The English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare was the author of the most widely admired and influential body of literatur

The English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare was the author of the most widely admired and influential body of literature by any individual in the history of Western civilization. His work comprises 36 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 narrative poems. Knowledge of Shakespeare is derived from two sources: his works and those remains of legal and church records and contemporary allusions through which scholars can trace the external facts of his life.

Life

Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, on Apr. 26, 1564. He is buried in the same church, where a memorial records his death on Apr. 23, 1616. In 1623 his colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell created another memorial by publishing Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the collection of his plays now known as the First Folio.

His mother, Mary, was the daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmcote, near Stratford. His father, John, was a glover and leather merchant whose increasing financial success was marked by his appointment to a series of municipal posts during the first ten years of William's life. In the mid-1570s, John Shakespeare's fortunes declined, and he no longer took a visible part in Stratford affairs. The family fortunes lost by John would later be repaired by his son.

Shakespeare probably attended Stratford's excellent free grammar school, although no record of the fact exists. On Nov. 28, 1582, church authorities gave permission for him to marry Anne Hathaway of the neighboring village of Shottery. He was 18 years old, and she was 26; probably she was pregnant. On May 26, 1583, their daughter Susanna was baptized in Holy Trinity. Twins, named Hamnet and Judith, were baptized on Feb. 2, 1585.

No records have been found for the years between the twins' baptism and 1592. In that year a disappointed author, Robert Greene, referred cryptically to Shakespeare in his Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance; he warned his fellow writers about "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 fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Thus as early as 1592, Shakespeare was sufficiently well known to be recognized by the pun on his name and the parody of a line from his Henry VI, Part 3: "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide." Greene's is the only hostile allusion to Shakespeare that exists; its motive can be guessed from his description of Shakespeare as Johannes fac totum--"Jack-of-all-trades." Unlike Greene, Shakespeare was an actor ("player") as well as a writer, and he was associated with a group of other actors that included the day's leading comedian, Will Kempe, and a leading tragedian, Richard Burbage. They were known, after their nominal patron, as the Lord Chamberlain's Men and (after 1603) as the King's Men. By 1592, Shakespeare was acting exclusively for this company; he held shares in the company's profits; he was part of a consortium that in 1599 built and owned its home theater, the Globe Theatre; and he wrote his plays exclusively for this company, at the rate of about two per year.

In 1593-94 a plague epidemic forced the closing of the London theaters. In those years Shakespeare published two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The circumstances surrounding another nondramatic work, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, are less clear. Scholars are not certain how long before their publication (1609) they were written, whether they were all written in the same period, or whether the order in which they appeared was of Shakespeare's design. Because the sonnets are the only works in which Shakespeare may plausibly be thought to write from a frankly autobiographical impulse, they have exercised a fascination beyond even their extraordinary value as poetry.

Works and Reputation

Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, not publication, and apparently took no part in their printing. Nineteen plays appeared in individual quarto volumes before appearing in the First Folio. Some were printed from texts reconstructed from memory by the actors, whereas others were supplied to the printer by the company. Shakespeare's indifference to publication creates problems in dating and establishing accurate texts for the plays.

Shakespeare's earliest plays, performed between 1588 and 1593, already show the range of his formal dramatic interests. They foreshadow his mature accomplishments and reveal some of the sources on which he drew for inspiration. His first tragedy, Titus Andronicus (c.1592-1594), was influenced by the emphasis on extreme psychological states and the rhetorically ornate manner of the Roman playwright Lucius Annaeus Seneca; the influence of Ovid is also felt. Popular in its own day, Titus is now often denigrated; its treatment of physical and moral outrage, however, is recalled even in the mature King Lear. For the three parts of Henry VI (c.1588) and for Richard III (c.1593) he drew on histories of England by Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed (1587). Shakespeare returned to this material between 1595 and 1600 to write four plays--Richard II (1595), Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (1597 and 1598), and Henry V (1599)--that tell an earlier part of the history. Shakespeare's English history plays reflect the age's horror at the idea of civil war and explore the responsibilities of divinely authorized kingship, pointing forward by implication to the reign of Elizabeth I.

The Comedy of Errors (c.1588-c.1593) is indebted to the Roman playwright Plautus; with characteristic exuberance, Shakespeare added a second pair of identical twins to the pair in his source. This early play shows a consummate technical ability, and some of its basic concerns--the dispersal and reunion of a family, time's destructive passage and its potential for renewal, imagery of ocean water, strange lands, and voyages--persist into his last play, The Tempest. A pervasive source for ideas and language in all his plays was the Bible, a work familiar to most of his audience.

Shakespeare continued to alternate the writing of comedy and tragedy, although comedy is relatively more prominent in the last decade of the 16th century--Love's Labor's Lost (1594), The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night--and tragedy after 1599--Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (c.1608). Shakespeare's interest in experimentation complicates this division and resulted in a group of plays (c.1601-c.1604) that do not fit neatly into either category: Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. These plays--and, in some critical accounts, others, including Hamlet or The Merchant of Venice--have been called problem plays. Near the end of his career he experimented further in four plays now often called the romances: Pericles (c.1608)--not included in the First Folio and possibly not written entirely by Shakespeare--Cymbeline (1609-1610), The Winter's Tale (1610-1611), and The Tempest. In them, psychological realism is subordinated to an interest in mythic patterns that incorporate both tragedy's deaths and comedy's wondrous reunions.

Shakespeare's achievement was manifold. He developed dramatic techniques for conveying a sense of his character's psychological identities; his are the first "modern," and enduringly the most vivid, dramatic characters. His language, by turns dense and supple, extended the range of possibilities for prose and verse. In verse he perfected the dramatic blank- verse line explored also by his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.

The richness of Shakespeare's imagination, and the subtlety with which he revealed the implications of thought and action, have made his plays endlessly amenable to reinterpretation by succeeding generations. The history of Shakespeare criticism and of Shakespeare in the theater is therefore an important part of the cultural history of the modern world. During the early 17th century he was appreciated as a great entertainer, although thought deficient in refinement compared to Ben Jonson. His supposed artlessness was regarded as a virtue during the 18th century, the period in which the first attempts to establish good printed texts were made. Notable editions include those by Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1723), Lewis Theobald (1733), and Edward Capell (1768). Samuel Johnson's edition (1765) includes his incisive preface and notes. During the 19th century, romantic poets and critics were especially attracted to Shakespeare's psychologically complex characters. German scholarship and criticism, such as that of Schlegel, complemented the work of the English romantics, notably that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. No one school of thought dominates 20th-century Shakespeare criticism, but interest in Shakespeare as a poet, which leads to close study of his language, complements interest in his plays as living works for the stage.

Lawrence Danson

Bibliography: Andrews, J. F., ed., William Shakespeare, 3 vols. (1985); Bentley, G. E., Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (1961; repr. 1986); Bullough, G., ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1957-75); Fox, L., ed., The Shakespeare Handbook (1987); Fraser, R., Young Shakespeare (1988); Gurr, A., The Shakespearean Stage, 3d ed. (1991); Hauss, L. L., et al., eds., Shakespearean Criticism, 18 vols. (1984-90); Levi, P., The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1989); McDonald, Russ, ed., Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts (1994); Rowse, A. L., Shakespeare the Man, rev. ed. (1989); Schoenbaum, S., ed., Shakespeare (1990) and William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, rev. ed. (1987); Skura, M. A., Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing (1993); Wells, S., and Taylor, G., William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1988).