Shakespeare, William

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616). Dramatist and poet. Baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564, William was the son of John Shakespeare, a glovemaker and prominent Stratford citizen who became mayor and justice of the peace during William's childhood. He was educated at the Stratford grammar school, and married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a successful local farmer, eight years his senior (and already pregnant at the wedding) in 1582. Myths abound about the ‘lost years’, but there is negligible evidence of his activities between leaving school and beginning work as an actor and playwright in London in the late 1580s. He started as an actor, continued as a playwright, and developed as an administrator and entrepreneur: by the time of his death, on 23 April 1616, he had established his status as a major shareholder in the King's Men, the principal acting company of his time, and was a successful and wealthy man.

Shakespeare wrote approximately 42 plays, in a range of genres and styles, which occupy the principal place in the canon of English literature and which are the subject of a considerable theatrical and critical industry (as well as of substantial tourist revenue). Quotations from Shakespeare remain an often unwitting part of everyday speech; productions of his plays remain hugely popular, both in theatres and in the cinema; his style and verse techniques have come to define ‘literariness’; and his history plays in particular are, for many people, the only source of information readily available for a considerable period of medieval history.

His earliest plays are mostly comedies and histories—The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew are probably the very earliest—for a variety of companies and theatres. He wrote the first play (The First Part of the Contention, generally better known as 2 Henry VI) in the four-play cycle known as the ‘first tetralogy’ in 1591, completing it with the best known of his earlier histories, Richard III, the following year. These plays emerged from a rapidly changing culture fascinated by historiography and particularly by the function of history in the analysis of current affairs. Shakespeare drew on contemporary histories of England, notably Holinshed's Chronicles, for accounts of the events he dramatized, but he rarely left his source (already the product of careful selection, omission, and collaboration) unaltered. His portrayals of kings—most notably of Richard III—have bequeathed a fixed, but often wholly inaccurate, sense of their historical personalities.

The first tetralogy preceded Shakespeare's attachment to the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594; it was for that company, and for their first playhouse, the Theatre, that he wrote the ‘second tetralogy’, his most popular group of history plays—Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V—which turned back to the period immediately prior to that delineated in the earlier histories to plot the rise to power of Henry Bolingbroke and the accession to the throne of his son, Henry V. Both tetralogies attest to the lasting impact on English society of the Wars of the Roses (which had occupied much of the previous century) and to the need of the Tudor dynasty, only relatively recently established, to mythologize and legitimize its claim to power. The historiographical focus of the plays shifts: where the earlier histories had adopted a wave-like, cyclical structure and a providentialist outlook— principal characters emerging and fading in succession, attention devoted to overarching issues of causation— the later histories focus on the character of the young Henry V, edging away from providential history and depicting a world in which ‘miracles are ceas'd; | And therefore we must needs admit the means | How things are perfected’ (Henry V, i. i. 67–9). As Phyllis Rackin notes, Shakespeare's Prince Hal ‘anticipates the Tudors in using the resources of theatrical role-playing to produce the perfect image of royal authority that he could not inherit from the ambiguous genealogy that left him the throne’.

The move to the new Globe theatre in 1598–9 marked a new phase in Shakespeare's writing career and the demise of the Shakespearian history play ‘proper’. The common assumption is that, as it became clearer that civil war was not likely to follow the death of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, the plays' function as lightning rods for succession anxiety gradually diminished. For the Globe, Shakespeare turned to other genres, writing his mature comedies (As You Like It and Twelfth Night) and his major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth), as well as his later tragicomedies or romances (Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest)—these latter plays affected also by the company's acquisition of an additional playhouse, the smaller, indoor Blackfriars theatre—and putting his Holinshed aside.

But his Jacobean plays none the less exhibit a strong consciousness of their cultural and historiographical function. The Lord Chamberlain's Men had become the King's Men at James I's accession, and played regularly at court. King Lear and Macbeth, for example, by depicting dark alternatives, acknowledge the role of James I in reunifying Britain, and both Lear and Cymbeline delve far back into mythical British history in search of complex political resonances. Shakespeare's penultimate (and collaborative) play, Henry VIII, or All is True—echoing another underestimated Shakespearian history, the energetically ambivalent King John—offers a complex, and not wholly complimentary, picture of the status of history and of ‘truth’ in the mid-Jacobean period, representing a vacillating, casually adulterous Henry, a cruel, machiavellian Wolsey, and a haughty yet sympathetic Catherine of Aragon, and culminating in the birth and christening of the baby Elizabeth and a prophecy from Cranmer that implies a certain frustration with the direction of James's policies, foreign and ecclesiastical.

Shakespeare wrote at a unique period in the history of the British theatre—for the range of his audiences, for the cultural resonance of theatrical institutions—and his plays cannot fairly be dismissed as ‘mere’ fiction or entertainment. It is a commonplace of current literary criticism that Shakespearian drama both responded to and shaped public perspectives on history and politics at a time of considerable, and hugely productive, cultural anxiety, ‘shaping fantasies’ for a developing nation state.

Gordon Macmullan

Bibliography

Greenblatt, S. J. , Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988);
Rackin, P. , Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca, NY, 1990);
Shakespeare, William , The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986), pp. xiii–xl;
Shakespeare Survey, 38 (Cambridge, 1985), a review of criticism of Shakespeare's history plays.