Classic Poetry Series

William Shakespeare - poems

Publication Date: 2012

Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive

William Shakespeare(26 April 1564 - 23 April 1616)

an English poet and playwright, 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 surviving works, including some
collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 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, 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, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication
and artistry by the end of the 16th century. 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, 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 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.
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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 birthdate remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on
23 April, St 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 the curriculum was dictated by
law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education
in Latin grammar and the classics.

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 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, and 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
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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. No 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

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. He was well enough known in London by then 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
universityeducated 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 only by 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.
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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 called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies'
wigs and other headgear.

Later Years and Death

Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired
to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon
at that time; and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612 he was called as a
witness in 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 1606�1607, 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 and 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.
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 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 ye man yt spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yt 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 who 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'
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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
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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 "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
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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.

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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 additions 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

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic

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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". 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.
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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
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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.