I | INTRODUCTION |
William
Shakespeare (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, recognized in much
of the world as the greatest of all dramatists. Hundreds of editions of his
plays have been published, including translations in all major languages.
Scholars have written thousands of books and articles about his plots,
characters, themes, and language. He is the most widely quoted author in
history, and his plays have probably been performed more times than those of any
other dramatist.
There is no simple explanation for
Shakespeare’s unrivaled popularity, but he remains our greatest entertainer and
perhaps our most profound thinker. He had a remarkable knowledge of human
behavior, which he was able to communicate through his portrayal of a wide
variety of characters. He was able to enter fully into the point of view of each
of his characters and to create vivid dramatic situations in which to explore
human motivations and behavior. His mastery of poetic language and of the
techniques of drama enabled him to combine these multiple viewpoints, human
motives, and actions to produce a uniquely compelling theatrical experience.
II | LIFE |
For someone who lived almost 400 years ago, a
surprising amount is known about Shakespeare’s life. Indeed we know more about
his life than about almost any other writer of his age. Nonetheless, for the
life of the greatest writer in the English language, there are still significant
gaps, and therefore much supposition surrounds the facts we have. He composed
his plays during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled England from 1558 to
1603, and during the early part of the reign of her closest relative, James VI
of Scotland, who took England’s throne as James I after Elizabeth’s death in
1603. During this period England saw an outpouring of poetry and drama, led by
Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and Christopher Marlowe, that remains unsurpassed
in English literary history (see English Literature).
A | Early Years |
Although the exact date of Shakespeare’s
birth is unknown, his baptism on April 26, 1564, was recorded in the parish
register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, a
prosperous town in the English Midlands. Based on this record and on the fact
that children in Shakespeare’s time were usually baptized two or three days
after birth, April 23 has traditionally been accepted as his date of birth.
The third of eight children, William
Shakespeare was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a locally prominent
glovemaker and wool merchant, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do
landowner in the nearby village of Wilmcote. The young Shakespeare probably
attended the Stratford grammar school, the King’s New School, which educated the
sons of Stratford citizens. The school’s rigorous curriculum was based largely
on the study of Latin and the major classical writers. Shakespeare’s writings
show that he was well acquainted with the Latin poet Ovid as well as other Latin
works, including comedies by Terence and Plautus, two much-admired Roman
playwrights.
As his family’s eldest son, Shakespeare
ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father’s shop after he completed
grammar school, so that he could learn and eventually take over the business. We
do not have any evidence that he did so, however. According to one late
17th-century account, he was apprenticed instead to a butcher because of
declines in his father’s financial situation, but this claim is no more
convincing that a number of other claims. A potentially reliable source, William
Beeston, the son of an actor and theater manager who would certainly have known
Shakespeare, claimed that Shakespeare had been “a schoolmaster in the country.”
Recently, some scholars have been intrigued by a letter from 1581 from a
prominent landowner, Alexander Hoghton, recommending a William Shakeshafte to
Sir Thomas Hesketh. Some believe that Shakeshafte is Shakespeare, working
perhaps as a schoolmaster for the Hoghtons, a Catholic family in Lancashire.
However, no absolutely reliable historical records remain to provide information
about Shakespeare’s life between his baptism and his marriage.
On November 27, 1582, a license was
issued to permit Shakespeare’s marriage, at the age of 18, to Anne Hathaway,
aged 26 and the daughter of a Warwickshire farmer. (Although the document lists
the bride as “Annam Whateley,” the scribe most likely made an error in the
entry.) The next day a bond was signed to protect the bishop who issued the
license from any legal responsibility for approving the marriage, as William was
still a minor and Anne was pregnant. The couple’s daughter, Susanna, was born on
May 26, 1583, and twins—Hamnet and Judith who were named for their godparents,
neighbors Hamnet and Judith Sadler—followed on February 2, 1585.
Sometime after the birth of the twins,
Shakespeare apparently left Stratford, but no records have turned up to reveal
his activity between their birth and his presence in London in 1592, when he was
already at work in the theater. For this reason Shakespeare’s biographers
sometimes refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as “the lost years.”
Speculations about this period abound. An unsubstantiated report claims
Shakespeare left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir
Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Another theory has him leaving for
London with a theater troupe that had performed in Stratford in 1587.
B | Arrival in London |
Shakespeare seems to have arrived in London
about 1588, and by 1592 he had attained sufficient success as an actor and a
playwright to attract the venom of an anxious rival. In his Groat’s Worth of
Wit, English dramatist Robert Greene sneers at “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 [jack of all trades], is in his own
conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” The pun on Shakespeare’s name and
the parody in the quotation of a line from Henry VI leave no doubt of Greene’s
target. Shortly after this remark, Shakespeare’s first publications appeared.
Shakespeare’s poetry rather than his plays
reached print first: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of
Lucrece in 1594. These two fashionably erotic narrative poems were probably
written to earn money as the theaters were closed from the summer of 1592 to the
spring of 1594 because of plague, and Shakespeare’s normal source of income was
thus denied him. Even so, the two poems, along with the Sonnets,
established Shakespeare’s reputation as a gifted and popular poet.
Shakespeare dedicated the two poems to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd earl of
Southampton. Scholars disagree on whether the dedications are evidence of a
close relationship between Shakespeare and Southampton. Literary dedications
were designed to gain financial support from wealthy men interested in fostering
the arts, and it is probable that Southampton rewarded Shakespeare for his two
poems. Both poems became best-sellers—The Rape of Lucrece
appearing in eight editions by 1632, Venus and Adonis in a remarkable 16
editions by 1636—and both were widely quoted and often imitated.
The Sonnets were not published until
1609, but as early as 1598, a contemporary, Francis Meres, praised Shakespeare
as a “mellifluous and honey-tongued” poet equal to the Roman Ovid, praising in
particular his “sugared sonnets” that were circulating “among his private
friends.” The 154 sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified
as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a
mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The sonnets
are prized for their exploration of love in all its aspects. Sonnet 18, which
begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” ranks among the most famous
love poems of all time. See also Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
C | Actor and Playwright |
Shakespeare’s reputation today is,
however, based primarily on the 38 plays that he wrote, modified, or
collaborated on. Records of Shakespeare’s plays begin to appear in 1594, when
the theaters reopened with the passing of the plague that had closed them for 21
months. In December of 1594 his play The Comedy of Errors was
performed in London during the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, one of the London
law schools. In March of the following year he received payment for two plays
that had been performed during the Christmas holidays at the court of Queen
Elizabeth I by his theatrical company, known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The
receipt for payment, which he signed along with two fellow actors, reveals that
he had by this time achieved a prominent place in the company. He was already
probably a so-called sharer, a position entitling him to a percentage of the
company’s profits rather than merely a salary as an actor and a playwright. In
time the profits of this company and its two theaters, the Globe Theatre, which
opened in 1599, and the Blackfriars, which the company took over in 1608,
enabled Shakespeare to become a wealthy man.
It is worth noting that Shakespeare’s
share in the acting company made him wealthy, not any commissions or royalties
from writing his plays. Playwriting was generally poorly paid work, which
involved providing scripts for the successful theater business. His plays would
have belonged to the acting company, and when they did reach print they then
belonged to the publisher. No system of royalties existed at that time. Indeed,
with the exception of the two narrative poems he published in 1593 and 1594,
Shakespeare never seems to have bothered about publication. The plays that
reached print did so without his involvement. The only form of “publication” he
sought was their performance in the theater.
The theater served Shakespeare’s financial
needs well. In 1597 he bought New Place, a substantial three-story house in
Stratford. With the opening of the splendid Globe Theatre in 1599, Shakespeare’s
fortunes increased and in 1602 he bought additional property: 43 hectares (107
acres) of arable land and 8 hectares (20 acres) of pasture north of the town of
Stratford and, later that year, a cottage facing the garden at New Place. In
1605 he bought more property in a neighboring village. His financial activities
can be traced, and his final investment is the purchase of a house in the
Blackfriars district of London in 1613.
Shakespeare wrote nearly all of his plays
from 1590 to 1611, when he retired to New Place. A series of history plays and
joyful comedies appeared throughout the 1590s, ending with As You Like It
and Twelfth Night. At the same time as he was writing comedy, he also
wrote nine history plays, treating the reigns of England’s medieval kings and
exploring realities of power still relevant today. The great tragedies—including
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth—were written during the
first decade of the 1600s. All focus on a basically decent individual who brings
about his own downfall through a tragic flaw. Scholars have theorized about the
reasons behind this change in Shakespeare’s vision, and the switch from a focus
on social aspects of human activity to the rending experience of the individual.
But no one knows whether events in his own life or changes in England’s
circumstances triggered the shift, or whether it was just an aesthetic decision.
Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, had died in 1596 at the age of 11, his father
died in 1601, and England’s popular monarch, Elizabeth I, died in 1603, so it is
not unreasonable to think that the change in Shakespeare’s genre and tone
reflects some change in his own view of life prompted by these events. In his
last years working as a playwright, however, Shakespeare wrote a number of plays
that are often called romances or tragicomedies, plays in which the tragic facts
of human existence are fully acknowledged but where reassuring patterns of
reconciliation and harmony can be seen finally to shape the action.
Shakespeare’s plays were performed at the
courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I more frequently than those of any
other dramatist of that time. Shakespeare risked losing royal favor only once,
in 1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and killing of
King Richard II” at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. In
the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeare’s company was absolved of any knowing
participation in the conspiracy. Although Shakespeare’s plays enjoyed great
popularity with the public, most people did not consider them literature. Plays
were merely popular entertainments, not unlike the movies today.
D | Last Years |
After about 1608 Shakespeare began to write
fewer plays. For most of his working life he wrote at least two plays a year; by
1608 he had slowed usually to one a year, even though the acting company
continued to enjoy great success. In 1608 the King’s Men, as his company was
called after King James took the throne, began to perform at Blackfriars, an
indoor theater that charged higher prices and drew a more sophisticated audience
than the outdoor Globe. An indoor theater presented possibilities in staging and
scenery that the Globe did not permit, and these can be recognized in the late
plays.
In 1613 fire destroyed the Globe Theatre
during a performance of Henry VIII. Although the Globe was quickly
rebuilt, Shakespeare’s association with it—and probably with the company—had
ended. Around the time of the fire, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, where he
had established his family and become a prominent citizen. Shakespeare’s
daughter Susanna had married John Hall, a doctor with a thriving practice in
Stratford, in 1607. His younger daughter, Judith, married a Stratford winemaker,
Thomas Quiney, in 1616.
Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616—the
month and day traditionally assigned to his birth—and was buried in Stratford’s
Holy Trinity Church. He had made his will the previous month, “in perfect health
and memory.” The cause of his death is not known, though a report from the Holy
Trinity’s vicar in the 1660s claims that he “died of a fever … contracted after
a night of drinking with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, friends and fellow
writers.”
Shakespeare left the bulk of his estate to
his daughter Susanna and the sum of 300 pounds to his daughter Judith. The only
specific provision for his wife was their “second-best bed with the furniture
[linens],” although customary practice allowed a widow one-third of the estate.
Shakespeare also left money for “the poor of Stratford,” and remembered the
three surviving original members of his acting company, Richard Burbage, John
Heminges, and Henry Condell, with small grants to buy memorial rings.
Shakespeare’s wife, Anne, died on August
6, 1623. She lived long enough to see a monument to her husband erected in Holy
Trinity Church, but she died just before the publication of the First Folio of
Shakespeare’s plays, the more lasting monument to his memory. Soon after her
death, Susanna and John Hall moved into New Place, where they lived until their
deaths, his in 1635 and hers in 1649. Their daughter, Elizabeth Hall, died
childless in 1670. Judith Quiney had three sons, but none lived long enough to
produce heirs, and she died in 1662. Thus, by 1670, the line of Shakespeare’s
descendants had reached its end.
III | PUBLICATION |
So far as is known, Shakespeare had no
hand in the publication of any of his plays and indeed no interest in the
publication. Performance was the only public forum he sought for his plays. He
supplied the scripts to the Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men, but acting
companies of that time often thought it bad business to allow their popular
plays to be printed as it might give other companies access to their property.
Some plays, however, did reach print. Eighteen were published in small, cheap
quarto editions, though often in unreliable texts. A quarto resembled a
pamphlet, its pages formed by folding pieces of paper in half twice.
For none of these editions did Shakespeare
receive money. In the absence of anything like modern copyright law, which
recognizes an author’s legal right to his or her creation, 16th- and
17th-century publishers paid for a manuscript, with no need to enquire about who
wrote it, and then were able to publish it and establish their ownership of the
copy. Fortunately for posterity, two fellow actors and friends of
Shakespeare—Heminges and Condell—collected 36 of his plays, 18 of them never
before printed, and published them in a handsome folio edition, a large
book with individual pages formed by folding sheets of paper once. This edition,
known as the First Folio, appeared in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s
death.
The First Folio divided Shakespeare’s
plays into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. These
categories are used in this article, with the addition of a fourth category:
tragicomedies, a term that modern critics have often used for the late plays,
which do not neatly fit into any of the three folio categories.
IV | THE COMEDIES |
Shakespeare’s comedies celebrate human
social life even as they expose human folly. By means that are sometimes
humiliating, even painful, characters learn greater wisdom and emerge with a
clearer view of reality. Some of his early comedies can be regarded as light
farces in that their humor depends mainly upon complications of plot, minor
foibles of the characters, and elements of physical comedy such as slapstick.
The so-called joyous comedies follow the early comedies and culminate in As
You Like It. Written about 1600, this comedy strikes a perfect balance
between the worlds of the city and the country, verbal wit and physical comedy,
and realism and fantasy.
After 1600, Shakespeare’s comedies take on
a darker tone, as Shakespeare uses the comic form to explore less changeable
aspects of human behavior. All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for
Measure test the ability of comedy to deal with the unsettling realities of
human desire, and these plays, therefore, have usually been thought of as
“problem comedies,” or, at very least, as evidence that comedy in its tendency
toward wish fulfillment is a problem.
A | Early Comedies |
Shakespeare remained busy writing comedies
during his early years in London, until about 1595. These comedies reflect in
their gaiety and exuberant language the lively and self-confident tone of the
English nation after 1588, the year England defeated the Spanish Armada, an
invasion force from Spain. The comedies in this group include The Comedy of
Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love’s
Labour’s Lost.
A1 | The Comedy of Errors |
Shakespeare based the plot of The
Comedy of Errors, a farce performed in 1594, on classical comedies by
Plautus. It was published for the first time in the First Folio of 1623. The
play, Shakespeare’s shortest, depends for its appeal on the mistaken identities
of two sets of twins both separated in their youth. The comedy ends happily with
the reunion of both sets of twins, after a bewildering series of confusions.
Shakespeare makes his play more complex than Plautus’s by the addition of the
second set of twins, twin servants to the twin brothers of the main action, and
the play displays the young Shakespeare’s formal mastery of the comic form and
anticipates themes and techniques of his later plays.
A2 | The Two Gentlemen of Verona |
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which appears as the second
comedy in the First Folio, was probably first performed about 1594.
Shakespeare’s first attempt at romantic comedy, it concerns two friends, Proteus
and Valentine, and two women, Julia and Sylvia. The play traces the relations of
the four, until the two sets of lovers are happily paired off: Proteus with
Julia, and Valentine with Sylvia. Much of the humor in the play comes from a
clownish servant, Launce, and his dog, Crab, described as “the sourest-natured
dog that lives.” Shakespeare probably wrote the part of Launce for comic actor
Will Kemp.
A3 | The Taming of the Shrew |
The Taming of the Shrew (1593?)
was first published in the First Folio in 1623. This comedy contrasts the prim
and conventional Bianca, who grows willful and disobedient over the course of
the play, with the shrewish Katherine, who is finally tamed by Petruchio, her
suitor and, finally, husband. Yet Katherine and Petruchio are clearly well
matched in style and temperament, and Katherine’s speech at the end on the
importance of obedience may be delivered with an obvious sense of how far this
is from what she believes or even from what Petruchio really wants. Kiss Me
Kate (1948), a musical based on The Taming of the Shrew, proved
popular on stage, as did a motion-picture version of Shakespeare’s play in 1967
with actors Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. However, unless the action is
played with its possible ironies clearly apparent, audiences today will likely
find the play’s ostensible values difficult to take, especially the belief in
the need to tame a wife.
A4 | Love’s Labour’s Lost |
Love’s Labour’s Lost was
first published in 1598 and was the first published play to have “By W.
Shakespeare” on its title page. The play’s slight action serves as a peg on
which to hang a glittering robe of wit and poetry. It satirizes the loves of its
main male characters as well as their fashionable devotion to studious pursuits.
The noblemen in the play have sought to avoid romantic and worldly entanglements
by devoting themselves in their studies, and they voice their pretensions in an
artificially ornate style, until love forces them to recognize their own
self-deceptions. The play’s title anticipates its unconventional ending: The
women refuse to marry at the end, demanding a waiting period of 12 months for
the men to demonstrate their reformation. “Our wooing does not end like an old
play,” says Berowne; “Jack hath not Jill.”
B | Middle Comedies |
Although very different in tone, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice from the mid-1590s
provide evidence of Shakespeare’s growing mastery of the comic form and his
willingness to explore and test its dramatic possibilities. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream represents Shakespeare’s first outstanding success in the
field of romantic comedy. The Merchant of Venice is in its main plot
another example of a romantic comedy, but the presence of Shylock disrupts the
comic action, haunting the place even after he has disappeared from it.
B1 | A Midsummer Night’s Dream |
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
first performed probably in 1594 or 1595 and first published in 1600,
presents a happy blend of fantasy and realism, and may have been intended for
performance at an aristocratic wedding. The comedy weaves together a number of
separate plots involving three different realms: one inhabited by two pairs of
noble Athenian lovers; another by members of the fairy world—notably, King
Oberon, Queen Titania, and the mischievous Puck; and the third by a group of
bumbling and unconsciously comic townspeople who seek to produce a play for
wedding celebrations. These three worlds are brought together in a series of
encounters that veer from the realistic to the magical to the absurd and back
again in the space of only a few lines. In Act III, for example, Oberon plays a
trick on Titania while she sleeps, employing Puck to anoint her with a potion
that will cause her to fall in love with the first creature she sees on waking.
As it happens, she opens her eyes to the sight of Bottom the weaver, adorned by
Puck with an ass’s head. Yet the comic episode of the Queen of the Fairies
“enamored of an ass” echoes the play’s more profound concerns with the nature of
love and imagination.
B2 | The Merchant of Venice |
The Merchant of Venice,
first published in 1600 though seemingly written in 1596 or 1597, shares the
lyric beauty and fairy-tale ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the
strong characterization of the play’s villain, a Jewish moneylender named
Shylock, shadows the gaiety. Shakespeare drew the main plot from an Italian
story in which a crafty Jew threatens the life of a Christian merchant. Its
composition may have arisen from a desire by Shakespeare’s acting company to
stage a play that could compete with The Jew of Malta (1589?), a tragedy
by English dramatist Christopher Marlowe, performed by a rival company, the
Admiral’s Men. In the play Shakespeare sets motifs of masculine friendship and
romantic love in opposition to the bitterness of Shylock, whose own misfortunes
are presented so as to arouse understanding and even sympathy. While this play
reflects European anti-Semitism of the time (although Jews had been banished
from England in 1290 and were not formally readmitted until 1656), its
exploration of power and prejudice also promote a critique of such bigotry. As
Shylock says, confronted by the double standards of his opponents:
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason?—I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
(Act III, scene 1)
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason?—I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
(Act III, scene 1)
C | Mature Comedies |
The romantic plays Much Ado About
Nothing, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth
Night are often characterized as joyous comedies because of their generally
happy mood and sympathetic characters. Written around 1599 and 1600, they
represent Shakespeare’s triumph in the field of high comedy. These mature
comedies revolve around beautiful, intelligent, and strong-minded heroines, a
type anticipated by the quick-witted heiress Portia in The Merchant of
Venice. Nothing quite like these plays appears in earlier English drama, and
Shakespeare never wrote anything like them in later years. They present a
contrast to the satiric comedy that was coming into fashion at the time, and
many critics believe they demonstrate not only Shakespeare’s mastery of his art
but also his congenial temperament in the sympathy he reveals toward his
characters.
C1 | Much Ado About Nothing |
The witty comedy Much Ado About
Nothing, written about 1599 and first published the following year, concerns
two pairs of lovers. In the play’s main plot, the war hero Claudius is deceived
into believing Hero has been unfaithful and calls off their wedding, until he is
forced to recognize his error and take her as his wife. The subplot, a “merry
war” of words and wit between Beatrice and Benedick, has long delighted
audiences. Although the two outwardly dislike each other, the audience soon
comprehends the real affection between the two. One of the play’s most popular
characters is the bumbling village constable Dogbery, who finally exposes the
plot that has deceived Claudio. In 1993 a film version was released, starring
Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson.
C2 | As You Like It |
In As You Like It, written
about 1599 but not published until the 1623 First Folio, Shakespeare draws a
rich and varied contrast between the strict code of manners at the court and the
relative freedom from such structure in the countryside. Yet it also satirizes
popular pastoral plays, novels, and poems of the time. Those popular but
sentimental works presented rural life as idyllic and its inhabitants as
innocents not yet corrupted by the world. In Shakespeare’s play the rural world
is far from perfect, and the characters are not always what they appear.
Rosalind and Celia have disguised themselves as men when they flee the court for
the forest, but other characters not disguised are self-deceived. In the forest,
however, true identities are re-established. A number of love matches mark the
conclusion, and the play ends in a parade of lovers marching two-by-two, like
“couples coming to the Ark.” Even the melancholy Jacques, who remains outside
the play’s concluding harmonies, expresses his benevolent hopes for the lovers,
as the comic logic promises all “true delights.”
C3 | The Merry Wives of Windsor |
The Merry Wives of Windsor, written probably in 1599 but
first published in 1602, is Shakespeare’s only comedy of middle-class life. The
“merry wives,” Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, outwit Shakespeare’s greatest
comic invention, Sir John Falstaff, who had first appeared in Henry IV.
Falstaff’s unsuccessful efforts to seduce the two wives and their comic revenge
upon him make up the main plot of the play. The comedy also includes the story
of Anne Page, who is wooed by two inappropriate lovers, but who finally is
united with Fenton, the man she loves. According to an early 18th-century
tradition The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the request of Queen
Elizabeth I, who wished to see “Falstaff in love” following his comic appearance
in both of the Henry IV plays.
C4 | Twelfth Night |
Twelfth Night is the most
mature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and one that recalls his own earlier
plays. It was written probably in 1601 and was published for the first time in
the Folio of 1623. We know it was performed in the winter of 1602 at the Middle
Temple, one of London’s law schools. It is a play of great emotional range, from
farcical misunderstandings (based on a set of separated twins, as in The
Comedy of Errors) to poignant moments in which a woman in disguise must
serve the man she loves (as in Two Gentlemen of Verona). The play ends
with lovers happily paired, but with the ambitious Malvolio isolated (like
Jacques in As You Like It or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice)
and swearing to “be revenged upon the whole pack of you.”
The comedy may have been written
specifically for presentation at a festival of Twelfth Night, which occurs 12
nights after Christmas Eve and was once a time for mirth and merrymaking,
marking the end of the Christmas revels. The play’s outrageous antics,
especially for Sir Toby Belch, reflect in spirit the outrageous behavior
permitted at Twelfth Night celebrations during the Middle Ages. Yet there is a
darker side to Twelfth Night. Not only is Malvolio unreconciled to the
community at the end, but Sir Andrew, Antonio, and the clown, Feste, all stand
apart from the final celebrations, and Feste’s final song reminds the audience
of how far our day-to-day world is from the idealization of comedy.
D | Problem Comedies |
Three plays—All’s Well That Ends Well,
Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure—written soon after the
mature comedies are usually called by modern critics “problem plays,” a term
first coined for them in 1896. The problem comedies touch on complex and often
unpleasant themes and contain characters whose moral flaws are graver and more
difficult to change than the shortcomings of the characters in the farces or the
joyous comedies. Little of the light-hearted humor of the earlier comedies, nor
the easy satisfactions of their endings, appears in these plays. They are,
however, emotionally rich and dramatically exciting, and have become
increasingly successful on stage and stimulating to readers.
D1 | All’s Well That Ends Well |
All’s Well That Ends Well,
written about 1603 but not published until the 1623 Folio, adheres to the
conventional pattern for comedy, as its title promises, ending with the reunion
of a separated couple. But the reunion is deeply troubled and troubling. The
callow, cowardly, and ungenerous Bertram is finally successfully paired with
Helena, but they have reached that point through a process that has humiliated
each. He immediately flees to Italy, and she must trick him to consummate the
marriage. At the end they accept each other, but the ending is appropriately
hedged with conditionals: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,/ The
bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.” The stability of even this muted
resolution is itself unsettled by the King’s offer to Diana, a young woman
Bertram has tried to seduce, to choose a husband for herself. At best this offer
reveals how little the King has learned and at worst it threatens to start the
dispiriting action all over again.
D2 | Troilus and Cressida |
Critics always have had trouble
classifying Troilus and Cressida (written about 1602) as a
tragedy, a history, or a comedy. In many ways it qualifies as all three, and its
earliest readers did not seem to know what kind of play it was. The editors of
the First Folio placed the play at the beginning of the section of tragedies;
the 1609 quarto titles the play The Famous Historie of Troylus and
Cresesid; and the prefatory note in that edition considers the play one of
Shakespeare’s comedies and worthy of comparison with the best of the classical
comic playwrights. Some critics believe that Troilus somewhat resembles
the satiric comedy in fashion at the time it was written. The play has two
plots. The first, a dramatic version of the siege of Troy by Greek armies during
the Trojan War, and the second, which gives the play its name, a rendering of
the medieval legend of the doomed love between Troilus, son of the king of Troy,
and Cressida, daughter of a Trojan priest who defects to the Greek side during
the war. The legend inspired a number of other works, including the tragic poem
Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) by Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakespeare’s play,
however, brilliantly combines the two plots in a withering exploration of the
realities of both chivalric honor and romantic love.
D3 | Measure for Measure |
Measure for Measure (written
about 1604 but not printed until the 1623 Folio) raises complex questions about
sex, marriage, identity, and justice but does not offer the comfort of easy
solutions. Like the other problem plays, it stretches the normal limits of the
comic form. In the play the Duke of Vienna sets out in disguise to test the
virtue of his unruly subjects, and leaves a harsh deputy, Angelo, in charge.
Although the deputy reveals himself a hypocrite and couples are successfully
united at the end, the questions that the play raises remain unanswered. At the
very end Isabella remains silent at the Duke’s proposal of marriage, leaving
open the question of whether she is overcome with joy or with horror, whether
the proposal promises future happiness or a mere recapitulation of Angelo’s
earlier intimidations.
The play’s most likely source was
Promos and Cassandra (1578), a two-part play by English author
George Whetstone. Shakespeare’s additions and changes, however, create a far
more disturbing play, which increasingly has found enthusiasm from critics and
audiences in its anticipation of modern questionings: Can one find a middle
ground between law and liberty? Is sexual desire constructive or
transgressive (an overstepping of proper limits)? Can morality be
legislated?
V | THE HISTORY PLAYS |
History plays, sometimes known as chronicle
plays (after the “chronicles” from which the plots were taken), were a highly
popular form of drama in Shakespeare’s time. By 1623, every English monarch from
William the Conqueror to Elizabeth I had been represented in a play, as the
English past served as an important repository of plots for the dramatists of
the burgeoning theater industry of Elizabethan England. The plays not only
offered entertainment but also served many people as an important source of
information about the nation’s past. In 1612 English dramatist Thomas Heywood
claimed that such plays “instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all
our English Chronicles.”
The Elizabethans considered history
instructive but did not always agree on the particular lessons it taught.
Sometimes history was thought to be a branch of theology, the record of God’s
providential guidance of events, and sometimes it was seen solely as the record
of human motives and actions. Sometimes history was valued because it was an
accurate record of the past, and sometimes because it provided examples of
behavior to be imitated or avoided. History plays became increasingly popular
after 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, so clearly the interest in
English history reflected a growing patriotic consciousness.
Shakespeare wrote ten plays listed in the
1623 Folio as histories and differentiated from the other categories, comedies
and tragedies, by their common origin in English history. Eight of Shakespeare’s
history plays re-create the period in English history from 1399, when King Henry
IV took the throne after deposing King Richard II, to the defeat of Richard III
in battle in 1485. Henry IV was the first English king from the house of
Lancaster. The history plays cover the conflict between the houses of Lancaster
and York, known as the Wars of the Roses, from 1455 to 1485. The final event is
the victory of Henry VII over Richard III in 1485, ending the rule of the York
dynasty and beginning the Tudor dynasty. The eight plays devoted to this period,
listed in the chronological order of the kings with the dates of their
composition in parentheses, are Richard II (1597?); Henry IV, Parts I
and II (1597?); Henry V (1598?); Henry VI, Parts I, II,
and III (1590-1592?); and Richard III (1592-1593?). As their dates
indicate, Shakespeare did not write the plays in chronological order. He wrote
the second half of the story first, and only later returned to the events that
initiated the political problems.
The two remaining Shakespeare history plays
are King John (1596?) and Henry VIII (1613?). King John,
beginning soon after John’s coronation in 1199, was seemingly reworked from an
anonymous, older play on the same subject. It treats the English king’s failed
effort to resist the power of the pope, a theme of obvious relevance in England
after the Protestant Reformation. Henry VIII, probably co-written with
English dramatist John Fletcher, is a loosely connected pageant of events in
Henry’s reign, ending with the prophecy of the birth of Elizabeth and her
succession by King James.
Shakespeare’s main sources for the events of
the history plays were the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
(1577; 2nd ed. 1586, which Shakespeare used) by Raphael Holinshed and Edward
Hall’s Chronicle (1542). Although Shakespeare took situations from these
and a few other historical sources, he selected only such facts as suited his
dramatic purposes. Sometimes he ignored chronology and telescoped the events of
years to fit his own dramatic time scheme. Above all, he used the power of his
imagination and language to mold vivid and memorable characters out of the
historical figures he found in his sources.
The overall theme of the history plays is the
importance of a stable political order, but also the heavy moral and emotional
price that often must be paid for it. Shakespeare dramatized the great social
upheaval that followed Henry IV’s usurpation of the throne until the first Tudor
king, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather, restored peace and stability. In addition
to chronicling the often violent careers of England’s great kings, Shakespeare’s
history plays explore the extreme pressures of public life, the moral conflicts
that kings and queens uniquely face, and the potential tragedy of monarchy.
A | Early Histories |
The four plays that dramatize the Wars of
the Roses, the turbulent period from 1422 to 1485, are possibly Shakespeare’s
earliest dramatic works. These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and
III and Richard III, deal with disorder resulting from weak
leadership and from national disunity fostered for selfish ends. Richard
III, however, closes triumphantly with the death of Richard and the ascent
to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty and grandfather of
Queen Elizabeth. See also England: The Lancastrian and Yorkist
Kings.
Although Shakespeare probably did not
invent the genre of the history play, only a very few plays on English history
had been written before he turned to it for his plots, and no contemporary
playwright wrote more histories than his ten. Clearly Shakespeare learned from
his few predecessors in English drama, especially Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe
had initiated the early greatness of Elizabethan tragedy, placing a single
monumental personality at the center of each of his major plays. By studying
Marlowe’s style and energetic protagonists, Shakespeare learned in Richard
III to construct a play around a complex, dominating personality. But
Shakespeare is as interested in the sweep of history itself, as it catches up
personalities in rhythms they are unable to predict or control.
A1 | Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III |
The three parts of Henry VI
chronicle the troubled reign of that king, from the death of his father in 1422
to his own death in 1471. During that time England was all but torn apart by
civil strife following the death of Henry V. Part I deals with wars in France,
including combat with Joan of Arc, and had early success on stage, performed 15
times in 1592 alone. Parts II and III, revealing Henry VI as a weak and
ineffectual king, treat England after it has lost its possessions in France and
factionalism at home erupts into full-fledged civil war. Today, the Henry
VI plays, if staged at all, are likely to be seen in condensed adaptations
or conflations (combination of parts) as in English director John
Barton’s Wars of the Roses in 1963 at Stratford-upon-Avon.
A2 | Richard III |
Richard III begins where Henry
VI, Part III leaves off and completes the sequence begun with the Henry VI
plays. It presents a fictionalized account of Richard III’s rise and fall, from
the time he gains the crown through murder and treachery to his death at the
Battle of Bosworth Field, which ends the Wars of the Roses and brings the Tudor
dynasty to power. The story of Richard’s rise and fall derives from an account
by English statesman Thomas More, written about 1513. As presented by
Shakespeare, Richard is an eloquent, intelligent man, who is morally and
physically deformed. Richard dominates the stage with a combination of wit and
wickedness that has fascinated audiences and made the part a popular one among
actors.
B | Later Histories |
Shakespeare wrote his most important history
plays in the period from 1596 to 1598, plays that reveal both his dramatic
mastery and his deep understanding of politics and history. The so-called second
tetralogy (four related works), consisting of Richard II, Henry
IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V, encompass the 23 years
immediately prior to those portrayed in the Henry VI plays. The last three plays
of the second tetralogy constitute Shakespeare’s supreme achievement in writing
histories, focusing on the development of Prince Hal (in the two parts of
Henry IV) into England’s greatest medieval hero—King Henry V.
B1 | Richard II |
Richard II is a study of a
sensitive, self-dramatizing, ineffective but sympathetic monarch who loses his
kingdom to his forceful successor, Henry IV. As a model for this play
Shakespeare relied heavily on Marlowe’s chronicle play Edward II (1592?)
with its focus on a personality ill-suited for the demands of rule. The play was
a success on stage and in the bookstalls, but until 1608 the scene of Richard
relinquishing his crown to Henry Bolingbroke, in Act 4, was omitted from the
printed versions because it portrayed the overthrow of a monarch.
B2 | Henry IV, Parts I and II |
In the two parts of Henry
IV, Henry recognizes his own guilt for usurping the throne from
Richard and finds himself facing rebellion from the very families that had
helped him to the throne. His son, Prince Hal, is, however, in many ways the
focus of the plays, which trace the prince’s development from a seemingly
wayward youth, enjoying the company and influence of the fat knight Falstaff and
other drinking cronies, to the future king who proves triumphant in the play
Henry V. Many critics consider Henry IV, Part I to be the most
entertaining and dramatic of the Henry plays with its struggle between King
Henry and his rebellious nobles, led by the volatile Hotspur. The king’s fears
for his son prove unfounded when Prince Hal leaves the tavern to take his place
on the battlefield, where his defeat of Hotspur in combat proves his readiness
to assume the burdens of rule.
Shakespeare makes much use of comedy in
the plays, particularly in the portrayal of the fat knight Falstaff, whose
irrepressible wit has long been the major source of the plays’ remarkable
popularity. The comedy, however, neither dominates nor is subordinated to the
historical plot, but is brilliantly intermingled with it, commenting often
witheringly on its actions and values. At the same the comedy insists that
history is something more spacious than a mere record of aristocratic men and
motives.
B3 | Henry V |
Henry V was the last history play
that Shakespeare wrote, until he returned to the genre with his collaboration on
Henry VIII late in his career. Henry V celebrates the great
military and political achievements of the king in his victories over France,
but also allows other angles of vision upon his accomplishments that may well
raise doubts about their moral cost. While the Chorus speaks the lofty rhetoric
of heroic idealization, the comic plot reveals a world of baser motive, which
parallels and comments on the historical action. Henry V may well have
been the first play performed at the Globe Theatre in the summer of 1599.
VI | THE TRAGEDIES |
Shakespeare’s tragedies are among the most
powerful studies of human nature in all literature and appropriately stand as
the greatest achievements of his dramatic artistry. Attention understandably has
focused on his unforgettable tragic characters, such as Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Yet the plays also explore and extend
the very nature of tragedy itself by discovering within it a structure that
derives meaning precisely from its refusal to offer consolation or compensation
for the suffering it traces.
A | Early Tragedies |
Shakespeare wrote his first tragedies in
1594 and 1595. But he left the field of tragedy untouched for at least five
years after finishing Romeo and Juliet, probably in 1595, and turned to
comedy and history plays. Julius Caesar, written about 1599, served as a
link between the history plays and the mature tragedies that followed.
A1 | Titus Andronicus |
The earliest tragedy attributed to
Shakespeare is Titus Andronicus (published in 1594). In its treatment of
murder, mutilation, and bloody revenge, the play is characteristic of many
popular tragedies of the Elizabethan period (see Revenge Tragedy). The
structure of a spectacular revenge for earlier heinous and bloody acts, all of
which are staged in sensational detail, derives from Roman dramatist Seneca. It
probably reached Shakespeare by way of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy
(1589?). Shakespeare’s gory tragedy proved highly successful in
Shakespeare’s time. But later audiences found the violent excesses of Titus
Andronicus absurd or disgusting, and only recently has the play’s theatrical
power been rediscovered. From the 1960s on, many directors and critics have
recognized in the play’s daring exploration of violence concerns that go beyond
the merely sensationalistic to address some of the deepest fears and
preoccupations of the modern world.
A2 | Romeo and Juliet |
Romeo and Juliet (1595?) is
justly famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love. The play
dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by the feuds and misunderstandings
of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments. Shakespeare borrowed the
tragic story of the two young Italian lovers from a long narrative poem, The
Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562) by English writer Arthur
Brooke. Shakespeare, however, added the character of Mercutio, increased the
roles of the friar and the nurse, and reduced the moralizing of Brooke’s work.
The play made an instant hit; four editions of the play were published before
the 1623 Folio, demonstrating its popularity. The play continues to be widely
read and performed today, and its story of innocent love destroyed by inherited
hatred has seen numerous reworkings, as, for example, in the musical West
Side Story (1957) by American composer Leonard Bernstein.
A3 | Julius Caesar |
Julius Caesar was written about
1599 and first published in 1623. Though a serious tragedy of political
rivalries, it is less intense in style than the tragic dramas that followed it.
Shakespeare based this political tragedy concerning the plot to overthrow Julius
Caesar on Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by 1st-century Greek
biographer Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives had first appeared in
English in 1579, in a version produced by Thomas North from a French translation
of the original. The North translation provided Shakespeare and his
contemporaries with a great deal of historical material. Shakespeare
followed Plutarch closely in Julius Caesar; little of incident or
character appears in the play that is not found in the Lives as well, and
he sometimes used North’s wording. Shakespeare’s play centers on the issue of
whether the conspirators were justified in killing Caesar. How a production
answers that question determines whether the conspirator Brutus is seen as
sympathetic or tragically self-deceived.
B | Mature Tragedies |
The tragedies Shakespeare wrote after 1600
are considered the most profound of his works and constitute the pillars upon
which his literary reputation rests. Some scholars have tied the darkening of
his dramatic imagination in this period to the death of his father in 1601. But
in the absence of any compelling biographical information to support this
theory, it remains only a speculation. For whatever reason, sometime around 1600
Shakespeare began work on a series of plays that in their power and profundity
are arguably unmatched in the achievement of any other writer.
B1 | Hamlet |
Hamlet, written about 1601
and first printed in 1603, is perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous play. It exceeds
by far most other tragedies of revenge in the power of its ethical and
psychological imagining. The play is based on the story of Amleth, a 9th-century
Danish prince, which Shakespeare encountered in a 16th-century French account by
François Belleforest. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the story of the
prince’s effort to revenge the murder of his father, who has been poisoned by
Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, the man who then becomes Hamlet’s stepfather and the
king. The prince alternates between rash action and delay that disgusts him, as
he tries to enact the revenge his father’s ghost has asked from him. The play
ends in a spectacular scene of death: As Hamlet, his mother, his uncle, and
Laertes (the lord chamberlain’s son) all lie dead, the Norwegian prince
Fortinbras marches in to claim the Danish throne. Hamlet is certainly
Shakespeare’s most intellectually engaging and elusive play. Literary critics
and actors turn to it again and again, possibly succeeding only in confirming
the play’s inexhaustible richness and the inadequacy of any single attempt
finally or fully to capture it.
B2 | Othello |
Othello was written about
1604, though it was not published until 1622. It portrays the growth of
unjustified jealousy in the noble protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a
general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife,
Desdemona. In this domestic tragedy, Othello’s evil lieutenant Iago draws him
into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. Othello is destroyed partly through
his gullibility and willingness to trust Iago and partly through the
manipulations of this villain, who clearly enjoys the exercise of evildoing just
as he hates the spectacle of goodness and happiness around him. At the end of
the play, Othello comes to understand his terrible error; but as always in
tragedy, that knowledge comes too late and he dies by his own hand in atonement
for his error. In his final act of self-destruction, he becomes again and for a
final time the defender of Venice and Venetian values.
B3 | King Lear |
King Lear was written about 1605
and first published in 1608. Conceived on a grander emotional and philosophic
scale than Othello, it deals with the consequences of the arrogance and
misjudgment of Lear, a ruler of early Britain, and the parallel behavior of his
councilor, the Duke of Gloucester. Each of these fathers tragically banishes the
child who most has his interests at heart and places himself in the power of the
wicked child or children. Each is finally restored to the loving child, but only
after a rending journey of suffering, and each finally dies, having learned the
truth about himself and the world, but too late to avert disaster. King
Lear is arguably Shakespeare’s most shocking play; the scenes of Lear with
his dead child and of Gloucester having his eyes struck out are horrible images
of the world’s cruelty. But the play offers moving if ineffective examples of
love and compassion: Even if these emotions are incapable of redeeming this
world, they are discovered as infinitely precious in their very defeat.
B4 | Antony and Cleopatra |
Antony and Cleopatra was written
about 1606 and first published in 1623. It deals with a different type of love
than that in Shakespeare’s earlier tragedies, namely the middle-aged passions of
the Roman general Mark Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Their love,
which destroys an empire, is glorified by some of Shakespeare’s most sensuous
poetry. Antony and Cleopatra, like the other two plays that close
Shakespeare’s tragic period—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—depicts
events from ancient history and draws on North’s translation of Plutarch’s
Lives. The action in the play shifts from Egypt to Rome to Greece and
back to Egypt and includes a battle at sea. In the process the play contrasts
the luxuriant atmosphere of Egypt with the strict military code of Rome, and the
cold and calculating Roman general Octavius with the passionate but ill-advised
Antony. The contrasts between Roman rigor and Egyptian luxury are at the heart
of this play, which keeps them in provocative balance and offers “no
midway/Twixt these extremes at all.”
B5 | Macbeth |
Macbeth was written about 1606
and first published in 1623. In the play Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a
man torn between an amoral will and a powerfully moral intellect. Macbeth knows
his actions are wrong but enacts his fearful deeds anyway, led on in part by the
excitement of his own wrongdoing. In securing the Scottish throne, Macbeth
deadens his moral intelligence to the point where he becomes capable of
increasingly murderous (and pointless) behavior, although he never becomes the
monster the moral world sees. At all times he feels the pull of his humanity.
Yet for Macbeth there is no redemption, only the sharp descent into a bleak
pessimism. Human existence, as he sees it (or as he has made it, at least for
himself), amounts to nothing:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Act V, scene 4)
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Act V, scene 4)
B6 | Coriolanus |
Shakespeare’s last tragedies,
Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, both set in classical times, were
written in 1607 and 1608 and first published in the 1623 Folio. Because their
protagonists appear to lack the emotional greatness or tragic stature of the
protagonists of the major tragedies, the two plays have an austerity that has
cost them the popularity they may well merit. In Coriolanus Shakespeare
adapts Plutarch’s account of the legendary Roman hero Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus
to the tragedy of a man who is arrogant and rigid, even in his virtue “too noble
for the world.” If Coriolanus in his integrity refuses to curry favor with the
populace, he also reveals his contempt for the citizenry. The isolating pride of
this great but flawed individual prevents him from finding any comfortable place
in the community. Finally, he is banished from Rome, and he seeks revenge
against the city. Eventually his wife, mother, and young son are sent to plead
with him to spare Rome, an action that reveals the relatedness to his others he
would deny. The play powerfully explores the conflicts between public and
private life, between personal needs and those of the community, and between the
pressures of individual honor and family ties and national ties.
B7 | Timon of Athens |
Timon of Athens, written
about 1608 and first published in the 1623 Folio, is a bitter play about a
character who reacts to the ingratitude he discovers by hating all of humanity.
Through his generosity to friends and flatterers, Timon bankrupts himself and
then finds these same people unwilling to assist him in his poverty. His
withering misanthropy follows. As in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare
explores the relationships between financial ties and ties of friendship.
Shakespeare probably found some of the material for his play in Plutarch’s
Lives, where anecdotes about Timon appear in the life of Marc Antony and
the life of the Greek politician and general Alcibiades. He perhaps also found
material in a dialogue, Timon, the Man-Hater, by the Greek writer Lucian,
which had been adapted into an anonymous English play, Timon, and
probably performed around 1602 in one of the London law schools, known as Inns
of Court.
VII | THE LATE PLAYS |
Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare
created several experimental plays that have become known as tragicomedies or
romances. These plays differ considerably from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies,
being more radical in their dramatic art and showing greater concern with
reconciliation among generations. Yet like the earlier comedies the
tragicomedies end happily with reunions or renewal. Typically, virtue is sorely
tested in the tragicomedies, but almost miraculously succeeds. Through the
intervention of magic and art—or their emotional equivalent, compassion, or
their theological equivalent, grace—the spectacular triumph of virtue that marks
the ends of these plays suggests redemptive hope for the human condition. In
these late plays, the necessity of death and sadness in human existence is
recognized but located within larger patterns of harmony that suggest we are
“led on by heaven, and crowned with joy at last,” as the epilogue of
Pericles proposes.
A | Pericles, Prince of Tyre |
The romantic tragicomedy Pericles,
Prince of Tyre was written in 1607 and 1608 and first published in 1609. It
concerns the trials and tribulations of the title character, including the
painful loss of his wife and the persecution of his daughter. After many exotic
adventures, Pericles is reunited with his loved ones; even his supposedly dead
wife is discovered to have been magically preserved. The play’s central themes
are characteristic of the late plays. Pericles focuses particularly on
the relationship between father and daughter, as do The Winter’s Tale and
The Tempest. Its backdrop of the sea also recalls the setting of The
Tempest, while its concern with separation and reunion is reminiscent of
The Winter’s Tale. However, Pericles is innocent of any blame for the
disruption of his family, unlike Leontes’s estrangement from his wife and
daughter in The Winter’s Tale.
Although Pericles, Prince of Tyre
was a great success in its own time, the play exists only in a somewhat
corrupted text. It did not appear in the First Folio, and critics have long
debated how much of it Shakespeare actually wrote. Some believe the play was a
collaborative effort between Shakespeare and another author, usually thought to
be George Wilkins. Pericles is based on a medieval legend, Apollonius,
Prince of Tyre, which had many English retellings, from Confessio
Amantis (Confessions of a Poet) by John Gower in the late 14th century to a
prose novella by Laurence Twine written in the 1570s.
B | Cymbeline |
Cymbeline was written about 1610
and first published in the 1623 Folio, where it appears as the last of the
tragedies. Like the other late plays, Cymbeline responds to the fashion
of the time for colorful plots and theatrical display. It is packed with
adventure, plot reversals, and dramatic spectacle, and was perhaps intended to
exploit the mechanical resources of Blackfriars, the new indoor theater of
Shakespeare’s company. One stage direction instructs that “Jupiter descends in
thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle he throws a thunderbolt.” This bit
of staging was far better suited to the indoor theater than to the Globe, where
the play was also performed.
The play has three interrelated plots:
one concerns Imogen’s love for her husband, Posthumus, and his jealousy; another
involves the long-lost sons of King Cymbeline; and the third concerns Britain’s
challenge to the power of Rome. The three plots marvelously come together in the
play’s astonishing conclusion, as characters move from error to truth, from
skepticism to faith, and from hatred to love. Confusion and loss are replaced by
clarity and gain, as families and nations are reunited and are again at peace.
At the play’s end, the comic order is, as the Soothsayer says, “full
accomplished.” King Cymbeline ruled at the time of Jesus Christ’s incarnation.
If the Soothsayer’s words seem to the echo Christ’s “consummatum est” (it
is finished), it may be because the achievement of harmony in the play offers a
secular (worldly) reflection of the patterns of Christian salvation
history.
C | The Winter’s Tale |
The Winter’s Tale was written
about 1610 and published for the first time in the 1623 Folio. In The
Winter’s Tale, as in Cymbeline, characters suffer great loss and pain
and families are driven apart, but by the end most of what has been lost has
been regained. This poignant romance revolves around the estrangement of
Leontes, King of Sicilia, from his wife and daughter. In a sudden fit of
jealousy Leontes becomes convinced that his wife, Hermione, has been conducting
an affair with his friend Polixenes. Believing the daughter she bears is not his
own, he orders the child to be abandoned abroad. The first three acts deal with
Leontes’s jealousy, his persecution of Hermione, the death of his son,
Mamillius, the loss of his daughter, Perdita, and the recognition of his error
and subsequent repentance. In the middle of the play a speech by Time marks the
change of fortunes that lead to the reconciliation and renewal of the final
scene, with its spectacular revelation that Hermione, long thought dead, in fact
still lives. Shakespeare borrowed the plot for The Winter’s Tale from
Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588), a romance in prose by English
writer Robert Greene.
D | The Tempest |
The Tempest, perhaps the
most successful of the tragicomedies, was written about 1611 and published for
the first time in the 1623 Folio. The play’s resolution suggests the beneficial
effects of the union of wisdom and power. In this play Prospero is deprived of
his dukedom by his brother and banished to an island. But he defeats his
usurping brother by employing magical powers and furthering a love match between
his daughter and the son of the king of Naples. At the play’s conclusion,
Prospero surrenders his magical powers. In this surrender some critics have seen
Shakespeare’s own relinquishment of the magic of the theater. In spite of the
appealing sentimentality of this idea, The Tempest was not Shakespeare’s
last play, and it is worth remembering that Prospero gives up his magic only to
return to the responsibilities of rule he had previously ignored.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Act IV, scene 1)
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(Act IV, scene 1)
The Tempest is without doubt
reflective in tone, especially on the end of life, in its concerns with
remembrance and forgiveness, the loss and limitation of power, and the need for
the reconciliation of the past, present, and future.
VIII | LATE COLLABORATIONS |
Although The Tempest probably was
Shakespeare’s final solo creation, he is thought to have continued to work as a
collaborator on several plays, including Henry VIII and The Two Noble
Kinsmen. The historical drama Henry VIII, also known as All Is
True, was probably written about 1613 with English dramatist John Fletcher,
and first published in the 1623 Folio. It dramatizes events from Henry’s reign
leading to the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth I, presenting an implied
history of the Reformation in a series of scenes on the fall from greatness of
some characters (the Duke of Buckingham, Catherine of Aragón, and Thomas
Cardinal Wolsey) and the rise of others (Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cranmer). At the
end of a performance at the Globe on June 29, 1613, the theater’s thatched roof
caught fire and the building burned to the ground.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably the
last play Shakespeare wrote, was written jointly with John Fletcher about 1613.
Both men’s names appear on the first published edition in 1634. Scholars
generally attribute to Shakespeare most of acts one and five and to Fletcher the
bulk of the play’s middle. The play tells of the competition of two friends,
Palamon and Arcite, for the love of one woman, Emilia. She is the sister of
Hippolyta, who was queen of the Amazons and wife of the Greek hero Theseus. The
story is taken from The Knight’s Tale, part of Chaucer’s influential
14th-century masterpiece The Canterbury Tales.
IX | LITERARY QUALITIES OF THE PLAYS |
Everyone loves a good story, and
Shakespeare was one of the very best storytellers. Most of Shakespeare’s stories
have an almost universal appeal, an appeal often lacking in the plays of his
contemporaries, who clung more closely to the tastes and interests of their own
day. An even greater achievement is Shakespeare’s creation of believable
characters. His people are not the exaggerated types or allegorical abstractions
found in many other Elizabethan plays. They are instead men and women with the
mingled qualities and many of the inconsistencies of life itself. The very
richness of Shakespeare’s language continues to delight, and it is always
amazing to be reminded how many common words and phrases have their origin in
Shakespeare’s art. His poetic and theatrical artistry has created plays that
continue to attract readers and theatergoers, and he properly remains one of our
own age’s most popular playwrights.
A | Shakespeare’s Characters |
Shakespeare’s characters emerge in his
plays as distinctive human beings. Although some of the characters display
elements of conventional dramatic types such as the melancholy man, the braggart
soldier, the pedant, and the young lover, they are nevertheless usually
individualized rather than caricatures or exaggerated types. Falstaff, for
example, bears some resemblance to the braggart soldiers of 16th-century Italian
comedy and to representations of the character Vice in medieval morality plays,
but his vitality and inexhaustible wit make him unique. Hamlet, one of the most
complex characters in all literature, is partly a picture of the ideal
Renaissance man, and he also exhibits traits of the conventional melancholic
character. However, his personality as a whole transcends these types, and he is
so real that commentators have continued for centuries to explore his
fascinating mind.
The women in Shakespeare’s plays are
vivid creations, each differing from the others. It is important to remember
that in Shakespeare’s time boy actors played the female parts. Actresses did not
appear in a Shakespeare play until after the restoration of Charles II to the
English throne in 1660 and the introduction of French practices such as women
actors. It says much about the talent of the boy actors of his own day that
Shakespeare could create such a rich array of fascinating women characters.
Shakespeare was fond of portraying aggressive, witty heroines, such as Kate of
The Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and
Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing. However, he was equally adept at
creating gentle and innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona
in Othello, and Cordelia in King Lear. His female characters also
include the treacherous Goneril and Regan in King Lear, the iron-willed
Lady Macbeth, the witty and resourceful Portia in Merchant of Venice, the
tender and loyal Juliet, and the alluring Cleopatra.
Shakespeare’s comic figures are also
highly varied. They include bumbling rustics such as Dogberry and Verges in
Much Ado About Nothing, tireless punsters like the Dromios in The
Comedy of Errors, pompous grotesques like Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s
Lost, elegant wits like Feste in Twelfth Night, cynical realists like
Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and fools who utter nonsense that
often conceals wisdom, such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the Fool
in King Lear.
Shakespeare drew his characters with
remarkable insight into human character. Even the most wicked characters, such
as Iago in Othello, have human traits that can elicit understanding if
not compassion. Thus, Macbeth’s violent end arouses pity and awe rather than
scornful triumph at a criminal’s just punishment for his deeds. The characters
achieve uniqueness through their brilliantly individualized styles of speech.
Shakespeare’s understanding of the human soul and his mastery of language
enabled him to write dialogue that makes the characters in his plays always
intelligible, vital, and memorable.
B | Shakespeare’s Attitudes |
Shakespeare’s philosophy of life can only
be deduced from the ideas and attitudes that appear frequently in his writings,
and he remained always a dramatist, not a writer of philosophical or ethical
tracts. Nonetheless, the tolerance of human weakness evident in the plays tends
to indicate that Shakespeare was a broad-minded person with generous and
balanced views. Although he never lectured his audience, sound morality is
implicit in his themes and in the way he handled his material. He attached less
importance to noble birth than to an individual’s noble relations with other
people. Despite the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s language, which is characteristic
of his period, he did not condone sexual license. He accepted people as they
are, without condemning them, but he did not allow wickedness to triumph. The
comments of Shakespeare’s contemporaries suggest that he himself possessed both
integrity and gentle manners.
It should be remembered that even though
Shakespeare was a poet “for all time,” as his friend Ben Jonson said, he
nevertheless was necessarily a product of his own era and shared many beliefs of
the time. These beliefs are different from our own, and some of them may now
seem strange and even unenlightened. Although Shakespeare anticipated many
modern ideas and values, in other ways he does not rise above the ideas and
values of his own time. As the history plays indicate, he accepted the idea of
monarchy and had little interest in, or even concept of, participatory
democracy. Although many of his women characters are assertive and independent,
the plays still have them subordinate their energy to the logic of the
male-dominated household. It is also likely that Shakespeare believed in ghosts
and witches, as did many people of his time, including King James I.
C | Shakespeare’s Stagecraft |
Shakespeare brilliantly exploited the
resources of the theaters he worked in. The Globe Theatre held an audience of
2,000 to 3,000 people. Like other outdoor theaters, it had a covered, raised
stage thrusting out into the audience. The audience stood around the three sides
of the stage in an unroofed area called the pit. Covered galleries, where people
paid more money to sit, rose beyond the pit. Performances took place only during
daylight hours, and there was little use of lighting. Few props were used, and
little scenery. Costumes, however, were elaborate. Language created the scene,
as in this passage from The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
Act V, scene 1
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
Act V, scene 1
D | Shakespeare’s Language |
In Shakespeare’s time English was a more
flexible language than it is today. Grammar and spelling were not yet completely
formalized, although scholars were beginning to urge rules to regulate them.
English had begun to emerge as a significant literary language, having recently
replaced Latin as the language of serious intellectual and artistic activity in
England. Freed of many of the conventions and rules of modern English,
Shakespeare could shape vocabulary and syntax to the demands of style. For
example, he could interchange the various parts of speech, using nouns as
adjectives or verbs, adjectives as adverbs, and pronouns as nouns. Such freedom
gave his language an extraordinary plasticity, which enabled him to create the
large number of unique and memorable characters he has left us. Shakespeare made
each character singular by a distinctive and characteristic set of speech
habits.
Just as important to Shakespeare’s
success as the suppleness of the English language was the rapid expansion of the
language. New words were being coined and borrowed at an unprecedented rate in
Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare himself had an unusually large vocabulary: about
23,000 different words appear in his plays and poetry, many of these words first
appearing in print through his usage. During the Renaissance many new words
enriched the English language, borrowed from Latin and from other European
languages, and Shakespeare made full use of the new resources available to
English. He also took advantage of the possibilities of his native tongue,
especially the crispness and energy of the sounds of English that derives in
large measure from the language’s rich store of monosyllabic
(one-syllable) words.
The main influences on Shakespeare’s
style were the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the homilies (sermons)
that were prescribed for reading in church, the rhetorical treatises that were
studied in grammar school, and the proverbial lore of common speech. The result
was that Shakespeare could draw on a stock of images and ideas that were
familiar to most members of his audience. His knowledge of figures of speech and
other devices enabled him to phrase his original thoughts concisely and
forcefully. Clarity of expression and the use of ordinary diction partly account
for the fact that many of Shakespeare’s phrases have become proverbial in
everyday speech, even among people who have never read the plays. It is also
significant that the passages most often quoted are usually from plays written
around 1600 and after, when his language became more subtle and complex. The
phrases “my mind’s eye,” “the primrose path,” and “sweets to the sweet” derive
from Hamlet. Macbeth is the source of “the milk of human kindness”
and “at one fell swoop.” From Julius Caesar come the expressions “it was
Greek to me,” “ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” and “the most
unkindest cut of all.”
Shakespeare wrote many of his plays in
blank verse—unrhymed poetry in iambic pentameter, a verse form in which
unaccented and accented syllables alternate in lines of ten syllables. In
Shakespeare’s hand the verse form never becomes mechanical but is always subject
to shifts of emphasis to clarify the meaning of a line and avoid the monotony of
unbroken metrical regularity. Yet the five-beat pentameter line provides the
norm against which the modifications are heard. Shakespeare sometimes used
rhymed verse, particularly in his early plays. Rhymed couplets occur frequently
at the end of a scene, punctuating the dramatic rhythm and perhaps serving as a
cue to the offstage actors to enter for the next scene.
As Shakespeare’s dramatic skill
developed, he began to make greater use of prose, which became as subtle a
medium in his hands as verse. Although prose lacks the regular rhythms of verse,
it is not without its own rhythmical aspect, and Shakespeare came to use the
possibilities of prose to achieve effects of characterization as subtle as those
he accomplished in verse. In the early plays, prose is almost always reserved
for characters from the lower classes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for
example, the weaver Bottom speaks in prose to the fairy queen Titania, but she
always responds in the verse appropriate to her position. Shakespeare, however,
soon abandoned this rigid assignment of prose or verse on the basis of social
rank. Although The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only play written almost
entirely in prose, many plays use prose for important effects. Examples include
Ophelia’s mad scenes in Hamlet, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in
Macbeth, and Falstaff’s wonderful comedy in Henry IV, Parts 1 and
2.
X | THE SONNETS |
Although Shakespeare is today best known for
his plays, his sonnets still rank among the world’s best-loved poems.
Shakespeare’s sonnets were published for the first time as a collection in 1609,
although two (numbers 138 and 144) had previously been printed in a volume of
Elizabethan verse called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The 1609
collection of sonnets was dedicated to “Mr. W.H.,” the “only begetter of these .
. . sonnets.” The dedication was signed by “T.T.,” (Thomas Thorpe, the
publisher). Thorpe may have secured a copy of the poems that had been
circulating among Shakespeare’s friends, or he may somehow have obtained
Shakespeare’s own manuscripts. In addition to 154 sonnets, the volume contained
“A Lover’s Complaint.” In this poem, too-little read today, a woman tells a
herdsman the story of her seduction and later abandonment by her lover. The
presence of a “Complaint” in a book of sonnets was a well-recognized practice,
and Shakespeare’s sonnets and “The Lover’s Complaint” were undoubtedly intended
to be read together.
The first 126 sonnets are apparently
addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author’s patron. The
poems express the writer’s selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the
young man. The next 28 sonnets are written to a “dark lady,” whom the poet
seemingly cannot resist. Another figure in the sequence is the “rival poet.”
Scholars have spent much time trying to identify the specific figures the
sonnets address, but it is unlikely that the sonnets are so personal. More
likely, the sonnet offered Shakespeare a structure for experiments in lyric
verse that enabled him to play with familiar conventions of feeling and poetry.
Although no systematic narrative develops in the sonnets, there is a thematic
link between the “young man” group and the “dark lady” group. The youth and the
mistress betray the poet, and at one point the author berates the young man for
stealing the dark lady from him. Miscellaneous sonnets treat various other
themes, most notably the rending effects of time and the eternalizing
possibilities of art.
The form of the poems is an English variation
of the traditional fourteen-line sonnet. The lines, which each have ten
syllables, are arranged into three quatrains, or groups of four lines, and a
final couplet (two successive lines that rhyme). The rhyme scheme of the sonnets
is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A theme is developed and elaborated in the
quatrains, and a concluding thought is presented in the couplet. Sonnet 116 is
typical of the form and excellence of the poems.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
The poet himself prophesied in Sonnet 55:
“Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful
rime.” The appreciation of the sonnets’ power and beauty by successive
generations confirms this prophecy. Shakespeare’s sonnets continue to be read
and enjoyed, and they remain among the greatest poetic achievements in the
English language.
XI | SHAKESPEARE TEXTS AND SCHOLARSHIP |
So far as is known, Shakespeare had no hand
in the publication of any of his plays. In any event, he did not own his plays
once he had supplied the scripts to the theatrical company. Except when the
plague closed the London theaters, acting companies normally did not consider it
in their own interest to allow their popular plays to be printed. However, in
whatever manner they reached their publishers, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were
printed during his lifetime in pamphlets (known as quartos, from the format in
which they were printed), which sold for sixpence. Publishers secured these
plays in various ways, some perhaps from the acting company, and some from lines
taken down in shorthand during performances or reconstructed from memory by
actors. The plays that reached print, therefore, had various degrees of
reliability, but what is of interest is that Shakespeare seemed not to care one
way or the other.
A | The Folios |
Fortunately for posterity, John Heminges
and Henry Condell, friends and colleagues of Shakespeare in the Lord
Chamberlain’s and King’s companies, collected 36 of the plays now accepted as
Shakespeare’s and published them in a handsome folio edition in 1623. This
volume preserved 18 plays that had never before been printed. Heminges and
Condell promised that they were offering all the plays “cured and perfect of
their limbs,” that is, purged of the errors that marred the early editions. The
First Folio nevertheless contains many imperfections resulting from misreading
of the manuscripts and inevitable printer’s errors, and their claim of accuracy
is little more than advertising for the volume. Yet without the efforts of
Heminges and Condell, 18 of the plays that we know as Shakespeare’s would not
have been preserved.
The demand for Shakespeare’s works was
sufficiently great to warrant the printing of the Second Folio in 1632. The
Third Folio edition, printed in both 1663 and 1664, included, in its second
printing, Pericles, which had been omitted from the previous editions,
and six other plays that are not regarded by modern editors as Shakespeare’s.
These are The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John
Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of
Locrine. In 1685 the Fourth Folio appeared, which also included the
unauthenticated plays. With each reprinting of Shakespeare’s works some
corrections were made but new errors were introduced in spelling and
punctuation, and the final text became more removed from the original work.
B | 18th-Century Editions |
The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays
with an editor’s name attached was prepared by dramatist and poet Nicholas Rowe
and printed in 1709. Rowe based his six-volume edition on the Fourth Folio, with
almost no comparison with other editions. He added the first biography of
Shakespeare and attached a list of characters to each play. The folios had
supplied such lists for only a few plays. Rowe also divided the plays into acts
and scenes according to 18th-century practice.
The next edition (6 vols., 1723-1725) was
prepared by English poet Alexander Pope, who did some slight comparison of
texts, relegated some passages he considered inauthentic to the bottom of pages,
and arbitrarily omitted others. Although he frequently rewrote Shakespeare’s
lines, mainly to make the verse regular, Pope offered some valuable restorations
of readings, rearranged passages as verse that were incorrectly printed as prose
in the early texts, and rejected the six spurious plays that had been added to
the Third Folio.
English writer Lewis Theobald’s
seven-volume edition of 1733 was the earliest systematic restoration of
Shakespeare’s texts. Many of Theobald’s emendations, or textual corrections, are
still accepted by scholars. Among the other important 18th-century editions was
that of English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, published in eight
volumes in 1765. Johnson’s edition was notable chiefly for its sensible
interpretations and critical evaluations of Shakespeare as a literary artist.
Also important was literary scholar Edmund Malone’s ten-volume edition published
in 1790, which was the most trustworthy text printed to that time. The first
American edition, published in Philadelphia in 1795 and 1796, was a reprinting
of Johnson’s text.
C | 19th-Century Editions |
In 1807, English editors Henrietta and
Thomas Bowdler first published The Family Shakespeare. Bowdler announced
that it “has been my study to exclude . . . whatever is unfit to be read aloud
by a gentleman to a company of ladies” and that he had endeavored to omit “words
and expressions which are of a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of
modesty.” The term bowdlerized has subsequently been applied to any text
from which passages have been removed to suit notions of propriety.
Among the more scholarly Shakespeare
collections of the 19th century were a handsomely illustrated edition
(1838-1842) of Charles Knight and the first Cambridge edition (1863-1866),
edited by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The one-volume reprint of
the Cambridge text, known as the Globe edition, was until recently the most
widely accepted text of the works ever distributed, and it was in this form that
Shakespeare first became a playwright belonging to the world.
The most ambitious editions undertaken
have been the various variorum editions, which collect and reprint the
corrections and comments of earlier critics and editors. (The word variorum
comes from the Latin phrase “cum notis variorum,” meaning “with the notes
of various people.”) The First and Second variorums (1803 and 1813) were edited
by Isaac Reed. The Third Variorum (21 vols., 1821) was prepared by James
Boswell, son of Samuel Johnson’s biographer, and was based on Edmund Malone’s
text. Like the preceding variorums, it contained a vast amount of biographical
and critical matter. In 1871 American scholar H. H. Furness began the New
Variorum Shakespeare, a project that has been continued to the present and is
the most comprehensive of all editions of Shakespeare. The Modern Language
Association of America has sponsored the New Variorum Shakespeare since 1936.
D | 20th-Century Editions |
Scholars of the 20th century had the
advantage not only of the exhaustive work done by editors of the past but also
of new bibliographical techniques. They also had at their disposal a vast amount
of information on the theatrical and printing conditions of Shakespeare’s time,
on Elizabethan handwriting, and on the historical background. Furthermore, they
were less hampered by the belief of many earlier editors that Shakespeare was
incapable of writing in imperfect meter or of using indelicate expressions.
American scholars W. A. Neilson and
George Lyman Kittredge each compiled a single-volume collection of Shakespeare’s
complete works in 1936 and 1942, respectively. From the 1960s and 1970s on, many
university presses and other publishers brought out their own editions of
Shakespeare, including paperback editions. The best of the modern editions of
individual plays are generally thought to be the Arden Shakespeare, the Oxford
Shakespeare, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions. For the collected
works, the Riverside Shakespeare and the Norton Shakespeare are arguably the
best editions.
Shakespeare plays began to appear on the
Internet during the 1990s. The University of Virginia has posted electronic
versions of the First Folio and the Globe edition on its Web site,
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/shakespeare/. Other Websites dedicated to the
plays are sponsored by the University of Victoria in Canada
(http://web.uvic.ca/shakespeare/) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(http://classics.mit.edu/Shakespeare/).
E | The Authorship Controversy |
With the exception of Homer, about whom
nothing definite is known, Shakespeare is the only major writer in the world’s
history whose authorship has been so widely disputed. Since the 18th century,
scores of books have been written to prove that Shakespeare’s works were written
by another person or persons. Dozens of candidates have been proposed, including
writers such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peele,
and John Lyly; a multitude of titled men, including the earls of Rutland and
Derby, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Bacon, and the Earl of Oxford; and even
Queen Elizabeth I.
The first systematic theory doubting
Shakespeare’s authorship was set forth by William Henry Smith, who in 1856
published a book declaring that Sir Francis Bacon was the real author of the
plays. In the same year, an American schoolteacher named Delia Bacon (no
relation to Francis Bacon) wrote an article and then a book supporting Bacon’s
authorship, and later she conceived the notion of the dual authorship of Sir
Walter Raleigh and Bacon. For a long time, Bacon was the leading candidate of
the anti-Shakespeareans, but Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is now the
most popular nominee. He was first proposed by an English schoolmaster with an
unfortunate last name, J. Thomas Looney, in 1920. Christopher Marlowe, whose
candidacy also has been strongly advocated, was first named by American writer
Wilbur Zeigler in 1892 as one of a group of possible authors of the plays.
Skepticism as to Shakespeare’s authorship
has arisen for a number of reasons. Some critics have claimed that too little is
known about the man from Stratford for him to be the author of these great
plays. But it is important to remember that far less is known about most other
writers and public men of the time. Other critics have said that what is known
about Shakespeare is incompatible with the sort of man who could have written
the works. Still others have argued that the lack of surviving manuscripts of
the plays indicates a mystery concerning the author’s identity. In general,
however, resistance to the notion that a glover’s son from Stratford wrote the
plays we attribute to Shakespeare comes from a form of snobbery. We know
Shakespeare did not go to university and he was not educated at court, so it has
seemed to some impossible that he could have written the wonderful works
ascribed to him.
The biography of Shakespeare that Rowe
included with his edition of the works in 1709 may have added to the skepticism.
Rowe painted a very respectable background for Shakespeare and made sweeping
assumptions from the known facts. In addition, a number of traditional although
unsubstantiated stories about Shakespeare, such as that of his deer poaching,
came to be accepted as true, and other legends accumulated. On the basis of
these, some skeptics decided that Shakespeare was an ignorant butcher’s boy from
an uncultured background who could not have written anything significant, let
alone great literary masterpieces that show intimate knowledge of aristocratic
manners. The misconceptions about Shakespeare were compounded in the 19th
century, when he acquired a reputation for vast learning and virtual
omniscience.
For a more balanced evaluation of
Shakespeare’s knowledge and education, it is necessary to take into account the
facts of his background. His native Stratford was a prosperous market town with
one of the best grammar schools in England. Shakespeare’s father held official
positions, which would indicate that he must have been an ambitious man who
would hardly have denied his son the free education to which he was entitled at
the grammar school. Most scholars familiar with the Elizabethan age believe that
the works display exactly the sort of knowledge that Shakespeare could have
obtained in the Stratford grammar school.
A number of scholars have closely studied
the book-learning exhibited in the works. They have concluded that even the
mythological allusions, which have sometimes been cited as proof of the author’s
wide classical reading, are no more numerous or obscure than those used by other
writers. Moreover, these allusions come from relatively few literary sources or
popular traditions. Nor is there evidence in the works of precise knowledge of
the scientific and philosophical trends of the day. As most modern scholars see
it, the author revealed in the works was a keenly sensitive and intelligent man
whose reading was inspired by wide curiosity, but that, unlike Sir Francis
Bacon, he was not a learned man of scientific bent.
The claim that the plays display
Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of the customs and manners of nobility and
royalty is illusory. The plays show kings speaking in regal tones when the
dramatic situation calls for emphasis on the dignity of royalty. In other
scenes, however, they speak as ordinary human beings, in keeping with the
emotional situation in which the action places them. In any case, Shakespeare
played at court many times before Queen Elizabeth and King James and had an
official position as one of James’ servants as a member of the King’s Men. It
would not, therefore, have been difficult for him to become familiar with
aristocratic life and manners.
The fact that Shakespeare’s manuscripts
have vanished is not surprising in the light of Elizabethan practices. Very few
play manuscripts from the period have survived. Plays were not considered
literature, and play scripts would not have had much value, except to the acting
company. In any case, once a playwright sold a script to an acting company, it
was no longer the author’s property. The manuscripts in the playhouse were
undoubtedly preserved for as long as they were usable, but afterward they were
probably used as scrap paper. The manuscripts supplied by Heminges and Condell
for the printing of the 18 previously unpublished plays in the First Folio would
most likely have been returned to the acting company after the book was in
print. The Second, Third, and Fourth folios are printed from the text of the
First Folio, rather than from manuscripts. When Parliament ordered the closing
of London’s playhouses in 1642, many companies sold their assets, including play
manuscripts. In addition, many manuscripts must have perished in the great fire
that swept London in 1666. Thus, it would be unusual if the manuscripts of
Shakespeare’s plays had survived.
Those who seek another author for
Shakespeare’s works believe that distinction of birth and education is a
necessary qualification for writing great literature. Yet it is the quality of
imaginative genius rather than a display of learning that distinguishes the
creator of these plays. The miracle is not that a man of Shakespeare’s
background wrote them, but that any human imagination produced creations of such
enduring power and beauty.
XII | LITERARY REPUTATION |
Shakespeare achieved his reputation as
perhaps the greatest of all dramatists after his death. Although his
contemporary Ben Jonson declared him “not of an age, but for all time,” early
17th-century taste found the plays of Jonson himself, or Thomas Middleton or
Beaumont and Fletcher, equally worthy of praise. Shakespeare’s reputation began
to eclipse that of his contemporaries some 150 years after his death. He was
always popular but until the mid-18th century his reputation was not, as it
would become, unrivaled. Although his works were regularly staged in the late
17th and early 18th centuries, theater companies hardly treated his plays with
reverence. When they performed the plays, they most often used versions
rewritten for the fashions of the age, “purged”—as their adaptors maintained—of
their coarseness and absurdities. These alterations could be significant. In the
version of King Lear that dominated the stage from 1681 until 1823, Lear
and his daughter Cordelia are left alive at the end, transforming a tragedy into
a tragicomedy (and reproducing what the historical source material suggests
about their fates). While these adaptations seem odd to us today, it was this
practice of adapting Shakespeare that kept his plays in the repertory while
those of Jonson, Middleton, and others remained on the shelf.
Shakespeare began to assume the role of
England’s national poet during the first half of the 18th century. This process
reached its culmination with the installation of a memorial statue in
Westminster Abbey in 1741 and the celebration of a festival in 1764 to
commemorate the bicentenary of his birth. During the 19th century the romantic
movement did much to shape both Shakespeare’s international reputation and the
view of his achievement that has persisted ever since. Particularly important
were the lectures on Shakespeare by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and the writings of German romantic poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe. Romantic authors claimed Shakespeare as a great precursor of their
own literary values. They celebrated his work as an embodiment of universal
human truths and an unequalled articulation of the human condition in all its
nobility and variety.
The views of the romantic movement have in
many ways been cemented during the 20th century. Institutions such as the Folger
Shakespeare Library, established in the United States in 1932, and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, founded in Britain in 1961, have ensured that Shakespeare’s
work remains a central icon of Western culture. Festival productions of the
plays began in 1870 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon.
The present theater, built in 1932 after the original was burned, is the
Stratford home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It may itself be rebuilt as
part of a redevelopment plan scheduled for completion in 2008. The annual
Shakespeare Festival of Stratford, Ontario, presented its first Shakespeare
plays in 1953. New York City has held an outdoor Shakespeare in Central Park
festival since 1957. A reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe was erected on
London’s South Bank and opened in 1997. By the early 2000s, numerous British,
Canadian, and American towns and cities held annual Shakespeare festivals.
As Polish literary critic Jan Kott noted in
the title of a 1965 work, Shakespeare is “our contemporary.” At the very least,
we strive to make him so. Shakespeare plays are performed today all over the
globe, not only in English-speaking countries but in lands and in languages
Shakespeare never dreamed of.
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