William Shakespeare

About William Shakespeare...

Who was William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)was an English poet, playwright,
and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's
greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or
simply "the Bard").His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154
sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship.
His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more
often than those of any other playwright.
• Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18,
he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and
twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career
in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord
Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to
have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's
private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his
physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to
him were written by others.
William Shakespeare career on short
• Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and
1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are
regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. Until
about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among
them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be
among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of
his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and
collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare's plays
were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his
lifetime.
William Shakespeare poems
• In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare
published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape
of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.
In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus;
while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the
lustful Tarquin.Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,the poems show the guilt and
moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.Both proved popular and were
often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's
Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor,
was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept
that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities
are marred by leaden effects.The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert
Chester's 1601 Love's M
William Shakespeare influence
• Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he
expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.Until Romeo and Juliet,
for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.Soliloquies had been used
mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore
characters' minds.His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive
Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse
dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes.„
• Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The
American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-
Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked
to Shakespeare's works. These include three operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff,
whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.Shakespeare has also inspired many
painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a
friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew
on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
The style of William Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He
wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the
needs of the characters or the drama.The poetry depends on extended,
sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often
rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches
in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for
example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as
stilted.
• Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic
pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and
consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable.
The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones.
Works of William Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to
their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Two plays not included in the
First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of
the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the
writing of both.No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.
• In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances,
and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term is often used. In
1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That
Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. "Dramas as singular in
theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may,
therefore, borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as
Shakespeare's problem plays." The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other
plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.
Speculation about Shakespeare
• Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of
the works attributed to him. Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher
Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.Several "group theories" have also been
proposed. Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional
attribution,but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship,
continues into the 21st century.
• Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion,but his private views on religion have been the
subject of debate. Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula, and he was a confirmed member of
the Church of England, where he was married, his children were baptised, and where he is buried.
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when practising
Catholicism in England was against the law. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from
a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his
father, John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. However,
the document is now lost and scholars differ as to its authenticity.In 1591, the authorities reported
that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.