William Shakespeare

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Portrait of William Shakespeare on the cover of the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is regarded as the greatest English-language playwright of all time. Many of his plays are required reading in many U. S. school curricula; those taught in schools often include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet.

All told, Shakespeare wrote 17 comedies, 10 tragedies, 10 historical plays, 154 love sonnets, and several other works of non-dramatic poetry. All his plays are freely available on the internet.[1]

Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon and is sometimes called "the bard of Avon." Because of sharing the name "Stratford," the towns of Stratford, Ontario, in Canada and Stratford, Connecticut, have become the homes of Shakespeare festivals where his plays are performed on a regular basis.

Because Shakespeare was not a member of the upper class and did not become famous until late in his life, historians and biographers don't know very much about his life. There are only a few pictures of him, and nobody is sure how accurate they are. Frequently, literary critics have questioned the authorship of many of the plays attributed to him, and there are even some scholars who have believed that he never existed at all, but was instead the pen-name of Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This is the minority view, but there is widespread agreement that at least some of the plays popularly ascribed to Shakespeare were actually largely written by other playwrights. These plays include Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsman, and Timon of Athens, among others.

The idea of an ill-educated (to his contemporaries) person coming among them and making a success was upsetting to the University-educated playwrights of the time. It is believed that the poet, Philip Green, was referring to Shakespeare when he wrote

"There is 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; being an absolute Johannes Factotum, in his conceit the only shake-scene in a country."

The 'tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' is a reference to one of Shakespeare's plays, The Third Part of King Henry VI,[2] while 'shake-scene' is a pun or play on words on Shakespeare's name.

His plays seem to show so much education and erudition that there are even theories that they must have been written by someone else, famous candidates being the Earl of Oxford and Sir Francis Bacon. Like Kennedy assassination theories, most scholars do not believe them, but there are enough questions that new books promoting new theories of Shakespearean authorship continue to keep coming out over the years.

A longstanding theatrical superstition holds that it is bad luck to refer to Macbeth directly by its name, and accordingly, actors traditionally refer to it obliquely as "the Scottish play."

Because Shakespeare's plays are so familiar, there are innumerable references to them in English literature. Sometimes his stories are recast into a different form. Audiences are expected to recognize the musical West Side Story as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, and the classic science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet as a transformed version of The Tempest. The motion picture Shakespeare in Love, which won the 1998 Academy Award as Best Picture is not a history or biography, but is enjoyed for evoking a sense of what Shakespeare's time and place might have been like.

The reverence in which Shakespeare is held, and the language of his plays (which come from the same era as the King James translation of the Bible) should not obscure the fact that his plays were (and still are) fabulously successful commercial entertainment.

He is also famous for his 154 sonnets, short poems written in a very strict rhyme scheme. The sonnets fall into series or sequences. Most of them are usually read as expressions of romantic or platonic love; some appear to be written to a married woman known in the sonnets as the "Dark Lady," some to a young man known as the "Fair Lord."

In his will, Shakespeare wrote, "I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting."[3]

His tomb in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, England, reads as follows:[4]

Good Friend For Jesus Sake Forbeare, To Digg The Dust Enclosed Heare. Blese Be Ye Man Spares Thes Stones, And Curst Be He Moves My Bones.


List of Plays by Shakespeare[1]

Comedies

Histories

Tragedies

Trivia

  • "Shakespeare" was spelled many ways before English spelling was standardized. Some of the more unexpected forms are "Shaxper," "Shaxberd," and "Shaksper."[5]


See also

References

  1. ↑ http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/
  2. ↑ Great Books, Shakespeare: I, Edited by Mortimer J. Adler, 1952.
  3. ↑ http://www.amerisearch.net/index.php?date=2004-04-23&view=View
  4. ↑ Id.
  5. ↑ http://shakespeareauthorship.com/name1.html
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