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William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
Signature

all people should allow to be

all freedom and love not slavery. William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616)^[a] was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays,^[b] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. 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 raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him 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, 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 sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples 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, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

Scholars have often noted four periods in Shakespeare's writing career. Until the mid-1590s, he wrote mainly comedies influenced by Roman and Italian models and history plays in the popular chronicle tradition. His second period began in about 1595 with the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and ended with the tragedy of Julius Caesar in 1599. During this time, he wrote what are considered his greatest comedies and histories. From about 1600 to about 1608, his "tragic period", Shakespeare wrote mostly tragedies, and from about 1608 to 1613, mainly tragicomedies, also called romances.

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 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. Their composition was influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe^[c], 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 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 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.

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain.

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 The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock which reflected Elizabethan views but may appear prejudiced 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".

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.

Shakespeare's so-called "tragic period" lasted from about 1600 to 1608, though he also wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well during this time and had written tragedies before. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The hero of the first, Hamlet, has probably been more discussed than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "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 murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. 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

Main article: Shakespeare in performance

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.

Reconstructed Globe Theatre, London.

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 sixteenth 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

Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.

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 texts between the quarto and folio editions. The folio version of King Lear is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, since they cannot be conflated without confusion.

List of works

Further information: [[:List of Shakespeare's works and Chronology of Shakespeare plays]]

Works

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

• All's Well That Ends Well‡
• As You Like It
• The Comedy of Errors
• Love's Labour's Lost
• Measure for Measure‡
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre*†^[d]
• The Taming of the Shrew
• The Tempest*
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Two Noble Kinsmen*†^[e]
• The Winter's Tale*

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean history

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1† ^[f]

• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII†^[g]

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

wrong people.

• Romeo and Juliet
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus†^[h]

• Timon of Athens†^[i]

• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth† ^[j]

• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida‡
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Cymbeline*

Poems

• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim^[k]
• The Phoenix and the Turtle
• A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won
• Cardenio†^[l]

sex lies love kill murder.

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

• Arden of Faversham
• The Birth of Merlin
• Locrine
• The London Prodigal
• The Puritan
• The Second Maiden's Tragedy
• Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas Lord Cromwell
• A Yorkshire Tragedy
• Edward III
• Sir Thomas More

Notes

• a. ^{^} Dates use the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan. Under the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on 3 May.

• b. ^{^} The exact figures are unknown. See Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.

• c. ^{^} An essay by Harold Brooks suggests Marlowe's Edward II influenced Shakespeare's Richard III. Other scholars discount this, pointing out that the parallels are commonplace.

• d. ^{^} Many scholars believe that Pericles was co-written with George Wilkins.

• e. ^{^} The Two Noble Kinsmen was co-written with John Fletcher.

• f. ^{^} Henry VI, Part 1 is often thought to be the work of a group of collaborators; but some scholars, for example Michael Hattaway, believe the play was wholly written by Shakespeare.

• g. ^{^} Henry VIII was co-written with John Fletcher.

• h. ^{^} Brian Vickers suggests that Titus Andronicus was co-written with George Peele, though Jonathan Bate, the play's most recent editor for the Arden Shakespeare, believes it to be wholly the work of Shakespeare.

• i. ^{^} Brian Vickers and others believe that Timon of Athens was co-written with Thomas Middleton, though some commentators disagree.

• j. ^{^} The text of Macbeth which survives has plainly been altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615).

• k. ^{^} The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name in 1599 without his permission, includes early versions of two of his sonnets, three extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, several poems known to be by other poets, and eleven poems of unknown authorship for which the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved.

• l. ^{^} Cardenio was apparently co-written with John Fletcher.

Further reading

• Schoenbaum, S. (1991). Shakespeare's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198186185. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Greenblatt, Stephen (2005). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico. ISBN 0712600981.
• Honan, Park (1998). Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198117922.
• Wells, Stanley, et al (2005). The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199267170.
• Vendler, Helen (1997). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674637127.
• Bryson, Bill (2007) Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives). Harper Collins. ISBN 000719790X.

External links

{{Spoken Wikipedia|William Shakespeare (Spoken Article).ogg|2008-04-11}}

• Open Source Shakespeare
• The Internet Shakespeare Editions
• Designing Shakespeare
• The Royal Shakespeare Company website
• The American Shakespeare Center website
• {{findagrave|1450}}
• Maev Kennedy, Shakespeare's Shoreditch theatre unearthed, The Guardian, Thursday, 7 August 2008, [1].

Category:English Renaissance dramatists Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:English poets Category:People from Stratford-upon-Avon Category:Shakespearean actors Category:Sonneteers Category:Tudor people Category:1564 births Category:1616 deaths Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes