WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (23 April 156423 April 1616)

Latest discovered portrait (March 2009; painted 1610)

A biographical sketch Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in south

Warwickshire 23 April 1564; His father: a successful glove-maker; an

alderman (member of the municipal council); His mother (Mary Arden): connected to the

gentry; Attended the Grammar School in Stratford At 18: married Anne Hathaway (26) had

three children (Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet);

Mary Ardens house

The Birthplace

The Birthplace

The Guild Chapel and Grammar School

The Guild Chapel and Grammar School

Anne Hathaways cottage

Anne Hathaways cottage

Shakespeare in London 1585, at the age of 21, he leaves home no

exact reason known; 1585 1592: the lost years no record of his

whereabouts; only speculations about what did e.g. he is supposed to have travelled through the country with groups of actors;

1592: first record of his presence in London the theatrical career he appears to have been successful, both as an actor and as a playwright, and to have provoked envy and anxiety among fellow-dramatists.

At the time (the 1590s), English drama was dominated by the University Wits playwrights educated at Oxford or Cambridge;

A literary elite transformed the native tradition into more accomplished, structurally coherent dramatic forms heightened considerably the poetic power of language;

John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge and Thomas Nashe.

Robert Greene accused him of plagiarism: There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our

feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt [i.e wrapped] in a Players hide* [i.e skin], supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum [i.e. Jack-of-all-trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country".

[*Greene parodies a line from Shakespeares Henry VI Oh, Tygers heart wrapt [wrapped] in a womans hide.]

Evidence of his rising reputation as a playwright: Francis Meres, in 1598 (Palladis Tamia; Wits Treasury): high praise of Shakespeare in the section entitled A Comparative Discourse of Our English Poets with the Greek, Latin and Italian Poets

Shakespeare is mentioned as one who has mightily enriched the English tongue, which is now gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments.

Shakespeare: successful also as a businessman early in his career;

1594: a member and part-owner of a playing company: the Lord Chamberlain's Men (named after the title of their sponsor) high reputation they played several times before Elizabeth I;

After the coronation of James I (1603): the companys name changed to The Kings Men.

1597: affluent enough to buy a new property in Stratford: the New Place the only brick house in Stratford

1599: Shakespeare and his partners have The Globe built a public theatre destroyed by fire in 1613; rebuilt in 1614; closed in 1642, demolished in 1644 a replica was built in 1997, close to the supposed original place.

1608: the Kings Men take over the lease for Blackfriars a private playhouse, built by Richard Burbage in 1596

Blackfriars was a playhouse for the wealthy and the educated artificial lighting admission more expensive.

The Globe built in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlains Men (1612 engraving)

The Globe interior

The Globe rebuilt (Shakespeares Globe, 1997)

Shakespeares Globe

Shakespeares Globe theatre Southbank

Shakespeares Globe today - interior

Shakespeares Globe today - interior

Shakespeares Globe theatre hall apron stage; galleries; the yard/pit (for the

groundlings)

Blackfriars Theatre (used as a winter playhouse between 1608-1642)

1613: Shakespeare retired to Stratford, a famous and wealthy man lived there with his wife and two daughters, who survived him he continued to visit London, mostly on family business.

Died on the 23rd of April 1616 was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare To digg the dust enclosed heare; Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, And curst be he that moves my bones

The authorship controversy

The anti-Stratfordians arguments: Only an aristocrat could have created such an

impressive work the vast learning exhibited by the plays reflects the education and instruction of a member of the nobility

No complete manuscript of Shakespeares work has come down to us no edition supervised by the author circulated in his time his name appears in an uncertain spelling

No mention of or allusion to his native town ever occurs in a work where so many other places are mentioned

Shakespeare is not known to have visited any of the places mentioned in his plays (France, Denmark, Italy).

Candidates for real authorship: Francis Bacon (1561 1626), the greatest

philosopher of the time and an important statesman at the court of James I.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 1604) (the Oxfordian theory).

Christopher Marlowe (1564 1593), Shakespeares rival and contemporary hypothesis that he might have actually survived the murder attempt and was the real author of the plays.

The Stratfordians counterarguments: The invoked vast learning of Shakespeares plays is only apparent

there are many elementary mistakes of fact. His calling a place France or Italy or Illyria or Athens is purely

conventional. The plots: largely unoriginal Shakespeare was a great borrower

very few literary allusions (cf. Ben Jonson: Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek).

He was acquainted with the sphere of Court life and manners he met very early his first patron, the Earl of Southampton.

He was an experiencing nature (Walter Bagehot, 1858 Shakespeare - the Individual) a man endowed with acuity of observation and the capacity to register the complexities of human character not a real difficulty for him to acquire the kind of knowledge displayed in his dramatic work.

Periodisation of Shakespeares dramatic creation

Shakespeares creation is commonly perceived as falling into three main periods each of them dominated by certain kinds of plays.

He never wrote a single kind of play in a certain period of his creative life.

These phases: more or less conventional divisions there is still uncertainty regarding the composition dates.

Shakespeares Plays: First Period of creation (15921600)

(light-hearted and brilliant maturity Shakespeare came to dominate the English stage, proving his versatility and his extraordinary instinct for the

stage) History

plays/Chronicles Romantic comedies Dark

comedies Tragedie

s Roman plays

Henry VI (Part 2), Henry VI (Part 3)

(1590-1) Henry VI (Part 1)

(1591-2) Richard III (1592-3) Richard II (1595-6) King John (1596-7) Henry IV (Parts 1

and 2) (1597-8) Henry V (1598-9)

The Comedy of Errors (1592-3)

The Taming of the Shrew (1593-4)

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Loves Labours Lost (1594-5) A Midsummer Nights

Dream (1595-6) Much Ado About

Nothing (1598-9) As You Like It, Twelfth Night (1599-1600)

The Merchant of Venice (1596-7)

Romeo and

Juliet (1594-5)

Titus Andronicus (1593-4) Julius

Caesar (1599-

1600)

Shakespeares Plays: Second Period of creation (1600/11608)

(his artistic maturity gained in depth a darkened vision somber grandeur of the conflicts portrayed in the tragedies poetic language unequalled in its power of expression and

metaphorical complexity associated with the rise of the baroque sensibility)

History plays/ Chronicles

Romantic comedies

Dark comedies

Tragedies Roman plays

The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600-1)

Alls Well that Ends Well (1602-3)

Measure for Measure

(1604-5)

Hamlet (1600-1) Troilus and

Cressida (1601-2)

Othello (1604-5) King Lear, Macbeth (1605-6) Timon of Athens

(1607-8)

Antony and Cleopatra

(1606-7) Coriolanus (1607-8)

Shakespeares Plays: Third Period of creation (16081613)

(spirit of reconciliation serenity and quest for order the grim vision of his tragedies: transcended turns to romance: a consoling alternative healing

breaches, forgiveness, hope their melancholy: tributary to the baroque sensibility)

Chronicles Romantic comedies

Dark comedies

Tragedies Romance plays (romances)

Henry VIII (1612-13)

The Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-13)

Pericles (1608-9) Cymbeline (1609-10) The Winters Tale (1610-11) The Tempest (1611-12)

Major early editions of Shakespeares dramatic works

Shakespeare was apparently indifferent to the publication of his plays more concerned with their performance.

Many of the plays circulated individually during his lifetime as quarto editions, but they were pirated and corrupt.

[in the early modern age, quarto refers to books close to the size of A5 paper today].

The first Folio: 1623

Folio: the largest common size for a book in early modern times (approx. 38 cm in height).

The first integral edition, containing 36 plays, produced by John Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeares friends and fellow actors.

Re-issued in 1632 (contains a praising sonnet by Milton in its opening).

Successive improved editions continued to appear. Among the most significant:

1709: Nicholas Rowe (famous Restoration dramatist) published a critical edition gave a series of interesting data concerning Shakespeares life operated corrections on the text of the previous editions, making it more intelligible made useful adjustments concerning the division of acts into scenes.

1725: Alexander Pope editor six volumes in quarto Pope praised Shakespeare for being not so much an imitator as an instrument of Nature, placing him above Homer he perfected the subdivision of the long scenes and indicated the places of the action.

1765: Samuel Johnson editor for him, Shakespeare shared pride of place with the Ancient writers and could claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration.

1807: Thomas Bowdler first edition (in four volumes) of The Family Shakespeare an edition purged of all words considered obscene more appropriate for 19th century women and children and for moral instruction. I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic

poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare.

"Many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased. Of these the greater part were evidently introduced to gratify the bad taste of the age in which he lived, and the rest may perhaps be ascribed to his own unbridled fancy. But neither the vicious taste of the age, nor the most brilliant effusions of wit, can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these could be obliterated, the transcendant genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded lustre (from the Preface to the 1818 edition)

To bowdlerise has come to refer to the practice of purging a text of its more licentious expressions (=censorship)

The 18th century raised Shakespeare to the status of national genius a cultural myth.

Ever since Nicholas Rowes edition in 1709, an immense body of critical knowledge has been built about Shakespeares work by inquirers and scholars in the most diverse fields of humanistic study.

The cult of Shakespeare was established, however, by the Romantics they worshipped him as an original genius, the poet-prophet-bard unsurpassed by any other writer.

His works were not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but [] also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, [] to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties (Thomas de Quincey, On the Knocking of the Gate in Macbeth, 1823).

Later, George Bernard Shaw was to refer to this adulation (excessive, in his opinion) by the term bardolatry.

Shakespeares centrality in the literary canon What makes Shakespeare a writer not for an age, but for

all time (Ben Jonson)? A. The variety of his work

He was a master of every contemporary dramatic form Extremely diverse range of approached subjects, most of

them re-workings and adaptations from a variety of ancient, medieval and contemporary sources English, Italian, and French.

B. His inventiveness and imagination were invested not in the plots, but in the creation of characters and the exploration of their mind and heart he builds a whole human universe in his plays.

Every character major or minor has a consistent individuality and is animated by passions, conflicts, aspirations and interests, rendered accurately in their poetic truth.

His characters are always credible, irrespective of the register in which they are conceived tragic or comic, sublime or burlesque, romantic or trivial; they emerge from the dramatic situation with an unsurpassed force of conviction.

Extraordinary insight into human nature, deep understanding of humanity. A wide range of feelings, states of mind, moral attitudes, and experiences are given dramatic shape in his plays: love, friendship, devotion, hate, jealousy, envy, loyalty and betrayal, gratitude and ingratitude, struggle for power, search for truth, etc.

C. The extraordinary command of language, according to the dramatic necessity.

An astonishing variety of styles and registers from the sublime accents of pure poetry in the great blank verse soliloquies to the prose speech of simple folk, craftsmen or servants, in plain, sometimes even trivial, language.

A perfect adequacy of the language to the characters moral nature and to the dramatised experience or emotion.

Harold Bloom (The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages, 1994): Shakespeare IS the canon there is a difference in both kind and degree between Shakespeare and all the other writers. His creation: more comprehensive than that of Dante a

Human Comedy free of the latters theological allegories, free of any religious or moral ideology, of metaphysics, ethical or political theory (except, Bloom says, that attributed to him by critics), therefore a universal mode of representation.

Shakespeare unites in a singular way popular and elitist art he is capable of captivating any kind of audience.

His centrality in the Western canon: primarily because of his mysterious power of representing human character and personality in their mutability, of making the imaginary individuals of his creation free artists of their own selves (Hegel)

The appropriation of Shakespeare by the newer critical theories e.g. Marxist criticism, feminist and gender studies, psychoanalysis, New Historicism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, etc.

These critical trends lay emphasis on the social constructedness of literature, in the detriment of the idea of originality and universal genius

They attempt to relativise Shakespeares value e.g. they analyse colonial attitudes, relations of power, gender relations, race issues in his plays

Some critics consider these kinds of approaches to be reductive Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: [Shakespeare] is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically,

whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him. You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism (). Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare's; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare ().

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon (1890)

Royal Shakespeare Theatre rebuilt 1932 (architect: Elizabeth Scott)

Royal Shakespeare Theatre today

Royal Shakespeare Theatre today front view

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre Hall