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

"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 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 and his work has been adulated by eminent figures through the centuries. He is often called England's national poet, the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard") or the "Swan of Avon".

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613, 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 and 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." (Although interpretations differ, the italicised line certainly parodies the phrase "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, Act II Scene 7

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, 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 a man of the theatre, with many phrases, words, and references to the stage.

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. 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.

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

By 1598, his name also began to appear on the title pages of his plays, presumably as a selling point. 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 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. Although Susanna married Dr John Hall, there are no direct descendants of Shakespeare alive today.

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

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.

Works

Plays

Image of Shakespeare from the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his 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 believed to be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear may be 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 may also have 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.

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 labeled 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

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

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 Shake-speare'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, possibly 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 served his dramatic apprenticeship at the height of the Elizabethan period, in the years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada; he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years' War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods. His style changed not only in accord with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.

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. To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet—two rhyming lines of poetry—to heighten expectation of what is to follow. A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage, to the sound of a clock chiming, to murder Duncan he says,

Hear it not Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

While many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote the most important passages in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger. This pattern changed in Shakespeare's later plays, where he began to use a flowing form of blank verse (where the lines don't rhyme and are not grouped in stanzas). This style is most evident in The Tempest.

His plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict. Among his most famous soliloquies are To be, or not to be, All the world's a stage, and What a piece of work is a man.

Shakespeare's writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay, in which double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used.

Influences

Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre and literature. 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: dramatists writing for London's new commercial playhouses were combining two different strands of dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis. 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 largely symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have seen this type of play (along with, perhaps, mystery plays and miracle plays). The other strand of dramatic tradition was classical aesthetic theory. This theory derived ultimately from Aristotle; in Renaissance England, however, the theory was better known through its Roman interpreters and practitioners. At the universities, academic plays were staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, usually performed in Latin, adhered to classical ideas of unity and decorum, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action. Shakespeare would have learned this theory at grammar school, where Plautus and especially Terence were key parts of the curriculum and were taught in editions with lengthy theoretical introductions.

Elizabethan Shakespeare

For Shakespeare as he began to write, both traditions were alive; they were, moreover, filtered through the recent success of the University Wits on the London stage. 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 revolutionised theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with classical theory to produce a new secular form. The new drama combined the rhetorical complexity of the academic play with the bawdy energy of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple allegory. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare continued these artistic strategies, 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. What Marlowe and Kyd did for tragedy, John Lyly and George Peele, among others, did for comedy: they offered models of witty dialogue, romantic action, and exotic, often pastoral location that formed the basis of Shakespeare's comedic mode throughout his career.

Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character. In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more skeptical, than Marlowe's. By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet.

In comedy, Shakespeare strayed even further from classical models. The Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Menaechmi, follows the model of new comedy closely. Shakespeare's other Elizabethan comedies are more romantic. Like Lyly, he often makes romantic intrigue (a secondary feature in Latin new comedy) the main plot element; even this romantic plot is sometimes given less attention than witty dialogue, deceit, and jests. The "reform of manners," which Horace considered the main function of comedy, survives in such episodes as the gulling of Malvolio.

Jacobean Shakespeare

Shakespeare reached maturity as a dramatist at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and in the first years of the reign of James. In these years, he responded to a deep shift in popular tastes, both in subject matter and approach. At the turn of the decade, he responded to the vogue for dramatic satire initiated by the boy players at Blackfriars and St. Paul's. At the end of the decade, he seems to have attempted to capitalize on the new fashion for tragicomedy, even collaborating with John Fletcher, the writer who had popularized the genre in England.

The influence of younger dramatists such as John Marston and Ben Jonson is seen not only in the problem plays, which dramatize intractable human problems of greed and lust, but also in the darker tone of the Jacobean tragedies. The Marlovian, heroic mode of the Elizabethan tragedies is gone, replaced by a darker vision of heroic natures caught in environments of pervasive corruption. As a sharer in both the Globe and in the King's Men, Shakespeare never wrote for the boys' companies; however, his early Jacobean work is markedly influenced by the techniques of the new, satiric dramatists. One play, Troilus and Cressida, may even have been inspired by the War of the Theatres.

Shakespeare's final plays hearken back to his Elizabethan comedies in their use of romantic situation and incident. In these plays, however, the sombre elements that are largely glossed over in the earlier plays are brought to the fore and often rendered dramatically vivid. This change is related to the success of tragicomedies such as Philaster, although the uncertainty of dates makes the nature and direction of the influence unclear. From the evidence of the title-page to The Two Noble Kinsmen and from textual analysis it is believed by some editors that Shakespeare ended his career in collaboration with Fletcher, who succeeded him as house playwright for the King's Men. These last plays resemble Fletcher's tragicomedies in their attempt to find a comedic mode capable of dramatizing more serious events than had his earlier comedies.

Later influence

Shakespeare's influence isn't limited to theatre. His plays and poems have influenced a large number of writers in the following centuries, including novelists such as Charles Dickens and William Faulkner, and Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (with critic George Steiner calling all English poetic dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson "feeble variations on Shakesearean themes."

Finally, Shakespeare's writings greatly influenced the entire English language. Prior to and during Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not fixed. As England and English culture gained power and pride during Shakespeare's time, he and other poets and playwrights experimented with the English language. Because of the popularity of Shakespeare's plays, a large number of English words and phrases that Shakespeare created or modified are now in common usage.

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.

In Shakespeare's lifetime, the estimate of his contemporaries was generous, but not overwhelming. In 1598, Francis Meres singled out Shakespeare among a group of English poets which he compared with the greatest of Greece and Rome, and he was alluded to alongside Chaucer, Gower and Spenser by the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. In the years following Shakespeare's death, his rival Ben Jonson would record both praise and criticism, describing Shakespeare as "soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage" in his prefatory poem to the First Folio, yet elsewhere asserting that "Shakespeare wanted art".

In Restoration society, the vogue for neoclassicism, and tastes at the Royal courts, led to a consensus which ranked Shakespeare below Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. The influential critic John Dryden acknowledged this consensus, and sought to modify it in 1668, saying of Jonson: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". At this time the collaborative works of Beaumont and Fletcher were twice as popular as those of Shakespeare in the theatres.

Beginning in the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright and poet. Shakespeare's classic status was established by a series of critically annotated versions of his works, including those by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, Alexander Pope in 1725 and, most influentially, Samuel Johnson in 1765. Johnson's greatest criticism of Shakespeare was in the over-use of puns: "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare's reputation began to spread into Europe, largely as a result of the treatment of his works by Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

"There is no eminent writer ... whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

—George Bernard Shaw, on Shakespeare's mind.

Neoclassicism (the view that dramatic works should be judged by principles established by Aristotle) damaged Shakespeare's reputation until the Romantic era, when his genius began to be acknowledged by other, more individual, standards: particularly as a result of the works of the translator and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel in Germany, and the poet and lecturer Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. This reverence for Shakespeare became parodied in the term bardolatry, which would be attacked by George Bernard Shaw who argued that, after Ibsen, Shakespeare had become antiquated and would need to be set aside. The plays of Shakespeare were also dismissed as rubbish by Leo Tolstoy. In the theatres, throughout the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare became increasingly pictorial, using highly elaborate scenery, detailed costumes and props, spectacular effects and the frequent use of tableaux.

In the twentieth century, a professional field of study known as "English" developed, so among academics, Shakespeare was subjected to critical methods such as structuralism, poststructuralism and semiotics, and was analysed from feminist and Marxist perspectives.

The widespread reverence for Shakespeare has provoked an unforeseen negative reaction in some of today's youth. Because most people in the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, there is an association by some students of his work with boredom and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture; an ironic fate considering the social mix of Shakespeare's original audience. 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 use his plots rather than his dialogue.

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 plays show signs of either collaboration or revision or both. 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.

Stephen Greenblatt makes the case 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 genres: Tragedies, Comedies, and Histories. However, this method was not the conventional grouping at the time. When Shakespeare was alive, plays were usually organized chronologically. The organization chosen for Shakespeare's plays, which is featured in the title Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, enables readers to read the plays in light of the genre, appreciating resemblances within each group as well as the individual distinctions.

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

Parodies

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

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 ISBN 0-393-31507-X
• Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (1970). Biography
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (Jonathan Cape, 2004). Biography ISBN 0-224-06276-X
• Bertram Fields, Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare (2005) ISBN 0-060-83417-X
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). Literary Criticism ISBN 1-573-22751-X
• Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare BBC Books (2003). Companion to the television series of the same title. ISBN 0-563-53477-X
• Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography *(Chatto and Windus 2005). Biography. ISBN 1-856-19726-3
• A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man (St. Martin’s Press, revised ed. 1988). Biography ISBN 0-312-03425-3
• S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford U. Press, 1977). Biography ISBN 0-195-02433-8
• Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th century (Chatto and Windus, 1954)

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.