William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed (National Portrait Gallery, London).
Born	April 1564 (exact date unknown) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1616 Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
Literary movement	Renaissance, Elizabethan and Jacobean eras

"Shakespeare" redirects here. For other uses, see Shakespeare (disambiguation).

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language and as the world's preeminent dramatist. He wrote approximately 38 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems. Already great in his lifetime, his fame grew considerably after his death. His work was adulated by eminent figures through the centuries. He is often called England's national poet, and sometimes the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard") or the "Swan of Avon".

Shakespeare produced most of his work between 1586 and 1612, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are uncertain. He is one of the few playwrights considered to have excelled in both tragedy and comedy; his plays combine popular appeal with complex characterisation, and poetic grandeur with philosophical depth.

Shakespeare's works have been translated into every major living language, and his plays are continually performed all over the world. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world; many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage in English and other languages. Many have speculated about his sexuality, religious affiliation, and the authorship of his works.

Life

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life

Shakespeare's signature, from his will: By me William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, Shaxper, and Shake-speare) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. His birth is assumed to have occurred at the family house on Henley Street. The record of Shakespeare's christening is dated 26 April of that year. As christenings were performed within 3 days of birth, tradition has settled on 23 April, Saint Georges day, as his birthday. This date has a convenient symmetry, for Shakespeare died on the same day: 23 April, in 1616.

Shakespeare may have attended King Edward VI Grammar School in central Stratford, but no school records of the time survive. As the son of a prominent town official, he was entitled to attend free of charge. The school probably would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature, although Elizabethan-era grammar schools varied in quality.

At the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, aged twenty-six, on 28 November 1582. One document identified her as being "of Temple Grafton," near Stratford, and the marriage may have taken place there. Two neighbours of Hathaway posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably because Anne was three months pregnant. On 26 May 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died aged 11 in the Black Plague in 1596; his date of death is not known, but he was buried on 11 August.

After his marriage Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. Indeed, the period from 1585 (when his twin children were born) until 1592 are known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence survives to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. Numerous stories attempt to account for Shakespeare's life during this time: including one that Shakespeare got in trouble for poaching deer, one that he worked as a schoolmaster for the Catholic Hoghton family in Lancashire, and one that he minded the horses of theatre patrons in London. However, there is no direct evidence to support these stories, and they all appear to have begun circulating after Shakespeare's death.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London; his reputation was high enough for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (The italicised line parodies the phrase "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)

By late 1594 Shakespeare was an actor, writer and part-owner of a playing company known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men — like others of the period, the company took its name from its aristocratic sponsor, in this case the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough for the new king James I (1603) to adopt the company himself, after which it became known as the King's Men. Shakespeare's writing shows him indeed to be an actor, with many phrases, words, and references to acting.

Shakespeare's House in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Now home of the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust

By 1596 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and by 1598 he appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour written by Ben Jonson. By 1598, his name also began to appear on the title pages of his plays, presumably as a selling point.

There is a tradition that Shakespeare, in addition to writing many of the plays his company performed, and being concerned as part-owner of the company with business and financial details, continued to act in various parts, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V.

He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599. By 1604, he had moved north of the river, lodging just north of St Paul's Cathedral with a Huguenot family named Mountjoy. He helped arrange a marriage between the Mountjoys' daughter and their apprentice Stephen Bellott. Bellott later sued his father-in-law for defaulting on part of the promised dowry, and Shakespeare was called as a witness. Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years

Shakespeare's funerary monument

Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford in 1613. He died on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. Supposedly Shakespeare died on his birthday, if the tradition that he was born on April 23 is correct. He was married to Anne Hathaway until his death and was survived by her and their two daughters, Susanna and Judith. His son Hamnet had died in 1596.

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel, not on account of his literary fame but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440. A monument on the wall nearest his grave, probably placed by his family, features a bust showing Shakespeare posed in the act of writing. Each year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing hand of the bust. He may have written the epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosèd here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Although Susanna married Dr John Hall, there are no direct descendants of Shakespeare alive today.

Works

Plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

Many of Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. The First Folio of his works divided these plays into tragedies, histories and comedies. They have been translated into every major living language, and are continually performed all over the world.

Like many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the works of other playwrights and reworked earlier stories and historical material. Hamlet (c. 1601) is probably a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear is an adaptation of an earlier play, called King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts: Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North) for most of his history plays, and the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which provided material for Macbeth and King Lear) for his English history plays. Shakespeare also possibly borrowed stylistic elements from contemporary playwrights like Christopher Marlowe.

Shakespeare's plays tend to be placed into three main stylistic groups:

• early romantic comedies and histories (such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV, Part 1);
• middle period romantic comedies and tragedies (including his most famous tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, as well as "problem plays" such as Troilus and Cressida);
• later romances (such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest).

The earlier plays range from broad comedy to historical nostalgia. The middle-period plays have grander themes, addressing issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and ambition. The late romances have redemptive plotlines with ambiguous endings and magic and other fantastical elements. However, the borders between these genres are never clear.

Image of Shakespeare from the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays

Some of Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos; but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors who had been in Shakespeare's company. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the pattern of the First Folio. It is at this point that stage directions, punctuation and act divisions enter his plays, setting the trend for further future editorial decisions. Modern criticism has also labelled some of his plays "problem plays", or tragi-comedies, because they defy easy categorisation, or perhaps purposefully break conventions. The term "romances" has also been preferred for the later comedies.

There are many controversies about the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays. The lack of an authoritative print version of his plays during his lifetime accounts for part of the textual problem, the difficulty of identifying which plays he wrote, and for the different textual versions of some of his plays. The textual problem became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions also resulted from printers' errors, compositors' misreadings, or wrongly scanned lines from the source material. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, exacerbating transcribers' confusions. Modern scholars believe Shakespeare revised his plays throughout the years, sometimes producing two different versions of one play.

Sonnets

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 poems that deal with such themes as love, beauty, and mortality. All but two first appeared in the 1609 publication entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets; numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. The Sonnets were written over a number of years, probably beginning in the early 1590s.

The conditions under which the sonnets were published are unclear. The 1609 text is dedicated to one "Mr. W.H.", who is described as "the only begetter" of the poems in the dedication. It is unknown if the dedication was written by Shakespeare or Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. It is also unknown who this man was, although there are many theories, including those who believe him to be the young man featured in the sonnets. In addition, it is not known whether the publication of the sonnets was even authorised by Shakespeare.

Other poems

Besides his sonnets, Shakespeare also wrote three known longer poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and A Lover's Complaint. These poems appear to have been written either in an attempt to win the patronage of a rich benefactor (as was common at the time) or as the result of such patronage. For example, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were both dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.

In addition, Shakespeare wrote the short poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. The anthology The Passionate Pilgrim was attributed to him upon its first publication in 1599, but in fact only five of its poems are by Shakespeare and the attribution was withdrawn in the second edition.

Style

Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square, London.

Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature, he also transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterisation, plot, action, language, and genre. His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theatre, permitting it to be admired by intellectuals as well as by those seeking pure entertainment.

Theatre was changing when Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes who validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over evil. The characters and plot situations are symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have been exposed to this type of play (along with mystery plays and miracle plays). Meanwhile, at the universities, academic plays were being staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, often performed in Latin, used a more exact and academically respectable poetic style than the morality plays, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action.

By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe began to revolutionise theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with academic theatre to produce a new secular form. The new drama had the poetic grandeur and philosophical depth of the academic play and the bawdy populism of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple moral allegories. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare took these changes to a new level, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it means to be human.

Shakespeare wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems with a rhythm known as iambic pentameter, in which each line has ten syllables, alternating unstressed with stressed syllables.

Reputation

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

"He was not of an age, but for all time."

—Ben Jonson, in an epitaph to The Bard written in the early 1600s.

Shakespeare's reputation has grown considerably since his own time. During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642–1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. As with other older playwrights, Shakespeare's plays were mercilessly adapted by later dramatists for the Restoration stage with little of the reverence that would later develop.

Beginning in the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright (and, to a lesser extent, poet). Initially this reputation focused on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theatre. By the early 19th century, though, Shakespeare began hitting peaks of fame and popularity. During this time, theatrical productions of Shakespeare provided spectacle and melodrama for the masses and were extremely popular. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge then raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry (from bard + idolatry), in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. In the middle to late 19th century, Shakespeare also became an emblem of English pride and a "rallying-sign", as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British Empire.

This reverence has provoked an unforeseen negative reaction in the youth. In the 21st century most people in the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, and there is an association by some students of his work with boredom beyond comprehension and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture; an ironic fate considering the social mix of Shakespeare's audience.

"Not for all time, but for an age."

—A twist on the Jonson quote developed by a critic in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright and are frequently adapted into film—including Hollywood movies specifically marketed to broad teenage audiences, though many simply take credit for his plots rather than his narrative. Famously, Shakespeare's plays are often transferred to a different environment even when retaining his dialogue.

On another level, many modern English words and phrases that are taken for granted were introduced by Shakespeare.

See also: Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

Speculations about Shakespeare

Authorship

Main article: Shakespearean authorship question

Around one hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the plays and poetry attributed to him. Researchers who believe the works to have been written by another playwright, or group of playwrights, have since then proposed many candidates for alternative authorship, including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. While it is generally accepted in academic circles that Shakespeare's plays were written by Shakespeare of Stratford and not another author, popular interest in the subject has continued into the 21st century.

Another question in Shakespearean research addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that a number of his "later plays" show signs of collaboration and/or revision. This would not be uncommmon, as collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre.

Religion

In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church after decades of uncertainty. In the ensuing years, extreme pressure was placed on England's Catholics to convert to the Protestant Church of England, and recusancy laws made Catholicism illegal. Some historians maintain that in Shakespeare's lifetime there was a substantial and widespread quiet resistance to the newly imposed faith. Some scholars, using both historical and literary evidence, have argued that Shakespeare was one of these recusants.

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. The tract was found in the 18th century in the rafters of a house which had once been John Shakespeare's, and was seen and described by the reputable scholar Edmond Malone. Malone later changed his mind and declared that he thought the tract was a forgery. His opinion is shared by most modern scholars. However, the tract has since been lost, and the truth can therefore never be known. John Shakespeare was also listed as one who did not attend church services, but this was "for feare of processe for Debtte", according to the commissioners, not because he was a recusant. Then again, avoiding creditors may have merely been a convenient pretext for a recusant's avoidance of the established church's services.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire. In 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. It may, however, also be a sign of Puritan sympathies; Susannah's sister Judith was, according to some statements, of a Puritanical bent. Archdeacon Richard Davies, an 18th century Anglican cleric, allegedly wrote of Shakespeare: "He dyed a Papyst". Four of the six schoolmasters at the grammar school during Shakespeare's youth were Catholic sympathisers, and Simon Hunt, likely one of Shakespeare’s teachers, later became a Jesuit.

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, one historian, Clare Asquith, has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing. Asquith claims that Shakespeare uses terms such as "high" when referring to Catholic characters and "low" when referring to Protestants (the terms refer to their altars) and "light" or "fair" to refer to Catholic and "dark" to refer to Protestant, a reference to certain clerical garbs. Asquith also detects in Shakespeare's work the use of a simple code used by the Jesuit underground in England which took the form of a mercantile terminology wherein priests were 'merchants' and souls were 'jewels', the people pursuing them were 'creditors', and the Tyburn gallows where the members of the underground died was called 'the place of much trading'. The Jesuit underground used this code so their correspondences looked like innocuous commercial letters, and Asquith claims that Shakespeare also used this code.

Greenblatt (2004:338) is persuasive that the "equivocator" arriving at the gate of hell in the Porter's speech in Macbeth refers to the Jesuit Father Henry Garnet after his execution in 1606. He allows, however, that Shakespeare probably included the allusion for the sake of topicality, trusting that his audience would have heard of Garnet's pamphlet on equivocation (when to lie under oath) rather than any hidden sympathy for the man or his cause—indeed the portrait is not a sympathetic one. Shakespeare may have also been aware of the "equivocation" concept which appeared as the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley as well as the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.

Needless to say, Shakespeare’s Catholicism is by no means universally accepted. The Catholic Encyclopedia questions not only his Catholicism, but whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age." Greenblatt suspects Catholic sympathies of some kind or another in Shakespeare and his family but considers the writer to be a less than pious person with essentially worldly motives. An increasing number of scholars do look to matters biographical and evidence from Shakespeare’s work such as the placement of young Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg while old Hamlet’s ghost is in purgatory, the sympathetic view of religious life ("thrice blessed"), scholastic theology in The Phoenix and the Turtle, and sympathetic allusions to martyred English Jesuit St. Edmund Campion in Twelfth Night and many other matters as suggestive of a Catholic worldview.

Sexuality

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

As with many aspects of Shakespeare's life, there is little direct evidence with regards to Shakespeare's sexuality aside from the fact that he was married to Anne Hathaway and fathered three children. Circumstantial evidence suggests Shakespeare's wedding to Hathaway was hurried because she was already pregnant. Evidence for this is that their first child, Susanna, was born six months after the marriage ceremony on 26 May 1583. In addition, a marriage license was issued for the couple after only one reading of their intent to marry (the reading was normally done three times in order to give local residents a chance to voice any legal or other objection to the marriage).

It is possible that Shakespeare felt trapped by this marriage, speculation supported by the fact that he left his family and moved to London after only three years of marriage.

While in London, Shakespeare may have had affairs with different women. One anecdote along these lines is provided by a law student named John Manningham, who wrote in his diary that Shakespeare had a tryst with a woman during a performance of Richard III. While this is one of the few surviving contemporary anecdotes about Shakespeare, scholars are sceptical of its validity (although the anecdote may have helped inspire the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love). Still, the anecdote suggests that at least one of Shakespeare's contemporaries (Manningham) believed that Shakespeare was heterosexual, even if he wasn't "averse to an occasional infidelity to his marriage vows." Possible evidence of other affairs are that twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the so-called "Dark Lady").

In recent decades some scholars have taken another view of Shakespeare's sexuality, stating that possible homoerotic allusions in a number of his works suggest that Shakespeare was bisexual. While twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets are addressed to his Dark Lady, one hundred and twenty-six are addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"). The amorous tone of the latter group, which focuses on the young man's beauty and the writer's devotion, has been interpreted as suggestive evidence for Shakespeare's being bisexual. For example, in 1954, C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" (although he added that they are not the poetry of "full-blown pederasty") and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature." Nonetheless, others interpret them as referring to intense friendship rather than sexual love.

See also

• Complete Works of Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's late romances
• Chronology of Shakespeare plays
• Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays - Oxfordian
• Anne Hathaway
• Elizabethan era

• English Renaissance theatre
• Globe Theatre
• Shakespeare on screen
• List of Shakespearean characters
• List of English words invented by Shakespeare
• Early Modern English language

Bibliography

Shakespeare's plays are traditionally organised into three groups: Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories. The following list separates the plays according to their classification in the First Folio, the first published edition of Shakespeare's plays. Today, some of the comedies are usually considered as a separate subgenre, the 'romances' or tragicomedies; these plays are highlighted with an asterisk (*).

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

• The Tempest*
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• As You Like It
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale*
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre* (not included in the First Folio)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen* (not included in the First Folio)
• Cymbeline*

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean histories

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

• Romeo and Juliet
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus
• Timon of Athens
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra

Poems

• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim
• The Phoenix and the Turtle
• A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won
• Cardenio

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

• The Birth of Merlin
• Locrine
• The London Prodigal
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• The Puritan
• The Second Maiden's Tragedy
• Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas Lord Cromwell
• The Two Noble Kinsmen
• A Yorkshire Tragedy
• Edward III

Shakespeare on screen

Main article: Shakespeare on screen

• BBC Television Shakespeare
• Shakespeare in Love

Early editions of Shakespeare

• bad quarto
• first quarto
• second quarto
• first folio
• second folio
• false folio

Further reading

• Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun (1964). Fictionalised biography
• Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (1970). Biography
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004). Biography
• Bertram Fields, Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare (2005)
• John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France (2005)
• Shakespeare on Film Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). Literary Criticism
• Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (2003) Historical background, BBC Books, ISBN 0-563-52141-4 (paperback). This work is a companion to the television series of the same title.
• Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography *(2005). Biography
• A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man (St. Martin’s Press, revised ed. 1988). Biography
• S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford U. Press, 1977). Biography
• Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (Harvest, 1947). This collection of criticism contains a classic essay on Macbeth.
• J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge U. Press, 1970). Literary Criticism
• P. Crittwell, The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th century (Vintage, 1960).
• Dr Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare's Theory of Drama (Cambridge U. Press, 1996). Shakespearean Scholar's Literary analysis.
• Dr Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (Cambridge U. Press, 1999). Explains the work carried out after the building of the New Globe Theatre in London.

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare includes the complete works, an advanced search function, a complete concordance, and some statistics about the works.
• The Internet Shakespeare Editions at the University of Victoria has old spelling versions of all the texts, with newly edited modern texts for some works; facsimiles, an extensive section on the life and times, a growing database of Shakespeare in performance, and a detailed section of links.
• Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet
• The Shakespeare Wiki
• William Shakespeare Search Engine
• National Geographic article about Shakespeare's coinages
• Designing Shakespeare - 40 years of Shakespearian performance in London and Stratford, featuring thousands of high-quality photographs, cast lists, reviews and interviews
• The Royal Shakespeare Company - probably the most famous classical theatre company in the world. This site has all the latest information on current and future productions, ticket sales, merchandising as well as press and educational resources.