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 William Shakespeare | What is there still to say about the man universally acknowledged to be the greatest writer in the history of the English language, if not the history of the world, whose very name is synonymous with literary genius? Apparently a great deal, to judge from the unending stream of books that continue to be written about William Shakespeare, as well as the myriad articles printed in any number of periodicals devoted to him. And even in so brief a sketch as this, there are, in addition to the facts of his life, several points worth making—that he was a real person, a human being with specific attributes and attitudes (whether in his horror of rebellion, as manifested in the history plays, or his horror at the damage wrought by supposed romantic betrayal in both the comedies and Othello, he consistently demonstrates a rage for order); that even as an artist, matchless as the greatest of his works may be, he was capable of weakness and failure; and that, despite the unremitting efforts to prove otherwise, there is no doubt that he was the author of the plays and poems that bear his name. |
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in 1564. The fact of his baptism on April 26 of that year has led scholars to assign him the birthdate of April 23, as it was the custom to baptize children three days after birth. The selection of that date has a certain sentimental appeal as well, not only because it is the feast day of Saint George, the patron saint of England, but because Shakespeare would also die on April 23, fifty-two years later. He was the third of eight children, four sons and four daughters, of John Shakespeare, a wool dealer and glovemaker—who was elected an alderman in Stratford in 1565, high bailiff in 1568, and chief alderman in 1571—and Mary (Arden) Shakespeare, daughter of a wealthy landowner upon whose property John Shakespeare had been a tenant farmer. Both of his older sisters had died in infancy, so that William was effectively the eldest child of the family. He was in all likelihood educated at the Stratford grammar school and would have had the opportunity to be exposed to live performances of plays when several touring theatrical companies appeared in Stratford in the 1580s. In late November of 1582, when he was eighteen years of age, he married twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway. One likely reason for the marriage can be found in the fact that their daughter, Susanna, was baptized on May 26, 1583, six months after the wedding. In February 1585, Anne gave birth to their only other children, twins named Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet would die at the age of eleven in August 1596, while both of Shakespeare's daughters would marry and have children. With the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth Hall in 1670, his direct line would come to an end.
Shakespeare's nonaristocratic origins, the gaps in the biographical record, and the relative meagerness of his education are all details seized upon by those who theorize that he did not write his works. The first point is especially difficult to sustain, since genius—unlike those who dispute Shakespeare's genius—is no respecter of social distinctions. Shakespeare's life may be lightly documented by the standards of twentieth-century record-keeping, but we know much more about him than we do about many of his well-known contemporaries; the fact that most references to Shakespeare concern loans of money and purchases of property proves only that the law is more concerned with financial transactions than with literary ones, not, as some would have it, that he was a soulless materialist who could not possibly have been a poet. And his detractors fail to appreciate that Shakespeare would have learned more and learned it better in the grammar school of his day than many students learn in present-day high schools and colleges; it should also be borne in mind that the references in his writings are not particularly learned by the standards of his time, and are well within the reach of a lively and active intelligence, even one not trained in a university. Further, not one of Shakespeare's contemporaries ever raised the slightest doubt about his authorship of his works. The kinds of conspiracies fantasized by those who do raise such doubts depend upon dozens of far-fetched coincidences, every single one of which would have had to occur, as well as upon hundreds, if not thousands, of people taking the secret to the grave and beyond. Those who call Shakespeare's authorship a tissue of improbabilities seem stunningly indifferent to the absolute impossibilities of their own contentions.
When and for what reasons Shakespeare left Stratford for London, leaving his wife and children at home, can only be (and has been) speculated upon, but the first mention of him in a professional capacity came in 1592 when the playwright and pamphleteer Robert Greene, in his deathbed testament A Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance, made an unflattering reference to Shakespeare as an actor and playwright. The succeeding two years brought Shakespeare's first acknowledged publications, the long narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). That his stage writings were popular with the public from the beginning of his career can be gauged from the fact that they began to be printed as early as 1594. These publications were sometimes textually corrupt and possibly unauthorized editions. British drama was still in its infancy when Shakespeare began to write; plays were regarded more as popular entertainments than serious works of literature, and the circumstances surrounding their publication were often haphazard, as dramatic copyright did not exist. Plays were also derived for the most part from other works, whether historical accounts or literary texts, and in fact all but one of Shakespeare's plays—The Tempest is the exception—are based on other sources. Originality as a literary virtue, if not a requirement, is a phenomenon of the last two centuries.
The earliest publications of Shakespeare's plays were anonymous, but his reputation clearly grew in a short time, for by 1598 the presence of his name on a title page was considered a selling point. In that same year, Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, or Wit's Treasury, made reference to "mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare," mentioning him as the author of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and "his sugared Sonnets among his private friends," as well as of a number of plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Love's Labour's Won (either a lost play or, more likely, an earlier title of a familiar work—Much Ado about Nothing, perhaps), A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet.
In addition to his literary talents, Shakespeare showed himself to be a shrewd businessman, becoming a shareholder in his theatrical company and acquiring real estate in Stratford. Players and other theater people were held in low esteem in Shakespeare's day. To avoid running afoul of laws against vagabonds, they found it expedient to organize themselves into companies, usually under the protection of a prominent nobleman whose servants they would profess to be. Shakespeare became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Players. After James I's ascension to the throne in 1603, the company would become the King's Players. In 1599, the Players dismantled their old theater and built the Globe, a circular open-air building not unlike—though much smaller than—modern sports stadiums, which would be the company's home until it burned in 1613. Admission prices were graduated, with the lowest price being for standing room in the middle of the theater. The plays tended to be mixtures of elegant and raucous material, providing something for everyone in the audience, from the aristocrats in the boxes to the groundlings in the pit.
Performances, which were given in the afternoon, ran without intermission. There were no printed programs and little or no scenery. Since the texts involved frequent changes of place, all new locales, times of day, and other features necessary to be known were established early in the dialogue of each scene. There was also no front curtain, and so provision was made in the text itself for the removal of the body or bodies at the end of any scene in which a death had occurred onstage. Women were not permitted to appear in plays, so all the female roles were undertaken by boy actors, a fact that was frequently exploited for humorous effect by innuendoes in the dialogue.
Contrary to romanticized assumptions, Shakespeare was not a fully formed genius who began creating masterpieces from the first moment that his pen touched paper. To read his plays in chronological order, insofar as that order can be determined, is to trace a fascinating process of growth and development. Metrically speaking (iambic pentameter was the principal medium of dialogue on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, although there are prose scenes in virtually all of Shakespeare's plays), his earliest plays are often almost mechanical in their insistence on a ten-syllable line with five properly placed and heavily marked accents, whatever forcing of natural word order may be needed to achieve that goal, with the ends of syntactic units corresponding to the ends of lines. Over time, the metronomic meter gave way to a more relaxed line, one that could accommodate extra unstressed syllables in an attempt to more closely approximate the rhythms of actual speech, and there was much more frequent use of enjambment.
One notes Shakespeare's increasing mastery of the playwright's craft in other areas as well, such as exposition, which is the communication to the audience, usually at the beginning of the play, of information that it needs in order to understand the basic situation and the relationships among the characters. Since the playwright, unlike the poet or the novelist, has no voice in which to speak directly to the audience, this must be done through the characters' dialogue. In this regard, one might consider the opening of The Comedy of Errors, in which an old man, a stranger, is directly asked to explain his background and the nature of his quest, and does so with only two small interruptions, for more than one hundred lines, in contrast to the first scene of Hamlet, in which several characters discuss the basic situation—the death of the late king, his ghost's appearance, and so on—in quick exchanges of natural-sounding dialogue, without telling one another what they all already know just so that the audience will learn it.
Needless to say, one finds similar patterns of growth and increasing depth in the content of the plays. Earlier treatments are often rather formulaic, staying well within audience expectations and the conventions of the time, as in the presentation of romantic love in Love's Labour's Lost, in which four young noblemen—one of them a king—withdraw into the forest to contemplate love and to attach love poems to tree trunks in the hope that the young women they desire will pass by and read them. The audience would have expected and appreciated the total artificiality of this situation, an artificiality that is emphasized by keeping the young lovers isolated from the earthy and often crude responses to their behavior by the foresters who surround them. Contrast this situation to that of the delightfully hesitant lovers Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, who finally overcome their history of posturing against the follies of love to commit themselves to their new feelings, and whose commitment is all the more endearing and satisfying because of their recognition of its essential foolishness.
Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's earliest tragedies, is a vigorous exercise with an absurdly delightful villain who concludes by affirming that "If one good deed in all my life I did/I do repent it from my very soul," but it is a crude farrago of blood and bombast. One need only compare the reaction of Marcus Andronicus to the rape and mutilation of his niece, a fifty-line monologue that ransacks the Smaller Classical Dictionary for relevant allusions, to the economy of means, and consequent devastating emotional effect, with which Shakespeare presents the prison reunion of Lear and Cordelia in King Lear. Lear customarily vies with Hamlet for the title of Shakespeare's masterpiece; more than any others of his works, these two are rich not only in almost unbearable emotional intensity but also in brilliant poetry, never more so than in its descriptions of the bleakness of human existence.
It is in their depiction of human nature, and their own humanity, that Shakespeare's plays strike their deepest and richest notes, and it is part of our own humanity to respond in personal terms to that which moves us. As with any other writer, we want to know the personality of Shakespeare himself and to understand how his own experiences were transmuted into glorious and imperishable works of art. In his last group of plays, the so-called tragicomic romances which withhold traditional comic assurances from the audience until the final happy resolution, there is a recurring motif of parents being separated from their grown children and presuming them to be dead. One inevitably wonders about the relationship between Shakespeare's obsession with this theme and the death of his own young son years before, but given the meagerness of the record, wondering is essentially all that can be done.
And then there is the special case of the Sonnets. Everything about these poems raises more questions than it resolves, from our ignorance of when they were written to the mysterious circumstances of their publication, to the basic situation in the sequence itself, in which an older man addresses a younger one in passionate terms that clearly indicate love and in which some sort of betrayal takes place involving the younger man and the other's mistress, the famous "dark lady." Is the poet's love for his young friend physical in nature or not? Who (if anyone) are the originals of the young man and the dark lady? And are the sonnets autobiographical? William Wordsworth seems to have thought so. In his sonnet in defense of the sonnet form, he says: "with this key/Shakespeare unlocked his heart." But Robert Browning, himself one of the least overtly autobiographical of poets, felt that Shakespeare's genius lay precisely in his ability to imagine and to convincingly render persons and situations outside of his own experience, an attitude he expressed when he responded to Wordsworth: "Did Shakespeare?/If so, the less Shakespeare he!"
Shakespeare's last plays seem to have been written around the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century, after which he apparently retired to Stratford, where, like his father before him, he had become a considerable property-holder and leading citizen. On February 10, 1616, his daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney of Stratford. On March 25 of that year, Shakespeare, "in perfect health and memory," executed his will. Despite that assertion, he died—suddenly, according to tradition—of an unknown illness four weeks later, on April 23, 1616.
| His legacy is so vast as to beggar description. No one else has made such stunningly effective use of language or enriched the language with so many vivid phrases, expressing our deepest and our most familiar thoughts much better than we could ever express them for ourselves. No one else has given us so rich a pageant of memorable characters and incidents or shown so complete an understanding of the labyrinths of human personality, presenting both the weakness of the greatest among us and the humanity in the least and basest. No one else has spoken with such profound insight of the things that exalt and terrify us, from the most trivial to those that lie at the very heart of life's mystery. As critics and scholars have extensively demonstrated, Shakespeare was very much a man of his bustling and fascinating age and yet no one spoke more truly than his friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson, when he said of Shakespeare, "He was not of an age, but for all time!" |  William Shakespeare |
The Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about William Shakespeare. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Shakespeare Links.
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