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William Shakespeare
Stratford-upon-Avon, Reino Unido
1616-04-23 Stratford-upon-Avon, Reino Unido
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William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 - 23 April 1616)
an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the
English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works,
including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two
long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been
translated into every major living language and are performed more often
than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18,
he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and
twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful
career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company
called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He
appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died
three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and
there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical
appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to
him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His
early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak
of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote
mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and
Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his
last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and
collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy
during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published
the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but
two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his
reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The
Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians
worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called
"bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and
rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays
remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and
reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Life
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Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a
successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter
of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and
baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate remains unknown, but
is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day. This date, which can
be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to
biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616. He was the third child of
eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers
agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in
Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his
home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the
curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would
have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The
consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27
November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds
guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony
may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor
allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,
and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna,
baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed
almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of
unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is
mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to
the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many
apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted
a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape
prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy.
Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a
scurrilous ballad about him. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare
starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in
London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country
schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare
may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of
Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte"
in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay
collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the
Lancashire area.
London and Theatrical Career
It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary
allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on
the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to
be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of
Wit:
...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, 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 being an absolute Johannes factotum,
is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that
Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to
match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas
Nashe and Greene himself (the "university wits"). The italicised phrase
parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from
Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies
Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here Johannes Factotum—"Jack of all
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trades"— means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than
the more common "universal genius".
Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s career in
the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time
from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks. From 1594,
Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a
company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon
became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen
Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king,
James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the
south bank of the River Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the
partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of
Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the
company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest
house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the
parish tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594.
By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the
title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his
success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him
on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall
(1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone
is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its
end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the
Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after
Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In
1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.
In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of
Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You
Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the
information.
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his
career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in
Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate,
north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599,
the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had
moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with
many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called
Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Later Years and Death
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare
retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all
work was uncommon at that time; and Shakespeare continued to visit
London. In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the
marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought
a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he
was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to
him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John
Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two
daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith
had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s
death.
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter
Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son
of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without
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marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died
without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's
will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third
of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my
second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars
see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the
second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in
significance.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days
after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave
includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided
during restoration of the church in 2008:
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
Modern spelling:
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,"
"To dig the dust enclosed here."
"Blessed be the man that spares these stones,"
"And cursed be he who moves my bones."
Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on
the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque
compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with
the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials
around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and
Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Plays
Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some
point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late
in his career. Some attributions, such as Titus Andronicus and the early
history plays, remain controversial, while The Two Noble Kinsmen and the
lost Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual
evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by
other writers after their original composition.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts
of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama.
Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts
suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s
earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise
the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as
a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were
influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas
Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by
the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical
models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though
it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from
a folk story. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear
to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's
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independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and
directors.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight
double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the
romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream
is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.
Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice,
contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which
reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.
The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting
of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete
Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II,
written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into
the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His
characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between
comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative
variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies:
Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged
adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new
kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius
Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary
events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to
infuse each other".
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays"
Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and
a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that
Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular
hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably
been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for
his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question". Unlike the
introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies
that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of
judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal
errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he
loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point
where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old
king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events
which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the
murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank
Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any
relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of
Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his
wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until
their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a
supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony
and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry
and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T.
S. Eliot.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and
completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The
Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak
than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of
the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially
tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as
evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may
merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on
two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen,
probably with John Fletcher.
Performances
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The
title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had
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been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3,
Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre
and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there
to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff
come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".] When the
company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The
Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first
playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at
Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the
first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were
written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603,
they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the
performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of
Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October
1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608,
they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the
Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean
fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more
elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in
thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The
ghosts fall on their knees."
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage,
William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the
leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays,
including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic
actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry
in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced
around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such
as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry
Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary
circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set
fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an
event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.
Textual Sources
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends
from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of
Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first
time. Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy
books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. No
evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First
Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". Alfred Pollard termed
some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or
garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.
Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The
differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors
or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers. In some cases, for
example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have
revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King
Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio
version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the Oxford Shakespeare
prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague,
Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley,
Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the
sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife
Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,
the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled
lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's
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lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young
woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first
edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare
wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred
by leaden effects. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's
1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his
lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and
144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's
name but without his permission.
Sonnets
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic
works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets
was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets
throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two
unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis
Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his
private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows
Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two
contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of
dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair
young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent
real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents
Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets
"Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr.
W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems.
It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the
publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication
page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or
whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the
Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion,
procreation, death, and time.
Style
Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day.
He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally
from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on
extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is
often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand
speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the
action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has
been described as stilted.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own
purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the
self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid
self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature
plays. No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style.
Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet
perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. By the time of Romeo
and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s,
Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly
tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic
pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and
consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second
syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his
later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and
finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare
mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow.
This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays
such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to
convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
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Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8
After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the
more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C.
Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in
construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". In the last phase
of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these
effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme
variations in sentence structure and length. In Macbeth, for example, the
language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the
hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a
naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/
Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is
challenged to complete the sense. The late romances, with their shifts in
time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long
and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up,
subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of
spontaneity.
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.
Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as
Plutarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of
interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as
possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can
survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core
drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and
more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved
aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late
romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which
emphasised the illusion of theatre.
Influence
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and
literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of
characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for
example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.
Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or
events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work
heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive
Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner
described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble
variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner,
and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies
owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic
hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music
linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi,
Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source
plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics
and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of
William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of
Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
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In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less
standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape
modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other
author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of
its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and
"a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English
speech.
Critical Reputation
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of
praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a
group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.
And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge,
numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben
Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the
wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare
wanted art".
Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th
century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly
rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for
example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic.
Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying
of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". For several decades,
Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to
respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his
natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of
Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing
reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the
18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those
who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor
Hugo.
During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary
philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel
translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th
century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on
adulation. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in
1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest,
gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible". The Victorians
produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and
critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as
"bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made
Shakespeare obsolete.
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from
discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the
avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow
mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt
Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet
and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness"
in fact made him truly modern. Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the
school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of
Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches
replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of
Shakespeare. By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements
such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies,
and queer studies.
Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Main article: Shakespeare authorship question
Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed
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about the authorship of the works attributed to him. Proposed alternative
candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere,
17th Earl of Oxford. Several "group theories" have also been proposed. Only
a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the
traditional attribution, but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian
theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.
Religion
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics,
at a time when Catholic practice was against the law. Shakespeare's mother,
Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest
evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare,
found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The
document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity. In
1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for
fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse. In 1606 the name of
William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend
Easter communion in Stratford. Scholars find evidence both for and against
Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to
prove either way.
Sexuality
Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the
26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their
three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the
centuries some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are
autobiographical, and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man.
Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather
than sexual love. The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a
married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.
Portraiture
There is no written description of Shakespeare's physical appearance and no
evidence that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving,
which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness, and his Stratford
monument provide the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th
century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that
various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to
the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions,
repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people.
Eserleri:
List of Works
Classification of The Plays
Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623,
listed below according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and
tragedies. Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen
and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with
scholars agreed that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their
composition. No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.
In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies
as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies,
his term is often used. These plays and the associated Two Noble Kinsmen
are marked with an asterisk (*) below. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the
term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well,
Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet. "Dramas as singular
in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he
wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of
today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays." The term,
much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though
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Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy. The other problem plays are
marked below with a double dagger.
Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a
dagger below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as
apocrypha.
Comedies
All's Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Winter's Tale
Poems
Shakespeare's sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Lover's Complaint
Histories
King John
Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII
Lost Plays
Love's Labour's Won
The History of Cardenio
Tragedies
Romeo and Juliet
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline
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Apocrypha
Arden of Faversham
The Birth of Merlin
Edward III
Locrine
The London Prodigal
The Puritan
The Second Maiden's Tragedy
Sir John Oldcastle
Thomas Lord Cromwell
A Yorkshire Tragedy
Sir Thomas More
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