Word play of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise—is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare’s plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.

Many of his plays appeared in print as a series of quartos, but approximately half of them remained unpublished until 1623, when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the categories used in the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays «problem plays» that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies.

When Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1570s or early 1580s, dramatists writing for London’s new commercial playhouses (such as The Curtain) were combining two strands of dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, generally celebrating piety, use personified moral attributes to urge or instruct the protagonist to choose the virtuous life over Evil. The characters and plot situations are largely symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have seen this type of play (along with, perhaps, mystery plays and miracle plays).^[1]

The other strand of dramatic tradition was classical aesthetic theory. This theory was derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England, however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and practitioners. At the universities, plays were staged in a more academic form as Roman closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action. Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum^[2] and were taught in editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.^[3]

Theatre and stage setup[edit]

Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late twentieth century^[4] showed that all London English Renaissance theatres were built around similar general plans. Despite individual differences, the public theatres were three stories high and built around an open space at the center. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect, three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open center into which jutted the stage—essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience, only the rear being restricted for the entrances and exits of the actors and seating for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could be used as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet, or as a position for a character to harangue a crowd, as in Julius Caesar.

Usually built of timber, lath and plaster and with thatched roofs, the early theatres were vulnerable to fire, and gradually were replaced (when necessary) with stronger structures. When the Globe burned down in June 1613, it was rebuilt with a tile roof.

A different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular use on a long term basis in 1599. The Blackfriars was small in comparison to the earlier theatres, and roofed rather than open to the sky; it resembled a modern theatre in ways that its predecessors did not.

Elizabethan Shakespeare[edit]

For Shakespeare, as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were, moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University Wits on the London stage. By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe revolutionized theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with classical theory to produce a new secular form.^[5] The new drama combined the rhetorical complexity of the academic play with the bawdy energy of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple allegory. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare continued these artistic strategies,^[6] creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it means to be human. What Marlowe and Kyd did for tragedy, John Lyly and George Peele, among others, did for comedy: they offered models of witty dialogue, romantic action, and exotic, often pastoral location that formed the basis of Shakespeare’s comedic mode throughout his career.^[7]

Shakespeare’s Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character.^[8] In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than Marlowe’s.^[9] By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet.

In comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare’s other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic intrigue (a secondary feature in Latin new comedy) the main plot element;^[10] even this romantic plot is sometimes given less attention than witty dialogue, deceit, and jests. The «reform of manners», which Horace considered the main function of comedy,^[11] survives in such episodes as the gulling of Malvolio.

Jacobean Shakespeare[edit]

Shakespeare reached maturity as a dramatist at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, and in the first years of the reign of James. In these years, he responded to a deep shift in popular tastes, both in subject matter and approach. At the turn of the decade, he responded to the vogue for dramatic satire initiated by the boy players at Blackfriars and St. Paul’s. At the end of the decade, he seems to have attempted to capitalize on the new fashion for tragicomedy,^[12] even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularized the genre in England.

The influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston and Ben Jonson is seen not only in the problem plays, which dramatize intractable human problems of greed and lust, but also in the darker tone of the Jacobean tragedies.^[13] The Marlovian, heroic mode of the Elizabethan tragedies is gone, replaced by a darker vision of heroic natures caught in environments of pervasive corruption. As a sharer in both the Globe and in the King’s Men, Shakespeare never wrote for the boys’ companies; however, his early Jacobean work is markedly influenced by the techniques of the new, satiric dramatists. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.^[14]

Shakespeare’s final plays hark back to his Elizabethan comedies in their use of romantic situation and incident.^[15] In these plays, however, the sombre elements that are largely glossed over in the earlier plays are brought to the fore and often rendered dramatically vivid. This change is related to the success of tragicomedies such as Philaster, although the uncertainty of dates makes the nature and direction of the influence unclear. From the evidence of the title-page to The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual analysis it is believed by some editors that Shakespeare ended his career in collaboration with Fletcher, who succeeded him as house playwright for the King’s Men.^[16] These last plays resemble Fletcher’s tragicomedies in their attempt to find a comedic mode capable of dramatising more serious events than had his earlier comedies.

Style[edit]

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, «drama became the ideal means to capture and convey the diverse interests of the time.»^{[citation needed]} Stories of various genres were enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Later on, he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years’ War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods.^[17] His style changed not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.^[18]

While many passages in Shakespeare’s plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger.^[19] He and many dramatists of this period used the form of blank verse extensively in character dialogue, thus heightening poetic effects.

To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet to give a sense of conclusion, or completion.^[20] A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,^[21]

Hear it not Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

Shakespeare’s writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay in which double entendres and rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used.^[22][23] Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Although a large amount of his comical talent is evident in his comedies, some of the most entertaining scenes and characters are found in tragedies such as Hamlet and histories such as Henry IV, Part 1. Shakespeare’s humour was largely influenced by Plautus.^[24]

Soliloquies in plays[edit]

Shakespeare’s plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character, apparently alone within the context of the play, makes a speech so that the audience may understand the character’s inner motivations and conflict.^[25]

In his book Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies, James Hirsh defines the convention of a Shakespearean soliloquy in early modern drama. He argues that when a person on the stage speaks to himself or herself, they are characters in a fiction speaking in character; this is an occasion of self-address. Furthermore, Hirsh points out that Shakespearean soliloquies and «asides» are audible in the fiction of the play, bound to be overheard by any other character in the scene unless certain elements confirm that the speech is protected. Therefore, a Renaissance playgoer who was familiar with this dramatic convention would have been alert to Hamlet’s expectation that his soliloquy be overheard by the other characters in the scene. Moreover, Hirsh asserts that in soliloquies in other Shakespearean plays, the speaker is entirely in character within the play’s fiction. Saying that addressing the audience was outmoded by the time Shakespeare was alive, he «acknowledges few occasions when a Shakespearean speech might involve the audience in recognising the simultaneous reality of the stage and the world the stage is representing». Other than 29 speeches delivered by choruses or characters who revert to that condition as epilogues «Hirsh recognizes only three instances of audience address in Shakespeare’s plays, ‘all in very early comedies, in which audience address is introduced specifically to ridicule the practice as antiquated and amateurish.'»^[26]

Source material of the plays[edit]

As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. For example, King Lear is probably an adaptation of an older play, King Leir, and the Henriad probably derived from The Famous Victories of Henry V.^[27] There is speculation that Hamlet (c. 1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet),^[28] but the number of lost plays from this time period makes it impossible to determine that relationship with certainty. (The Ur-Hamlet may in fact have been Shakespeare’s, and was just an earlier and subsequently discarded version.)^[27] For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North),^[29] and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles. This structure did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare’s plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces.

While there is much dispute about the exact chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, there is a general consensus that stylistic groupings largely reflect a chronology of three-phases:

1. Histories and comedies – Shakespeare’s earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwrights’ works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue. These elements showed up in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Almost all of the plays written after the plague hit London are comedies, perhaps reflecting the public’s desire at the time for light-hearted fare. Other comedies from Shakespeare during this period include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It.
2. Tragedies – Beginning in 1599 with Julius Caesar, for the next few years, Shakespeare would produce his most famous dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear. The plays of this period address issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power and egoism.
3. Late romances – These plays romances, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, are so called because they bear similarities to medieval romance literature. Among the features of these plays are a redemptive plotline with a happy ending, and magic and other fantastic elements.

Canonical plays[edit]

Except where noted, the plays below are listed, for the thirty-six plays included in the First Folio of 1623, according to the order in which they appear there, with two plays that were not included (Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen) being added at the end of the list of comedies and Edward III at the end of the list of histories.

Note: Plays marked with ^LR are now commonly referred to as the «late romances». Plays marked with ^PP are sometimes referred to as the «problem plays». The three plays marked with ^FF were not included in the First Folio.

Dramatic collaborations[edit]

Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone, and a number of his plays were collaborative, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial and are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

• Cardenio (a lost play or one that survives only as a later adaptation, Double Falsehood) – Contemporaneous reports suggest that Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher.
• Cymbeline – The Yale Shakespeare suggests that a collaborator may have been responsible for parts or all of act III, scene 7, and act V, scene 2
• Edward III – Brian Vickers concluded that the play was 40% Shakespeare and 60% Thomas Kyd.
• Henry VI, Part 1 – Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
• Henry VIII – Generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.
• Macbeth – Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
• Measure for Measure – May have undergone a light revision by Middleton.
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre – May include work by George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
• Timon of Athens – May have resulted from collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton.
• Titus Andronicus – May have been written in collaboration with or revised by George Peele.
• The Two Noble Kinsmen – Attributed in 1634 to Fletcher and Shakespeare.

Lost plays[edit]

• Love’s Labour’s Won – A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a bookseller’s list both include this title among Shakespeare’s recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All’s Well That Ends Well.
• Cardenio – Attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers’ Register entry of 1653 (alongside a number of erroneous attributions), and often believed to have been re-worked from a subplot in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, but modern scholarship has not established with certainty whether Double Falshood includes fragments of Shakespeare’s lost play.

Plays possibly by Shakespeare[edit]

Note: For a comprehensive account of plays possibly by Shakespeare or in part by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare apocrypha.

• Arden of Faversham – The middle portion of the play (scenes 4–9) may have been written by Shakespeare.
• Edmund Ironside – Contains numerous words first used by Shakespeare, and, if by him, is perhaps his first play.
• The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy – Both plays were published in quarto as works of Shakespeare, in 1605 and 1608, and were included in the Third Folio. However, stylistic analysis considers these attributions unlikely.
• Sir Thomas More – A collaborative work by several playwrights, including Shakespeare. There is a «growing scholarly consensus»^[30] that Shakespeare was called in to re-write a contentious scene in the play and that «Hand D» in the surviving manuscript is that of Shakespeare himself.^[31]
• The Spanish Tragedy – Additional passages included in the fourth quarto, including the «painter scene», are likely to have been written by him.^[32]

Shakespeare and the textual problem[edit]

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays and produced no overall authoritative version of his plays before he died. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote is a major concern for most modern editions.

One of the reasons there are textual problems is that there was no copyright of writings at the time. As a result, Shakespeare and the playing companies he worked with did not distribute scripts of his plays, for fear that the plays would be stolen. This led to bootleg copies of his plays, which were often based on people trying to remember what Shakespeare had actually written.

Textual corruptions also stemming from printers’ errors, misreadings by compositors, or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardized spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers’ confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare’s original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.

In some cases the textual solution presents few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth for example, scholars believe that someone (probably Thomas Middleton) adapted and shortened the original to produce the extant text published in the First Folio, but that remains the only known text of the play. In others the text may have become manifestly corrupt or unreliable (Pericles or Timon of Athens) but no competing version exists. The modern editor can only regularize and correct erroneous readings that have survived into the printed versions.

The textual problem can, however, become rather complicated. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such cases, editors must face the choice between the original first version and the later, revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they believe to be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide a conflated text would run contrary to Shakespeare’s intentions. In King Lear for example, two independent versions, each with their own textual integrity, exist in the Quarto and the Folio versions. Shakespeare’s changes here extend from the merely local to the structural. Hence the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986 (second edition 2005), provides two different versions of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other Shakespearean plays (Henry IV, Part 1; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida; and Othello).

Performance history[edit]

During Shakespeare’s lifetime, many of his greatest plays were staged at the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars Theatre.^{[33][34][35][36]} Shakespeare’s fellow members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acted in his plays. Among these actors were Richard Burbage (who played the title role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and King Lear),^[37] Richard Cowley (who played Verges in Much Ado About Nothing), William Kempe, (who played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and, possibly, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Henry Condell and John Heminges, who are most famous now for collecting and editing the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623).

Shakespeare’s plays continued to be staged after his death until the Interregnum (1649–1660), when all public stage performances were banned by the Puritan rulers. After the English Restoration, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in playhouses with elaborate scenery and staged with music, dancing, thunder, lightning, wave machines, and fireworks. During this time the texts were «reformed» and «improved» for the stage, an undertaking which has seemed shockingly disrespectful to posterity.

Victorian productions of Shakespeare often sought pictorial effects in «authentic» historical costumes and sets. The staging of the reported sea fights and barge scene in Antony and Cleopatra was one spectacular example.^[38] Too often, the result was a loss of pace. Towards the end of the 19th century, William Poel led a reaction against this heavy style. In a series of «Elizabethan» productions on a thrust stage, he paid fresh attention to the structure of the drama. In the early twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker directed quarto and folio texts with few cuts,^[39][38] while Edward Gordon Craig and others called for abstract staging. Both approaches have influenced the variety of Shakespearean production styles seen today.^[40]

See also[edit]

• Chronology of Shakespeare’s plays
• Elizabethan era
• List of Shakespearean characters
• Shakespeare on screen
• Shakespeare’s late romances
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
• Music in the plays of William Shakespeare
• Returning to Shakespeare by Brian Vickers

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Maric, Jasminka, Filozofija u Hamletu, Alfa BK Univerzitet, Belgrade, 2015.
• Maric, Jasminka, Philosophy in Hamlet, author’s edition, Belgrade, 2018.
• Murphy, Andrew (2003). Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1139439466.

External links[edit]

• Complete text of Shakespeare’s plays, listed by genre, with other options including listing of all speeches by each character
• Summaries of Shakespeare’s plays List of all 27 of Shakespeare’s plays with summaries, and images of the plays being performed.
• Complete list of shakespeare’s plays with synopsis
• Narrative and Dramatic Sources of all Shakespeare’s works Also publication years and chronology of Shakespeare’s plays
• «All Shakespeare’s works, Folger Shakespeare Library
• Modern Translations, Study Guides, context and biography of William Shakespeare, of Shakespeare’s plays, and his sonnets
• The Shakespeare Resource Center A directory of Web resources for online Shakespearean study. Includes play synopses, a works timeline, and language resources.
• Shake Sphere Summary and analysis of all the plays, including those of questionable authorship, such as Edward III, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio.
• Shakespeare at the British Library – resource including images of original manuscripts, new articles and teaching resources.

Shakespeare’s plays portray recognisable people in situations that we can all relate to — including love, marriage, death, mourning, guilt, the need to make difficult choices, separation, reunion and reconciliation. They do so with great humanity, tolerance, and wisdom. They help us to understand what it is to be human, and to cope with the problems of being so.  

Click on a play to read a full synopsis.

Because Shakespeare’s plays are written to be acted, they are constantly fresh and can be adapted to the place and time they are performed. Their language is wonderfully expressive and powerful, and although it may sometimes seem hard to understand in reading, actors can bring it to vivid life for us. The plays provide actors with some of the most challenging and rewarding roles ever written. They are both entertaining and moving. 

In the first Folio of 1623, the earliest edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays, they are divided into Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Over time, these have been further divided into Romances which include The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles. The term ‘Problem Plays’ has been used to include plays as apparently diverse as Measure for Measure, Hamlet, All’s Well that Ends Well  and Troilus and Cressida. 

In his history plays, Shakespeare sometimes had the same character appear over and over. For example, the character ‘Bardolph’ appears in the the most plays of any characters, including Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Scholars of Elizabethan drama believe that William Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays between 1590 and 1612. These dramatic works encompass a wide range of subjects and styles, from the playful «A Midsummer Night’s Dream» to the gloomy «Macbeth.» Shakespeare’s plays can be roughly divided into three genres—comedies, histories, and tragedies—though some works, such as «The Tempest» and «The Winter’s Tale,» straddle the boundaries between these categories.

Shakespeare’s first play is generally believed to be «Henry VI Part I,» a history play about English politics in the years leading up to the Wars of the Roses. The play was possibly a collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, another Elizabethan dramatist who is best known for his tragedy «Doctor Faustus.» Shakespeare’s last play is believed to be «The Two Noble Kinsmen,» a tragicomedy co-written with John Fletcher in 1613, three years before Shakespeare’s death.

Shakespeare’s Plays in Chronological Order

The exact order of the composition and performances of Shakespeare’s plays is difficult to prove—and therefore often disputed. The dates listed below are approximate and based on the general consensus of when the plays were first performed:

1. «Henry VI Part I» (1589–1590)
2. «Henry VI Part II» (1590–1591)
3. «Henry VI Part III» (1590–1591)
4. «Richard III» (1592–1593)
5. «The Comedy of Errors» (1592–1593)
6. «Titus Andronicus» (1593–1594)
7. «The Taming of the Shrew» (1593–1594)
8. «The Two Gentlemen of Verona» (1594–1595)
9. «Love’s Labour’s Lost» (1594–1595)
10. «Romeo and Juliet» (1594–1595)
11. «Richard II» (1595–1596)
12. «A Midsummer Night’s Dream» (1595–1596)
13. «King John» (1596–1597)
14. «The Merchant of Venice» (1596–1597)
15. «Henry IV Part I» (1597–1598)
16. «Henry IV Part II» (1597–1598)
17. «Much Ado About Nothing» (1598–1599)
18. «Henry V» (1598–1599)
19. «Julius Caesar» (1599–1600)
20. «As You Like It» (1599–1600)
21. «Twelfth Night» (1599–1600)
22. «Hamlet» (1600–1601)
23. «The Merry Wives of Windsor» (1600–1601)
24. «Troilus and Cressida» (1601–1602)
25. «All’s Well That Ends Well» (1602–1603)
26. «Measure for Measure» (1604–1605)
27. «Othello» (1604–1605)
28. «King Lear» (1605–1606)
29. «Macbeth» (1605–1606)
30. «Antony and Cleopatra» (1606–1607)
31. «Coriolanus» (1607–1608)
32. «Timon of Athens» (1607–1608)
33. «Pericles» (1608–1609)
34. «Cymbeline» (1609–1610)
35. «The Winter’s Tale» (1610–1611)
36. «The Tempest» (1611–1612)
37. «Henry VIII» (1612–1613)
38. «The Two Noble Kinsmen» (1612–1613)

Dating the Plays

The chronology of Shakespeare’s plays remains a matter of some scholarly debate. Current consensus is based on a constellation of different data points, including publication information (e.g. dates taken from title pages), known performance dates, and information from contemporary diaries and other records. Though each play can be assigned a narrow date range, it is impossible to know exactly in which year any one of Shakespeare’s plays was composed. Even when exact performance dates are known, nothing conclusive can be said about when each play was written.

Further complicating the matter is the fact that many of Shakespeare’s plays exist in multiple editions, making it even more difficult to determine when the authoritative versions were completed. For example, there are several surviving versions of «Hamlet,» three of which were printed in the First Quarto, Second Quarto, and First Folio. The version printed in the Second Quarto is the longest version of «Hamlet,» though it does not include over 50 lines that appear in the First Folio version. Modern scholarly editions of the play contain material from multiple sources.

Authorship Controversy

Another controversial question regarding Shakespeare’s bibliography is whether the Bard actually authored all of the plays assigned to his name. In the 19th century, a number of literary historians popularized the so-called «anti-Stratfordian theory,» which held that Shakespeare’s plays were actually the work of Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, or possibly a group of playwrights. Subsequent scholars, however, have dismissed this theory, and the current consensus is that Shakespeare—the man born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564—did, in fact, write all of the plays that bear his name.

Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that some of Shakespeare’s plays were collaborations. In 2016, a group of scholars performed an analysis of all three parts of «Henry VI» and came to the conclusion that the play does include the work of Christopher Marlowe. Future editions of the play published by Oxford University Press will credit Marlowe as co-author.

Another play, «The Two Noble Kinsmen,» was co-written with John Fletcher, who also worked with Shakespeare on the lost play «Cardenio.» Some scholars believe that Shakespeare may have also collaborated with George Peele, an English dramatist and poet; George Wilkins, an English dramatist and inn-keeper; and Thomas Middleton, a successful author of numerous stage works, including comedies, tragedies, and pageants.

William Shakespeare (Baptized April 26, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist. His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several shorter poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare was born and lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. From 1585 until 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the acting company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about his life and prodigious literary achievements.

Shakespeare’s early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication by the end of the sixteenth century. In his following phase he wrote mainly tragedies, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, Othello. The plays are often regarded as the summit of Shakespeare’s art and among the greatest tragedies ever written. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as Shakespeare’s.

Shakespeare’s canon has achieved a unique standing in Western literature, amounting to a humanistic scripture. His insight in human character and motivation and his luminous, boundary-defying diction have influenced writers for centuries. Some of the more notable authors and poets so influenced are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. According to Harold Bloom, Shakespeare «has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else, before or since.»^[1]

Shakespeare lived during the so-called Elizabethan Settlement in which relatively moderate English Protestantism gained ascendancy. Throughout his works he explored themes of conscience, mercy, guilt, temptation, forgiveness, and the afterlife. The poet’s own religious leanings, however, are much debated. Shakespeare’s universe is governed by a recognizably Christian moral order, yet threatened and often brought to grief by tragic flaws seemingly embedded in human nature much like the heroes of Greek tragedies.

He was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but Shakespeare’s reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed his genius, and in the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman and alderman, and of Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. Shakespeare’s baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year.

Because baptisms were performed within a few days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 as his birthday. This date is convenient as Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616.

As the son of a prominent town official, Shakespeare was entitled to attend King Edward VI Grammar school in central Stratford, which may have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Hathaway, who was 25, was seven years his senior. Two neighbors of Anne posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There was some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably as Anne was three months pregnant.

After his marriage, Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. The late 1580s are known as Shakespeare’s «Lost Years» because little evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. On May 26, 1583, Shakespeare’s first child, Susannah, was baptized at Stratford. Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptized on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died in 1596, Susanna in 1649, and Judith in 1662.

London and theatrical career

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene:

…there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.^[2]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself.^[3] The italicized line parodying the phrase «Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide» from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3, along with the pun «Shake-scene,» identifies Shakespeare as Greene’s target.

«All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…»

As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42.

Greene’s attack is the first recorded mention of Shakespeare in the London theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks.^[4][5] From 1594, Shakespeare’s plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.^[6] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King’s Men. The change of fortunes of the acting profession in Tudor England is noteworthy. As late as 1545 traveling actors were defined by statute as rogues and subject to arrest; largely due to Shakespeare’s writing and staging, «rogues» now enjoyed the patronage of the king, and members of the King’s Men were officially attached to the Court as Grooms of the Chamber.^[7]

Shakespeare grew to maturity just as the theater was being reborn in London. London’s first theater, the Red Lion, was built in 1567, and in 1576 James Burbage (father of the famed actor Richard Burbage for whom Shakespeare would write many parts), constructed the Theater, a conscious allusion to classical amphitheaters of antiquity.^[7] In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare’s property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.^[8] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of «the Principal Actors in all these Plays,» some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain what roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that «good Will» played «kingly» roles.^[9] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the information.

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theater there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul’s Cathedral with many fine houses.

Later years

Shakespeare’s last two plays were written in 1613, after which he appears to have retired to Stratford. He died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters, Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr. John Hall, but there are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today.

Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honor of burial in the chancel not on account of his fame as a playwright but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440 (a considerable sum of money at the time). A bust of him placed by his family on the wall nearest his grave shows him posed in the act of writing. Each year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing hand of the bust, and he is believed to have written the epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones,

But cursed be he that moves my bones.

Speculations

Over the years such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the commoner from Stratford-upon-Avon actually produced the works attributed to him.

The most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon has been Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth. Other alternatives include Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and even Queen Elizabeth herself. Although alternative authorship is almost universally rejected in academic circles, popular interest in the subject has continued into the twenty-first century.

A related academic question is whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theater. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.

Shakespeare’s sexuality has also been questioned in recent years, as modern criticism has subordinated conventional literary and artistic concerns to often overtly political issues. Although 26 of Shakespeare’s sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the «Dark Lady»), 126 are addressed to a young man (known as the «Fair Lord»). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focuses on the young man’s beauty, has been taken as evidence for Shakespeare’s «bisexuality,» although most critics from Shakespeare’s time to the present day interpret them as referring intense friendship, not sexual love. Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical, so that the «speaker» of the sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. The etiquette of chivalry and brotherly love of the time enabled Elizabethans to write about friendship in more intense language than is common today.

Works

Plays

Scholars have often categorized Shakespeare’s canon into four groupings: comedies, histories, tragedies, and romances; and his work is roughly broken into four periods. Until the mid-1590s, he wrote mainly comedies influenced by Roman and Italian models and history plays in the popular chronicle tradition. A second period began from about 1595 with the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and ended with the tragedy of Julius Caesar in 1599. During this time, he wrote what are considered his greatest comedies and histories. From about 1600 to about 1608, Shakespeare wrote most of his greatest tragedies, and from about 1608 to 1613, mainly tragicomedies or romances.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare’s plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.^[10] Their composition was influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.^[11] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models; but no source for the The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.^[12] Like Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew’s story of the taming of a woman’s independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.

Shakespeare’s early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic low-life scenes. Shakespeare’s next comedy, the equally romantic The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock which reflected Elizabethan views but may appear racist to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts I and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.

This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.^[13] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar «the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other».^[14]

Shakespeare’s so-called «tragic period» lasted from about 1600 to 1608, though he also wrote the so-called «problem plays» Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well during this time and had written tragedies before. Many critics believe that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The hero of the first, Hamlet, has probably been more discussed than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy «To be or not to be; that is the question.» Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello’s sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, triggering scenes which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Duke of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, «the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty».^[15] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare’s tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare’s finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.^[16]

In his final period, Shakespeare completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare’s part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.^[17]

As was normal in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. For example, Hamlet (c. 1601) is probably a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is an adaptation of an older play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North)^[18], and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles.

Some of Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos, but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic of the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays «problem plays» as they elude easy categorization and conventions, and has introduced the term «romances» for the later comedies.

There are many controversies about the exact chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, the fact that Shakespeare did not produce an authoritative print version of his plays during his life accounts for part of Shakespeare’s textual problem, often noted with his plays. This means that several of the plays have different textual versions. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions also stem from printers’ errors, compositors’ misreadings or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardized spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, further adding to the transcribers’ confusion. Modern scholars also believe Shakespeare revised his plays throughout the years, which could lead to two existing versions of one play.

Poetry

Shakespeare’s sonnets are a collection of 154 poems that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. All but two first appeared in the 1609 publication entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets; numbers 138 («When my love swears that she is made of truth») and 144 («Two loves have I, of comfort and despair») had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim.

The conditions under which the sonnets were published are unclear. The 1609 text is dedicated to one «Mr. W. H.,» who is described as «the only begetter» of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. It is not known who this man was although there are many theories. In addition, it is not known whether the publication of the sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare. The poems were probably written over a period of several years.

In addition to his sonnets, Shakespeare also wrote several longer narrative poems, «Venus and Adonis,» «The Rape of Lucrece» and «A Lover’s Complaint.» These poems appear to have been written either in an attempt to win the patronage of a rich benefactor (as was common at the time) or as the result of such patronage. For example, «The Rape of Lucrece» and «Venus and Adonis» were both dedicated to Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

In addition, Shakespeare wrote the short poem “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” The anthology The Passionate Pilgrim was attributed to him upon its first publication in 1599, but in fact only five of its poems are by Shakespeare and the attribution was withdrawn in the second edition.

Shakespeare and religion

Shakespeare’s writings have achieved a stature transcending literature. They have, says Harry Levin, «been virtually canonized as humanistic scriptures, the tested residue of pragmatic wisdom, a general collection of quotable texts and usable examples.»^[19] Although Shakespeare was immersed in a religiously saturated culture and themes of sin, prejudice, jealousy, conscience, mercy, guilt, temptation, forgiveness, and the afterlife appear throughout his writings, the playwright’s religious sensibilities remains notoriously problematic. In part this may owe to the political perils of professing avowedly Catholic or other doctrinally suspect sympathies in the Protestant reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

«What were Shakespeare’s beliefs?» Aldous Huxley asked in his last published work (dictated on his deathbed). «The question is not an easy one to answer; for in the first place Shakespeare was a dramatist who made his characters express opinions which were appropriate to them, but which may not have been those of the poet. And anyhow did he himself have the same beliefs, without alteration or change or emphasis, throughout his life?»^[20]

For Huxley, the poet’s essential Christianity is apparent in Measure for Measure, when the saintly Isabella reminds the self-righteous Angelo of the divine scheme of redemption and of the ethical consequences which ought to follow from its acceptance in faith.^[21]

Alas, alas!

Why, all the souls that were[,] were forfeit once;

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out the remedy. How would you be,

If He, which is the top of judgement, should

But judge you as you are? O, think on that;

And mercy then will breathe within your lips,

Like man new-made. (Measure for Measure, Act 2, Scene 2)

Expressions of ethical Christianity are famously expressed in Portia’s appeal to the vindictive Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.(The Merchant Of Venice Act 4, scene 1)

The moral order, while divinely ordained, appears irreparably undone by human vices such as greed, jealousy, and a malignancy infecting the soul in such figures as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. Traditional Christian categories of heaven, hell, and purgatory coexist in his writings with expressions of the fundamental disorientation of the human condition:

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. (Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5)

For Shakespeare, at least as deduced from his writings, Christianity describes a moral order and code of conduct, more than a catalog of orthodox beliefs. The direct heir of humanists such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, and Montaigne, says critic Robert Grudin, Shakespeare «delighted more in presenting issues than in espousing systems, and held critical awareness, as opposed to doctrinal rectitude, to be the highest possible good.»^[22]

Possible Catholic sympathies

While little direct evidence exists, circumstantial evidence suggests that Shakespeare’s family had Catholic sympathies and that he himself may have been Catholic, though this is much debated. In 1559, five years before Shakespeare’s birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England’s Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, and recusancy laws made Catholicism illegal. Some historians maintain that in Shakespeare’s lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed faith.^[23][24] Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.^[25]

There is some meager evidence that members of Shakespeare’s family were recusant Catholics. One piece of evidence is a tract, of debated authenticity, professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the eighteenth century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare’s. John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was «for feare of processe for Debtte,» according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant.^[26]

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. In 1606, William’s daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion in a Protestant service, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.^[27] It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies, which some sources have ascribed to Susannah’s sister Judith.^[28] Archdeacon Richard Davies, an eighteenth century Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: «He dyed a Papyst».^[29]

Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare’s youth, King’s New School in Stratford, were Catholic sympathizers,^[30] and Simon Hunt, who was likely to have been one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.^[31] A fellow grammar school pupil with Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, joined the Jesuits at Douai and was later executed in England for Catholic proselytizing.^[30]

The writer’s marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 may have been officiated, amongst other candidates, by John Frith ^[32] later identified by the crown as a Roman Catholic priest, although he maintained the appearance of a Protestant.^[33] Some surmise Shakespeare wed in neighboring Temple Grafton rather than the Protestant Church in Stratford in order for his wedding to be performed as a Catholic sacrament.^[33] Finally, one historian, Clare Asquith, has claimed that Catholic sympathies are detectable in his writing in the use of terms such as «high» when referring to Catholic characters and «low» when referring to Protestants, as well as other indicators in the text.^[34]

Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted. The 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia questioned not only his Catholicism, but whether «Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which…. was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age.»^[35] Stephen Greenblatt suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives.^[36] An increasing number of scholars do look to biographical and other evidence from Shakespeare’s work, such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, the sympathetic view of religious life («thrice blessed»), scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.^[37]

Shakepeare’s influence

On theatre

Shakespeare’s impact on modern theater cannot be overestimated. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature, he also transformed English theater by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterization, plot, action, language and genre.^[38] His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theater, permitting it to be admired by intellectuals as well as by those seeking pure entertainment.

Theater was changing when Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Previously, the commonest forms of popular English theater were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes that validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over evil. The characters and plot situations are symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have been exposed to this type of play (along with mystery plays and miracle plays). Meanwhile, at the universities, academic plays were being staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, often performed in Latin, placed a greater emphasis on poetic dialog but emphasized lengthy speechifying over physical stage action.

By the late 1500s the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe began to revolutionize theater. Their plays blended the old morality drama with academic theater to produce a new secular form. The new drama had the poetic grandeur and philosophical depth of the academic play and the bawdy populism of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple moral allegories. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare took these changes to a new level, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it meant to be human.

In plays like Hamlet, says Roland Mushat, Shakespeare «integrated characterisation with plot» in a manner that plot becomes dependent upon the development of the principal characters.^[39] In Romeo and Juliet, argues Jill Levenson, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy to create a new romantic tragedy genre (previous to Shakespeare, romance had not been considered a worthy topic for tragedy).^[40] Finally, through his soliloquies, Shakespeare explored a character’s inner motivations and conflict, rather than, conventionally, to introduce characters, convey information, or advance the plot.^[41]

Shakespeare’s plays portrayed a wide variety of emotions, and his encyclopedic insight into human nature distinguished him from any of his contemporaries. Every day life in London, which was exploding with the growth of manufacturing, gave vitality to his language. Shakespeare even used «groundlings» (lower-class, standing-room spectators) widely in his plays, which, says Boris Ford, «saved the drama from academic stiffness and preserved its essential bias towards entertainment».^[42] Shakespeare’s earliest history plays and comedies portrayed the follies and achievements of kings, and «in shaping, compressing, and altering chronicles, Shakespeare gained the art of dramatic design; and in the same way he developed his remarkable insight into character, its continuity and its variation.»^[42]

On literature

Shakespeare is cited as an influence on a large number of writers in succeeding centuries, including Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. Shakespearean quotations appear throughout Dickens’ writings and many of Dickens’ titles are drawn from Shakespeare. Melville frequently used Shakespearean devices, including formal stage directions and extended soliloquies, in Moby Dick.^[43] In fact, Shakespeare so influenced Melville that the novel’s main protagonist, Captain Ahab, is a classic Shakespearean tragic figure, «a great man brought down by his faults.»^[44] Shakespeare has also influenced a number of English poets, especially Romantic poets who were obsessed with self-consciousness, a modern theme Shakespeare anticipated in plays such as Hamlet. Shakespeare’s writings were so influential to English poetry of the 1800s that critic George Steiner has called all English poetic dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson «feeble variations on Shakespearean themes.»^[45]

Shakespeare united the three main steams of literature: verse, poetry, and drama. To the versification of the language, he imparted his eloquence and variety giving highest expressions with elasticity of language. The second, the sonnets and poetry, was bound in structure. He imparted economy and intensity to the language. In the third and the most important area, the drama, he saved the language from vagueness and vastness and infused actuality and vividness. Shakespeare’s work in prose, poetry, and drama marked the beginning of modernization of English literature by introduction of words and expressions, style and form to the language.

Shakespeare’s use of blank verse is among the most important of his influences on the way the English language was written. He used the blank verse throughout in his career, experimenting and perfecting it. The free speech rhythm gave Shakespeare more freedom for experimentation. The striking choice of words in common place blank verse, says Boris Ford, influenced «the run of the verse itself, expanding into images which eventually seem to bear significant repetition, and to form, with the presentation of character and action correspondingly developed, a more subtle and suggestive unity».^[42] Expressing emotions and situations in form of a verse gave a natural flow to language with an added sense of flexibility and spontaneity.

Scholars have also identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare’s works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites.^[46][47] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.^[48]

On the English language

One of Shakespeare’s greatest contributions is the introduction of vocabulary and phrases which enriched the English language, making it more colorful and expressive. Many original Shakespearean words and phrases have since become embedded in English, particularly through projects such as Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary which quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer.^[49]

Shakespeare lived during an era when the English language was loose, spontaneous, and relatively unregulated. In Elizabethan England one could «happy» your friend, «malice» or «foot» your enemy, or «fall» an ax on his head. And no one was a more exuberant innovator than Shakespeare, who could «uncle me no uncle» and «out-Herod Herod.»^[50] Lack of grammatical rules offered the genius of Shakespeare virtually unrestricted license to coin new terms, and the newly constructed London theaters became «the mint where new words were coined daily,» according to Globe Theater director of education Patrick Spottiswoode.^[7] The theater, agrees Boris Ford, was «a constant two way exchange between learned and the popular, together producing the unique combination of racy tang and the majestic stateliness that informs the language of Shakespeare».^[42] It was a two way process in which literary language gained ascendancy in the process toward standardization and descriptive popular speech enriched the literary language.

Journalist Bernard Levin summed up the lasting impact of Shakespeare on the English language with his memorable compilation of Shakespearean coinages in The Story of English:^[51]

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare «It’s Greek to me,» you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if the truth were known (for surly you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinkin idiot, then—by Jove! O Lord! Tut, tut! for goodness’ sake! what the dickens! but me no buts—it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

Reputation

Shakespeare’s reputation has grown considerably through the years. During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642–1660, the new Restoration theater companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. As with other older playwrights, Shakespeare’s plays were mercilessly adapted by later dramatists for the Restoration stage with little of the reverence that would later develop.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright and, to a lesser extent, poet. Initially this reputation focused on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theater. By the early nineteenth century, though, Shakespeare began hitting peaks of fame and popularity. During this time, theatrical productions of Shakespeare provided spectacle and melodrama for the masses and were extremely popular. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge then raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or ‘bardolatry’, in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. In the middle to late nineteenth century, Shakespeare also became an emblem of English pride and a «rallying-sign,» as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British Empire.

Shakespeare’s continued supremacy, wrote critic Harold Bloom in 1999, is an empirical certainty: the Stratford playwright «has been universally judged to be a more adequate representer of the universe of fact than anyone else, before him or since. This judgment has been dominant at least since the mid-eighteenth century; it has been staled by repetition, yet it remains merely true. … He extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower Freud, is our psychologist.»^[52]

This reverence has of course provoked a negative reaction. In the twenty-first century most inhabitants of the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, and there is a common association of his work with boredom and incomprehension. At the same time, Shakespeare’s plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright and are frequently adapted into film.

List of works

Comedies All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Cymbeline* Love’s Labour’s Lost Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night, or What You Will The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen The Winter’s Tale

Histories King John Richard II Henry IV, part 1 Henry IV, part 2 Henry V Henry VI, part 1 Henry VI, part 2 Henry VI, part 3 Richard III Henry VIII

Tragedies Romeo and Juliet Coriolanus Titus Andronicus Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth Hamlet Troilus and Cressida King Lear Othello Antony and Cleopatra

Poems Shakespeare’s Sonnets Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece The Passionate Pilgrim The Phoenix and the Turtle A Lover’s Complaint

Lost plays Love’s Labour’s Won Cardenio

Apocrypha Arden of Faversham The Birth of Merlin Locrine The London Prodigal The Puritan The Second Maiden’s Tragedy Sir John Oldcastle Thomas Lord Cromwell A Yorkshire Tragedy Edward III Sir Thomas More

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. Doubleday, 2005. ISBN 0385511396
• Asquith, Clare. Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. PublicAffairs, 2005. ISBN 1586483870
• Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. ISBN 1573221201
• Chambers, E.K. Shakespearean Gleanings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944. ASIN B001PQ755G
• Cheney, Patrick Gerard. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0521527341
• Clemen, Wolfgang H. Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. Routledge, 1987.
• de Groot, John Henry. The Shakespeares and The Old Faith, with The Introduction by Stanley L. Jaki. (original 1946) Dissertation. reprint ed. Catholic Classics. ISBN 0964115034
• Dotterer, Ronald L. Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context. Susquehanna University Press, 1989.
• Eliot, T.S. Elizabethan Essays. Haskell House, 1969. 978-0838305423
• Ford, Boris. The Age of Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books, 1982. ISBN 978-0140222654
• Greenblatt. Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico, 2005. ISBN 0712600981
• Huxley, Aldous, «Shakespeare and Religion,» reprinted in Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience. The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003. ISBN 978-0824522520
• Kermode, Frank. The Age of Shakespeare. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004. ISBN 029784881X
• Lambourne, Lionel. Victorian Painting. London: Phaidon, 1999. ISBN 0714837768
• Levin, Harry, «General Introduction,» The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. ISBN 0395044022
• McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Viking, 1986. ISBN 0670804673
• Olsen, Eric. «The Elizabethan Achievement,» The World & I (December 2003).
• Porter, Roy, and Teich Mikuláš. Romanticism in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 0521339138
• Ribner, Irving. The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare. London; New York: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 0415353149
• Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0198186185
• Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. ISBN 0571214800
• Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare & Co. New York: Pantheon, 2006. ISBN 0375424946

External links

All links retrieved October 10, 2020.

• Open Source Shakespeare—complete works and a full concordance
• British Library; Original 93 copies in quarto
• The Complete Literary Works of William Shakespeare
• Works by William Shakespeare. Project Gutenberg
• Upenn.edu online books page for Shakespeare
• Touchstone — UK Shakespeare collections
• Full text of plays erroneously attributed to Shakespeare
• Essay on Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens
• The Illustrated Shakespeare
• Shakespeare Online
• Jennifer Vernon, Shakespeare’s Coined Words Now Common Currency National Geographic News, 2004.
• Poetry Archive: 430 poems of William Shakespeare