William Shakespeare - Biography

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564 - April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)), English poet and playwright, has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists.

Shakespeare's literary achievement is not confined to his mastery of the poetic and dramatic form; his ability to capture and convey the most profound aspects of human nature is considered by many scholars to be unequalled, due to his understanding of the range and depth of human emotions. A colossal figure in world literature, Shakespeare's legacy and influence continues to be felt in all parts of the globe. He has been translated into every major living language, and his plays are continually performed all around the world. Shakespeare is among the very few playwrights who have excelled in both tragedy and comedy.

Shakespeare wrote his works between 1588 and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are often uncertain. His prolific output is especially impressive in light of the fact that he lived only 52 years.

Shakespeare's influence on the English-speaking world shows in the widespread use of quotations from Shakespearean plays, the titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases, and the many adaptations of his works.

Biography

Many historians agree that William Shakespeare1-actor, playwright, and poet-was one individual whose life can be mapped out through the study of considerable historical evidence.

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman, and of Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. They lived on Henley Street. His baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year. Because baptisms were performed within a few days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 as his birthday. It provides a convenient symmetry: he died on that day in 1616, and perhaps appropriately for a playwright commonly considered to be England's greatest, it is also the Feast Day of Saint George, the patron saint of England.

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

As the son of a prominent town official, William Shakespeare probably attended the Stratford grammar school, which may have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. The quality of Elizabethian-era grammar schools was uneven. It is presumed that the young Shakespeare attended this school, since he was entitled to, although this cannot be confirmed because the school's records have not survived. There is no evidence that his formal education extended beyond grammar school.

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

The late 1580s are known as Shakespeare's 'Lost Years' because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. One legend is that he was caught poaching deer on the park of Sir Thomas Lucy, the local Justice of the Peace, and had to flee. Another theory is that Shakespeare could have joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men when they travelled through Stratford while on tour. The seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey believed that Shakespeare spent some time as 'a schoolmaster in the country'.

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

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

In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on August 11, 1596. Some suspect that his death was part of the inspiration behind The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c.1601), a reworking of an older, lost play (possibly Danish play Amleth or Thomas Kyd).

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

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

In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that in 1604, Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker (a maker of ornamental headdresses) in the northwest of London. Mountjoy's apprentice Stephen Belott wanted to marry Mountjoy's daughter. Shakespeare was enlisted as a go-between, to help negotiate the details of the dowry. On Shakespeare's assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Belott sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry. Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the circumstances.

Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

In 1609 when his sonnets were initially published, likely without his approval, one hundred and twenty six of his love poems were addressed to a young man (or 'fair lord'); and twenty six to a married woman ('dark lady'). This edition was not widely dispersed and may have been suppressed.

John Benson published another edition in 1640 and changed most of the pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly all of them were inspired by the dark lady. Benson's modified version was mass-produced and dominant. Edmund Malone re-published the original sonnets again in 1780, this time it was widely distributed.

During sonnet 13 Shakespeare calls the young man 'dear my love' and in 15 announces that he is at 'war with Time for love of you'. Finally in sonnet 18 he says 'shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate', followed by sonnet 20 where he says that the man is his 'master-mistress'. Scholars for the past two hundred years have argued over whether Shakespeare acted on his bisexual attractions because of these themes. By 1944 the Variorum edition of his Sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators.

The controversy began in 1780 when George Steevens upon reading sonnet twenty where Shakespeare describes his young male friend as his 'master-mistress' remarked 'it is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without and equal mixture of disgust and indignation'. 

Other English scholars who were dismayed of the possibility that one of their national heroes may have been a 'sodomite' responded with Samuel Taylor Coleridge around 1800 saying that Shakespeare's love was 'pure' and in his sonnets there is 'not even an allusion to that very worst of all possible vices'.

Critics in Continental Europe added more to the debate with a French reviewer in 1834 saying 'He instead of she? Can I be mistaken? Can these sonnets be addressed to a man? Shakespeare! Great Shakespeare? Did you feel yourself authorized by Virgil's example?'

Douglas Bush in the preface to his 1961 Pelican edition said 'since modern readers are unused to such ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of homosexuality. we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above the love of women could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas Browne and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature'. 

C.S. Lewis says that the sonnets are 'too lover-like for ordinary male friendship' and he has never 'found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature'.   For example, Bush cite's Montaigne as evidence of a platonic interpretation, but he said his male friendships were distinct from 'that other, licentious Greek love'.

Shakespeare says that his love for the youth gives him sleepless nights, causes sharp anguish and fearful jealousy, torments him and the young man's beauty is exactly the kind of 'passion' that a beautiful woman might inspire. In sonnet twenty he theorizes that the youth was originally a female that Mother Nature had fallen in love with and to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism, added a penis, which Shakespeare describes as 'to my purpose nothing'. Later in the same sonnet he tells the adolescent to sleep with women but only love him 'mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.' Some have interpreted that to infer that he ruled out sexual relations while openly saying that he was sexually aroused by the youth.

It must be kept in mind that if Shakespeare had openly engaged in sexual relations with other males he risked prosecution under sodomy laws of the time that could have resulted in the use of the death penalty.

One of Shakespeare's greatest role-models, Christopher Marlowe, whom he even uses a few sentences from his poem Hero and Leander, was a known lover of young men. In the play The Merchant of Venice many regard the relationship between Bassanio and Antonio to be a direct allusion to the widespread practice of pederasty during the Italian Renaissance further sparking interests in the playwright's sexuality.

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

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

Shakespeare died in 1616, on April 23. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John Hall. Although Susannah and Judith both had children, none of them had any offsprings and as such there are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today.

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

It was common in his time for graves in the chancel of the church to later be emptied with the contents removed to a nearby charnel house as more room was needed. Possibly fearing that his body would be removed, he was considered to have written an epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones,

But cursed be he that moves my bones.

Popular legend claims that unpublished works by Shakespeare may lie inside his tomb, but no one has ever verified these claims, perhaps for fear of the curse included in the quoted epitaph.

Reputation

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

During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded, but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. It is more difficult to assess his contemporary reputation as a playwright: plays were considered ephemeral and even somewhat disreputable entertainments rather than serious literature. The fact that his plays were collected in an expensively produced folio in 1623 (the only precedent being Ben Jonson's Workes of 1616) and the fact that that folio went into another edition within nine years, indicate that he was held in unusually high regard for a playwright.

After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642-1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Old plays were often adapted for the Restoration stage, and where Shakespeare is concerned, this undertaking has seemed shockingly respectless to posterity. A notorious example is Nahum Tate's bowdlerized happy ending of King Lear of 1681, which held the stage until 1838. From the early 18th century, Shakespeare took over the lead on the English stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it again.

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

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

Identity and authorship

As noted above, there is considerable historical evidence of the existence of a William Shakespeare who lived in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The vast majority of academics identify this Shakespeare as the Shakespeare. Over the years however, such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain ('Is Shakespeare Dead?'), Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, christened William Shaksper or Shakspere, actually produced the works attributed to him. This scepticism is variously grounded: such as the lack of a single book to be found in his otherwise detailed will, the circumscribed social, education and travel opportunities available to the young author that could have served to prepare him, the differences in spellings of his name, the language of the works itself. Mainstream scholars consider all these supposed mysteries to be explicable.

Many attribute this debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of this period. Even the painting in the National Portrait Gallery, London  may not depict Shakespeare after all, and the well-known 'Flower Portrait' at Stratford-upon-Avon was demonstrated (by analysing pigment and discovering chrome yellow) to be an early 19th-century forgery . Various fringe scholars have suggested writers such as Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I as alternative authors or co-authors for some or all of 'Shakespeare's' work. Some of these claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them, although advocates of alternative authors point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, became the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, after having been identified in the 1920s. Oxford partisans note the similarities between the Earl's life, and events and sentiments depicted in the plays and sonnets. Oxford was also contemporaneously identified as a poet and writer of some talent, and had the documented education, travel and life experience that one would ordinarily associate with works both as broad and detailed as Shakespeare.

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

Word Coinage

Shakespeare provided the first print citations for many of the words (ode, addiction, alligator) and phrases ('my mind's eye,' 'one fell swoop') that have become household words in our time.

Cononical Works

The plays and their categories

Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of folios and quartos, and scholars, actors and directors continue to study and perform them extensively. They form an established part of the Western canon of literature.

The plays are traditionally divided into tragedies, comedies and histories, following the logic of the original publications; however, modern criticism has labelled some of them 'problem plays' as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. In addition, Shakespeare's later comedies are commonly known as 'romances'.

The following list gives the plays in the order and categorization of the 1623 First Folio (the first collected edition of the plays). A single asterisk indicates a play commonly classified as a 'romance' today; two asterisks indicates those generally accepted as 'problem plays' - though other comedies still occasion critical dispute.

+Comedies

--The Tempest *

--The Two Gentlemen of Verona

--The Merry Wives of Windsor

--Measure for Measure **

--The Comedy of Errors

--Much Ado About Nothing

--Love's Labour's Lost

--A Midsummer Night's Dream

--The Merchant of Venice **

--As You Like It

--Taming of the Shrew

--All's Well That Ends Well

--Twelfth Night or What You Will

--The Winter's Tale *

--Pericles, Prince of Tyre * (not included in the First Folio)

--The Two Noble Kinsmen * (not included in the First Folio)

+Histories

--King John

--Richard II

--Henry IV, part 1

--Henry IV, part 2

--Henry V

--Henry VI, part 1

--Henry VI, part 2

--Henry VI, part 3

--Richard III

--Henry VIII

+Tragedies

--Troilus and Cressida **

--Coriolanus

--Titus Andronicus

--Romeo and Juliet

--Timon of Athens

--Julius Caesar

--Macbeth

--Hamlet

--King Lear

--Othello

--Antony and Cleopatra

--Cymbeline * (normally classed as a comedy today)

Dramatic collaborations

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

Cardenio, a lost play; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.

Henry VI, part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.

Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.

Macbeth: Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.

Measure for Measure may have undergone a light revision by Thomas Middleton at some point after its original composition.

Pericles Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.

Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might explain its incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.

Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision of, George Peele.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each playwright appears to have written about half of the text.

Lost plays by Shakespeare

Love's Labour's Won A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternate title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.

Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all we have of the lost play.

Poems

Shakespeare's other literary works include:

--Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Longer poems:

--Venus and Adonis

--The Rape of Lucrece

--The Passionate Pilgrim

--The Phoenix and the Turtle

--A Lover's Complaint

Apocrypha

Plays possibly by Shakespeare

Edward III Some scholars have recently chosen to attribute this play to Shakespeare, based on the style of its verse. Others refuse to accept it, citing, among other reasons, the mediocre quality of the characters. If Shakespeare had involvement, he probably worked as a collaborator.

Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work by several playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare. That Shakespeare had any part in this play remains uncertain.

Other works possibly by Shakespeare

A Funeral Elegy by W.S. For a period many believed, on the basis of stylistic evidence researched by Donald Foster, that Shakespeare wrote a Funeral Elegy for William Peter. However most scholars, including Foster, now conclude that this evidence was flawed and that Shakespeare did not write the Elegy, which is more likely from the pen of John Ford.

The King James Version of the Bible Some people claim that Shakespeare assisted in the translation of the King James Bible, rewording or rewriting certain sections to make them more poetic; they argue that the poetic sensibility of certain sections of the King James Bible is very similar to the style of Shakespeare, and cite Psalm 46, where the word 'shake' appears 46 words from the beginning, and 'spear' 46 words from the end. This is a controversial notion and is not accepted by mainstream scholarship.

Shakespeare and the textual problem

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays. The problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.

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

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