William Shakespeare

The English playwright, poet, and actor William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of English writers and one of the most extraordinary creators in human history.

The most crucial fact about William Shakespeare's career is that he was a popular dramatist. Born 6 years after Queen Elizabeth I had ascended the throne, contemporary with the high period of the English Renaissance, Shakespeare had the good luck to find in the theater of London a medium just coming into its own and an audience, drawn from a wide range of social classes, eager to reward talents of the sort he possessed. His entire life was committed to the public theater, and he seems to have written nondramatic poetry only when enforced closings of the theater made writing plays impractical. It is equally remarkable that his days in the theater were almost exactly contemporary with the theater's other outstanding achievements—the work, for example, of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and John Webster.

Shakespeare was born on or just before April 23, 1564, in the small but then important Warwickshire town of Stratford. His mother, born Mary Arden, was the daughter of a landowner from a neighboring village. His father, John, son of a farmer, was a glove maker and trader in farm produce; he had achieved a position of some eminence in the prosperous market town by the time of his son's birth, holding a number of responsible positions in Stratford's government and serving as mayor in 1569. By 1576, however, John Shakespeare had begun to encounter the financial difficulties which were to plague him until his death in 1601.

Though no personal documents survive from Shakespeare's school years, his literary work shows the mark of the excellent if grueling education offered at the Stratford grammar school (some reminiscences of Stratford school days may have lent amusing touches to scenes in The Merry Wives of Windsor). Like other Elizabethan schoolboys, Shakespeare studied Latin grammar during the early years, then progressed to the study of logic, rhetoric, composition, oration, versification, and the monuments of Roman literature. The work was conducted in Latin and relied heavily on rote memorization and the master's rod. A plausible tradition holds that William had to discontinue his education when about 13 in order to help his father. At 18 he married Ann Hathaway, a Stratford girl. They had three children (Susanna, 1583-1649; Hamnet, 1585-1596; and his twin, Judith, 1585-1662) and who was to survive him by 7 years. Shakespeare remained actively involved in Stratford affairs throughout his life, even when living in London, and retired there at the end of his career.

The years between 1585 and 1592, having left no evidence as to Shakespeare's activities, have been the focus of considerable speculation; among other things, conjecture would have him a traveling actor or a country schoolmaster. The earliest surviving notice of his career in London is a jealous attack on the "upstart crow" by Robert Greene, a playwright, professional man of letters, and profligate whose career was at an end in 1592 though he was only 6 years older than Shakespeare. Greene's outcry testifies, both in its passion and in the work it implies Shakespeare had been doing for some time, that the young poet had already established himself in the capital. So does the quality of Shakespeare's first plays: it is hard to believe that even Shakespeare could have shown such mastery without several years of apprenticeship.

Early Career

Shakespeare's first extant play is probably The Comedy of Errors (1590; like most dates for the plays, this is conjectural and may be a year or two off), a brilliant and intricate farce involving two sets of identical twins and based on two already-complicated comedies by the Roman Plautus. Though less fully achieved, his next comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591), is more prophetic of Shakespeare's later comedy, for its plot depends on such devices as a faithful girl who educates her fickle lover, romantic woods, a girl dressed as a boy, sudden reformations, music, and happy marriages at the end. The last of the first comedies, Love's Labour's Lost (1593), is romantic again, dealing with the attempt of three young men to withdraw from the world and women for 3 years to study in their king's "little Academe," and their quick surrender to a group of young ladies who come to lodge nearby. If the first of the comedies is most notable for its plotting and the second for its romantic elements, the third is distinguished by its dazzling language and its gallery of comic types. Already Shakespeare had learned to fuse conventional characters with convincing representations of the human life he knew.

Though little read and performed now, Shakespeare's first plays in the popular "chronicle," or history, genre are equally ambitious and impressive. Dealing with the tumultuous events of English history between the death of Henry V in 1422 and the accession of Henry VII in 1485 (which began the period of Tudor stability maintained by Shakespeare's own queen), the three "parts" of Henry VI (1592) and Richard III (1594) are no tentative experiments in the form: rather they constitute a gigantic tetralogy, in which each part is a superb play individually and an integral part of an epic sequence. Nothing so ambitious had ever been attempted in England in a form hitherto marked by slapdash formlessness.

Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus (1593), reveals similar ambition. Though its chamber of horrors— including mutilations and ingenious murders—strikes the modern reader as belonging to a theatrical tradition no longer viable, the play is in fact a brilliant and successful attempt to outdo the efforts of Shakespeare's predecessors in the lurid tradition of the revenge play.

When the theaters were closed because of plague during much of 1593-1594, Shakespeare looked to nondramatic poetry for his support and wrote two narrative masterpieces, the seriocomic Venus and Adonis and the tragic Rape of Lucrece, for a wealthy patron, the Earl of Southampton. Both poems carry the sophisticated techniques of Elizabethan narrative verse to their highest point, drawing on the resources of Renaissance mythological and symbolic traditions.

Shakespeare's most famous poems, probably composed in this period but not published until 1609, and then not by the author, are the 154 sonnets, the supreme English examples of the form. Writing at the end of a brief, frenzied vogue for sequences of sonnets, Shakespeare found in the conventional 14-line lyric with its fixed rhyme scheme a vehicle for inexhaustible technical innovations—for Shakespeare even more than for other poets, the restrictive nature of the sonnet generates a paradoxical freedom of invention that is the life of the form—and for the expression of emotions and ideas ranging from the frivolous to the tragic. Though often suggestive of autobiographical revelation, the sonnets cannot be proved to be any the less fictions than the plays. The identity of their dedicatee, "Mr. W. H.," remains a mystery, as does the question of whether there were real-life counterparts to the famous "dark lady" and the unfaithful friend who are the subject of a number of the poems. But the chief value of these poems is intrinsic: the sonnets alone would have established Shakespeare's preeminence among English poets.

Lord Chamberlain's Men

By 1594 Shakespeare was fully engaged in his career. In that year he became principal writer for the successful Lord Chamberlain's Men—one of the two leading companies of actors; a regular actor in the company; and a "sharer," or partner, in the group of artist-managers who ran the entire operation and were in 1599 to have the Globe Theater built on the south bank of the Thames. The company performed regularly in unroofed but elaborate theaters. Required by law to be set outside the city limits, these theaters were the pride of London, among the first places shown to visiting foreigners, and seated up to 3,000 people. The actors played on a huge platform stage equipped with additional playing levels and surrounded on three sides by the audience; the absence of scenery made possible a flow of scenes comparable to that of the movies, and music, costumes, and ingenious stage machinery created successful illusions under the afternoon sun.

For this company Shakespeare produced a steady outpouring of plays. The comedies include The Taming of the Shrew (1594), fascinating in light of the first comedies since it combines with an Italian-style plot, in which all the action occurs in one day, a more characteristically English and Shakespearean plot, the taming of Kate, in which much more time passes; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), in which "rude mechanicals," artisans without imagination, become entangled with fairies and magic potions in the moonlit woods to which young lovers have fled from a tyrannical adult society; The Merchant of Venice (1596), which contributed Shylock and Portia to the English literary tradition; Much Ado about Nothing (1598), with a melodramatic main plot whose heroine is maligned and almost driven to death by a conniving villain and a comic subplot whose Beatrice and Benedick remain the archetypical sparring lovers; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599), held by tradition to have been written in response to the Queen's request that Shakespeare write another play about Falstaff (who had appeared in Henry IV), this time in love; and in 1600 the pastoral As You Like It, a mature return to the woods and conventions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, perhaps the most perfect of the comedies, a romance of identical twins separated at sea, young love, and the antics of Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch.

Shakespeare's only tragedies of the period are among his most familiar plays: Romeo and Juliet (1596), Julius Caesar (1599), and Hamlet (1601). Different from one another as they are, these three plays share some notable features: the setting of intense personal tragedy in a large world vividly populated by what seems like the whole range of humanity; a refusal, shared by most of Shakespeare's contemporaries in the theater, to separate comic situations and techniques from tragic; the constant presence of politics; and—a personal rather than a conventional phenomenon—a tragic structure in which what is best in the protagonist is what does him in when he finds himself in conflict with the world.

Continuing his interest in the chronicle, Shakespeare wrote King John (1596), despite its one strong character a relatively weak play; and the second and greater tetralogy, ranging from Richard II (1595), in which the forceful Bolingbroke, with an ambiguous justice on his side, deposes the weak but poetic king, through the two parts of Henry IV (1597), in which the wonderfully amoral, fat knight Falstaff accompanies Prince Hal, Bolingbroke's son, to Henry V (1599), in which Hal, become king, leads a newly unified England, its civil wars temporarily at an end but sadly deprived of Falstaff and the dissident lowlife who provided so much joy in the earlier plays, to triumph over France. More impressively than the first tetralogy, the second turns history into art. Spanning the poles of comedy and tragedy, alive with a magnificent variety of unforgettable characters, linked to one another as one great play while each is a complete and independent success in its own right—the four plays pose disturbing and unanswerable questions about politics, making one ponder the frequent difference between the man capable of ruling and the man worthy of doing so, the meaning of legitimacy in office, the value of order and stability as against the value of revolutionary change, and the relation of private to public life. The plays are exuberant works of art, but they are not optimistic about man as a political animal, and their unblinkered recognition of the dynamics of history has made them increasingly popular and relevant in our own tormented era.

Three plays of the end of Elizabeth's reign are often grouped as Shakespeare's "problem plays," though no definition of that term is able successfully to differentiate them as an exclusive group. All's Well That Ends Well (1602) is a romantic comedy with qualities that seem bitter to many critics; like other plays of the period, by Shakespeare and by his contemporaries, it presents sexual relations between men and women in a harsh light. Troilus and Cressida (1602), hardest of the plays to classify generically, is a brilliant, sardonic, and disillusioned piece on the Trojan War, unusually philosophical in its language and reminiscent in some ways of Hamlet. The tragicomic Measure for Measure (1604) focuses more on sexual problems than any other play in the canon; Angelo, the puritanical and repressed man of ice who succumbs to violent sexual urges the moment he is put in temporary authority over Vienna during the duke's absence, and Isabella, the victim of his lust, are two of the most interesting characters in Shakespeare, and the bawdy city in which the action occurs suggests a London on which a new mood of modern urban hopelessness is settling.

King's Men

Promptly upon his accession in 1603, King James I, more ardently attracted to theatrical art than his predecessor, bestowed his patronage upon the Lord Chamberlain's Men, so that the flag of the King's Men now flew over the Globe. During his last decade in the theater Shakespeare was to write fewer but perhaps even finer plays. Almost all the greatest tragedies belong to this period. Though they share the qualities of the earlier tragedies, taken as a group they manifest new tendencies. The heroes are dominated by passions that make their moral status increasingly ambiguous, their freedom increasingly circumscribed; similarly the society, even the cosmos, against which they strive suggests less than ever that all can ever be right in the world. As before, what destroys the hero is what is best about him, yet the best in Macbeth or Othello cannot so simply be commended as Romeo's impetuous ardor or Brutus's political idealism (fatuous though it is). The late tragedies are each in its own way dramas of alienation, and their focus, like that of the histories, continues to be felt as intensely relevant to the concerns of modern men.

Othello (1604) is concerned, like other plays of the period, with sexual impurity, with the difference that that impurity is the fantasy of the protagonist about his faithful wife. Iago, the villain who drives Othello to doubt and murder, is the culmination of two distinct traditions, the "Machiavellian" conniver who uses deceit in order to subvert the order of the polity, and the Vice, a schizophrenically tragicomic devil figure from the morality plays going out of fashion as Shakespeare grew up. King Lear (1605), to many Shakespeare's masterpiece, is an agonizing tragic version of a comic play (itself based on mythical early English history), in which an aged king who foolishly deprives his only loving daughter of her heritage in order to leave all to her hypocritical and vicious sisters is hounded to death by a malevolent alliance which at times seems to include nature itself. Transformed from its fairy-tale-like origins, the play involves its characters and audience alike in metaphysical questions that are felt rather than thought.

Macbeth (1606), similarly based on English chronicle material, concentrates on the problems of evil and freedom, convincingly mingles the supernatural with a representation of history, and makes a paradoxically sympathetic hero of a murderer who sins against family and state—a man in some respects worse than the villain of Hamlet.

Dramatizing stories from Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (both written in 1607-1608) embody Shakespeare's bitterest images of political life, the former by setting against the call to Roman duty the temptation to liberating sexual passion, the latter by pitting a protagonist who cannot live with hypocrisy against a society built on it. Both of these tragedies present ancient history with a vividness that makes it seem contemporary, though the sensuousness of Antony and Cleopatra, the richness of its detail, the ebullience of its language, and the seductive character of its heroine have made it far more popular than the harsh and austere Coriolanus. One more tragedy, Timon of Athens, similarly based on Plutarch, was written during this period, though its date is obscure. Despite its abundant brilliance, few find it a fully satisfactory play, and some critics have speculated that what we have may be an incomplete draft. The handful of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote between 1604 and 1608 comprises an astonishing series of worlds different from one another, created of language that exceeds anything Shakespeare had done before, some of the most complex and vivid characters in all the plays, and a variety of new structural techniques.

A final group of plays takes a turn in a new direction. Commonly called the "romances," Pericles (1607), Cymbeline (1609), The Winter's Tale (1611), and The Tempest (1611) share their conventions with the tragicomedy that had been growing popular since the early years of the century. Particularly they resemble in some respects plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher for the private theatrical company whose operation the King's Men took over in 1608. While such work in the hands of others, however, tended to reflect the socially and intellectually narrow interests of an elite audience, Shakespeare turned the fashionable mode into a new kind of personal art form. Though less searing than the great tragedies, these plays have a unique power to move and are in the realm of the highest art. Pericles and Cymbeline seem somewhat tentative and experimental, though both are superb plays. The Winter's Tale, however, is one of Shakespeare's best plays. Like a rewriting of Othello in its first acts, it turns miraculously into pastoral comedy in its last. The Tempest is the most popular and perhaps the finest of the group. Prospero, shipwrecked on an island and dominating it with magic which he renounces at the end, may well be intended as an image of Shakespeare himself; in any event, the play is like a retrospective glance over the plays of the 2 previous decades.

After the composition of The Tempest, which many regard as an explicit farewell to art, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, returning to London to compose Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1613; neither of these plays seems to have fired his imagination. In 1616, at the age of 52, he was dead. His reputation grew quickly, and his work has continued to seem to each generation like its own most precious discovery. His value to his own age is suggested by the fact that two fellow actors performed the virtually unprecedented act in 1623 of gathering his plays together and publishing them in the Folio edition. Without their efforts, since Shakespeare was apparently not interested in publication, many of the plays would not have survived.

Further Reading

Alfred Harbage, ed., The Complete Pelican Shakespeare (1969), is a sound one-volume text with useful introductions and bibliographies. For editions of individual plays the New Arden Shakespeare, in progress, is the best series. The authoritative source for biographical information is Sir Edmund K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols., 1930). Reliable briefer accounts are Marchette G. Chute's highly readable Shakespeare of London (1949) and Gerald E. Bentley, Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (1961).

The body of Shakespeare criticism is so large that selection must be arbitrary. Augustus Ralli, A History of Shakespeare Criticism (2 vols., 1932), is a guide through the thickets of the past. Ronald Berman, A Reader's Guide to Shakespeare's Plays (1965), provides helpfully annotated bibliographies. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare, edited by Terence Hawkes (1959), offers invaluable and influential criticism by a great romantic poet, and A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (1904), remains one of the indispensable books. Twentieth-century criticism can be sampled in Leonard F. Dean, Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism (1957; rev. ed. 1967), and Norman Rabkin, Approaches to Shakespeare (1964). Other noteworthy studies include G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedy (1930; 5th rev. ed. 1957); Derek A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1938; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1968); Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939); Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1946-1947), edited by M. St. Clare Byrne (4 vols., 1954); John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957; 2d ed. 1962); C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959); L.C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (1959); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1967); and Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (1969).

Studies of the theaters are in C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre (1953), and A.M. Nagler, Shakespeare's Stage (1958); and of the staging, in Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599-1609 (1962). The standard account of the audience is Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (1941). The best account of early Renaissance drama is in Frank P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée, eds., Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 4 (1969). Oscar J. Campbell and Edward G. Quinn, eds., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966), is a compendious handbook. □

William Shakespeare 1564–1616, English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-upon-Avon. He is widely considered the greatest playwright who ever lived.

Life

His father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and less Greeke," much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology.

In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus.

In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man.

The Plays

Chronology of Composition

The chronology of Shakespeare's plays is uncertain, but a reasonable approximation of their order can be inferred from dates of publication, references in contemporary writings, allusions in the plays to contemporary events, thematic relationships, and metrical and stylistic comparisons. His first plays are believed to be the three parts of Henry VI ; it is uncertain whether Part I was written before or after Parts II and III. Richard III is related to these plays and is usually grouped with them as the final part of a first tetralogy of historical plays.

After these come The Comedy of Errors,Titus Andronicus (almost a third of which may have been written by George Peele ), The Taming of the Shrew,The Two Gentlemen of Verona,Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. Some of the comedies of this early period are classical imitations with a strong element of farce. The two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, were both popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime. In Romeo and Juliet the main plot, in which the new love between Romeo and Juliet comes into conflict with the longstanding hatred between their families, is skillfully advanced, while the substantial development of minor characters supports and enriches it.

After these early plays, and before his great tragedies, Shakespeare wrote Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Parts I and II of Henry IV, Much Ado about Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. The comedies of this period partake less of farce and more of idyllic romance, while the history plays successfully integrate political elements with individual characterization. Taken together, Richard II, each part of Henry IV, and Henry V form a second tetralogy of historical plays, although each can stand alone, and they are usually performed separately. The two parts of Henry IV feature Falstaff, a vividly depicted character who from the beginning has enjoyed immense popularity.

The period of Shakespeare's great tragedies and the "problem plays" begins in 1600 with Hamlet. Following this are The Merry Wives of Windsor (written to meet Queen Elizabeth's request for another play including Falstaff, it is not thematically typical of the period), Troilus and Cressida,All's Well That Ends Well,Measure for Measure,Othello,King Lear,Macbeth,Antony and Cleopatra,Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens (the last may have been partially written by Thomas Middleton ).

On familial, state, and cosmic levels, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth present clear oppositions of order and chaos, good and evil, and spirituality and animality. Stylistically the plays of this period become increasingly compressed and symbolic. Through the portrayal of political leaders as tragic heroes, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra involve the study of politics and social history as well as the psychology of individuals.

The last two plays in the Shakespearean corpus, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be collaborations with John Fletcher . Shakespeare also may have had a small part in writing the play Double Falsehood, first published in 1727 and thought to be mainly the work of Fletcher. The remaining four plays— Pericles (two acts of which may have been written by George Wilkins), Cymbeline,The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest —are tragicomedies. They feature characters of tragic potential, but resemble comedy in that their conclusions are marked by a harmonious resolution achieved through magic, with all its divine, humanistic, and artistic implications.

Appeal and Influence

Since his death Shakespeare's plays have been almost continually performed, in non-English-speaking nations as well as those where English is the native tongue; they are quoted more than the works of any other single author. The plays have been subject to ongoing examination and evaluation by critics attempting to explain their perennial appeal, which does not appear to derive from any set of profound or explicitly formulated ideas. Indeed, Shakespeare has sometimes been criticized for not consistently holding to any particular philosophy, religion, or ideology; for example, the subplot of A Midsummer Night's Dream includes a burlesque of the kind of tragic love that he idealizes in Romeo and Juliet.

The strength of Shakespeare's plays lies in the absorbing stories they tell, in their wealth of complex characters, and in the eloquent speech—vivid, forceful, and at the same time lyric—that the playwright puts on his characters' lips. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's characters are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that it is their flawed, inconsistent nature that makes them memorable. Hamlet fascinates audiences with his ambivalence about revenge and the uncertainty over how much of his madness is feigned and how much genuine. Falstaff would not be beloved if, in addition to being genial, openhearted, and witty, he were not also boisterous, cowardly, and, ultimately, poignant. Finally, the plays are distinguished by an unparalleled use of language. Shakespeare had a tremendous vocabulary and a corresponding sensitivity to nuance, as well as a singular aptitude for coining neologisms and punning.

Editions and Sources

The first collected edition of Shakespeare is the First Folio, published in 1623 and including all the plays except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter play also generally not appearing in modern editions). Eighteen of the plays exist in earlier quarto editions, eight of which are extremely corrupt, possibly having been reconstructed from an actor's memory. The first edition of Shakespeare to divide the plays into acts and scenes and to mark exits and entrances is that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709. Other important early editions include those of Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), and Samuel Johnson (1765).

Among Shakespeare's most important sources, Raphael Holinshed 's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) is significant for the English history plays, although Shakespeare did not hesitate to transform a character when it suited his dramatic purposes. For his Roman tragedies he used Sir Thomas North 's translation (1579) of Plutarch's Lives. Many times he rewrote old plays, and twice he turned English prose romances into drama ( As You Like It and The Winter's Tale ). He also used the works of contemporary European authors. For further information on Shakespeare's sources, see the table entitled Shakespeare's Play .

The Poetry

Shakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the 1980s and 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612 entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed "W.S." exhibits many Shakespearean characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon.

Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important nondramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content.

The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton , to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece ; or they are possibly the initials of William Herbert, 3d earl of Pembroke , whose connection with Shakespeare is more tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127–152 has also been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the recurring themes of beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of love and art to transcend time and even death.

Critical Opinion

There has been a great variety of critical approach to Shakespeare's work since his death. During the 17th and 18th cent., Shakespeare was both admired and condemned. Since then, much of the adverse criticism has not been considered relevant, although certain issues have continued to interest critics throughout the years. For instance, charges against his moral propriety were made by Samuel Johnson in the 18th cent. and by George Bernard Shaw in the 20th.

Early criticism was directed primarily at questions of form. Shakespeare was criticized for mixing comedy and tragedy and failing to observe the unities of time and place prescribed by the rules of classical drama. Dryden and Johnson were among the critics claiming that he had corrupted the language with false wit, puns, and ambiguity. While some of his early plays might justly be charged with a frivolous use of such devices, 20th-century criticism has tended to praise their use in later plays as adding depth and resonance of meaning.

Generally critics of the 17th and 18th cent. accused Shakespeare of a want of artistic restraint while praising him for a fecund imagination. Samuel Johnson, while agreeing with many earlier criticisms, defended Shakespeare on the question of classical rules. On the issue of unity of time and place he argued that no one considers the stage play to be real life anyway. Johnson inaugurated the criticism of Shakespeare's characters that reached its culmination in the late 19th cent. with the work of A. C. Bradley . The German critics Gotthold Lessing and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel saw Shakespeare as a romantic, different in type from the classical poets, but on equal footing. Schlegel first elucidated the structural unity of Shakespeare's plays, a concept of unity that is developed much more completely by the English poet and critic Samuel Coleridge .

While Schlegel and Coleridge were establishing Shakespeare's plays as artistic, organic unities, such 19th-century critics as the German Georg Gervinus and the Irishman Edward Dowden were trying to see positive moral tendencies in the plays. The 19th-century English critic William Hazlitt , who continued the development of character analysis begun by Johnson, considered each Shakespearean character to be unique, but found a unity through analogy and gradation of characterization. While A. C. Bradley marks the culmination of romantic 19th-century character study, he also suggested that the plays had unifying imagistic atmospheres, an idea that was further developed in the 20th cent.

The tendency in 20th-century criticism was to abandon both the study of character as independent personality and the assumption that moral considerations can be separated from their dramatic and aesthetic context. The plays were increasingly viewed in terms of the unity of image, metaphor, and tone. Caroline Spurgeon began the careful classification of Shakespeare's imagery, and although her attempts were later felt to be somewhat naive and morally biased, her work is a landmark in Shakespearean criticism. Other important trends in 20th-century criticism included the Freudian approach, such as Ernest Jones 's Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet ; the study of Shakespeare in terms of the Elizabethan world view and Elizabethan stage conventions; and the study of the plays in mythic terms.

Authorship

For about 150 years after his death no one seemed to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. However, in the latter part of the 18th cent. questions began to arise as to whether or not the historical William Shakespeare was indeed the author. Since then the issue has continued to be a subject of often heated debate, albeit mainly in academic circles. Those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote the works (sometimes called "anti-Stratfordians" ) generally assert that the actor from Stratford had a limited education; some have even claimed that he was illiterate. Many of the questioners maintain that such a provincial upstart could not have had the wide-ranging worldly and scholarly knowledge, linguistic skills, and fine sensibilities evinced by the author of the Shakespearean canon. Such qualities, they assert, could only have been possessed by a university-educated gentleman, multilingual, well-traveled, and quite possibly titled. Critics further contend that playwriting was a lowly profession at the time and that the "real" author protected his reputation by using Shakespeare's name as a pseudonym. Over the years, many other arguments, some involving secret codes, some even more abstruse, have been offered to cast doubt on Shakespeare's authorship.

On the other hand, traditionalists ( "Stratfordians" ) who believe that William Shakespeare was indeed the author of the plays and poems, point out that his probable education at the Stratford grammar school would have provided the required knowledge of the classics and classical civilization as well as of Latin and at least some Greek. They also maintain that what can be assumed to be his broad reading of historical sources along with his daily involvement in the lively worlds of Elizabethan London—artistic and intellectual, ordinary and aristocratic—would, when transmuted by his genius, have provided Shakespeare with the necessary background to create his dramatic and poetic works. Moreover, they say, Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries, as attested to by a number of extant references to him as a writer by other notable men of his time.

Anti-Stratfordians have suggested a number of Elizabethans as candidates for the "real" author of the works. From the late 18th through the 19th cent. the individual most often cited was Francis Bacon , who had the requisite aristocratic background, education, courtly experience, and literary talent. Others claimed that Bacon was one of a group that collectively wrote the Shakespearean oeuvre. In the 20th cent. a new candidate emerged as the authorial front runner—Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford . His proponents, the Oxfordians, cited correspondences between events in his life and those in some of the plays, apparent similarities in the two men's language, and Oxford's proven skills as a dramatist and poet. Prominent among the many reasons to doubt de Vere's authorship is the fact that he died in 1604 and that some of Shakespeare's greatest works were written well after that date.

More than 50 other names have been put forward as the "real" Shakespeare, ranging from the implausible, e.g., Queen Elizabeth I, to the somewhat more possible, e.g., Christopher Marlowe ; William Stanley, 6th earl of Derby; and Roger Manners, 5th earl of Rutland. Still others have suggested that the works were the result of a collaboration by two or more Elizabethan writers. In 2005 a new candidate, Sir Henry Neville, a courtier, diplomat, and distant relative of Shakespeare, was proposed. Even as studies and biographies of Shakespeare proliferate, the authorship controversy shows few signs of subsiding, and books, scholarly essays, and, more recently, websites continue to be devoted to the question.

Bibliography

See also biographies by E. K. Chambers (2 vol., 1930), G. E. Bentley (1961), S. Schoenbaum (1970 and 1975), S. Wells (1974), R. Fraser (2 vol., 1988), P. Levi (1988, repr. 1995), E. Sams (1995), P. Honan (1998), A. Holden (1999), I. L. Matus (1999), and P. Ackroyd (2005); A. Nicoll et al., ed., Shakespeare Survey (1948–) and, as author, Shakespeare: An Introduction (1952); G. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vol., 1957–75); O. J. Campbell and E. G. Quinn, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966); M. R. Martin and R. C. Harrier, The Concise Encyclopedic Guide to Shakespeare (1972); M. Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (6 vol., 1970); The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973); G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (1989); J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997); H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997); H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998); D. S. Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999); S. Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (2003); B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author (2003); S. Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (2003) and Shakespeare, Sex & Love (2010); S. Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004) and Shakespeare's Freedom (2010); J. Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010); M. Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (2008); J. Knapp, Shakespeare Only (2009); J. Bate, Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare (2009); C. Beauclerk, Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom (2010); T. Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (2010); bibliographies ed. by G. R. Smith (1963), E. Quinn et al. (1973), and L. S. Champion (1986).

Shakespeare.
1.

Life and Works

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), first son and third child of John Shakespeare, a glover yeoman of Stratford-upon-Avon, and his wife Mary Arden, was christened on 26 Apr. 1564; tradition asserts that his birthday was 23 Apr., St George's Day. John Shakespeare became an alderman in 1565 and in 1568 bailiff (that is, mayor). His position would have qualified William to attend the grammar school of his native town, but its archives have not survived and the first record of his activities is that of his marriage, evidently a hasty one, to a lady whom extant documents almost certainly (but not positively) identify as Anne Hathaway of Shottery. The wedding took place in 1582; a daughter was born in 1583, and twins followed in 1585. Another gap in our knowledge extends from this time until 1592, when a pamphlet written by the dying Robert Greene shows Shakespeare evidently well established in London as actor and dramatist. In 1593 and 1594 he dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton, in terms that suggest familiarity, and by the beginning of 1595 he had evidently become a sharer in the company known as the Chamberlain's Men. Evidence of his rise in the world appears in his father's successful application in 1596 to the Heralds' College for a coat of arms, and by the poet's purchase in 1597 of the large house known as New Place in Stratford, to which he was to retire in 1610. His will, signed on 25 Mar. 1616, preceded his death (23 Apr., his birthday) by about a month; tradition says he died after a too convivial evening with Drayton and Jonson. He was buried in the chancel of Stratford church.

Shakespeare came just at the right moment to make full and fresh use of the teeming drama of his time, finding a novel and flexible stage apt for his purposes and an eager audience representative of all classes to encourage and inspire. The man and the time were in harmonious conjunction. Starting to write probably about 1590, he contributed at least 36 plays to the theatre. Of these, 16 were printed in quarto during his lifetime, but, apart from the fact that some are obviously bad texts, surreptitiously obtained, the publishing conditions of the age make it probable that he himself did not read the proofs. In 1623 Heminge and Condell of the King's Men, as the Chamberlain's Men were called after 1603, issued the entire body of his dramatic work in folio form; this volume presents the only texts of another 20 plays, and is probably the most important single volume in the entire history of literature. Arranging the contents under the headings of Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the editors of the Folio give no indication of the dates of composition of the separate items, but from a careful scrutiny of such external evidence as exists, and from ‘internal’ tests (the quality of the blank verse, use of prose and rhyme, etc.), most scholars are agreed, at least in general terms, concerning their chronology. The prefatory matter shows how highly Shakespeare was esteemed by his fellow actors and his great contemporary Jonson.

Shakespeare probably started his career by writing, unaided or in collaboration, a historical tetralogy consisting of the three parts of Henry VI (1591–2) and Richard III (1593). Richard Burbage won fame in the role of Richard, and the play was still being presented in 1633. The success of these plays no doubt encouraged Shakespeare to write King John (1594), based on an older two-part dramatization of that monarch's reign. This tragedy stands alone, but shortly afterwards, about 1595, another historical tetralogy was started with Richard II, which, during the Essex conspiracy in 1601, won notoriety because of its abdication scene; it was still in the repertory of the Globe Theatre in 1631, and from the year 1607, comes an interesting record of its popularity, when it was produced on the high seas by sailors. The two parts of Henry IV (probably about 1597 or 1598) carry on the story of Henry Bolingbroke and introduce a richly contrasting comic element with the character of Falstaff (originally named after the historical Sir John Oldcastle), while the general theme is rounded off with Henry V (probably 1599). With this play Shakespeare closed his career as a writer of histories, save for the late Henry VIII, produced in 1613, in which he is believed by many scholars to have collaborated with the young Fletcher.

Early in his career he tried his hand at comedy, experimenting with the courtly, satirical Love's Labour's Lost (1592), The Comedy of Errors (1593) in the style of Plautus, and the more robust The Taming of the Shrew (1593/4). These plays convey the impression of a young dramatist unsure of his orientation, yet all are skilful and succeeded in holding the stage. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1594) shows perhaps even less assurance. Little is known about the early stage history of those rich and lyrical plays written between 1595 and 1599, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Following the production of Henry IV (1597–8) comes The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600–1), an aberration in this series; probably tradition is right in saying it was written at the command of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see Falstaff in love. In The Merchant of Venice (1596–7) a break in the almost perfect balance observable in the other comedies is patent, and this leads to a couple of so-called ‘dark comedies’—All's Well that Ends Well (1602) and Measure for Measure (given at Court in 1604), in which the romantic material is strained almost to breaking. With these may be associated the cynically bitter Troilus and Cressida (1602), which possibly was acted not on the public stage but privately.

These were composed at the same time as Shakespeare was reaching towards the deepest expression of tragic concepts. Already at the very beginning of his career he wrote (possibly in collaboration) Titus Andronicus (c.1592), a play which despite or because of its bloodiness remained popular. Again, in the midst of his lyrical comedies he made a second attempt at tragedy in Romeo and Juliet (about 1595). Then came the great series of tragedies and Roman plays. Julius Caesar, seen by a visitor to London in 1599, was probably the first, but Hamlet must have come very soon after. Othello may have been new when it was presented at Court in 1604; it was evidently very popular. King Lear followed not many months later; it appeared at Court in 1606, and about the same time came Macbeth, which, linked in theme with Julius Caesar, clearly addresses itself to a Jacobean Court. The classical subject-matter of Julius Caesar is paralleled in Antony and Cleopatra, in Coriolanus, and in Timon of Athens, which seems to have survived only in a draft (all probably c.1607 or 1608).

In King Lear Shakespeare had turned to ancient British history, and the atmosphere of this play is reproduced, albeit with a changed tone, in Cymbeline. Seen in 1611, it was written probably about 1610; there was a revival at Court in 1634. Another play seen in 1611, The Winter's Tale, is similar in spirit, darker than the early comedies of humour and including incidents reminiscent of the tragedies, yet ending with solemn happiness. Evidently popular, it had several Court productions. The Tempest, gravest and serenest of all the dramas, was presented at Court in 1611 and in the following year.

To Shakespeare have been attributed, in whole or in part, several other dramas. His hand in The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was printed in 1634 as by him and Fletcher, and in Pericles, printed as his in 1609 and added to the Third Folio of 1664, has generally been accepted. There may be some pages of his own writing in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, dating probably from the mid-1590s. Less likely, although still possible, is his participation in Edward III, printed in 1596.

2.

Production in English

Although some of Shakespeare's plays remained continuously in the repertory of the British theatre, from the Restoration until the end of the 19th century few people had an opportunity of seeing them in their original form. For this the change in theatre buildings and theatrical technique was partly responsible, but the main onus lay on those who, while professing their admiration for Shakespeare, deliberately altered his texts to make them conform to the requirements of a new age. During the Commonwealth his comedies were pillaged to provide short entertainments or drolls, such as that of ‘Bottom the Weaver’, taken from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Macbeth was revised and embellished with singing and dancing by Davenant; his ‘singing witches’ were to last until 1847. Romeo and Juliet was sometimes played with a happy ending. Neither play was revived in its proper form until 1744. The Tempest, adapted by Davenant and Dryden, was then made into an opera by Shadwell. A Midsummer Night's Dream was combined with masque-like episodes to music by Henry Purcell to become The Fairy Queen, and Lacy made a new version of The Taming of the Shrew. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear, omitting the Fool (who was not seen again until 1838), sending Lear, Gloucester, and Kent into peaceful retirement, and keeping Cordelia alive to marry her lover Edgar. He also tackled Richard II and Coriolanus, but with less success. An adaptation which survived even longer than Tate's Lear was the Richard III of Colley Cibber. First given in 1700, and containing passages from Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard II, as well as a good deal of Cibber's own invention, it proved immensely popular and provided an excellent part for a tragic actor. Also popular were versions of other plays by Cibber, Shadwell, and later Garrick. The last, though in some ways he tried to prune the excrescences of the Restoration texts and gave the first recorded performances of Antony and Cleopatra, retained Cibber's Richard III, gave Macbeth a dying speech, and caused Juliet to awake before the death of Romeo, giving them a touching final conversation. He even made short versions of four of the comedies, and his Katharine and Petruchio (1756) remained popular until well into the 19th century.

Garrick's tampering with Hamlet, including his omission of the Grave-diggers, marks the end of this phase in the treatment of Shakespeare's texts. In 1741 Macklin had rescued Shylock, in the so-called Jew of Venice, from the hands of the low comedian. John Philip Kemble reformed the costuming of Shakespeare's plays. His Othello was still a scarlet-coated general, his Richard III wore silk knee-breeches, and Lear defied the storm in a flowered dressing-gown. But, helped by his sister Sarah Siddons, who was the first to discard the hoops, flounces, and enormous headgear of earlier tragic heroines, he made an effort to combine picturesqueness with accuracy. Edmund Kean restored the original ending to King Lear, and the original plays gradually emerged. Mme Vestris and the younger Mathews revived Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1839–40 with the original text, and the freedom of the theatres in 1843 enabled Samuel Phelps to embark on his fine series of productions at Sadler's Wells from 1844 to 1862, while Charles Kean staged his equally remarkable Shakespeare seasons at the Princess's.

Shakespeare was now presented in a reasonably correct form. Macready should be credited with having restored the Fool to Lear, though played by a woman, and with having revived The Tempest without Dryden's interpolations, which included a male counterpart of Miranda. Phelps, who in 1845 restored a male Fool, and in 1847 put on Macbeth without the singing witches, as well as reviving The Winter's Tale, was more concerned with the text than with the scenery, which was pleasantly sober and unobtrusive. Elsewhere the newly restored texts were in danger of disappearing under the elaboration of detail, while the action of the plays, designed for an untrammelled stage, was constantly rearranged and held up because of the necessity for elaborate scene changes. Still in this tradition were Henry Irving's productions at the Lyceum (1878–1902) and Beerbohm Tree's at the Haymarket (1887–97) and later at Her Majesty's.

The publication in 1888 of de Witt's drawing of the Swan Theatre encouraged attempts to reproduce not only the text of Shakespeare's plays but also the physical conditions in which they were first seen. The main interest had already switched from the problem of the text to the problem of interpretation. This became even more important as the director gained the upper hand. To this was added the problem of providing a building suitable for Shakespeare, an approximation to the original Elizabethan stage. This was first tackled by William Poel. Robert Atkins's productions at the Ring, Blackfriars, made an effort to solve the difficulties by presenting Shakespeare-in-the-round. After the Second World War the stages at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Old Vic crept out beyond the proscenium arch, which Stratford finally abolished altogether. These and other developments showed that Shakespeare cannot adequately be presented in the proscenium-arch theatre, though even there efforts have been made to present the plays more simply and coherently, allowing the action to flow unchecked for as long as possible. One of the landmarks in the history of Shakespearian production was undoubtedly Granville-Barker's first season at the Savoy in 1912; another was the introduction in 1914 of the first season of Shakespeare at the Old Vic. Experiments in presenting the plays have been frequent, from Barry Jackson's modern-dress Hamlet to the fantastications of Komisarjevsky, the elaborations of Reinhardt, and the challenges to tradition of Peter Brook. There have been a Lear with Japanese décor, a Hamlet set in Victorian times, a Romeo and Juliet in modern Italian style by Zeffirelli. But, with all its divergencies and aberrations, the main trend since 1900 has been the simplification of the background, by the use of a permanent set, a bare stage, or symbolic settings, and a consequent insistence on the importance of the text, the free flow of the verse, and the unhampered action of the plot. These ideals have been discernible behind most of the productions of the RSC, diverse in style though these have been.

In America the first productions of Shakespeare were given by visiting British actors, and the situation was therefore much the same as in contemporary Britain. For instance, the first recorded play, Richard III, acted in New York City in 1750 by Thomas Kean and William Murray's company, was in Colley Cibber's version. Little information is available on the texts of subsequent productions, but it is reasonable to suppose that they were substantially those current in the English theatre at the time. Although there was not, as in Europe, a language barrier or a preconceived notion of classical writing to be overcome, there were moral difficulties. Even Shakespeare's reputation was not always sufficient to overcome deep-rooted prejudices against play-going, and Othello was first introduced to Boston as ‘a Moral Dialogue against the Sin of Jealousy’. Probably more people in the 18th century were reading Shakespeare as a poet than seeing him as a playwright. Although the eastern cities had opportunities of seeing the full-length plays in theatres modelled on contemporary British lines, in the West it was the lecturers, elocutionists, entertainers, and showboat companies who first popularized Shakespeare, in isolated scenes and speeches. It may be said that from the earliest times Shakespeare played a large part in the emergent culture of the pioneer peoples.

After the first 50 years it is difficult to disentangle the imported productions of Shakespeare from those of the young but vigorous American theatre. Thomas Abthorpe Cooper and Henry Wallack, who both appeared in Shakespeare early in their careers, were typical of the new generation of actors who, though born in Britain, spent the latter and greater part of their working lives in America. The honour of being the first native-born actor to play leading roles in Shakespeare must probably go to John Howard Payne, who as a youth of about 17 played Hamlet and Romeo in 1809, but the greatest was undoubtedly Edwin Booth, whose Hamlet in 1864 was generally admired. The 19th-century personality cult of the ‘star’ actor and the insistence on elaborate trappings was as prevalent in America as in Britain, and was reinforced by the many tours undertaken by such London companies as Charles Kean's and later Irving's.

The 20th century saw, as in Britain, the gradual liberation of the play from over-decoration, with the simplified settings of Robert Edmond Jones and Norman Bel Geddes, and the new approach to a purified text. This was reinforced by a phenomenon peculiar to America—the invasion of the world of the theatre by the universities, which did not take place in Britain until much later. The proliferation of university departments of drama whose syllabuses led to a degree in drama has not been without its dangers, but it has led to much scholarly work on the problems of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre in general, and to a wider spread of interest in and productions of Shakespeare. This is particularly fortunate since the commercial theatre on Broadway has not on the whole been enthusiastic about Shakespeare's plays. With no tradition of Shakespearian acting, with the same handicap as in London of unsuitable theatres, and with no pressing demand from the audience, managers have found them expensive to stage and uncertain in their box-office returns. The exceptions have mostly been due to the efforts of an individual— John Barrymore, Eva Le Gallienne, Orson Welles, Maurice Evans, Margaret Webster, Joseph Papp. It is therefore the universities who have mainly kept Shakespeare alive on the American stage, either by incorporating his plays in the repertory of a community theatre, or by organizing festivals devoted solely to his works. The main dangers of academic Shakespeare are pedantry in the presentation and immaturity in the actors, but a healthy spirit of experiment may do much to redress the balance. It certainly seems as if the future of Shakespeare in the USA lies rather with the community and the Off-Broadway theatres, and with the Shakespeare Festivals, than with the commercial theatre.

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.

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616). The Elizabethan playwright's work came to American stages relatively early, although there have since been notable peaks and valleys in his popularity with playgoers and producers. The first Shakespearean play performed on an American stage was probably Richard III, which Thomas Kean acted in New York in 1750 and may have played earlier in Philadelphia. Kean and his partner Walter Murray did not use Shakespeare's actual text but rather Colley Cibber's version. Indeed, the use of Restoration and 18th‐century redactions of virtually all of Shakespeare's plays was commonplace as much in America as in London until well into the last half of the 19th century. For the remainder of the 18th century and the very early years of the next, the Shakespearean repertory of the time was presented as part of the regular season by the stock companies that dominated the various American theatrical centers. However, with the appearance of noted tragedians such as Cooper, Cooke, and Edmund Kean, and the rise of the star system, the great actors began to tour. They generally toured alone, accepting whatever supporting casts and scenery local playhouses offered. Not until after the Civil War did great tragedians such as Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett begin to travel with specially selected companies and their own scenery. These touring ensembles peaked at the turn of the century, notably with the company headed by Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern. The productions of the great itinerant ensembles, as well as those mountings by distinguished stock companies from Burton's through Daly's, were, according to modern standards, top‐heavy with elaborate scenery. In the 20th century the rise of a more blatant commercialism on Broadway, the growth of an audience not steeped in older traditions, and perhaps simply a surfeit of Shakespeare caused a gradual dropping off of productions. Thereafter, most noted productions were mounted as occasional vehicles for special stars. To some extent collegiate playhouses compensated for this falling away. About the time of World War I, Shakespearean productions also discarded their sumptuous settings, relying thereafter primarily on more suggestive sets and imaginative lighting. These changes came about as much for aesthetic reasons as for commercial ones. In the 1930s and beyond Shakespearean festivals were established from Oregon to Connecticut, and many of the rarely performed works, no longer deemed profitable in mainstream theatres, were offered here along with the more famous plays. Starting in the 1950s there was an increase in the number of productions, the result of what would become the New York Shakespeare Festival in Manhattan and the development of regional theatres across the country, most of which would include one of the Bard's works on a regular basis. Today the only Shakespeare productions on Broadway are those boasting stars or coming from a renowned international troupe, such as the Royal Shakespeare Company. In an ambitious move, producer Joseph Papp offered the entire canon beginning in 1988 and not completed until 1997, six years after his death.

The following Shakespeare plays each have their own entry: Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Hamlet, Henry IV, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night. As for the other works, a thumbnail history in America follows.

All's Well That Ends Well had been performed on rare occasions by collegiate and regional theatres, but the New York Shakespeare Festival gave it its professional premiere, as far as the city was concerned, when it included it in the 1966 season in Central Park. In 1983 the Royal Shakespeare Company offered a critically acclaimed mounting, set at the time of World War I, that marked its first appearance in a Broadway theatre. The Comedy of Errors was first done at the Park Theatre in 1804, but its most memorable American revival was the free‐wheeling version offered with William H. Crane and Stuart Robson in 1878 and again in 1885. It has been performed intermittently since but is probably most familiar to playgoers through the Rodgers and Hart musical version, The Boys from Syracuse (1938), which employed only a single line of the text. Perhaps even more removed was a Lincoln Center production in 1987 that retained Shakespeare's text but was performed by the juggling Flying Karamazov Brothers as a onering circus. Coriolanus was presented initially at Philadelphia's Southwark Theatre in 1767 and it remained popular with all the classic tragedians, including Edwin Forrest and John McCullough, and is still revived with some regularity. Christopher Walken was particularly praised as the Roman emperor in a 1988 Public Theatre mounting. Cymbeline had its American premiere at the Southwark Theatre in 1767 with Miss Cheer as Imogen and the younger Hallam as Posthumus. Never very popular, it nonetheless provided successful vehicles for Adelaide Neilson and Viola Allen but has rarely been revived in modern times. Cooper was apparently the first American Henry V at the Park Theatre in 1804. One of the least popular of the plays for many years, it saw new life in the 1960s and 1970s when presented as an antiwar piece. The three parts of the history Henry VI have been presented in America only on collegiate and festival stages or the occasional mounting by a visiting company. The pageant play Henry VIII was first offered to New York in 1799. Although infrequently done, it was part of the season mounted in 1946 by the American Repertory Theatre with Victor Jory as Henry, Eva Le Gallienne as Katharine of Aragon, and Walter Hampden as Cardinal Wolsey. King John was first mounted at the Southwark Theatre in 1768 with Douglass in the title role, but it has never been popular with American playgoers, although such celebrated performers as McCullough and Modjeska have starred in revivals.

Love's Labours Lost was not produced in New York until Daly's celebrated 1874 mounting, and it continues as one of the plays least‐often resurrected. The earliest known American presentation of the dark comedy Measure for Measure is in 1818 in New York with performances by Mr. and Mrs. John Barnes. Adelaide Neilson headed a memorable 1880 mounting, although critical reaction to the play itself as “repulsively immoral” may explain the relative infrequency of Victorian stagings. The changing moral climate in the 1950s and 1960s was probably a factor in the increasing revivals of Measure for Measure, especially at Canada's Shakespeare Festival and some intriguing productions at the Public Theatre. Stagings of Pericles have pretty much been confined to collegiate and festival theatres. Richard II was first offered to New York by James W. Wallack in 1819. It is one of the rare Shakespearean plays that has proved far more popular in the 20th century than it was earlier. Noteworthy among contemporary revivals was Maurice Evans's 1937 production, to which he returned on several later occasions. The Tempest was first presented in 1770 at the Southwark Theatre in Dryden's redaction, and it was many years before a faithful rendering was presented. A movement toward textual accuracy was seen in one of the great 19th‐century productions, that of William E. Burton in 1854 with Charles Fisher as Prospero and Burton as Caliban. Besides restoring much, although not all, of the original text, Burton employed music by Arne, Purcell, and, somewhat anachronistically, Halévy and emphasized pictorial spectacle. By contrast, a notable modern version, staged by Margaret Webster in 1945 with Arnold Moss as Prospero and Canada Lee as Caliban, while rearranging the original text at some major points, offered relatively lean, suggestive settings and costumes and employed modern music by David Diamond. More recent New York Prosperos of note have been Sam Waterston in 1974, Frank Langella in 1989, and Patrick Stewart in 1995. Timon of Athens was a surprise success for the National Actors Theatre in 1993, with Brian Bedford giving a commanding performance in the title role. Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida have been almost wholly in collegiate and festival theatres, although the Old Vic offered the latter in its 1956 visit. Ellen and Charles Kean were the first performers to offer Americans The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which they acted during their 1846 visit. Daly staged a major revival in 1895. While rarely mounted since, except at collegiate and festival productions, it provided the source of a successful musical of the same name (minus the “the”) in 1971. Produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival, it employed rock music; some highly objectionable, scatological lyrics; and a mixture of modern, skeletonized settings with period costuming. The Winter's Tale was called Florizel and Perdita when it was first presented in 1795. Its most successful 19th‐century revival was that of Mary Anderson, who assumed the roles of both Hermione and Perdita. A 1946 Theatre Guild revival was short‐lived.

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). 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. 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 forty‐two plays. 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 earliest plays are mostly comedies and histories—The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew are probably the very earliest. He wrote the first play (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.

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. Both tetralogies attest to the lasting impact on English society of the Wars of the Roses. 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’. 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).

The Lord Chamberlain's Men had become the King's Men at James I's accession, and played regularly at court. King Lear andMacbeth, 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 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.

sonnets of Shakespeare, the, were printed in 1609 and probably date from the 1590s. Most of them trace the course of the writer's affection for a young man of rank and beauty: the first 17 urge him to marry to reproduce his beauty. The complete sequence of 154 sonnets was issued by the publisher Thomas Thorpe in 1609 with a dedication to ‘Mr W. H., the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets’. Mr W. H. has been identified as (among others) William, Lord Herbert, afterwards earl of Pembroke, or Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and further as the young man addressed in the sonnets. Another view argues that Mr W. H. was a friend of Thorpe, through whose good offices the manuscript had reached his hands—‘begetter’ being used in the sense of ‘getter’ or ‘procurer’. Other characters are alluded to in sequence including a mistress stolen by a friend (40–2), a rival poet (78–80 and 80–6), and a dark beauty loved by the author (127–52). Numerous identifications for all the ‘characters’ involved in the sequence, as well as for Mr W. H., have been put forward. Perhaps the most ingenious and amusing of these is Wilde's The Portrait of Mr W. H.

For the form of these poems see sonnet.

William Shakspere see Shakespeare, William .

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