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.
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Histories: Henry VIII and Richard II.
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Comedies: All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew.
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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
