Topic 44. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE AND WORLD.

MOST REPRESENTATIVE WORKS.

"Shakespeare is not for an age but for all time"

Ben Johnson

0. INTRODUCTION
Widely regarded as the greatest writer of all time, William Shakespeare occupies a
position unique in the world literature. No other poet or playwright can be compared to
him as his plays, written more than 4 centuries ago for a small audience, are now still
read, performed in theatres and adapted to films worldwide.
Throughout this topic we will deal with his time, his life and those works which
became representative in each stage of his life.

1. SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE AND WORLD

Like the rustic 'clown' William in As You Like It, William Shakespeare was born
and brought up in the Forest of Arden, Stratford-Upon-Avon, in 1564.
Despite Shakespeare's parents were illiterate, they sent him to a grammar school
where he had to learn classical texts by heart. One of his earliest works back in the
1580s, The Comedy of Errors, shows that Shakespeare was making good use of
his grammar-school education as this text derives from a play by the Roman comic
dramatist Plautus. Another text that caused impression on the author was Aesop's
Fables. Shakespeare cites at least eight of the fables in his plays; to give one example,
in King Lear, the Fool demonstrates that Lear, though old, is a childish fool, no better
than an ignorant schoolboy, by invoking a well-known fable (The Ant and the Fly,
no.198).
At the age of 11, he had the chance to see one of Queen Elizabeth I's Midland
processes, leading her to Robert Dudley's Castle. In Oberon's speech in A Midsummer
Night's Dream he invites the theatre audience in late 1590s to cast their minds back
and decide which had been the most splendid, the most prolonged and the most
outstanding of all her summer journeys. That particular journey was in fact the one
Oberon expected as an answer as everyone wondered if the Queen would marry Dudley.
 The mystery of Shakespeare's ‘lost years’ is often discussed. These are the
undocumented years between 1585 (the birth of his twins) and 1592, when he is again
heard of in London, married to Anne Hathaway and being a successful actor, poet and so
popular as to provoke bitterness and jealousy among other playwrights. Though it was
by no means unknown for players also to write plays, there was no precedent for a player
writing plays of sufficient quality to sometimes improve those of university-educated
poets such as Marlowe, Green and Nashe.
However, due to his father's bankruptcy, Shakespeare had to earn more money and
so joined the Queen's Men. His experience in this company and, in particular, the
plays he performed there were the basis for some of his later plays, such as Titus
Andronicus or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The former was a much more
complex creation from an old company’s play called The Troublesome, in which he
depicts a queen who enjoys hunting, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, who takes advantage
of a morning of hunting to flirt with her lover, Aaron the Moor (this recalls the several days
the Queen spent hunting at Dudley's Castle); the latter was adapted from another Queen's
Men comedy: Felix & Felismena. One of the actors of the company, Richard
Tarlton, was the best one according to Shakespeare and he paid posthumous tribute to
him in a passage in Hamlet, when the Prince recalls a friend of his who is dead and all
the good time they spent together and his incredible wit and humour.
From the Queen's Men's famous ‘victories’ Shakespeare also extracted the seeds
of his major history plays: Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. He also wrote history
plays based on two other of the company's plays: The Troublesome Reign of King
John (for his King John) and The True Tragedy of Richard III (for Richard III).
The plays with which Shakespeare first made in a big name were those based on the
Wars of the Roses, known under the titles Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3. These plays were
performed at the Rose theatre on the banks of river Thames, whose manager was Philip
Henslow. Shakespeare's Henry VI plays were bringing in three or four times as much
profit to Henslow as some other titles. As the 1999 screenplay Shakespeare in
Love implies, writing for the theatre in the late Elizabethan period was rather like
writing scripts for Hollywood. There was extremely big money to be made for all those
concerned: poets, players, playhouse managers...; but, as in Hollywood, failure was a
good deal more common than success. In the same way, those who invested huge sums
of money in building playhouses (Henslowe or Burbage for example) ran the risk, as
the film again suggests so well, to the theatres being suddenly closed down by order of
the civic authorities either because of plague or in response to Puritan attacks.
In fact, the spring of 1593 saw a major and prolonged outbreak of plague in the City
of London, which caused the closure of the public theatres. Like most major Elizabethan
playwrights, Shakespeare says rather little about plague in his plays. Romeo and
Juliet is the only work in which it plays a crucial part in the plot, and even here the
significance of the plague can easily be overlooked or forgotten. Friar John, who has
been charged by Friar Lawrence (Romeo’s friend) to deliver the letter to Romeo (in Mantua)

explaining that Juliet has taken a sleeping potion, is shut up in a house in Verona under
suspicion of being infected by the plague. As a result, Romeo travels to Verona, finds
Juliet apparently dead, and kills himself beside her in the Capulet crypt before she comes
round from her drugged sleep.
The effects of the plague on Shakespeare's career made him resort to other forms of
writing. During the period of plague, he wrote a long poem dedicated to the Earl of
Southampton. It is possible that he made more money from Venus and Adonis
than he had from acting and writing for the playing companies. Shakespeare would not
have dedicated a second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to him had he not been well
rewarded for the former. Venus and Adonis was an instant best-seller, and ranks
alongside Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as one of the three works for which
Shakespeare was most celebrated during his life.
The next severe and prolonged plague outbreak that affected Shakespeare's career
occurred in 1609. In this year, too, he was forced to sell his work to a publisher. Troilus
and Cressida is an example, and also his extraordinary collection of Sonnets. Like
the Earl of Southampton, the yet-to-be-found identity under Mr. W.H., to whom
he dedicates his Sonnets, is likely to have given the poet a reward that more than made
up for his loss of income from the theatre. We should no read the Sonnets too literarily,
as if they were mere narratives. We should delve into them, instead. For instance, in
number 144 he speaks about a triangular relationship and this can refer to the
extramarital relationships that Shakespeare is thought to have had.
Though he lived through the plagues unnoticed, he was aware that an individual's
life could end at any moment, lasting no longer than the few hours of a play, as he says in
Macbeth: “Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour
upon the stage, and then is heard no more”.
 Most people in Shakespeare's world believed that travelling, and especially to the
new world, was likely to lead to enormous wealth. That is why everything concerned to
faraway lands and even the existence of Eldorado made people interested. Shakespeare,
well aware of this, names a map leading to the Indies in Twelfth Night. However, few
of his plays make money a central theme, still less the search for gold in the New World.
Even in the Merchant of Venice, the themes of money bonds and mercantile
transactions are interwoven with complex love interests. The merchant rejects his friend's
suggestion that anxiety about his merchandise tossing about on the high seas is what is
making him so sad. Later developments in the play cause to suspect that Antonio's
sadness may be concerned with his unfulfilled love for his young friend Bassanio, rather
than worried about his merchandise.
Though Shakespeare left grammar school early, and did not attend a university,
students were always among his most enthusiastic fans. A high proportion of audience
was from young men who were studying, or at least whose families believed that they
were studying. Such young men were also consumers of London's taverns and brothels.
Like Biron in Love Labour's Lost, they felt that total commitment to book-learning
was a waste of time.
The support of students at Oxford, Cambridge and London (Shakespeare's new company
The Chamberlain's Men performed occasionally in both Oxford and Cambridge) , ensured that
Shakespeare not only became financially prosperous, but was like a 'Pop Idol'. On his
awareness that university-educated young men now formed the largest and most
influential segment of his audience, he wrote Hamlet, a tragedy about a highly reflective
young man who would much prefer to continue his studies at the University rather than
get bogged down in the rottenness of the state of Denmark. Although the writing of
Hamlet came at a difficult time as The Globe Theatre was temporarily closed down
because of political conflicts, it is a play that has at no point fallen out of fashion during
the succeeding 400 years.
The glover's son from the Midlands who had himself enjoyed only limited
opportunities for study was now widely recognised in all the universities and places of
higher learning as a writer to be reckoned with. Whether or not their tutors approved,
students adored him and his works. And this continued to be the case throughout the 17 th
century (such was the case that the Oxford’s Bodleian's Library - 1602, acquired a copy
of the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare's splays. By the 1660s, this volume was so
badly damaged from the friction and grime of thumbs and elbows of generations of
students (especially fond of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet) that the curators
of the Library decided to get rid of it.
During the weeks between the death of Elizabeth and the crown of James I (1603),
there was a rush to compose poems lamenting Elizabeth's death and welcoming the new
king. Shakespeare evokes this in sonnet 123 when he alludes to the ceremonial
welcoming of new king in London. On the contrary, Shakespeare appears to have written
no explicit lament for the dead Queen. Strange as it may seem, though he did not pay any
tribute to her, in his play Anthony and Cleopatra we can see that the author
encourages his audience to recall the charisma and magnificence of the recently dead
Queen. Like Cleopatra, Elizabeth had overcome the handicaps of gender, and had
governed her kingdom with great style. She, too, liked to upstage newly-arrived
delegates from other countries with her immense wealth. But like Cleopatra, Elizabeth
had also been capricious and at times cruel. She had compromised her own security and
that of her realm through her stormy late relationship with the Earl of Wessex who, like
Mark Anthony, had at one time been a war hero, but lately seemed coward and
indecisive.
In many other writings that reached audiences during the early Jacobean period,
Shakespeare showed astonishing modernity and originality. In Othello, performed as
‘The Moor of Venice’, he combined diverse traditions. Since the times of Chaucer,
marital jealousy had been treated as comic or even farcical (as in the crazy jealousy of
Master Ford in Shakespeare's own Merry Wives of Windsor). Another character type
that had normally been treated comically was that of the braggart soldier who is
determined to impress people with stories about his great adventures. Moors, too, had an
image problem on the stage; they had hitherto been presented as savagely wicked
villains, such as Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's own Titus Andronicus. Out of these
three theatrical stereotypes –the jealous husband, the braggart soldier and the
bloodthirsty Moor– Shakespeare created one of his most powerful, subtle and
charismatic heroes, a man of great sensitivity and generosity, Othello, who has been
tragically misled by a man he believed he could trust, Iago.
Two further tragedies that are undoubtedly Jacobean are Macbeth and King Lear.
While the former, also known as ‘the Scottish play’, is connected undoubtedly to the new
reign of James VI of Scotland (I of England) , this is not so immediately apparent in the
case of King Lear; though deep down it is. The uniting of the kingdoms of England and
Scotland led to a strong interest, and Lear is suited to this interest (as will also be the
slightly later Cymbeline).
Even though he did not stop writing, it is true that his rate of production diminished
notably. There is one obvious and positive explanation for this: the arrival of the new
king and his Scottish retinue brought to London eager audiences who had few
opportunities to see Shakespeare's plays performed. Records show that some of
Shakespeare's very earliest plays, such as The Comedy of Errors and Love's
Labour's Lost were being revived alongside recent work such as Measure for
Measure. Shakespeare must have been kept extremely busy directing such revivals of
his own plays, and he felt no great pressure to produce new titles, since the payment for
his performances were generous.
Shakespeare's final plays are Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the tragic separations of
parents from children and husbands from wives, followed by their miraculous reuniting;
Cymbeline, in which Shakespeare revisited a sweet, fairytale-like Ancient Britain (its
heroine, Imogen, resembles Rosalind in As You Like It in being disguised as a boy for
much of the play, but, unlike Rosalind, she is already married when the play opens and
travels across Britain in search of her husband Posthumus); and The Winter's Tale, for
which the author took Greene's romance Pandosto as a source. His last play, The
Tempest, reflects Shakespeare's excited awareness of the New World. Among his major
sources of the play was an account of a ship wrecked en route for Virginia, and the
survival of all on board, being this the storm that opens the play.
However, even while Shakespeare was responding creatively to the marvels of the
New World, he was also preparing to say a last farewell to the Old –the world of the
theatre, England and quite soon life itself. He realised that he would never had the
chance to see Virginia. Though his artistic Prospero might for a while play the part of
Divine Providence on a distant enchanted island, Prospero's creator would soon depart
from the island of The Globe's platform stage. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero
has been reconciled with his enemies, is reunited with his friends, and sees his daughter
well married, as he does not expect to enjoy any of these blessings for long. At the very
end of the play, Shakespeare, as Prospero appeals to the theatre audiences that have
always loved him so much to give him one final round of applause before he steps off
the stage.
Soon after his death, in 1616, his colleagues Heminge and Condell began to
prepare a compilation of Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies and histories, which would
become the First Folio (1623). This compilation has enabled numberless generations of
readers to enjoy his plays and to remember Shakespeare with both honour and affection.

Other works are:

- Tragedies: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Timon of Athens.
- Histories: Henry VIII and Richard II.
- Comedies: All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing and
The Taming of the Shrew.
- Poetry: A Lover's Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim and The Phoenix
and the Turtle.

2. CONCLUSION
Undoubtedly, the best writer or all time, his play scripts have been translated into
over 90 languages and have inspired poets, novelists, dramatists, painters, composers,
choreographers, film-makers, and other artists at all levels of creative activity; that is
how Shakespeare is still among us.

3. BIBLIOGRAPHY
- DUNCAN-JONES, K. Shakespeare's Life and World. The Folio Society. London,
2004.
- The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
- www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare