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.
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II
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LIFE
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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).
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A
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Early Years
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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.
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B
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Arrival in London
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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.
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C
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Actor and Playwright
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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.
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D
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Last Years
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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.
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III
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PUBLICATION
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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.
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IV
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THE COMEDIES
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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.
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A
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Early Comedies
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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.
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A1
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The Comedy of Errors
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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.
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A2
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The Two Gentlemen of Verona
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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.
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A3
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The Taming of the Shrew
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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.
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A4
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Love’s Labour’s Lost
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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.”
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B
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Middle Comedies
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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.
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B1
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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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.
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B2
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The Merchant of Venice
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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)
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C
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Mature Comedies
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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.
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C1
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Much Ado About Nothing
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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.
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C2
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As You Like It
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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.”
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C3
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The Merry Wives of Windsor
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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.
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C4
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Twelfth Night
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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.
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D
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Problem Comedies
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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.
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The Tempest
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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.
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LATE COLLABORATIONS
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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.
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LITERARY QUALITIES OF THE PLAYS
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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.
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Shakespeare’s Characters
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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.
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Shakespeare’s Attitudes
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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.
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Shakespeare’s Stagecraft
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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
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Shakespeare’s Language
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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.
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THE SONNETS
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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.
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SHAKESPEARE TEXTS AND SCHOLARSHIP
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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.
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The Folios
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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.
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18th-Century Editions
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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.
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19th-Century Editions
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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.
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20th-Century Editions
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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/).
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The Authorship Controversy
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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.
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XII
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LITERARY REPUTATION
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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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