Borcke in 1741. F. Nicolai in 1755, while adhering to the customary view of Shakespeare's ignorance of the rules, praised his creation of character (1755). G. E. Lessing, in both the Literaturbriefe (1759) and Die Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1768), took Shakespeare seriously, and in the latter work discussed Richard III at some length. Meanwhile the first collection of Shakespeare's works in German translation (8 vols., 1762-6) came from C. M. Wieland, who rendered twenty-one into prose and one (A Midsummer Night's Dream) into verse. In this form Goethe and Schiller first met Shakespeare's work. The 1770s brought a wave of boundless admiration. Herder published his essay Shakespeare (written in 1771) in Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773) and Goethe composed his briefer panegyric Rede zum Shakespeares-Tag (1771, see Zum Schäkespears Tag). A new complete prose translation by J. J. Eschenburg appeared 1775-7 (13 vols.). G. A. Bürger produced a prose translation of Macbeth (1782) before Schiller wrote his version in verse (1799-1800) for performance in Weimar; it is largely based on Wieland's and Eschenburg's translations, though he also consulted the original text, to which he introduced significant changes reflecting the play's proximity to Wallenstein. A perceptive and influential discussion of Hamlet is a feature of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Bk. 5). The enthusiasm for Shakespeare generated in the Sturm und Drang was sustained in the Romantic movement (see Romantik), notably by A. W. and F. Schlegel and L. Tieck.

A. W. Schlegel, together with Dorothea Tieck (see Schlegel, Dorothea von) and W. von Baudissin, produced the first verse translation of genius (9 vols., 1825-33). It was edited by Tieck and reissued (ed. A. Brandl) 1896-9 and by F. Gundolf in an edition which included his own translations (10 vols., 1908-23). At the time of its first publication it quickly superseded a translation by J. H. Voß (9 vols., 1818-29). Shakespeare's position on the German stage was secure from this time on, and indeed he came to be played more frequently in Germany than in his native land. Essays on Shakespeare and studies of individual works abound among notable German dramatists, usually with particular relevance to their own work ( Über die Shakespearo-Manie, 1827, by C. D. Grabbe and O. Ludwig's posthumously published Shakespeare-Studien, 1871, are examples of contrasting character). Not all, of course, are based on translations.

20th-c. translations include a bilingual edition by L. L. Schücking (20 vols., 1912-35), and others by M. J. Wolff, R. A. Schröder, R. Flatter, H. Rothe (the most extreme attempt at modernization, begun in the early 1920s), and Erich Fried (22 plays, published in 3 vols., 1989). Versions of the sonnets include those by K. Lachmann (1820), G. Regis (1836), F. Bodenstedt (1862), O. Gildemeister (1871), M. J. Wolff (1903), S. George (1909, revised 1931), Therese Robinson (1927), K. Kraus (1933), R. Flatter (1934, rev. 1956), and P. Celan (21 sonnets, 1967), and of epic poetry and poems those by F. Freiligrath (1849), W. Jordan (1861), and K. Simrock (1867).

Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616, English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-on-Avon. He is widely considered the greatest playwright who ever lived.

Life

His father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had “small Latine, and less Greeke,” much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology.

In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus.

In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man.

The Plays

Chronology of Composition

The chronology of Shakespeare's plays is uncertain, but a reasonable approximation of their order can be inferred from dates of publication, references in contemporary writings, allusions in the plays to contemporary events, thematic relationships, and metrical and stylistic comparisons. His first plays are believed to be the three parts of Henry VI; it is uncertain whether Part I was written before or after Parts II and III. Richard III is related to these plays and is usually grouped with them as the final part of a first tetralogy of historical plays.

After these come The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus (almost a third of which may have been written by George Peele), The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. Some of the comedies of this early period are classical imitations with a strong element of farce. The two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, were both popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime. In Romeo and Juliet the main plot, in which the new love between Romeo and Juliet comes into conflict with the longstanding hatred between their families, is skillfully advanced, while the substantial development of minor characters supports and enriches it.

After these early plays, and before his great tragedies, Shakespeare wrote Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Parts I and II of Henry IV, Much Ado about Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. The comedies of this period partake less of farce and more of idyllic romance, while the history plays successfully integrate political elements with individual characterization. Taken together, Richard II, each part of Henry IV, and Henry V form a second tetralogy of historical plays, although each can stand alone, and they are usually performed separately. The two parts of Henry IV feature Falstaff, a vividly depicted character who from the beginning has enjoyed immense popularity.

The period of Shakespeare's great tragedies and the “problem plays” begins in 1600 with Hamlet. Following this are The Merry Wives of Windsor (written to meet Queen Elizabeth's request for another play including Falstaff, it is not thematically typical of the period), Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens (the last may have been partially written by Thomas Middleton).

On familial, state, and cosmic levels, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth present clear oppositions of order and chaos, good and evil, and spirituality and animality. Stylistically the plays of this period become increasingly compressed and symbolic. Through the portrayal of political leaders as tragic heroes, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra involve the study of politics and social history as well as the psychology of individuals.

The last two plays in the Shakespearean corpus, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be collaborations with John Fletcher. The remaining four plays—Pericles (two acts of which may have been written by George Wilkins), Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest—are tragicomedies. They feature characters of tragic potential, but resemble comedy in that their conclusions are marked by a harmonious resolution achieved through magic, with all its divine, humanistic, and artistic implications.

Appeal and Influence

Since his death Shakespeare's plays have been almost continually performed, in non-English-speaking nations as well as those where English is the native tongue; they are quoted more than the works of any other single author. The plays have been subject to ongoing examination and evaluation by critics attempting to explain their perennial appeal, which does not appear to derive from any set of profound or explicitly formulated ideas. Indeed, Shakespeare has sometimes been criticized for not consistently holding to any particular philosophy, religion, or ideology; for example, the subplot of A Midsummer Night's Dream includes a burlesque of the kind of tragic love that he idealizes in Romeo and Juliet.

The strength of Shakespeare's plays lies in the absorbing stories they tell, in their wealth of complex characters, and in the eloquent speech—vivid, forceful, and at the same time lyric—that the playwright puts on his characters' lips. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's characters are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that it is their flawed, inconsistent nature that makes them memorable. Hamlet fascinates audiences with his ambivalence about revenge and the uncertainty over how much of his madness is feigned and how much genuine. Falstaff would not be beloved if, in addition to being genial, openhearted, and witty, he were not also boisterous, cowardly, and, ultimately, poignant. Finally, the plays are distinguished by an unparalleled use of language. Shakespeare had a tremendous vocabulary and a corresponding sensitivity to nuance, as well as a singular aptitude for coining neologisms and punning.

Editions and Sources

The first collected edition of Shakespeare is the First Folio, published in 1623 and including all the plays except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter play also generally not appearing in modern editions). Eighteen of the plays exist in earlier quarto editions, eight of which are extremely corrupt, possibly having been reconstructed from an actor's memory. The first edition of Shakespeare to divide the plays into acts and scenes and to mark exits and entrances is that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709. Other important early editions include those of Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), and Samuel Johnson (1765).

Among Shakespeare's most important sources, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) is significant for the English history plays, although Shakespeare did not hesitate to transform a character when it suited his dramatic purposes. For his Roman tragedies he used Sir Thomas North's translation (1579) of Plutarch's Lives. Many times he rewrote old plays, and twice he turned English prose romances into drama (As You Like It and The Winter's Tale). He also used the works of contemporary European authors. For further information on Shakespeare's sources, see the table entitled Shakespeare's Play.

The Poetry

Shakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the 1980s and 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612 entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed “W.S.” exhibits many Shakespearean characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon.

Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important nondramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content.

The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; or they are possibly the initials of William Herbert, 3d earl of Pembroke, whose connection with Shakespeare is more tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127–152 has also been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the recurring themes of beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of love and art to transcend time and even death.

Critical Opinion

There has been a great variety of critical approach to Shakespeare's work since his death. During the 17th and 18th cent., Shakespeare was both admired and condemned. Since then, much of the adverse criticism has not been considered relevant, although certain issues have continued to interest critics throughout the years. For instance, charges against his moral propriety were made by Samuel Johnson in the 18th cent. and by George Bernard Shaw in the 20th.

Early criticism was directed primarily at questions of form. Shakespeare was criticized for mixing comedy and tragedy and failing to observe the unities of time and place prescribed by the rules of classical drama. Dryden and Johnson were among the critics claiming that he had corrupted the language with false wit, puns, and ambiguity. While some of his early plays might justly be charged with a frivolous use of such devices, 20th-century criticism has tended to praise their use in later plays as adding depth and resonance of meaning.

Generally critics of the 17th and 18th cent. accused Shakespeare of a want of artistic restraint while praising him for a fecund imagination. Samuel Johnson, while agreeing with many earlier criticisms, defended Shakespeare on the question of classical rules. On the issue of unity of time and place he argued that no one considers the stage play to be real life anyway. Johnson inaugurated the criticism of Shakespeare's characters that reached its culmination in the late 19th cent. with the work of A. C. Bradley. The German critics Gotthold Lessing and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel saw Shakespeare as a romantic, different in type from the classical poets, but on equal footing. Schlegel first elucidated the structural unity of Shakespeare's plays, a concept of unity that is developed much more completely by the English poet and critic Samuel Coleridge.

While Schlegel and Coleridge were establishing Shakespeare's plays as artistic, organic unities, such 19th-century critics as the German Georg Gervinus and the Irishman Edward Dowden were trying to see positive moral tendencies in the plays. The 19th-century English critic William Hazlitt, who continued the development of character analysis begun by Johnson, considered each Shakespearean character to be unique, but found a unity through analogy and gradation of characterization. While A. C. Bradley marks the culmination of romantic 19th-century character study, he also suggested that the plays had unifying imagistic atmospheres, an idea that was further developed in the 20th cent.

The tendency in 20th-century criticism was to abandon both the study of character as independent personality and the assumption that moral considerations can be separated from their dramatic and aesthetic context. The plays were increasingly viewed in terms of the unity of image, metaphor, and tone. Caroline Spurgeon began the careful classification of Shakespeare's imagery, and although her attempts were later felt to be somewhat naive and morally biased, her work is a landmark in Shakespearean criticism. Other important trends in 20th-century criticism included the Freudian approach, such as Ernest Jones's Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet; the study of Shakespeare in terms of the Elizabethan world view and Elizabethan stage conventions; and the study of the plays in mythic terms.

Authorship

For about 150 years after his death no one seemed to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. However, in the latter part of the 18th cent. questions began to arise as to whether or not the historical William Shakespeare was indeed the author. Since then the issue has continued to be a subject of often heated debate, albeit mainly in academic circles. Those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works (sometimes called “anti-Stratfordians”) generally assert that the actor from Stratford had a limited education; some have even claimed that he was illiterate. Many of the questioners maintain that such a provincial upstart could not have had the wide-ranging worldly and scholarly knowledge, linguistic skills, and fine sensibilities evinced by the author of the Shakespearean canon. Such qualities, they assert, could only have been possessed by a university-educated gentleman, multilingual, well-traveled, and quite possibly titled. Critics further contend that playwriting was a lowly profession at the time and that the “real” author protected his reputation by using Shakespeare's name as a pseudonym. Over the years, many other arguments, some involving secret codes, some even more abstruse, have been offered to cast doubt on Shakespeare's authorship.

On the other hand, traditionalists (“Stratfordians”) who believe that William Shakespeare was indeed the author of the plays and poems, point out that his probable education at the Stratford grammar school would have provided the required knowledge of the classics and classical civilization as well as of Latin and at least some Greek. They also maintain that what can be assumed to be his broad reading of historical sources along with his daily involvement in the lively worlds of Elizabethan London—artistic and intellectual, ordinary and aristocratic—would, when transmuted by his genius, have provided Shakespeare with the necessary background to create his dramatic and poetic works. Moreover, they say, Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries, as attested to by a number of extant references to him as a writer by other notable men of his time.

Anti-Stratfordians have suggested a number of Elizabethans as candidates for the “real” author of the works. From the late 18th through the 19th cent. the individual most often cited was Francis Bacon, who had the requisite aristocratic background, education, courtly experience, and literary talent. Others claimed that Bacon was one of a group that collectively wrote the Shakespearean oeuvre. In the 20th cent. a new candidate emerged as the authorial front runner—Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. His proponents, the Oxfordians, cited correspondences between events in his life and those in some of the plays, apparent similarities in the two men's language, and Oxford's proven skills as a dramatist and poet. Prominent among the many reasons to doubt de Vere's authorship is the fact that he died in 1604 and that some of Shakespeare's greatest works were written well after that date.

More than 50 other names have been put forward as the “real” Shakespeare, ranging from the implausible, e.g., Queen Elizabeth I, to the somewhat more possible, e.g., Christopher Marlowe; William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby; and Roger Manners, 5th earl of Rutland. Still others have suggested that the works were the result of a collaboration by two or more Elizabethan writers. In 2005 a new candidate, Sir Henry Neville, a courtier, diplomat, and distant relative of Shakespeare, was proposed. Even as studies and biographies of Shakespeare proliferate, the authorship controversy shows few signs of subsiding, and books, scholarly essays, and, more recently, websites continue to be devoted to the question.

Bibliography

See also biographies by E. K. Chambers (2 vol., 1930), G. E. Bentley (1961), S. Schoenbaum (1970 and 1975), S. Wells (1974), R. Fraser (2 vol., 1988), P. Levi (1988, repr. 1995), E. Sams (1995), P. Honan (1998), A. Holden (1999), I. L. Matus (1999), and P. Ackroyd (2005); bibliographies ed. by G. R. Smith (1963) and E. Quinn et al. (1973); A. Nicoll, Shakespeare: An Introduction (1952); G. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vol., 1957–75); O. J. Campbell and E. G. Quinn, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966); M. R. Martin and R. C. Harrier, The Concise Encyclopedic Guide to Shakespeare (1972); M. Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (6 vol., 1970); The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973); S. Wells, ed., Current Approaches to Shakespeare: Language, Text, Theatre, and Ideology (1988); G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (1989); J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997); H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998); D. S. Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999); S. Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (2003); B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (2003); S. Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (2003); S. Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004); J. Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005).

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), English playwright, poet, and actor. Shakespeare is universally recognized as the foremost writer in the English language to date. The thirty-seven plays associated with his name, including the major tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, and his romances and comedies, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream among them, have been translated into many languages and have crossed all kinds of cultural divide. His poetry, in particular his intricately woven and fiercely passionate love sonnets, have stirred the senses of reader and critic alike for generations past and will do so for generations to come.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, and he was probably educated in the 1570s at the free grammar school there known as the King's New School. His father, John Shakespeare, has been described as a glover or whittawer, which means someone who works with animal skins. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was from a noted local family, the daughter of Robert Arden, John Shakespeare's landlord. At some point, perhaps in 1568 when his father was high bailiff (mayor) of the town and responsible for Stratford's entertainment, Shakespeare must have first seen actors perform as traveling players visiting on tour.

In about 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a rich yeoman's daughter. The marriage was undertaken during a notable downturn in the affairs of Shakespeare's father. Having been a respected and confident town official during Shakespeare's earliest years—initiating an application for gentry status in 1576, for example—during 1586 John Shakespeare's alderman status was withdrawn. Although controversy surrounds the possible reasons for Shakespeare's marriage to a woman who was eight years his senior, three children were produced from the marriage. Susanna was the first-born in 1583 with a pair of twins produced in 1585—a son, Hamnet, who died in childhood, and a daughter, Judith.

London Actor, Playwright, and Poet

Whether Shakespeare had to leave Stratford for some reason, or whether he joined a visiting touring company such as the Queen's Men, we first hear of him as a London playhouse personality seven years after the birth of the twins. This is when he is mentioned in a pamphlet called A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) written by a writer and playwright named Robert Greene. This text was written while the writer knew that he was dying, and in it he urged his fellow well-educated peers, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele, to forsake the stage. "For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," Greene wrote, "that with his 'Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and [ . . . ] is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country." We know this allusion is directed toward Shakespeare, not only because of the play on his name and profession as a "Shake-scene," but also because of the misquotation from one of his Henry VI plays: "O Tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide!" (Part III, act 1, scene 4, line 138).

By this time, scholars believe that the player Shakespeare had not only embarked on his English history cycle with the three Henry VI plays, but had also presented the highly successful if violent Titus Andronicus as well. In this play a woman is raped, has both her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and a queen unknowingly eats her own children, baked in a pie. However, in a matter of a few years Shakespeare was also provably capable of writing the extraordinarily poised and tragic Romeo and Juliet. Here two young lovers, divided by their families' antagonism to one another, meet, marry, and die while speaking the most beautiful words of love written for the English stage.

By 1595, Shakespeare, as a sharer member of the acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was entitled to a portion of the company's takings. This status was acquired through his investment in things for the company like costumes, playbooks, and props. However, there is some evidence to show that Shakespeare wanted to be perceived more as a serious poet than as either an actor or a playwright. In 1593 and 1594 he published his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to his supposed patron Henry Wroithesley, 3rd earl of Southampton. This period also marks the time when it is believed he had begun his 154 sonnets, published as a collection in 1609, with Southampton a candidate for the "Fair Youth" to whom the first 126 possibly allude. The fourteen-line sonnet, quietly evolving in form since its first emergence in fourteenth-century Italy, had reached England through poet-courtiers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey earlier in the sixteenth century. In the hands of Shakespeare, many sonnet conventions were challenged, questioning the poetic expectation of comparing one's lover to nature, for example. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is the bold opening of Number 130, for example. Thus Shakespeare chose to use the sonnet to engage, not only with the passions and intellect of the person to whom the sonnet is addressed, but even with poetry itself. It is interesting that Greene chose to mark out Shakespeare's verse as his primary objection to him as an "upstart." Shakespeare indeed wrote much of his drama in blank verse, the flexible iambic pentameter form of unrhymed poetry, again used by Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, and taken on by dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe. However, Shakespeare's energy when approaching his plays did not hold back on inventiveness and variety. The blank verse form reached its apotheosis with Shakespeare, but a few of his early plays contain sonnet moments too. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, given by the Chorus, is a sonnet, and later in this lovers' play, one is interwoven through the dialogue when the protagonists first speak together (act 1, scene 5, lines 90–113).

By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Lord Chamberlain's Men had rebuilt their Shoreditch amphitheater (called the "Theater") as the Globe on London's Bankside (the south bank of the Thames). They were now the most well established of the city's playing companies. By this time Shakespeare had begun to write his heavyweight tragedies for them, beginning with Hamlet published in 1603. If Titus Andronicus was violent, and Romeo and Juliet tragically romantic, Hamlet was Shakespeare's play concerned with the human mind. The eponymous prince of Denmark, whose father's ghost tells him how he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, sets out on a course of revenge, while at the same time, as the philosopher prince studying at Wittenburg University, he questions life and death and any decision involving them. Shakespeare is creative with the revenge tragedy form, using the vengeful mindset of the main character to explore highly philosophical questions. 'What a piece of work is man!' (act 2, scene 2, lines 293–300) and 'To be, or not to be, that is the question' (act 3, scene 1, lines 58–90) are two lines from speeches of profound mental depth. Hamlet is the most widely quoted and most investigated of Shakespeare's plays, attracting a phenomenal amount of scholarly study, just as much because of the questions it poses as because of the answers it fails to give.

The Jacobean Shakespeare

In 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of James I, the company were renamed the King's Men, acquiring royal patronage status. In 1608 they also acquired a new, small, more select playhouse known as the Blackfriars that was to be used alongside the Globe, the public playhouse. Shares in this venture, which company members were given, were very lucrative acquirements for the actors—including Shakespeare. This period marked the writing of plays such as Othello, first performed 1603–1604 and published in the 1620s, King Lear of 1606, published in 1608, and Macbeth, again c. 1606 but first published in the collected First Folio of Shakespeare's works of 1623. The plot lines and characters of these tragedies continued to demonstrate the extraordinary range of Shakespeare's mind as he dealt with, for example, jealousy and deception in Othello; madness, mercy, and true filial love in King Lear; and the dangers of encouraged ambition in Macbeth. In about 1613, however, at the peak of his writing powers, Shakespeare was to give up his career on London's stage.

Shakespeare the Stratford Man

By 1616, Shakespeare had returned to Stratford and the substantial home called New Place that he had bought for his family. It was there that he was to die in 1616 of a fever, reputedly after a rowdy visit from his friend and colleague Ben Jonson. He died where he began, therefore, not in London where he made his name, but in the Stratford of his birth. Back in 1596, gentry status had finally been achieved for his family, and the payee for this was likely to have been William. He died, therefore, not only rich, but respected and esteemed in his community, to become later in the minds of many the man most associated with the finest use of poetic English.

In the historical context of his day-to-day existence as an actor and a companyman, Shakespeare's significant output as a dramatic writer can be interpreted as simple good business sense that resulted in his family's bettered status at home. By writing good plays he drew audiences to playhouses in which he had financial interests. Shakespeare's plays did not, in fact, belong to him, but were the property of his company. Despite evidence that Shakespeare was involved in the printing of his poetry, there is no proof of authorial concern with the printed publication of his plays. His dramas were only collected as serious "works" seven years after his death in 1623 for what we now know as Shakespeare's "First Folio," put together by his fellow actors. A man of extraordinary talent, however, at a time when there were no rulebooks for the English language or its lexicon, his contribution to what we now perceive as beauty through dramatic story and words is inestimable.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Norton facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman. 2nd ed. New York and London, 1996.

——. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London, 1997. Based on the Oxford Edition.

——. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven, 1997.

Secondary Sources

Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford, 2001.

Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642. 3rd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Jones, Peter, ed. Shakespeare, the Sonnets: A Casebook. London, 1977.

Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare's Language. New York, 2001.

Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare's Lives. Rev. ed. Oxford and New York, 1991.

—EVA GRIFFITH

• Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet: the blog Additions and topics about the web site Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet

Quotes:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

"Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all."

"For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night."

"'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, and after one hour more twill be eleven. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. and thereby hangs a tale."

"I shall the effect of this good lesson keeps as watchman to my heart."

"Now, neighbor confines, purge you of your scum! Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance, revel the night, rob, murder, and commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways?"

See more famous quotes by William Shakespeare

In the English Renaissance, various playwrights made use of dreams as a favorite channel of communication between the human and the divine. Dreams, which were generally regarded in popular belief as the most intelligible form of supernatural warning, represented a useful dramatic device for the Elizabethan playwrights, since they foreshadowed events of plot, provided the audience with needed information, and imparted a vivid atmosphere of mystery to the play. Concepts of the dream world were derived from various sources, such as classical Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, the native heritage of English folklore, and the medieval tradition of the dream vision, which culminated in England with the works of Chaucer. Among the Elizabethans, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), made selective use of these sources, transforming and refining the material in accordance with his literary purposes.

In plays the frequent use of dreams has many dramatic purposes. Even in Shakespeare's earliest plays, besides being a form of presentation and a predictive device of plot, dreams are a way of presenting the process of the mind at work in memory, emotion, and imagination. This is the case of the dramatic action of Richard III, in which omen, apparitions, narrated dreams, and long soliloquies define the play's world, creating a reality both inside and outside Richard. When Clarence tells Blackenbury the dream foretelling his assassination in the first scene, the images used are some of the archetypes usually associated with death, such as crossing the sea, the unsteady deck, stumbling, and drowning.

In the last act of the same tragedy, parallel dreams are experienced by King Richard and his rival, Richmond, who will face each other in their last battle in Bosworth. The personages of these dreams appear among the tents as the ghosts of murdered princes, such as Edward, King Henry's son, Henry VI, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, and Hastings, who try to make Richard yield to remorse, while encouraging his rival to fight and conquer. Thus, in Richard III Shakespeare uses the dream also for moral ends, presenting the opposition of good and evil.

The dream is usually the preferred vehicle for premonitions of death, as in Henry VI, where the death of the duke of Gloucester is preceded by a dream by the cardinal of Winchester, and in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo dreams that his lady comes and finds him dead, and Balthazar dreams that his master fights and kills another man. In Hamlet and in Macbeth, on the other hand, the dream world is closely related to the entire realm of witchcraft, omen, and the supernatural.

In Julius Caesar the dream is also vital to the plot and is opportunely inserted into the development of the tragedy, which deals with the conflict between monarchical and democratic parties in the political world of Rome. Julius Caesar is full of omens and dreams, such as Calpurnia's dream, the dream of Cinna the poet, and the advice of the augurers, which are misinterpreted, making tragedy inevitable. The dream imagery of this tragedy, in which a primary emphasis is placed on the potential ambiguity of interpretation, also constitutes a means of examining character and consciousness, and, as in Richard III, divides men into two categories: those who attempt to control dream and destiny, and those who are controlled by them.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream-which deals full force with dreaming-the categories of reality and illusion, sleeping and waking, reason and imagination, are reversed, and the central theme of the dream is presented as truer than reality. Thus, by regarding facts as if they were dreams and dreams as if they were facts, Shakespeare shows how closely dreams skirt the truth, and how fascinating is the attraction of the false.

The subject of The Winter's Tale and The Tempest is the confrontation that humanity experiences with the irrational and complex role of the dream world in life. The dream world represents the entire world of The Winter's Tale, which is fundamentally a play of metamorphosis based on the images of time and change, and on the possibility for things that have already happened to happen again. In The Tempest, on the other hand, things happen on an enchanted island which represents the dream world-in order that they need never happen again. The poles of sleeping and waking, and vision and reality are deliberately explored in this play, in which the theme of losing and finding achieves its ultimate expression.

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