Profile of William Shakespeare on Famous Like Me

William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright. Shakespeare has a reputation as one of the greatest of all writers in the English language and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists. He is among the very few playwrights who have excelled in both tragedy and comedy. His works have been translated into every major living language and his plays are continually performed all around the world.

Life

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life

Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, and Shake-speare, due to the fact that Elizabethan spelling was very erratic) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman, and of Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. They lived on Henley Street. His baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year. Because baptisms were performed within a few days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 as his birthday. It provides a convenient symmetry: he died on that day in 1616. As the son of a prominent town official, Shakespeare probably attended King Edward VI Grammar school in central Stratford, which may have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. At the age of 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was 25, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. After his marriage, William Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London literary scene.

The late 1580s are known as Shakespeare's 'Lost Years' because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. On May 26, 1583 Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. A son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised soon after on February 2, 1585. In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on August 11, 1596.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London. Around this time he evidently had enough of a reputation 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 beeing 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.)

In addition to being a playwright, Shakespeare also worked as an actor and, eventually, part-owner of a playing company, known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men. The company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the King's Men.

By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every man in his Humour written by Ben Jonson. Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years

Shakespeare retired in about 1611. He died on April 23, 1616 at the age of 52. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters, Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John Hall. There are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today. Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was considered to have written an epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blest be the man that spares these stones,

But cursed be he that moves my bones.

Career and reputation

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

Shakespeare wrote his works between 1586 and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are often uncertain. Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays. The problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardized spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating errors as far as possible. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play.

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.

In literary criticism Shakespeare held a unique position from the start. The unbending French neo-classical "rules" and the three unities of time, place, and action were never strictly followed in England, and practically all critics gave the more "correct" Ben Jonson second place to Shakespeare. The myth that the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by accolades from Restoration and 18th-century writers such as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. The 18th century is also largely responsible for setting the text of Shakespeare's plays. In the twenty-first century, Shakespeare is often considered the greatest author by the general public. Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright.

Plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

A number of Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among greatest in the English language and in Western literature. His plays cover both tragedy, history, and comedy and have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed all around the world.

Among the most famous and critically acclaimed of Shakespeare's plays are Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth.

Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of folios and quartos. The division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic of these folios. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays "problem plays" as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. In addition, Shakespeare's later comedies are commonly known as "romances". There is also some question about the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays.

Sonnets

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets comprise a collection of 154 poems in sonnet form that deal with such themes as love, beauty, politics, and mortality. All but two first appeared in a 1609 collection; 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 titled The Passionate Pilgrim.

The sonnets were published under conditions that have become unclear to history. For example, there is a mysterious dedication at the beginning of the text wherein a certain "Mr. W. H." is mentioned as "the begetter" of the poems by the publisher Thomas Thorpe, but it is not known who this man was. Also, although the works were written by William Shakespeare, is not known if the publisher used an authorized manuscript from him, or an unauthorized copy. The poems were probably written over a period of several years.

Speculations about Shakespeare

Questions about Shakespeare identity

Main article: Shakespearean authorship

Over the years such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, christened William Shaksper or Shakspere, actually produced the works attributed to him. Many mainstream scholars consider this baseless, while others think the claims merit further investigation. Many attribute this debate to the scarcity and ambiguity of many of the historical records of his period. These claims necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct historical evidence for them, although advocates of alternative authors point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history.

Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, became the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, after having been identified in the 1920s. Oxford partisans note the similarities between the Earl's life, and events and sentiments depicted in the plays and sonnets. The principal hurdle for Oxfordian theory is the evidence that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after their candidate's death, but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to have written the works of Shakespeare, though he too was dead before most of them were written. A related question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly-accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.

Sexuality and Shakespeare's sonnets and plays

Main article: Shakespeare's sexuality

The content of Shakespeare's works has raised the question of whether he may have been bisexual. It should be noted that the question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" in a modern sense is anachronistic, as the concepts of homosexuality and bisexuality did not emerge until the nineteenth century; while sodomy was a crime in the period, there was no word for an exclusively homosexual identity (see History of homosexuality). Elizabethans also frequently wrote in same sexed terminology. The controversy continues in the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare's sonnets were initially published, perhaps without his approval, in 1609. One hundred twenty-six of them appear to be love poems addressed to a young man (known as the "Fair Lord"), and twenty-six are addressed to a married woman (known as the "Dark Lady"). Some have seen evidence of homosexuality in the poems, yet not everyone has interpreted these selected passages as sexual. The poems can be explained as referring to intense friendship, not sexual love. Another explanation is that the poems are not autobiographical, but mere fiction, so that the 'speaker' of the Sonnets should not be simplistically identified with Shakespeare himself. This is a common error in critical hermeneusis. Despite these alternative interpretations, many readers have suspected otherwise. In 1640, John Benson published a second edition in which he changed most of the pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly all of the sonnets were addressed to the Dark Lady. It was not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their original forms. By 1944, the Variorum edition of his Sonnets contained an appendix with the conflicting views of nearly forty commentators. C.S. Lewis wrote that the sonnets are "too lover-like for ordinary male friendship" and that he "found no real parallel to such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature" .

Some readers have found similar evidence in the plays. The most commonly-cited example is The Merchant of Venice, in which the characters Bassanio and Antonio have a close friendship which some have interpreted as paederastic, that is, as a sexual/mentoring relationship between an adult male and a young man, in which the adult helps his lover in the transistion to adulthood, a relationship that culminates in helping him find a wife. Several of the comedies, such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It contain comic situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device which exploits the fact that in Shakespeare's day women's roles were played by boys. While the situations thus presented are heterosexual in terms of the story, the stage image of men wooing and and kissing may well have been titillating to those of a homosexual orientation.

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