William Jenkins Worth 1794-1849, American army officer, b. Hudson, N.Y. He served with distinction on the Niagara frontier in the War of 1812 and later became commandant of cadets and instructor of infantry tactics at West Point (1820-28), even though he was not a West Point graduate. Promoted to colonel in 1838, he was brevetted brigadier general for his service against the Seminole . In the Mexican War , Worth first fought under Gen. Zachary Taylor in the northern campaign that ended with the capture of Monterrey. Later under Gen. Winfield Scott he further distinguished himself in the victorious advance from Veracruz to Mexico City. He was the first to enter Mexico City, receiving the surrender of the capital. In 1848 he was given command of the Dept. of Texas, but his career was cut short by cholera. Fort Worth, Tex., was named for him.

Bibliography: See biography by E. S. Wallace (1953).

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564. His birth is traditionally celebrated on 23 April, also known to have been the date of his death. He was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glover and dealer in other commodities who played a prominent part in local affairs. John had married c.1557 Mary Arden, who came from a family of higher social standing. It is probable that William was educated at the local grammar school. Records indicate that in 1582 he married Anne Hathaway of Shottery, eight years his senior. A daughter, Susanna, was baptized on 26 May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585. According to Aubrey, ‘he had been in his younger yeares as Schoolmaster in the Countrey.’

Nothing is known of his beginnings as a writer, nor when or in what capacity he entered the theatre. The first printed allusion to him is from 1592, in the pamphlet Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte; its mention of ‘an upstart Crow’ who ‘supposes he is well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’ and who ‘is in his owne conceit the onely Shakes-cene in a countrey’ suggests rivalry, and parody of a line from 3 Henry VI shows that Shakespeare was established on the London literary scene. He was a leading member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men soon after their re-foundation in 1594. With them he worked and grew prosperous for the rest of his career as they developed into London's leading company, occupying the Globe Theatre from 1599, becoming the King's Men on James I's accession in 1603, and taking over the Blackfriars as a winter house in 1608.

London became Shakespeare's professional base, but his family remained in Stratford. In August 1596 William's son Hamnet died. In October Shakespeare was lodging in Bishops-gate, London; in May 1597 he bought a substantial Stratford house, New Place, and in 1604 he lodged in London with a family called Mountjoy.

Evidence suggests that by 1608 Shakespeare was withdrawing to New Place, but his name continues to appear in London records; in March 1613 he bought a gatehouse close to the Blackfriars theatre. He died, according to the inscription on his monument, on 23 April 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity, Stratford.

Shakespeare's only writings for the press (apart from the disputed ‘Funeral Elegy’ of 1613) are the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and the short poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ (1601), published in Robert Chester's Loves Martyr. His sonnets (1609) date probably from the mid-1590s; the volume includes the poem ‘A Lover's Complaint’.

Shakespeare's plays were published by being performed. Scripts of only half of them appeared in print in his lifetime, some in short, corrupt texts, often known as ‘bad quartos’. Dates and order of composition are often difficult to establish. The list that follows gives dates of first printing of all the plays other than those that first appeared in the 1623 folio.

Probably Shakespeare began to write for the stage in the late 1580s. The ambitious trilogy known as Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and its sequel Richard III, are among his early works. Parts Two and Three were printed in variant texts as The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York (1595). Henry VI Part 1 may have been written after these. A variant quarto of Richard III appeared in 1597. Shakespeare's first Roman tragedy is Titus Andronicus, printed 1594, and his earliest comedies are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew (a derivative play, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed 1594), The Comedy of Errors (acted 1594), and Love's Labour's Lost (printed 1598). All these plays are thought to have been written by 1595.

King John is particularly difficult to date, but it must be from some time between 1591 and 1598. Richard II, printed 1597, is usually dated 1595. For some years after this, Shakespeare concentrated on comedy, in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice (both printed 1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (printed in a variant text 1602), Much Ado About Nothing (printed 1600), As You Like It (mentioned in 1600), and Twelfth Night, probably written in 1600, or soon afterwards. Romeo and Juliet (ascribed to the mid-1590s) is a tragedy with strongly comic elements, and the tetralogy begun by Richard II is completed by three comical histories: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (Part 1 printed 1598, Part 2 1600), and Henry V (printed in a shortened, possibly corrupt, text, in 1600), almost certainly written 1599.

Late in the century Shakespeare turned again to tragedy. Julius Caesar was performed in 1599. Hamlet was entered in the register of the Stationers' Company in July 1602. A play that defies easy classification is Troilus and Cressida, probably written 1602, printed 1609. The comedy All's Well that Ends Well and the tragi-comedy Measure for Measure are probably of this period. Othello, performed 1604, was printed in 1622. King Lear probably dates, in its first version, from 1605. Timon of Athens, printed in the Folio from uncompleted papers, was probably written in collaboration with T. Middleton. Macbeth, probably adapted by Middleton, is generally dated 1606, Antony and Cleopatra 1606–7, and Coriolanus 1607–9.

Towards the end of his career Shakespeare turned to romantic tragi-comedy. Pericles was printed in a debased text 1609; it is generally believed to be mostly by Shakespeare but it was not included in the 1623 Folio. Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest were performed in 1611.

The last three plays associated with Shakespeare appear to have been written in collaboration with J. Fletcher. They are Henry VIII, known in its own time as All Is True, performed 1613; a lost play Cardenio, acted 1613 and attributed to the two dramatists in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653; and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which appears to incorporate elements from a 1613 masque by F. Beaumont, and was first printed 1634. No Shakespeare play survives in authorial manuscript, though three pages of revisions to a manuscript play, Sir Thomas More, variously dated about 1593 or 1601, are often thought to be by Shakespeare and in his hand.

Heminges and Condell prepared the First Folio, which appeared in 1623, and which includes a dedicatory epistle to William and Philip Herbert, earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, and the substantial poem by Jonson in which he declares that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age, but for all time’. Its title-page engraving, by Droeshout, is, along with the half-length figure bust by Gheerart Janssen erected in Holy Trinity, Stratford, by 1623, the only image of Shakespeare with strong claims to authenticity. (See folios and quartos, Shakespearian.)

Over 200 years after Shakespeare died, doubts were raised about the authenticity of his works (see Baconian theory). They are best answered by the facts that the monument to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon compares him with Socrates and Virgil, and that Jonson's verses in the Folio identify the author of that volume as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’.

The first editor to try to bring into order the documents committed to print between 1593 and 1623, reconcile their discrepancies, and correct their errors, was the dramatist Rowe, in 1709. His 18th-cent. successors include Pope (1723–5), Theobald (1733), Dr Johnson (1765), Capell (1767–8), and Malone (1790; third variorum 1821 by Boswell, out of Malone's edition). The most important 19th-cent. edition is the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–6, rev. 1891–3), on which the Globe text (1864) was based. The American New Variorum edition, still in progress, began to appear in 1871. Early in the 20th cent. advances in textual studies transformed attitudes to the text. Subsequent editions include the Arden Shakespeare (1899–1924), Quiller-Couch's and J. Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1921–66), G. L. Kittredge's (1936), Peter Alexander's (1951), the New Arden (1951–81), and the Riverside (1974). The first volumes in the Oxford English Texts edition appeared in 1982, and William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, was published in 1986.

Great critics who have written on Shakespeare include Dryden, Samuel Johnson, S. T. Coleridge, Hazlitt, A. C. Bradley, and (less reverently) G. B. Shaw. The standard biographical studies are E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols, 1930) and S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975).

SHAKESPEARE, William [1564–1616]. English poet and playwright, the foremost figure in ENGLISH LITERATURE and a primary influence on the development of especially the literary language. Knowledge of his life comes chiefly from documents unrelated to his career: records of his property transactions, his taxes, his occasional involvement in lawsuits. Other ‘knowledge’ derives from anecdotes, many set down long after his death, and biographical inferences from his writing. No record of his education survives. The tradition, first set down in the early 18c, that says he attended the Stratford ‘free school’ appears to be borne out by the knowledge of LATIN language and literature evident in his plays and poems. The same tradition says that his father's declining fortunes forced Shakespeare to quit school before he finished. He received special permission to marry Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was 18 and she was 26. Their daughter Susanna was born in May 1583; twins Hamnet and Judith were born in 1585.

Career

In 1592, the playwright Robert Greene alluded to another writer who ‘with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hide … is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey’. The allusion to 3 Henry VI (1. 4. 137) and the PUN on his name make it clear that Shakespeare was already in 1592 a prominent, if controversial, figure on the London theatrical scene. Within a few years, his pre-eminence was beyond controversy: in 1598, Francis Meres gave Shakespeare pride of place among the English dramatists he listed in Palladis Tamia, praising the ‘sugred’ sonnets and naming twelve plays composed in ‘Shakespeares fine filed phrase’.

The plague forced the closing of London theatres from 1592 to 1594, years in which Shakespeare's non-dramatic Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece appeared. When the theatres reopened, Shakespeare wrote new plays, acted in some of Ben Jonson's, and, according to some traditions, in several of his own. He also became a partowner of his theatrical troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's company. In the five years or so following, according to the conventional chronology, Shakespeare wrote eleven plays, the early sonnets, and The Lover's Complaint. His increasing success enabled him to buy Stratford's second-largest house in 1597, when he was 33, and he continued to buy property in the town and in London as well until at least 1613.

Shakespeare's company opened the Globe theatre in 1599. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and her successor James I pronounced Shakespeare's troupe his servants under the name the King's Men. The company often performed at court and, in 1608, took over the Blackfriars, a private indoor theatre. Shakespeare had written fewer plays since 1601, and seems to have stopped acting after 1607, perhaps because he was spending more time in Stratford. In 1613, he wrote his last play, probably in collaboration with Fletcher; in the same year, the Globe theatre burned down.

Works

Shakespeare's works do not survive in manuscript, and the copies that printers used were apparently not always his: some came from actors' reconstructions, some from the theatre company's prompt-books. Both scribes and printing-house compositors made occasional further alterations in the course of transmitting Shakespeare's text, including linguistic details such as punctuation, spelling, and grammatical inflections. Many of his works appeared in small separate editions known as ‘quartos’ during his lifetime; dates on the title page, or in the Stationers' Register, along with lists like Meres's, outline the chronology of Shakespeare's career. Some at least of the sonnets were already in circulation when Meres mentioned them over a decade before their 1609 publication, and some of the plays may likewise have been written and presented earlier than their publication. Several of the plays did not appear until the posthumous collected Folio edition of 1623, so the following chronology, though it reflects the preponderance of modern opinion, remains uncertain:

(1) Early works written before Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's company in 1594: 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece.(2) Works written between 1594 and the opening of the Globe in 1599: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, the early sonnets, and The Lover's Complaint.(3) Works written between 1599 and the acquisition of Blackfriars in 1608: As You like It, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That End's Well, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, the later sonnets, and The Phoenix and the Turtle.(4) The last plays, written between 1608 and the burning of the Globe in 1613: Pericles, Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII.

Language

The phrase ‘Shakespeare's language’ has come to mean both the state of English around 1600 and Shakespeare's use of it. Both are topics in the following discussion of orthography, pronunciation and rhyme, syntactic structure, vocabulary and word-formation, linguistic variety, rhetoric, and pragmatics. In it, all the citations are from Richard II in the Quarto first edition (Q) of 1597, and comparisons with the Folio (F) of 1623. This concentration of examples from one play makes it easier to follow the passages cited, and gives an idea of the frequency of the features. Though no play embodies the full range of Shakespeare's linguistic ideas and practices, Richard II is notably concerned with the powers, limits, and dangers of language.

Orthography

The original editions of Shakespeare's works look very different from present-day orthography. They used no apostrophe for possessives; the occasional capitals on common nouns were more frequent in F than Q (for example, violl Q, Vyall F); and the letters v and u varied according to position rather than sound: v stood for both the v- and u-sounds when initial, and u stood for both when medial. Similarly, i stood for both i and j initially (Iohn). Other non-substantive variants included silent final -e (robbes 1. 3. 173 Q, robs F); this -e remains in conservative spellings like the surname Clarke.

Pronunciation and rhyme

The printed page best preserves features of vocabulary and structure; it preserves features of sound worst. Early editions of Shakespeare spelled the vowel in band and bond (5. 2. 65, 67) indifferently, and made no distinction between the consonants in words like Murders (1. 2. 21) and Murthers (3. 2. 40). Presumably, the spellings represented indistinguishable pronounciations. Q has my owne (1. 1. 133) but thine owne (1. 2. 35); where Q has my honour (1. 1. 191) and thy oth (1. 3. 14), F has mine honour and thine oth. The changes show that the matter of this historical -n before a vowel received editorial attention, but variations within Q indicate that the attention was not uniform. However, sit (1: 2. 47) in F differs from set in Q because the two words were commonly confused in the late 16c.

A rhyme such as John of Gaunt's when/againe (1. 1. 162–3) contrasts with the Duchess of York's againe/twaine (5. 3. 131–2), perhaps opportunistically making use of two current pronunciations, both still heard today. But the rhymes teare (verb)/feare (1. 1. 192–3) and beare/heere (5. 5. 117–18) reflect consistent pronunciation in both cases, as does pierce/rehearse (5. 3. 125–6) in Q, where F has the spelling pearce (from Old French percer) and the -ea- in rehearse looks back to a time when it was pronounced like the -ea- in bear. So too happie hauens (1. 3. 276) is a pun depending on a pronunciation of heavens implied by the -ea- spelling as in bear. Much of the variation in spelling concerns the long vowels, which the Great Vowel Shift had left uncertain: for yeeres (1. 3. 159) in Q, F has yeares; but both have yeeres in line 171.

Syntactic structure

The structure of Shakespeare's EARLY MODERN ENGLISH is unlike present-day English. It seems familiar, however, because it is often studied, so its older features are overlooked, at least until they begin to cause difficulty. These features are, notably: word order; the polarity of adjectives and verbs; transitivity; subject–verb concord; negation and the use of do; relative pronouns and conjunctions; verb inflection; personal pronouns; and strong and weak verbs.

Word order.

The sentence My natiue English now I must forgo (1. 3. 159–60) inverts typical English subject–verb–object word order from SVO to OSV, but is not ambiguous, because I is clearly the subject. However, there is structural ambiguity in The last leaue of thee takes my weeping eie (1. 2. 74): is leaue or eie the subject of takes? Shakespeare sometimes used the VS(O) order with the subjunctive verb for conditional clauses: Holde out my horse (2. 1. 300) means If my horse holds out, and Put we our quarrell (1. 2. 6) is a hortative order equivalent to Let us put our quarrel to the will of heauen…

Polarity.

It bootes thee not to be compassionate (1. 3. 174) seems odd in part because compassionate now means showing compassion; for Shakespeare, it meant seeking compassion, and so the sentence translates as ‘It won't help you to seek pity’. Similar instances of change in syntactic polarity are pittiful = showing pity (5. 2. 103), fall = let fall (3. 4. 104), remember (1. 3. 269) = remind, and learne (4. 1. 120) = teach.

Transitivity.

A related feature is change in transitivity: inhabit (4. 1. 143) and frequent (5. 3. 6) are intransitive, while Staies for ‘awaits’ (1. 3. 3) and part for ‘part from’ (3. 1. 3) are transitive. The construction Me thinkes is impersonal, but Shakespeare could also write I bethinke me and I had thought.

Concord.

His management of subject–verb agreement sometimes varied because the subject might be construed as either singular or plural: this newes, these newes (3. 4. 82, 100). Hence, Reproch and dissolution hangeth ouer him (2. 1. 258) is a singular verb following a double subject conceived of as a single entity.

Negation and the use of ‘do’.

Negatives like I slewe him not (1. 1. 133) avoid do, while we do not vnderstand (5. 3. 122) employs it; both are common in Shakespeare. The same is true of negative imperatives: Call it not patience (1. 2. 29), but doe not so quickly go (1. 2. 64). Multiple negations that retain negative sense are also common, though the Folio ‘corrects’ some of these: Nor neuer looke vpon each others face, / Nor neuer write, regreete, nor reconcile (1. 3. 185–6) Q becomes Nor euer looke … Nor euer write … or reconcile in F. Like negatives, questions can be formed with or without do: Why dost thou say (3. 4. 77), what saist thou (1. 1. 110).

Do also has an abundance of other uses: manage (How shal we do for money: 2. 2. 104); verb substitute (let vs share thy thoughts as thou dost ours: 2. 1. 273); idiomatically with right or wrong (to do him right: 2. 3. 137); idiomatically with have (I haue to do with death: 1. 3. 65); finish (my life is done: 1. 1. 183); with emphatic stress (Yes … It doth containe a King: 3. 3. 24–5).

Relative pronouns.

Shakespeare will omit a relative pronoun for the subject of the clause where modern English omits it only for the object: neare the hate of those loue not the King (2. 2. 127), or use intricate subordination: Hath causd his death, the which if wrongfully, / Let heauen reuenge (1. 2. 39–40). He was no stickler for the use of that and which in restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, respectively: the hollow crowne / That roundes but this flesh which wals about (3. 2. 160–1, 167). He also used a variety of subordinating conjunctions: for (1. 1. 132) meaning ‘as for’, for that meaning ‘because’ (1. 1. 129) and ‘in order that’ (1. 3. 125), for-because (5. 5. 3) and for why (5. 1. 46), both meaning ‘because’.

The endings -s and -th.

The third-person singular indicative ending in Shakespeare's verbs could be either -s, as now, or the older -th. No meaning attached to the choice, so one line might include both: Greefe boundeth where it falls (1. 2. 58) F. But the forms of do and have were almost invariably doth and hath. The subjunctive mood, marked in the third-person singular present by the absence of a -s or -th ending, is often used in place of an auxiliary like may or let, and sometimes in combination with them: O set my husbands wronges on Herefords speare, / That it may enter butcher Mowbraies breast: / Or if misfortune misse the first carier, / Be Mowbraies sinnes so heauy in his bosome / That they may breake his foming coursers backe (1. 2. 47–51).

Pronouns.

Shakespeare's English included the second-person pronouns you or ye and thou. Historically, they were plural and singular respectively, but you had come to be used as a formal or honorific alternative for the singular. In Richard II, some usages conform to this pattern: the Queen calls the gardener thou in 3. 4 and he calls her you in her presence; after she leaves he changes to a compassionately familiar thou. Likewise, the King regularly calls the disputants, his subjects, thou in the singular and you in the plural. Generally, they call him the respectful you, as Mowbray does at the beginning of his ‘protest’ speech (1. 3. 154–73); but by the end of the speech he has switched to thou. The change could arise from Mowbray's growing anguish, but other alternations between the two forms occur: in 1. 2, John of Gaunt usually calls the Duchess of Gloucester you (but thee: 1. 2. 57), while she consistently calls him thou; in 5. 5, the Groom calls the King thou, but the Keeper uses you.

Shakespeare's English lacked the possessive its; he sometimes used the uninflected it, sometimes the historical neuter possessive his: what a Face I haue, / Since it is Bankrupt of his Maiestie (4. 1. 266–7) F.

Strong and weak verbs.

Among Shakespeare's weak verbs, the spelling often shows that the suffix -ed is not syllabic: learnt 1. 3. 159, casde 1. 3. 163. The suffix after t or d is, however, regularly syllabic: blotted. Both pronunciations accord with modern practice; unlike it, however, are words like fostered, which had three syllables. His strong verbs occasionally take unfamiliar forms in the past: for example, spake (5. 2. 12). Some forms of strong past participles are identical with the simple past: broke (5. 5. 43–8) F (broken 2. 2. 59 Q is extra-metrical, and F has broke), shooke (4. 1. 163) F, spoke (1. 1. 77) Q (spoken F). Others are archaic: holp (5. 5. 62), eate (5. 5. 85), writ (4. 1. 275) F.

Vocabulary and word-formation

Shakespeare's vocabulary is sometimes estimated at c.20,000 words. For it, he drew on Renaissance technical terms, derivations, compounds, archaisms, polysemy, etymological meanings, and idioms. Richard II abounds in technical terms, often words with specialized meanings distinct from their everyday use: in That knowes no touch to tune the harmonie (1. 3. 165) touch means ‘fingering’ and to tune means ‘to play’. Suitably to the subject of the play, many technical terms are from the law or chivalry.

Conversion.

Shakespeare is noted for verbal conversion such as grace me no grace, nor vnckle me no vnckle (2. 3. 86). Other examples include the verbs converted from nouns refuge (5. 5. 26), twaine (5. 3. 132), priuiledge (1. 1. 120), and dog them at the heeles (5. 3. 137).

Derivation.

Shakespeare was also fecund with derviations, words created by the addition of a suffix, often in a new part of speech: the verb ‘partialize’ (1. 1. 120), from the adjective ‘partial’, a Shakespeare original as a transitive verb. In addition, every Shakespeare play makes concentrated use of some lexical field. Whereas in Coriolanus it is a lexical set centring on ‘breath’, ‘voice’, and ‘vote’, in Richard II it is a morphological set centring on privatives beginning with un-, like vnfurnisht wals, / Vnpeopled offices, vntrodden stones (1. 2. 68–9). Some of these appear nowhere else in Shakespeare, like vndeafe, vnhappied, and vnkingd.

Compounding.

Lines like My oile-dried lampe, and time bewasted light (1. 3. 221) show Shakespeare's fondness for compounds: here, compounds formed on past participles. They are most often nouns, like beggarfeare (1. 1. 189), or adjectives, like the cluster Egle-winged pride / Of skie-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, / With riuall-hating enuy (1. 3. 129–31).

Rhetoric

Shakespeare was familiar with paradox and other figures of traditional rhetoric, for example chiasmus in Banisht this fraile sepulchre of our flesh, / As now our flesh is banisht (1. 3. 196–7); the last taste of sweetes is sweetest last (2. 1. 13); Deposing thee before thou wert possest, / Which art possest now to depose thy self (2. 1. 107–8). The last example also contains paronomasia; here, the pun is on possessed meaning both having come into possession and unreasonably determined. Richard comments on Gaunt's onomastic word-play, Can sicke men play so nicely with their names? (2. 1. 84), but Gaunt has already juggled inspire and expire (2. 1. 31–2), and urged his son to Call it a trauaile that thou takst for pleasure (1. 3. 262), playing on travel and travail. Even in prison, Richard replies to the salutation Haile roiall Prince with Thankes noble peare: / The cheapest of vs is ten grotes too deare (5. 5. 67–8), the royal being a coin worth ten groats more than a noble.

See AUREATE DICTION, DIALOGUE, KRIO, LYLY, MULCASTER, PROSE, QUOTATION, RHETORICAL QUESTION.