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4. William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

ow let us speak about the greatest of all dramatists of the English Renaissance – William Shakespeare. Various ages have found various things in Shakespeare. The 18^th century writers of the Enlightenment saw in him “just observation of general nature”. The Romantic age admired his freedom from literary convention. The later 19^th century critics admired the delicate and complicated psychological insight of his characterization. All ages have admired his command of the language. By modern critics he is presented as the writer and philosopher who is deeply concerned with the moral basis of life. The key concepts of his plays are Nature, Order, Truth, Right and Wrong.

But did this man of genius really exist? Some critics claim that it was not Shakespeare but another person, or a group of people who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare . If he did exist, they say, how did he manage to write 37 plays, 4 poems and 154 sonnets? Why weren’t they all published during his life-time?

One of the possible explanations is that at the time no-one even thought of publishing drama. Each dramatist wrote for his company of actors, and as long as the company had the text, it had the monopoly for staging the play. Publishing it, would have only played into the hands of the rival companies. Yet, 20 plays, several poems and sonnets were published during Shakespeare’s lifetime. After his death, his friends published several other plays in what is known as the ‘First Folio’.

As for the question ‘How was one man able to write so many plays?’ – the answer is fairly simple. Like any other dramatist of the time, Shakespeare mostly did patching and was known as a play-patcher. That is, he took well-known stories and adapted them for the stage. In 1577 Holished published his Chronicles which served as a major source for Shakespeare’s history plays. Two years later, in 1579, there came a publication of North’s translations from Plutarch – that was yet another source for Shakespeare.

What do we actually know about the man called William Shakespeare?

• Childhood and youth

He was born in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1564. John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was engaged in wool industry. He had some pasture land of his own, and also rented a house and land belonging to Robert Arden, whose younger daughter Mary later became his wife. John Shakespeare was elected alderman and by the time their eldest children were born, he acted as bailiff. Some documents of the time indicate that John Shakespeare was illiterate and in documents marked his name with a cross. John and Mary Shakespeare had 8 children – 4 boys and 4 girls. The first two daughters died in infancy. The third child born to them was a son who was named William.

William was a boy of free and open nature, much like his mother, who was a woman of a lively disposition. In his boyhood and youth, William was an inquisitive child: he knew the name of every plant in the woods and in the fields. Later, when he started writing plays, he displayed that knowledge. For example, in Hamlet, when Ophelia goes mad and walks pretending to pick flowers, she mentions the wild flowers that used to grow in Stratford and the neighbourhood. At the age of 7, William was sent to the local Grammar School where the boys were taught ‘the three R’s’: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Besides, they learned elementary Latin and Greek. As his contemporary, Ben Johnson, later wrote, ‘Shakespeare knew little Latin and even less Greek’. Ben Johnson had every reason to say so as he himself had gone to the best London school and could freely speak those two languages. On the other hand, William’s teachers were university graduates and gave him the basic knowledge of literature, history and geography which he deepened later.

In Shakespeare’s time, there was much guesswork in the way children were taught to read. Reading was sometimes the same as learning by heart. The first book was called The Horn-Book. The hornbook was a form of ABC book. It consisted of a piece of parchment or paper pasted onto a wooden board and protected by a sheet of horn. The text usually started with a cross in the top left-hand corner. It was followed by an alphabet, vowels, syllables, and the Lord’s prayer. Shakespeare mentions the Hornbook in his play Love’s Labours Lost.

William saw performances produced by travelling actors who came to Stratford. He was still a boy when he began to set and produce plays even though he had to work hard in his father’s business. Probably, it was also the influence of what he had seen when the Queen visited the nearby castle of Kenilworth. The stately ceremonies, the shows and plays were given in her honour, must have been imprinted in his memory. Later he showed both professional travelling actors and amateurs as characters of his plays. Travelling actors come to the Castle in Hamlet and perform a tragedy, as required by Hamlet. In the comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream a group of amateurs are busy preparing a play for the Duke to be performed on his wedding day.

Upon the wide margin of the Bible belonging to Shakespeare, one can see some drafts of play-bills. One of the play-bills announces that a sad play is to take place in Ann Hathaway’s land. Ann Hathaway was the daughter of a farmer in the village of Shottery, a short distance off Stratford. She was 8 years older than William, but they fell in love with each other and got married in 1582. At that time, Shakespeare was already writing poems. Poetry was so popular and common that Ann Hathaway expressed her feelings towards Shakespeare in verse:

And proud thy Anna well may be

For queens themselves might envy me

Who scarce in palaces can find

My Willie’s form with Willie’s mind.

The first child born to them was their daughter Susanna (1583). Two years later Ann bore him twins, a boy and a girl – Hamneth and Judith. (Unfortunately, Hamneth died at the age of 11.) It was then that the Shakespeares faced hard times. The rich landlord Sir Thomas Lucy, started a conflict with the Shakespeares over the land they had. The trouble was that William was an actor, though an amateur and Sir Thomas Lucy was a Puritan. As a result, the Shakespeares lost their land and became poor. William worked as an assistant teacher in the Grammar School, but the pay was low and he had to look for another job. Shortly after the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left for London.

• Starting a career in London

Little is known about the next years of his life. There is evidence that he worked as a secretary to a nobleman, bought and sold houses, was a buccaneer, an actor and a playwright. Once a year he would return to Stratford and then leave for London again. His playsKing Henry VI and King Richard III were performed in London. It was there that Shakespeare met the actor Richard Burbage, whose father had built the Theatre and whom he had met in Stratford before. Burbage became his friend and the leading actor of the company. Shakespeare was quite a good actor himself, but it often happens even now that the playwright takes the shortest part for himself, leaving the principle ones to others. Thus, in Shakespeare’s company, the first Othello and the first Romeo was Richard Burbage. As for Shakespeare, we only know that he played the part of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Shakespeare soon won the reputation of a play-patcher, then he began to write plays of his own, based on familiar stories. If, at the time, you had asked a Londoner where to find master Shakespeare, he would have shrugged his shoulders. But if you had asked him about Hamlet, he would have explained that that was a Danish prince who had gone mad and had been sent to England. The Londoner would have shown you The Globe where the play was often performed.

‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, the company Shakespeare belonged to, had to pay almost all the money they earned to the owners of playhouses. That is why it was decided to build a playhouse especially for the company and let the actors get a fair share of the profit. The Globe opened in the autumn of 1599 with Julius Caesar – one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.

• Tragedies

At that time, Shakespeare was already quite famous. Towards the end of the 16th century, the London stage shook with his plays – comedies and, especially, tragedies. They were performed at the royal court, in noblemen’s houses, in universities. Once, Hamlet was performed on board a ship. Shakespeare was known on the Continent, even as far as Bohemia (the present-day Czech Republic). Who did he write for? – Mostly, for the audience that would come to The Globe. Shakespeare could please both the groundlings and the lords. If we look back at his most tragic plays, Hamlet and King Lear, let alone comedies – The Twelfth Night, for instance, – we will see that one of the characters is a fool, or a jester. The most moving scenes are mixed with ‘indecent jesters’. Once, at the request of a Lady of Honour, Shakespeare dropped out the graveyard scene from Hamlet. The audience roared wild, threatening to bury the actors, the lady and the author, if the grave-diggers were not restored.

One of the most exciting and moving tragedies is Romeo and Juliet. It has long become a symbol of love and devotion. The name Romeo has become nearly synonymous with “lover.” Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet, does indeed experience a love of such purity and passion that he kills himself when he believes that the object of his love, Juliet, has died. Romeo’s deep capacity for love is merely a part of his larger capacity for intense feeling of all kinds. Love compels him to sneak into the garden of his enemy’s daughter, risking death simply to catch a glimpse of her. Anger compels him to kill his wife’s cousin to avenge the death of his friend. Despair compels him to commit suicide upon hearing of Juliet’s death. Such extreme behavior dominates Romeo’s character throughout the play and contributes to the ultimate tragedy that befalls the lovers.

As for Juliet, she is presented as a young girl, barely 14 years of age, who is suddenly awakened to love. After Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished, Juliet does not follow him blindly. She makes a logical and heartfelt decision that her loyalty and love for Romeo must be her guiding priorities. Essentially, Juliet cuts herself loose from her parents and her social position in Verona—in order to try to reunite with Romeo. When she finds Romeo dead, she does not kill herself out of weakness, but rather out of an intensity of love. Juliet’s development from a naïve, wide-eyed girl into a loyal and capable woman is one of Shakespeare’s early triumphs of characterization. It also marks one of his most confident and treatments of a female character.

Shakespeare’s tragedies, and sometimes comedies, might have been the result of deep personal experience. It is known that, apart from his very young days, he was not a very happy man. We can only trace the history of his mind by his works. The ideals of the Renaissance, the world-wide problems are always focused in his characters. As compared with the classical Greek tragedy which presents model heroes acting according to the law and duty, Shakespeare’s characters are made of flesh and blood. They are full of passions and the problem of choice between virtue and evil. How can evil be overcome is virtue is too passive? This problem is raised in Sonnet 66.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold Desert a beggar born,

And needy Nothing trimm’d in jollity,

And purest Faith unfaithfully forsworn,

And gilded Honour shamefully misplaced,

And maiden Virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right Perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And Strength by limping Sway disabled,

And Art made tongue-tied by Authority,

And Folly doctor-like controlling Skill,

And simple Truth miscall’d Simplicity,

And captive Good attending captain ill:

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

At the same time, the effort to avenge the wrong, only creates new crimes – that is shown in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare stresses that murder is not a way out. And in search of an answer there comes Hamlet. In the tragedy man’s existence itself is questioned. The famous line from Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘to be or not to be’ has long become a saying.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them.

In the same soliloquy, Hamlet says: ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’. In another tragedy, Macbeth is also tortured by the pangs of conscience. Thus, it is conscience that appears to be the driving force of the Shakespearean tragedy. ‘A sea of troubles’ which Hamlet speaks about brings into collision different people. By the end of each tragedy, the stage is full of corpses – again, unlike in the Greek tragedy. But Shakespeare shows that the noble heroes do not kill for the sake of revenge only, they kill for the sake of justice and then they perish, too.

• Sonnets

Shakespeare raised the same problems in his sonnets which he began to write in the 1590s. All 154 sonnets were published in 1609. Many of them were written to a friend whose name remained unknown. Another personage of the sonnets is ‘The Dark Lady’. It was believed that the Dark Lady was Mary Fitton, for a time – one of the ornaments of the Queen’s court. Now it is thought that the Dark Lady was Emilia Bassano, the daughter of a royal. It was to her that Shakespeare wrote:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,

Coral is far more red than her lips red,

If snow be white, well, then her breasts are dun,

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

(Sonnet 130)

Another well-known sonnet that ranks among the best is Sonnet 90 (‘Then hate me if thou wilt…’). The atmosphere of misery and the musical effect of the Sonnet are achieved through a frequent use of long vowels (which number 22) and diphthongs (which number 34). The sonnet was masterfully translated into Russian by Samuel Marshak.

• Old age and death

Shakespeare never considered himself a man of genius. He had his ups and downs, had to be a pawnbroker, he even had to quarrel with his fellow actors. The prospect of dying poor frightened him that is why in 1597 he bought two houses in Stratford and was proud that he would die an esquire. He enjoyed fame and was flattered when he was received by King James I. (The king discussed with him his plays, especially “Macbeth” in connection with the role of monarchy.) At the end of his life, Shakespeare suffered a terrible blow: in 1613 The Globe burnt down. Shakespeare returned to Stratford, where he lived three more years. The remaining years of his life were anything but happy. He suffered from asthma. One of his daughters was still unmarried and had grown bitter. Anne Hathaway, or Mrs. Shakespeare, had turned into an old grumbler. But in her own way, she was attached to him. Shakespeare died in 1616, presumably on his birthday. He was buried in the yard of the same church where he had been baptized and married. The painted bust on his grave shows him as he was in the last year of his life – a typical town burger, bald and wrinkled. But everybody, in their mind’s eye, sees their own Shakespeare.