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