Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your William Shakespeare shopping experience:
1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the William Shakespeare offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of William Shakespeare at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.
2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about
3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a William Shakespeare? Wrong! If the William Shakespeare is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.
4. Questions - Got a question about William Shakespeare then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....
5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling William Shakespeare? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about William Shakespeare and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.
6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your William Shakespeare wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.
7. Feedback - happy with your William Shakespeare then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.
8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the William Shakespeare site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site
9. Contact - got a question about William Shakespeare, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.
10. Payment - ready to pay for your William Shakespeare, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.
{{Infobox Writer| name = William Shakespeare| image = Shakespeare.jpg| bgcolour = silver| caption = The
Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.] (exact date unknown)| birth_place = Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, [Warwickshire,
England, [poet, actor [26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an
English people poet and
playwright, now widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. Shakespeare voted millennium's best writer, BBC News, March 1, a1999, accessed Oct. 11, 2007.
Stephen Greenblatt (2005).
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico, 11. ISBN 0712600981.
• David Bevington (2002)
Shakespeare, 1–3. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0631227199.
•
Stanley Wells (1997).
Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. New York: W. W. Norton, 399. ISBN 0393315622. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon (county)" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38
Shakespeare's plays, 154 Shakespeare's 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 (Shakespeare), who bore him three children:
Susanna Hall, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare and
Judith Quiney. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the
playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the
King's Men (playing company). He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and considerable speculation has been poured into this void,
James S. Shapiro (2005).
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, xvii–xviii. ISBN 0571214800.
• including questions concerning his sexuality of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's religion, and whether the works attributed to him were
Shakespeare authorship question.{{cite book| last =Taylor| first =Gary| authorlink =Gary_Taylor_(English_literature_scholar)| title =Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present| publisher =Hogarth Press| location =London| date =1990| pages =145, 210–23, 261–5| isbn =0701208880 -->
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly
Shakespearean comedy and
Shakespearean history, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly Shakespearean tragedy until about 1608, producing plays, such as
Hamlet,
King Lear, and
Macbeth, considered some of the finest in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote
Shakespeare's late romances and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and 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 nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorian era hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that
George Bernard Shaw called "
bardolatry".Bertolini, John Anthony (1993).
Shaw and Other Playwrights. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 119. ISBN 027100908X. In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today, consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Life
Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of
John Shakespeare, a successful glover and
alderman originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 14–22. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on
26 April 1564. His unknown birthday is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 24–6. This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April
1616.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 24, 296.
• Honan, 15–16. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 23–24.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was educated at the
King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon in Stratford,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 62–63.
•
Peter Ackroyd (2006).
Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Vintage, 53. ISBN 0749386558.
• Stanley Wells,
et al (2005).
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xv–xvi. ISBN 0199267170. a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter of a mile from his home.
Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England,Baldwin, 164–84.
• Cressy, David (1975).
Education in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: St Martin's Press, 28, 29. OCLC 2148260. and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin language and the classical literature.Baldwin, 164–66.
• Cressy, 80–82.
• Ackroyd, 545.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xvi.At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old
Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare). The consistory court of the
Anglican Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on
27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 77–78. The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the Banns of marriage to be read once instead of the usual three times.Michael Wood (historian) (2003).
Shakespeare. New York: Basic Books, 84. ISBN 0465092640.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 78–79. Anne's pregnancy could have been the reason for any hurry. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna Hall, who was baptised on 26 May 1583.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 93 Twins, son Hamnet Shakespeare and daughter
Judith Quiney, followed almost two years later and were baptised on 2 February
1585.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 94. Hamnet died of unrecorded causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August,
1596.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 224.
After the birth of the twins, there are few historical traces of Shakespeare until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. Owing to this gap in the records, scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".Schoenbaum,
Compact, 95. Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many wikt:apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe (dramatist), Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 97–108.
• Nicholas Rowe (dramatist) (1709).
Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear. Reproduced by Terry A. Gray (1997) at: Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. Retrieved 30 July
2007. Another eighteenth-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 144–45. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 110–11. Some twentieth-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.Honigmann, E. A. J. (1999).
Shakespeare: The Lost Years. Revised Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1. ISBN 0719054257.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xvii. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 95–117.
• Wood, 97–109.
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.Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1930).
William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 287, 292. OCLC 353406. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright
Robert Greene (16th century):
...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.Greenblatt, 213.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,Greenblatt, 213.
• Schoenbaum, 153. 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.Ackroyd, 176. The italicised line parodying the phrase "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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 151–52.
{], Act II, Scene 7, 139–42.Wells,
Oxford, 666.|}
Greene’s attack is the first recorded 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.Wells, Stanley (2006).
Shakespeare & Co. New York: Pantheon, 28. ISBN 0375424946.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 144–46.
• Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 59. 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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 184. After the death of
Elizabeth I of England in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I of England, and changed its name to the King's Men (playing company).
Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1923).
The Elizabethan Stage. Vol 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 208–209.
OCLC 336379.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the Thames, which they called the Globe Theatre. In 1608, the partnership also took over the
Blackfriars Theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 2, p. 67–71. 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.Bentley, G. E (1961).
Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 36.
OCLC 356416.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in Bookbinding#Terms and techniques editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 188.
• Kastan, David Scott (1999).
Shakespeare After Theory. London; New York: Routledge, 37. ISBN 041590112X.
• 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 (play) (1603).Joseph Quincy Adams (1923).
A Life of William Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 275.
OCLC 1935264. 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.Wells,
Shakespeare & Co., 28. 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 what roles he played.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 200. In 1610,
John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 200–201. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.Rowe, N.,
Account. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in
As You Like It and the Chorus in
Henry V (play),Ackroyd, 357.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxii. though scholars doubt the sources of the information.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 202–3.
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.Honan, Park (1998).
Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 121. ISBN 0198117922. He moved across the river to
Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.Shapiro, 122. 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.Honan, 325; Greenblatt, 405.
Later years and death
in Stratford-upon-Avon
After 1606–7, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 279. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher (playwright),Honan, 375–78. who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 276.
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death;Ackroyd, 476. but
retiring from all work was uncommon at that time,Honan, 382–83. and Shakespeare continued to visit London.Ackroyd, 476. In 1612, he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.Honan, 326.
• Ackroyd, 462–464. In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the Blackfriars
priory;Schoenbaum,
Compact, 272–274. and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law,
John Hall (physician).Honan, 387.
Shakespeare died on
23 April 1616,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 25, 296. and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 287. and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 292, 294.{] (2005).
The Art of the Dramatist. London; New York: Routledge, 16. ISBN 0415352894.
• Greenblatt, 145–6. 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.Schoenbaum, 301–3.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon two days after his death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 306–07.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xviii. Sometime before 1623, a Shakespeare's funeral 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 (mythology), Socrates, and
Virgil.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 308–10. A stone slab covering his grave is inscribed with a curse against moving his bones. As far as is known, the curse has been effective and his remains lie undisturbed.
Plays
Scholars have often noted four periods in Shakespeare's writing career.Edward Dowden (1881).
Shakspere. New York: Appleton & Co., 48–9.
OCLC 8164385. Until the mid-1590s, he wrote mainly comedies influenced by Roman and Italian models and history plays in the popular chronicle tradition. His second period began in about 1595 with the tragedy
Romeo and Juliet and ended with the tragedy of
Julius Caesar (play) in 1599. During this time, he wrote what are considered his greatest comedies and histories. From about 1600 to about 1608, his "tragic period", Shakespeare wrote mostly tragedies, and from about 1608 to 1613, mainly tragicomedy, also called Shakespeare's late romances.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are
Richard III (play) and the three parts of
Henry VI Part 1, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,Frye, 9.
• Honan, 166. and studies of the texts suggest that
Titus Andronicus,
The Comedy of Errors,
The Taming of the Shrew and
Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 159–61.
• Frye, 9. His first Shakespearean history, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,Dutton, Richard; and Jean Howard (2003).
A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Histories. Oxford: Blackwell, 147. ISBN 0631226338. dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the
Tudor dynasty.Ribner, Irving (2005).
The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare. London; New York: Routledge, 154–155. ISBN 0415353149. Their composition was 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 Younger.Frye, 105.
• Ribner, 67.
• Cheney, Patrick Gerard (2004).
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 100. ISBN 0521527341.
The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models; but no source for the
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.Honan, 136.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 166. Like
Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,Frye, 91.
• Honan 116–117.
• Werner, Sarah (2001).
Shakespeare and Feminist Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 96–100. ISBN 0415227291. the
Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.Friedman, Michael D (2006). "'I'm not a feminist director but...': Recent Feminist Productions of
The Taming of the Shrew," in
Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of James.P. Lusardi. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter (eds.). New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 159. ISBN 0838640591.
, c. 1786.
Tate Britain.
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.Ackroyd, 235.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic low-life scenes.Wood, 161–162. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic
The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender
Shylock which reflected Elizabethan views but may appear racist to modern audiences.Wood, 205–206.
• Honan 258. The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,Ackroyd, 359. the charming rural setting of
As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of
Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.Ackroyd, 362–383. After the lyrical
Richard II (play), written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s,
Henry IV, part 1 and
Henry IV, part 1, and
Henry V (play). 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.Shapiro, 150.
• Gibbons, Brian (1993).
Shakespeare and Multiplicity.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1. ISBN 0521444063.
•Ackroyd, 356. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: ''[Romeo and Juliet'', the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;Wood, 161.
• Honan, 206. and ''[Julius Caesar (play)''—based on Sir [Thomas North 1579 translation of [Plutarch ''[Parallel Lives''—which introduced a new kind of drama.Ackroyd, 353, 358.
• Shapiro, 151–153. 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".Shapiro, 151.
, 1780–5.
Kunsthaus Zürich.
Shakespeare's so-called "tragic period" lasted from about 1600 to 1608, though he also wrote the so-called Problem plays (Shakespeare)
Measure for Measure,
Troilus and Cressida, and
All's Well That Ends Well during this time and had written
Shakespearean tragedy before.
Andrew Cecil Bradley (1991 edition).
Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Penguin, 85. ISBN 0140530193.
• Muir, Kenneth (2005).
Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence. London; New York: Routledge, 12–16. ISBN 0415353254. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The hero of the first,
Prince Hamlet, has probably been more discussed than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous
soliloquy "To be, or not to be."Bradley, 94. 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.Bradley, 86. 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.Bradley, 40, 48. In
Othello, the villain
Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.Bradley, 42, 169, 195.
• Greenblatt, 304. In
King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, triggering scenes which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Duke of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".Bradley, 226.
• Ackroyd, 423.
• Frank Kermode (2004).
The Age of Shakespeare. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 141–2. ISBN 029784881X. In
Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,McDonald, Russ (2006).
Shakespeare's Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43–46. ISBN 0521820685. uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife,
Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare), to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.Bradley, 306. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies,
Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus (play), contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic
T. S. Eliot.Ackroyd, 444.
• McDonald, 69–70.
•
T. S. Eliot (1934).
Elizabethan Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 59.
OCLC 9738219.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to Shakespeare's late romances 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.Dowden, 57. 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.Dowden, 60.
• Frye, 123.
• McDonald, 15. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays,
Henry VIII (play) and
The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher (playwright).Wells,
Oxford, 1247, 1279. ISBN 0199267170.
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 been acted by three different troupes.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xx. After the
Black Death of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at
The Theatre and the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxi. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of
Henry IV, Leonard Digges (II) recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".Shapiro, 16. 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.Foakes, R. A (1990). "Playhouses and Players". In
The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. A. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6. ISBN 0521386624.
• Shapiro, 125–31. 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.Foakes, 6.
• Nagler, A.M (1958).
Shakespeare's Stage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 7. ISBN 0300026897.
• Shapiro, 131–2.
, London.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men (playing company) in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new James I of England. 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.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxii. After 1608, they performed at the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.Foakes, 33. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean era fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In
Cymbeline, for example,
Jupiter (mythology) descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."Ackroyd, 454.
• Holland, Peter (ed.) (2000).
Cymbeline. London: Penguin; Introduction, xli. ISBN 0140714723.
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.Ringler, William Jr. (1997)."Shakespeare and His Actors: Some Remarks on King Lear". In
Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism. James Ogden and Arthur Hawley Scouten (eds.). New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 127. ISBN 083863690X. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in
Romeo and Juliet and
Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 210.
• Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 341. He was replaced around the turn of the sixteenth century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as
Touchstone (As You Like It) in
As You Like It and the fool in
King Lear.Shapiro, 247–9. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that
Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".Wells, Oxford Shakespeare
, 1247. 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.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, 1247.
Textual sources
, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.
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.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxvii. Many of the plays had already appeared in Book size versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".Pollard, xi. Alfred W. Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv.
• Alfred W. Pollard (1909). Shakespeare Quartos and Folios. London: Methuen, xi. OCLC 46308204.
• Maguire, Laurie E (1996). Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad" Quartos and Their Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 28. ISBN 0521473640. Where several versions of a play survive, each Shakespeare's plays#Shakespeare and the textual problem. The differences may stem from copying or Typesetting#Letterpress era errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own foul papers.Bowers, Fredson (1955). On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 8–10.
• Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv–xxxv. In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised texts between the quarto and folio editions. The folio version of King Lear is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, since they cannot be conflated without confusion.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, 909, 1153.
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of Bubonic plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem) and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus (mythology); while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virgin Lucretia is raped by the lustful Sextus Tarquinius.Rowe, John; Brian Gibbons; and A.R. Braunmuller (eds.) (2006). The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, by William Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd revised ed.; introduction, 21. ISBN 0521855519. Influenced by Ovid Metamorphoses,Frye, 288. the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.Rowe J., The Poems, 3, 21. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's 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.Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
• Jackson, MacD P (2004). "A Lover's Complaint Revisited". In Shakespeare Studies. Susan Zimmermann (ed.). Cranbury, NJ.: Associated University Press, 267–294. ISBN 0838641202.
• Honan, 289. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix (mythology) 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.Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
• Honan, 289.
• Schoenbaum, Compact, 327.
Sonnets
-->
{| class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:23em; max-width: 25%;" cellspacing="5"| style="text-align: left;" |"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."|-| style="text-align: left;" | Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.] 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.Wood, 178.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 180. 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".Honan, 180. Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 268. 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 pure 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".Honan, 180.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 180. 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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 268–269. Critics praise the
Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.Wood, 177.
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.Clemen, Wolfgang (2005).
Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays, 150. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415352789. 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
Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.Frye, 105, 177.
• Clemen, Wolfgang (2005).
Shakespeare's Imagery. London; New York: Routledge, 29. ISBN 0415352800.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening
soliloquy of
Richard III (play) has its roots in the self-declaration of the Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.Brooke, Nicholas, "Language and Speaker in Macbeth", 69; and
M. C. Bradbrook, "Shakespeare's Recollection of Marlowe", 195: both in
Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Edwards, Philip; Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G.K. Hunter (eds.) (2004 edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521616948. 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.Clemen,
Shakespeare's Imagery, 63. By the time of
Romeo and Juliet,
Richard II (play), 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.
, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in
Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".
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-stopping, with the risk of monotony.Frye, 185. 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 (play) and
Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8. Wright, George T (2004). "The Play of Phrase and Line". In
Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Russ McDonald (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 868. ISBN 0631234888.
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...
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".Bradley, 91. In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included
enjambment, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.McDonald, 42–6. 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.McDonald, 36, 39, 75.
Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre.Gibbons, 4. Like all playwrights of the time, Shakespeare dramatised stories from sources such as Petrarch and Holinshed.Gibbons, 1–4. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and 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.Gibbons, 1–7, 15. 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 his Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.McDonald, 13.
• Meagher, John C. (2003).
Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in his Playmaking. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 358. ISBN 0838639933.
Influence
, 1793–94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of
characterisation,
plot (narrative),
language, and genre.Chambers, E. K. (1944).
Shakespearean Gleanings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 35. OCLC 2364570. Until
Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.Levenson, Jill L. (2000) (ed.). Introduction.
Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 49–50. ISBN 0192814966. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.Clemen, Wolfgang (1987).
Shakespeare's Soliloquies. London: Routledge, 179. ISBN 0415352770. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romanticism attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy,Millgate, Michael, and Wilson, Keith (2006).
Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 38. ISBN 0802039553.
William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. Dickens often quoted Shakespeare, drawing 25 of his titles from Shakespeare's works. The American novelist Herman Melville soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in
Moby Dick is a classic
tragic hero, inspired by
King Lear.Bryant, John (1998). "Moby Dick as Revolution". In
The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Robert Steven Levine (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82. ISBN 052155571X. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two
operas by
Giuseppe Verdi,
Otello and
Falstaff (opera), whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.Gross, John (2003). "Shakespeare's Influence". In
Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Wells, Stanley and Orlin, Lena Cowen (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 641–2. ISBN 0199245223. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich (1988).
Romanticism in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48. ISBN 0521339138.
• Lambourne, Lionel (1999).
Victorian Painting. London: Phaidon, 193–8. ISBN 0714837768. The Swiss Romantic artist
Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated
Macbeth into German.Paraisz, Júlia (2006). "The Nature of a Romantic Edition". In
Shakespeare Survey 59. Peter Holland (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 130. ISBN 0521868386. The
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.Nicholas Royle (2000). "To Be Announced". In
The Limits of Death: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Joanne Morra, Mark Robson, Marquard Smith (eds.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719057515.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar and spelling were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English.
David Crystal (2001).
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 55–65, 74. ISBN 0521401798.
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.John Wain (1975).
Samuel Johnson. New York: Viking, 194. ISBN 0670616710. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (
Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (
Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.Lynch, Jack (2002).
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language. Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 12. ISBN 184354296X.
• Crystal, 63.
Critical reputation
{{Infobox Writer| name = William Shakespeare| image = Shakespeare.jpg| bgcolour = silver| caption = The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.] (exact date unknown)| birth_place =
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire,
England, [Warwickshire,
England, [poet,
actor [26 April 1564 –
23 April 1616) was an
English people poet and playwright, now widely regarded as the greatest writer in the
English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. Shakespeare voted millennium's best writer, BBC News, March 1, a1999, accessed Oct. 11, 2007.Stephen Greenblatt (2005).
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico, 11. ISBN 0712600981.
• David Bevington (2002)
Shakespeare, 1–3. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0631227199.
• Stanley Wells (1997).
Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. New York: W. W. Norton, 399. ISBN 0393315622. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon (county)" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38
Shakespeare's plays, 154
Shakespeare's 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 (Shakespeare), who bore him three children: Susanna Hall, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare and
Judith Quiney. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the
playing company the
Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the
King's Men (playing company). He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and considerable speculation has been poured into this void,
James S. Shapiro (2005).
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, xvii–xviii. ISBN 0571214800.
• including questions concerning his sexuality of William Shakespeare,
Shakespeare's religion, and whether the works attributed to him were Shakespeare authorship question.{{cite book| last =Taylor| first =Gary| authorlink =Gary_Taylor_(English_literature_scholar)| title =Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present| publisher =Hogarth Press| location =London| date =1990| pages =145, 210–23, 261–5| isbn =0701208880 -->
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly
Shakespearean comedy and Shakespearean history, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly Shakespearean tragedy until about 1608, producing plays, such as
Hamlet,
King Lear, and
Macbeth, considered some of the finest in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote Shakespeare's late romances and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and 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 nineteenth century. The
Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorian era hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that
George Bernard Shaw called "
bardolatry".Bertolini, John Anthony (1993).
Shaw and Other Playwrights. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 119. ISBN 027100908X. In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today, consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Life
Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman originally from Snitterfield, and
Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 14–22. He was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on
26 April 1564. His unknown birthday is traditionally observed on
23 April, St George's Day.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 24–6. This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 24, 296.
• Honan, 15–16. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 23–24.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was educated at the
King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon in Stratford,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 62–63.
• Peter Ackroyd (2006).
Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Vintage, 53. ISBN 0749386558.
• Stanley Wells,
et al (2005).
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, xv–xvi. ISBN 0199267170. a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter of a mile from his home.
Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England,Baldwin, 164–84.
• Cressy, David (1975).
Education in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: St Martin's Press, 28, 29. OCLC 2148260. and the school would have provided an intensive education in
Latin language and the
classical literature.Baldwin, 164–66.
• Cressy, 80–82.
• Ackroyd, 545.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xvi.At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old
Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare). The consistory court of the Anglican Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November
1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 77–78. The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester
chancellor allowed the Banns of marriage to be read once instead of the usual three times.Michael Wood (historian) (2003).
Shakespeare. New York: Basic Books, 84. ISBN 0465092640.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 78–79. Anne's pregnancy could have been the reason for any hurry. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna Hall, who was baptised on 26 May 1583.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 93 Twins, son Hamnet Shakespeare and daughter
Judith Quiney, followed almost two years later and were baptised on 2 February
1585.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 94. Hamnet died of unrecorded causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August, 1596.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 224.
After the birth of the twins, there are few historical traces of Shakespeare until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. Owing to this gap in the records, scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".Schoenbaum,
Compact, 95. Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many wikt:apocryphal stories.
Nicholas Rowe (dramatist), Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer
poaching.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 97–108.
• Nicholas Rowe (dramatist) (1709).
Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear. Reproduced by Terry A. Gray (1997) at: Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet. Retrieved
30 July 2007. Another eighteenth-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 144–45. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 110–11. Some twentieth-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.Honigmann, E. A. J. (1999).
Shakespeare: The Lost Years. Revised Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1. ISBN 0719054257.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xvii. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 95–117.
• Wood, 97–109.
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.
Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1930).
William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 287, 292.
OCLC 353406. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene (16th century):
...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.Greenblatt, 213.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,Greenblatt, 213.
• Schoenbaum, 153. 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.Ackroyd, 176. The italicised line parodying the phrase "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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 151–52.
{], Act II, Scene 7, 139–42.Wells,
Oxford, 666.|}
Greene’s attack is the first recorded 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.Wells, Stanley (2006).
Shakespeare & Co. New York: Pantheon, 28. ISBN 0375424946.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 144–46.
• Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 59. 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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 184. After the death of Elizabeth I of England in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king,
James I of England, and changed its name to the
King's Men (playing company).
Edmund Kerchever Chambers (1923).
The Elizabethan Stage. Vol 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 208–209.
OCLC 336379.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the
Thames, which they called the Globe Theatre. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars Theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 2, p. 67–71. 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.Bentley, G. E (1961).
Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook. New Haven: Yale University Press, 36. OCLC 356416.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in Bookbinding#Terms and techniques editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the
title pages.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 188.
• Kastan, David Scott (1999).
Shakespeare After Theory. London; New York: Routledge, 37. ISBN 041590112X.
• 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 (play) (1603).
Joseph Quincy Adams (1923).
A Life of William Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 275.
OCLC 1935264. 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.Wells,
Shakespeare & Co., 28. 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 what roles he played.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 200. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 200–201. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.Rowe, N.,
Account. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in
As You Like It and the Chorus in
Henry V (play),Ackroyd, 357.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxii. though scholars doubt the sources of the information.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 202–3.
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.Honan, Park (1998).
Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 121. ISBN 0198117922. He moved across the river to
Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.Shapiro, 122. 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.Honan, 325; Greenblatt, 405.
Later years and death
in Stratford-upon-Avon
After 1606–7, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 279. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher (playwright),Honan, 375–78. who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 276.
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death;Ackroyd, 476. but retiring from all work was uncommon at that time,Honan, 382–83. and Shakespeare continued to visit London.Ackroyd, 476. In 1612, he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.Honan, 326.
• Ackroyd, 462–464. In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the Blackfriars
priory;Schoenbaum,
Compact, 272–274. and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law,
John Hall (physician).Honan, 387.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 25, 296. and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,Schoenbaum,
Compact, 287. and Judith had married
Thomas Quiney, a
vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 292, 294.{] (2005).
The Art of the Dramatist. London; New York: Routledge, 16. ISBN 0415352894.
• Greenblatt, 145–6. 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.Schoenbaum, 301–3.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon two days after his death.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 306–07.
• Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xviii. Sometime before 1623, a
Shakespeare's funeral 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 (mythology), Socrates, and Virgil.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 308–10. A stone slab covering his grave is inscribed with a curse against moving his bones. As far as is known, the curse has been effective and his remains lie undisturbed.
Plays
Scholars have often noted four periods in Shakespeare's writing career.
Edward Dowden (1881).
Shakspere. New York: Appleton & Co., 48–9. OCLC 8164385. Until the mid-1590s, he wrote mainly comedies influenced by Roman and Italian models and history plays in the popular chronicle tradition. His second period began in about 1595 with the tragedy
Romeo and Juliet and ended with the tragedy of
Julius Caesar (play) in 1599. During this time, he wrote what are considered his greatest comedies and histories. From about 1600 to about 1608, his "tragic period", Shakespeare wrote mostly tragedies, and from about 1608 to 1613, mainly tragicomedy, also called
Shakespeare's late romances.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are
Richard III (play) and the three parts of
Henry VI Part 1, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,Frye, 9.
• Honan, 166. and studies of the texts suggest that
Titus Andronicus,
The Comedy of Errors,
The Taming of the Shrew and
Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 159–61.
• Frye, 9. His first
Shakespearean history, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,Dutton, Richard; and Jean Howard (2003).
A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Histories. Oxford: Blackwell, 147. ISBN 0631226338. dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the
Tudor dynasty.Ribner, Irving (2005).
The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare. London; New York: Routledge, 154–155. ISBN 0415353149. Their composition was 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 Younger.Frye, 105.
• Ribner, 67.
• Cheney, Patrick Gerard (2004).
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 100. ISBN 0521527341.
The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models; but no source for the
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.Honan, 136.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 166. Like
Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,Frye, 91.
• Honan 116–117.
• Werner, Sarah (2001).
Shakespeare and Feminist Performance. London; New York: Routledge, 96–100. ISBN 0415227291. the
Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.Friedman, Michael D (2006). "'I'm not a feminist director but...': Recent Feminist Productions of
The Taming of the Shrew," in
Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Honor of James.P. Lusardi. Paul Nelsen and June Schlueter (eds.). New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 159. ISBN 0838640591.
, c. 1786.
Tate Britain.
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.Ackroyd, 235.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic low-life scenes.Wood, 161–162. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic
The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock which reflected Elizabethan views but may appear racist to modern audiences.Wood, 205–206.
• Honan 258. The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,Ackroyd, 359. the charming rural setting of
As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of
Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.Ackroyd, 362–383. After the lyrical
Richard II (play), written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s,
Henry IV, part 1 and
Henry IV, part 1, and
Henry V (play). 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.Shapiro, 150.
• Gibbons, Brian (1993).
Shakespeare and Multiplicity.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1. ISBN 0521444063.
•Ackroyd, 356. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: ''[Romeo and Juliet'', the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;Wood, 161.
• Honan, 206. and ''[Julius Caesar (play)''—based on Sir [Thomas North 1579 translation of [Plutarch ''[Parallel Lives''—which introduced a new kind of drama.Ackroyd, 353, 358.
• Shapiro, 151–153. 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".Shapiro, 151.
, 1780–5.
Kunsthaus Zürich.
Shakespeare's so-called "tragic period" lasted from about 1600 to 1608, though he also wrote the so-called
Problem plays (Shakespeare) Measure for Measure,
Troilus and Cressida, and
All's Well That Ends Well during this time and had written
Shakespearean tragedy before.Andrew Cecil Bradley (1991 edition).
Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. London: Penguin, 85. ISBN 0140530193.
• Muir, Kenneth (2005).
Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence. London; New York: Routledge, 12–16. ISBN 0415353254. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The hero of the first,
Prince Hamlet, has probably been more discussed than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous
soliloquy "To be, or not to be."Bradley, 94. 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.Bradley, 86. 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.Bradley, 40, 48. In
Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.Bradley, 42, 169, 195.
• Greenblatt, 304. In
King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, triggering scenes which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Duke of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".Bradley, 226.
• Ackroyd, 423.
•
Frank Kermode (2004).
The Age of Shakespeare. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 141–2. ISBN 029784881X. In
Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,McDonald, Russ (2006).
Shakespeare's Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 43–46. ISBN 0521820685. uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare), to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.Bradley, 306. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies,
Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus (play), contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic
T. S. Eliot.Ackroyd, 444.
• McDonald, 69–70.
• T. S. Eliot (1934).
Elizabethan Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 59.
OCLC 9738219.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to Shakespeare's late romances 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.Dowden, 57. 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.Dowden, 60.
• Frye, 123.
• McDonald, 15. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays,
Henry VIII (play) and
The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher (playwright).Wells,
Oxford, 1247, 1279. ISBN 0199267170.
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 been acted by three different troupes.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xx. After the
Black Death of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at
The Theatre and the
Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxi. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of
Henry IV,
Leonard Digges (II) recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".Shapiro, 16. 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.Foakes, R. A (1990). "Playhouses and Players". In
The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. A. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6. ISBN 0521386624.
• Shapiro, 125–31. 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.Foakes, 6.
• Nagler, A.M (1958).
Shakespeare's Stage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 7. ISBN 0300026897.
• Shapiro, 131–2.
, London.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men (playing company) in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new James I of England. 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.Wells,
Oxford Shakespeare, xxii. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.Foakes, 33. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean era fashion for lavishly staged
masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In
Cymbeline, for example,
Jupiter (mythology) descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."Ackroyd, 454.
• Holland, Peter (ed.) (2000).
Cymbeline. London: Penguin; Introduction, xli. ISBN 0140714723.
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.Ringler, William Jr. (1997)."Shakespeare and His Actors: Some Remarks on King Lear". In
Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism. James Ogden and Arthur Hawley Scouten (eds.). New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 127. ISBN 083863690X. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in
Romeo and Juliet and
Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 210.
• Chambers,
William Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 341. He was replaced around the turn of the sixteenth century by
Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone (As You Like It) in
As You Like It and the fool in
King Lear.Shapiro, 247–9. In
1613, Sir
Henry Wotton recorded that
Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".Wells, Oxford Shakespeare
, 1247. 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.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, 1247.
Textual sources
, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.
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.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxvii. Many of the plays had already appeared in Book size versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".Pollard, xi. Alfred W. Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv.
• Alfred W. Pollard (1909). Shakespeare Quartos and Folios. London: Methuen, xi. OCLC 46308204.
• Maguire, Laurie E (1996). Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The "Bad" Quartos and Their Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 28. ISBN 0521473640. Where several versions of a play survive, each Shakespeare's plays#Shakespeare and the textual problem. The differences may stem from copying or Typesetting#Letterpress era errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own foul papers.Bowers, Fredson (1955). On Editing Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Dramatists. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 8–10.
• Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, xxxiv–xxxv. In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised texts between the quarto and folio editions. The folio version of King Lear is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, since they cannot be conflated without confusion.Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, 909, 1153.
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of Bubonic plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem) and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus (mythology); while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virgin Lucretia is raped by the lustful Sextus Tarquinius.Rowe, John; Brian Gibbons; and A.R. Braunmuller (eds.) (2006). The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint, by William Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd revised ed.; introduction, 21. ISBN 0521855519. Influenced by Ovid Metamorphoses,Frye, 288. the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.Rowe J., The Poems, 3, 21. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's 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.Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
• Jackson, MacD P (2004). "A Lover's Complaint Revisited". In Shakespeare Studies. Susan Zimmermann (ed.). Cranbury, NJ.: Associated University Press, 267–294. ISBN 0838641202.
• Honan, 289. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix (mythology) 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.Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
• Honan, 289.
• Schoenbaum, Compact, 327.
Sonnets
-->
{| class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; font-size: 85%; background:#c6dbf7; color:black; width:23em; max-width: 25%;" cellspacing="5"| style="text-align: left;" |"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."|-| style="text-align: left;" | Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.] 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.Wood, 178.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 180. 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".Honan, 180. Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 268. 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 pure 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".Honan, 180.
• Schoenbaum,
Compact, 180. 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.Schoenbaum,
Compact, 268–269. Critics praise the
Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.Wood, 177.
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.Clemen, Wolfgang (2005).
Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays, 150. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415352789. 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
Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.Frye, 105, 177.
• Clemen, Wolfgang (2005).
Shakespeare's Imagery. London; New York: Routledge, 29. ISBN 0415352800.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of
Richard III (play) has its roots in the self-declaration of the Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.Brooke, Nicholas, "Language and Speaker in Macbeth", 69; and M. C. Bradbrook, "Shakespeare's Recollection of Marlowe", 195: both in
Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Edwards, Philip; Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G.K. Hunter (eds.) (2004 edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521616948. 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.Clemen,
Shakespeare's Imagery, 63. By the time of
Romeo and Juliet,
Richard II (play), 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.
, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in
Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".
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-stopping, with the risk of monotony.Frye, 185. 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 (play) and
Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8. Wright, George T (2004). "The Play of Phrase and Line". In
Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Russ McDonald (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 868. ISBN 0631234888.
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...
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".Bradley, 91. In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included
enjambment, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.McDonald, 42–6. 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.McDonald, 36, 39, 75.
Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre.Gibbons, 4. Like all playwrights of the time, Shakespeare dramatised stories from sources such as
Petrarch and Holinshed.Gibbons, 1–4. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and 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.Gibbons, 1–7, 15. 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 his Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.McDonald, 13.
• Meagher, John C. (2003).
Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in his Playmaking. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 358. ISBN 0838639933.
Influence
, 1793–94.
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of
characterisation, plot (narrative),
language, and genre.Chambers, E. K. (1944).
Shakespearean Gleanings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 35.
OCLC 2364570. Until
Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.Levenson, Jill L. (2000) (ed.). Introduction.
Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 49–50. ISBN 0192814966. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.Clemen, Wolfgang (1987).
Shakespeare's Soliloquies. London: Routledge, 179. ISBN 0415352770. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The
Romanticism attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from
Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy,Millgate, Michael, and Wilson, Keith (2006).
Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 38. ISBN 0802039553.
William Faulkner, and
Charles Dickens. Dickens often quoted Shakespeare, drawing 25 of his titles from Shakespeare's works. The American novelist Herman Melville soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in
Moby Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by
King Lear.Bryant, John (1998). "Moby Dick as Revolution". In
The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Robert Steven Levine (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82. ISBN 052155571X. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi,
Otello and
Falstaff (opera), whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.Gross, John (2003). "Shakespeare's Influence". In
Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Wells, Stanley and Orlin, Lena Cowen (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 641–2. ISBN 0199245223. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich (1988).
Romanticism in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48. ISBN 0521339138.
• Lambourne, Lionel (1999).
Victorian Painting. London: Phaidon, 193–8. ISBN 0714837768. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of
William Blake, even translated
Macbeth into German.Paraisz, Júlia (2006). "The Nature of a Romantic Edition". In
Shakespeare Survey 59. Peter Holland (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 130. ISBN 0521868386. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.Nicholas Royle (2000). "To Be Announced". In
The Limits of Death: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Joanne Morra, Mark Robson, Marquard Smith (eds.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719057515.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar and spelling were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English.
David Crystal (2001).
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 55–65, 74. ISBN 0521401798. 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.John Wain (1975).
Samuel Johnson. New York: Viking, 194. ISBN 0670616710. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (
Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (
Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.Lynch, Jack (2002).
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language. Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 12. ISBN 184354296X.
• Crystal, 63.
Critical reputation
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Biography, plays, sonnets, poems and quotes, quiz and forum.
William Shakespeare Biography
A timeline and key events and facts detailing the life and times of the great bard.
William Shakespeare Biography
Visit this William Shakespeare site including information about his biography. Educational resource for his biography and William Shakespeare. Comprehensive facts about his ...
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
William Shakespeare: Shop for Gifts and Books: Activities and Events: Library & Archive ... The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is an independent charity which owns and cares ...
BBC - History - William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
Shakespeare's reputation as dramatist and poet actor is unique and he is considered by many to be the greatest playwright of all time, although many of the facts of his life remain ...
William Shakespeare - poetry, poems
ART OF EUROPE. poetry | prints | cine | home. William Shakespeare - poetry, poems. so, the leonardo o' lit, christopher marlowe, was born in crewe alexandra (which is on the ...
William Shakespeare Facts
Visit this site dedicated to the Great Bard including William Shakespeare Facts.Fast and accurate details of William Shakespeare Facts.Learn about William Shakespeare Facts.
William Shakespeare: Complete works, criticism, study aids, CD, video ...
To read or download; a glossary of obscure words and expressions.
William Shakespeare
Spartacus, USA History, British History, Second World War, First World War, Germany,
William Shakespeare in quarto: view 21 of Shakespeare's plays online
View online the British Library's copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642 and find out about William Shakespeare's ...
