William Shakespeare (
//;
26 April 1564 (
baptised) – 23 April 1616)
was an English
poet,
playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the
English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.
He is often called England's
national poet and the "Bard of Avon".
His extant works, including some
collaborations, consist of about
38 plays,
154 sonnets, two long
narrative poems, and a few other verses, the authorship of some of which is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major
living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in
Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married
Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children:
Susanna, and twins
Hamnet and
Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a
playing company called the
Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the
King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as
his physical appearance,
sexuality,
religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were
written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.
His early plays were mainly
comedies and
histories and these works remain regarded as some the best work produced in these genres even today. He then wrote mainly
tragedies until about 1608, including
Hamlet,
King Lear,
Othello, and
Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as
romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623,
John Heminges and
Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the
First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by
Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time".
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The
Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the
Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that
George Bernard Shaw called "
bardolatry".
In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Life
Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of
John Shakespeare, an
alderman and a successful glover originally from
Snitterfield, and
Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.
He was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April,
Saint George's Day.
This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616.
He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the
King's New School in Stratford,
a free school chartered in 1553,
about a quarter-mile from his home.
Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar, the basic
Latin text was standardised by royal decree,
and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin
classical authors.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old
Anne Hathaway. The
consistory court of the
Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.
The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester
chancellor allowed the
marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,
and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter,
Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.
Twins, son
Hamnet and daughter
Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.
Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the 'complaints bill' of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated
Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589.
Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many
apocryphal stories.
Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer
poaching in the estate of local squire
Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.
Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.
John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.
Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of
Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.
Little evidence substantiates such stories other than
hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
London and theatrical career
"All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.
By then, he was sufficiently well known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright
Robert Greene in his
Groats-Worth of Wit:
...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words,
but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such as
Christopher Marlowe,
Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the
"university wits").
The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's
Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here
Johannes Factotum—"Jack of all trades"— means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".
Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks.
From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed by only the
Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading
playing company in London.
After the death of
Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king,
James I, and changed its name to the
King's Men.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the
River Thames, which they called the
Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the
Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man.
In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford,
New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish
tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in
quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the
title pages.
Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of
Ben Jonson's
Works names him on the cast lists for
Every Man in His Humour (1598) and
Sejanus His Fall (1603).
The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's
Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.
The
First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after
Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played.
In 1610,
John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.
In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.
Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in
As You Like It and the Chorus in
Henry V,
though scholars doubt the sources of the information.
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's,
Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.
He moved across the river to
Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.
By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of
St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French
Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Later years and death
Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by
Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford 'some years before his death'.
He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers' petition in 1635
Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the
Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from
Henry Evans, the King's Men 'placed men players' there, 'which were
Heminges,
Condell, Shakespeare, etc.'. However it is perhaps relevant that the
bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609. The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),
which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.
Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614.
In 1612, he was called as a witness in
Bellott v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.
In March 1613 he bought a
gatehouse in the former
Blackfriars priory;
and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law,
John Hall.
After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.
His last three plays were collaborations, probably with
John Fletcher,
who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King's Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.
He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in “perfect health”. There is no extant contemporary source that explains how or why he died. After half a century had passed,
John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”
This is not impossible, for Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes that started to come from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively early death: “We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went’st so soon/From the world’s stage to the grave’s tiring room.”
He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,
and Judith had married
Thomas Quiney, a
vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death.
Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna.
The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".
The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.
The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.
Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically.
He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.
Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.
Shakespeare was buried in the
chancel of the
Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.
The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,To digg the dvst encloased heare.Bleste be 
man 
spares thes stones,And cvrst be he moves my bones. (Modern spelling:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, | To dig the dust enclosed here. | Blessed be the man that spares these stones, | And cursed be he that moves my bones.)
Sometime before 1623, a
funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to
Nestor,
Socrates, and
Virgil.
In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the
First Folio, the
Droeshout engraving was published.
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many
statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in
Southwark Cathedral and
Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey.
Plays
Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.
Some attributions, such as
Titus Andronicus and the early history plays, remain controversial, while
The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost
Cardenio have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are
Richard III and the three parts of
Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however,
and studies of the texts suggest that
Titus Andronicus,
The Comedy of Errors,
The Taming of the Shrew and
The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest period.
His first
histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the
Tudor dynasty.
The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially
Thomas Kyd and
Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of
Seneca.
The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for
The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.
Like
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,
the
Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.
Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic
Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender
Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.
The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,
the charming rural setting of
As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of
Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.
After the lyrical
Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s,
Henry IV, parts 1 and
2, and
Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.
This period begins and ends with two tragedies:
Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;
and
Julius Caesar—based on Sir
Thomas North's 1579 translation of
Plutarch's
Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.
According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in
Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "
problem plays"
Measure for Measure,
Troilus and Cressida, and
All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known
tragedies.
Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies,
Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous
soliloquy which begins "
To be or not to be; that is the question".
Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.
The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.
In
Othello, the villain
Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.
In
King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play-offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".
In
Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,
uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife,
Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn.
In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies,
Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic
T. S. Eliot.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to
romance or
tragicomedy and completed three more major plays:
Cymbeline,
The Winter's Tale and
The Tempest, as well as the collaboration,
Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.
Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.
Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays,
Henry VIII and
The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with
John Fletcher.
Performances
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of
Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.
After the
plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at
The Theatre and the
Curtain in
Shoreditch, north of the Thames.
Londoners flocked there to see the first part of
Henry IV,
Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room".
When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the
Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at
Southwark.
The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with
Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including
Hamlet,
Othello and
King Lear.
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the
King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new
King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of
The Merchant of Venice.
After 1608, they performed at the indoor
Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.
The indoor setting, combined with the
Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged
masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In
Cymbeline, for example,
Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous
Richard Burbage,
William Kempe,
Henry Condell and
John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including
Richard III,
Hamlet,
Othello, and
King Lear.
The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in
Romeo and Juliet and
Dogberry in
Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.
He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by
Robert Armin, who played roles such as
Touchstone in
As You Like It and the fool in
King Lear.
In 1613, Sir
Henry Wotton recorded that
Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".
On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.
Textual sources
In 1623,
John Heminges and
Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the
First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.
Many of the plays had already appeared in
quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.
No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".
Alfred Pollard termed some of them "
bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.
Where several versions of a play survive, each
differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or
printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own
papers.
In some cases, for example
Hamlet,
Troilus and Cressida and
Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of
King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the
Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of
plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes,
Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In
Venus and Adonis, an innocent
Adonis rejects the sexual advances of
Venus; while in
The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife
Lucrece is raped by the lustful
Tarquin.
Influenced by
Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.
Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem,
A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the
Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote
A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects.
The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601
Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary
phoenix and his lover, the faithful
turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in
The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.
Sonnets
Title page from 1609 edition of
Shake-Speares Sonnets.
Published in 1609, the
Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.
Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in
The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599,
Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends".
Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.
He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though
Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."
The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher,
Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.
Critics praise the
Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.
Style
Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.
The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in
Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.
Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening
soliloquy of
Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of
Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.
No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with
Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.
By the time of
Romeo and Juliet,
Richard II, and
A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
Pity by
William Blake, 1795,
Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in
Macbeth:
“And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air.” Shakespeare's standard poetic form was
blank verse, composed in
iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the
end of lines, with the risk of monotony.
Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as
Julius Caesar and
Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
- Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
- That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
- Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
- And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
- Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
- Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8
After
Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic
A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".
In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included
run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.
In
Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.
The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.
Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.
Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as
Plutarch and
Holinshed.
He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.
As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In
Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.
Influence
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of
characterisation, plot,
language, and
genre.
Until
Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.
Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.
His work heavily influenced later poetry. The
Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic
George Steiner described all English verse dramas from
Coleridge to
Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as
Thomas Hardy,
William Faulkner, and
Charles Dickens. The American novelist
Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in
Moby-Dick is a classic
tragic hero, inspired by
King Lear.
Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by
Giuseppe Verdi,
Otello and
Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.
Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the
Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist
Henry Fuseli, a friend of
William Blake, even translated
Macbeth into German.
The
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English.
Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his
A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.
Expressions such as "with bated breath" (
Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (
Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.
Critical reputation
"He was not of an age, but for all time."
Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.
In 1598, the cleric and author
Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.
The authors of the
Parnassus plays at
St John's College, Cambridge numbered him with
Chaucer,
Gower and
Spenser.
In the
First Folio,
Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".
A recently garlanded statue of William Shakespeare in
Lincoln Park, Chicago, typical of many created in the 19th and early 20th century.
Between
the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below
John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.
Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic
John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare".
For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of
Samuel Johnson in 1765 and
Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.
By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers
Voltaire,
Goethe,
Stendhal and
Victor Hugo.
During the
Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher
Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic
August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of
German Romanticism.
In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.
"That King Shakespeare," the essayist
Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".
The
Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.
The playwright and critic
George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "
bardolatry", claiming that the new
naturalism of
Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.
The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the
avant-garde. The
Expressionists in Germany and the
Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director
Bertolt Brecht devised an
epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic
T.S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.
Eliot, along with
G. Wilson Knight and the school of
New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "
post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.
By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as
structuralism, feminism,
New Historicism,
African-American studies, and
queer studies.
In a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare's works and comparing Shakespeare literary accomplishments to accomplishments among leading figures in philosophy and theology as well, Harold Bloom has commented that, "Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He
encloses us, because we
see with his fundamental perceptions."
Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.
Proposed alternative candidates include
Francis Bacon,
Christopher Marlowe, and
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Several "group theories" have also been proposed.
Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution,
but interest in the subject, particularly the
Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.
Religion
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was against the law.
Shakespeare's mother,
Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by
John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity.
In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.
In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter
communion in Stratford.
As several scholars have noted, whatever his private views, Shakespeare "conformed to the official state religion", as
Park Honan put it.
Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula and he was a confirmed member of the
Church of England, where he got married, his children were baptized, and where he was buried. Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare's religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove.
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