William Shakespeare

Biography

Most historians agree that William Shakespeare—actor, playwright and poet—was a single person, of whose life and work there is considerable historical evidence.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker, and of Mary Arden. His 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. It provides a convenient symmetry: he died on that day in 1616, and, perhaps appropriately for a playwright considered to be England's greatest, it is also the Feast Day of Saint George, patron saint of England.

Shakespeare's father, prosperous at the time of William's birth, was prosecuted for participating in the black market in wool, and later lost his position as an alderman. Some evidence exists that both sides of the family had Roman Catholic sympathies.

As the son of a prominent town official, William Shakespeare probably attended the Stratford grammar school, which provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. There is no evidence that his formal education extended beyond this.

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Two neighbors of Anne, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson, posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony: Anne was three months pregnant. After his marriage, William Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London literary scene.

On May 26, 1583 Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. A son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptized soon after on February 2, 1585.

By 1592 Shakespeare had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (The italicised line parodies the phrase, "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare used in Henry VI, part 3.)

In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on August 11, 1596. Because of the similarities of their names, some suspect that his death inspired Shakespeare's The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared top of a list of actors in Every man in his Humour written by Ben Jonson.

Shakespeare became an actor, writer and finally part-owner of an acting company known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men — the company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as The King's Men.

In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that in 1604, Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker [a maker of ornamental headdresses] in the northwest quarter of London. Mountjoy's apprentice Stephen Belott wanted to marry Mountjoy's daughter. Shakespeare was enlisted as a go-between, to help negotiate the details of the dowry. On Shakespeare's assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Belott sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry. Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the circumstances.
Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

In 1609 his sonnets were published, love poems variously addressed: most to a youth (or 'fair lord'); the remainder to a 'dark lady'. Some regard the former set as being homoerotic, but that characterization remains in debate.

Shakespeare retired in about 1611. His retirement was not entirely without controversy. He was drawn into a legal quarrel regarding the enclosure of common lands. (Enclosure enabled land to be converted to pasture for sheep, but removed it as a resource for the poor.) Shakespeare had a financial interest in the land, and to the chagrin of some, he took a neutral position, making sure only that his own income from the land was protected.

In the last few weeks of Shakespeare's life, the man who was to marry his younger daughter Judith -- a tavern-keeper named Thomas Quiney -- was charged in the local church court with "fornication." A woman named Margaret Wheeler had given birth to a child and claimed it was Quiney's; she and the child both died soon after. Quiney was disgraced, and Shakespeare revised his will to ensure that Judith's interest in his estate was protected from possible malfeasance on Quiney's part.

Shakespeare died in 1616, on April 23. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John Hall, and later became the subject of a court case.

William Shakespeare is buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. His grave carries his well-known epitaph:

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.

Reputation

Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation, Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

Shakespeare's reputation has grown higher and higher since his own time, as illustrated in a timeline of Shakespeare criticism from the 17th to 20th century.

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. It is more difficult to assess his contemporary reputation as a playwright: plays were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments rather than serious literature. The fact that his plays were collected in an expensively produced folio in 1623 (the only precedent being Ben Jonson's Workes of 1616) and the fact that that folio went into another edition within nine years, indicate that he was held in unusually high regard for a playwright. wrote about "the incomparable Shakespeare" in 1668.

After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642—1660, the new Restoration theatre 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. Old plays were often adapted for the Restoration stage, and where Shakespeare is concerned, this undertaking has seemed shockingly respectless to posterity. A notorious example is Nahum Tate's happy-ending King Lear of 1681, which held the stage until 1838. In the early 18th century, Shakespeare took over the lead on the English stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it again.

In literary criticism, by contrast, Shakespeare held a unique position from the start. The unbending French neo-classical "rules and the three unities of time, place, and action were never strictly followed in England, and practically all critics gave the more "correct" Ben Jonson second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare" (John Dryden, 1668), the follower of nature, the untaught genius, the great realist of human character. The long-lived myth that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by accolades from Restoration and 18th-century writers such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. The 18th century is also largely responsible for setting the text of Shakespeare's plays. Nicholas Rowe created the first truly scholarly text for the plays in 1709, and Edmund Malone's Variorum Edition (published posthumously in 1821) is still the basis of modern editions of the plays.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry, in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius.

Identity and authorship

Main article: Shakespearean authorship

As noted above, there is considerable historical evidence of the existence of a William Shakespeare who lived in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The vast majority of academics identify this Shakespeare as the Shakespeare, contrary to the theories of some who believe that there were two different Shakespeares, one an actor, the other a playwright; or that some other writer used the name "Shakespeare" as a pseudonym; or that the alternative spellings of Shakespeare's surname were actually legitimate spellings of two different names.

In part, this debate stems from the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of this period; even the painting that accompanies this article (and that appears above the name "William Shakespeare" in the National Portrait Gallery, London) may not depict Shakespeare at all. Various fringe scholars have suggested writers such as Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I as alternative authors or co-authors for some or all of "Shakespeare's" work. The proponents of such claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them.

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

Word Coinage

Shakespeare was the first to use many of the words (ode, addiction, alligator) and phrases ("my mind's eye," "one fell swoop") that have become household words in our time.

See: Partial List of Shakespeare's Coinages National Geographic Article About Shakespeare's Coinages

Works

Canonical works

The plays and their categories

• Tragedies
• * Romeo and Juliet
• * Macbeth
• * King Lear
• * Hamlet
• * Othello
• * Titus Andronicus
• * Julius Caesar
• * Antony and Cleopatra
• * Coriolanus
• * Troilus and Cressida
• * Timon of Athens
• Comedies
• * The Comedy of Errors
• * All's Well That Ends Well
• * As You Like It
• * A Midsummer Night's Dream
• * Much Ado About Nothing
• * Measure for Measure
• * The Tempest
• * Taming of the Shrew
• * Twelfth Night or What You Will
• * The Merchant of Venice
• * The Merry Wives of Windsor
• * Love's Labour's Lost
• * The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• * Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• * Cymbeline
• * The Winter's Tale
• * The Two Noble Kinsmen
• Histories
• * Richard III
• * Richard II
• * Henry VI, part 1
• * Henry VI, part 2
• * Henry VI, part 3
• * Henry V
• * Henry IV, part 1
• * Henry IV, part 2
• * Henry VIII
• * King John

Dramatic collaborations

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 dependant on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

• Cardenio, a lost play; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
• Henry VI, part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
• Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and John 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 Thomas Middleton at some point after its original composition.
• Pericles Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
• Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might explain its incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.
• Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision of, George Peele.
• The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each playwright appears to have written about half of the text.
  

  Lost plays by Shakespeare

• Love's Labour's Won A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list 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 alternate title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, or All's Well That Ends Well.
• Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It re-worked a tale 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, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all we have of the lost play.
  

  Other works