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William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait (held by the National Portrait Gallery, London)
Born	Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Baptised	26 April 1564
Died	23 April 1616 (aged 52)[a] Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Resting place	Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon
Occupations	Playwright poet actor
Years active	c. 1585–1613
Era	Elizabethan Jacobean
Movement	English Renaissance
Spouse	Anne Hathaway ​ (m. 1582)​
Children	Susanna Hall Hamnet Shakespeare Judith Quiney
Parents	John Shakespeare (father) Mary Arden (mother)
Signature

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April^[b] 1564 – 23 April 1616)^[c] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.^[2][3][4] He is often called England’s national poet and the «Bard of Avon» (or simply «the Bard»).^[5][d] His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays,^[e] 154 sonnets, three 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.^[7] He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

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.^[8][9][10]

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.^[11][12][f] His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.^[2][3][4] 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. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare’s, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works that included all but two of his plays.^[13] Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: «not of an age, but for all time».^[13]

Life

Early life

Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family.^[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George’s Day.^[15] This date, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.^[16][17] He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.^[18]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King’s New School in Stratford,^[19][20][21] a free school chartered in 1553,^[22] about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,^[23][24] and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.^[25]

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway’s neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.^[26] The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,^[27][28] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.^[29] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.^[30] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.^[31]

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the «complaints bill» of a law case before the Queen’s Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589.^[32] Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare’s «lost years».^[33] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.^[34][35] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.^[36] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.^[37] Some 20th-century scholars suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain «William Shakeshafte» in his will.^[38][39] Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.^[40][41]

London and theatrical career

It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.^[42] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

… 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: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.^[43]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene’s words,^[43][44] but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself (the so-called «University Wits»).^[45] The italicised phrase parodying the line «Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide» from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun «Shake-scene», clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene’s target. As used here, Johannes Factotum («Jack of all trades») refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common «universal genius».^[43][46]

Greene’s attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks.^[47][48][49] After 1594, Shakespeare’s plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.^[50] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King’s Men.^[51]

In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare’s property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man,^[53] and in 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.^[54]

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.^[55][56][57] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).^[58] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.^[47] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of «the Principal Actors in all these Plays», some of which were first staged after Volpone, although one cannot know for certain which roles he played.^[59] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that «good Will» played «kingly» roles.^[60] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father.^[35] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,^[61][62] though scholars doubt the sources of that information.^[63]

Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.^[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.^[64][66] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul’s Cathedral with many fine houses. There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of women’s wigs and other headgear.^[67][68]

Later years and death

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford «some years before his death».^[69][70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers’ petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King’s Men «placed men players» there, «which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.».^[71] However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.^[72][73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),^[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.^[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614.^[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary.^[76][77] In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;^[78] and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.^[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.^[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,^[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King’s Men. He retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of Henry VIII on 29 June.^[80]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.^[h] He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in «perfect health». No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: «Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted»,^[82][83] not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: «We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went’st so soon / From the world’s stage to the grave’s tiring room.»^[84][i]

He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,^[85] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.^[86] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day, his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.^[86]

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna^[87] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to «the first son of her body».^[88] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.^[89][90] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.^[91][92] Shakespeare’s will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his estate automatically.^[j] He did make a point, however, of leaving her «my second best bed», a bequest that has led to much speculation.^[94][95][96] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.^[97]

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.^[98][99] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:^[100]

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[101][k]

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.^[102] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.^[103] Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.^[104][105]

Plays

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.^[106]

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare’s plays are difficult to date precisely, however,^[107][108] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.^[109][107] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,^[110] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.^[111] The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.^{[112][113][114]} The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.^[115][116] Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,^{[117][118][119]} the Shrew‘s story of the taming of a woman’s independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.^[120]

Shakespeare’s early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.^[121] A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.^[122] Shakespeare’s next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.^[123][124] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,^[125] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies.^[126] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.^{[127][128][129]} This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;^[130][131] and Julius Caesar— based on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.^[132][133] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar, «the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other».^[134]

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called «problem plays» Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.^[135][136] Many critics believe that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins «To be or not to be; that is the question».^[137] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.^[138] The plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.^[139] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello’s sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.^[140][141] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, «the play…offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty».^{[142][143][144]} In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare’s tragedies,^[145] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn.^[146] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare’s finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.^{[147][148][149]}

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.^[150] Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare’s part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.^{[151][152][153]} Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.^[154]

Performances

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.^[155] After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare’s plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.^[156] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, «Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest … and you scarce shall have a room».^[157] When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.^[158][159] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare’s greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.^{[158][160][161]}

After the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were renamed the King’s Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King’s Men performed seven of Shakespeare’s plays at court between 1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.^[62] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.^[162] The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends «in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.»^[163][164]

The actors in Shakespeare’s company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.^[165] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.^[166][167] He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.^[168] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony».^[169] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.^[169]

Textual sources

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends from the King’s Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.^[170] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.^[171] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as «stol’n and surreptitious copies».^[172] Nor did Shakespeare plan or expect his works to survive in any form at all; those works likely would have faded into oblivion but for his friends’ spontaneous idea, after his death, to create and publish the First Folio.^[173]

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as «bad quartos» because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.^{[171][172][174]} Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare’s own papers.^[175][176] In some cases, for example, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.^[177]

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.^[178] Influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses,^[179] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.^[180] 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.^{[181][182][183]} The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester’s 1601 Love’s Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare’s name but without his permission.^{[181][183][184]}

Sonnets

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.^[185][186] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare’s «sugred Sonnets among his private friends».^[187] Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare’s intended sequence.^[188] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the «dark lady»), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the «fair youth»). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial «I» who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets «Shakespeare unlocked his heart».^[187][186]

The 1609 edition was dedicated to a «Mr. W.H.», credited as «the only begetter» of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.^[190] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.^[191]

Style

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.^[192] 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.^[193][194]

However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s mature plays.^[196][197] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.^[198] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

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. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.^[199] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet’s mind:^[200]

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well …

— Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8^[200]

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as «more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical».^[201] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.^[202] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: «was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?» (1.7.35–38); «… pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, hors’d/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air …» (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.^[202] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.^[203]

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.^[204] Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.^[205] He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting, and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.^[206] As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare’s late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.^[207][208]

Influence

Shakespeare’s work has made a significant and lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.^[209] Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.^[210] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore characters’ minds.^[211] 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.»^[212] John Milton, considered by many to be the most important English poet after Shakespeare, wrote in tribute: «Thou in our wonder and astonishment/ Has built thyself a live-long monument.»^[213]

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.^[214] 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.^[215] 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.^[216] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.^[217] Shakespeare has been a rich source for filmmakers; Akira Kurosawa adapted Macbeth and King Lear as Throne of Blood and Ran, respectively. Other examples of Shakespeare on film include Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Al Pacino’s documentary Looking For Richard.^[218] Orson Welles, a lifelong lover of Shakespeare, directed and starred in films of Macbeth and Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, in which he plays John Falstaff, which Welles himself called his best work.^[219]

In Shakespeare’s day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[220] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[221] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.^[222] Expressions such as «with bated breath» (Merchant of Venice) and «a foregone conclusion» (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[223][224]

Shakespeare’s influence extends far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; as early as the 18th century Shakespeare was widely translated and popularised in Germany, and gradually became a «classic of the German Weimar era;» Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce complete translations of Shakespeare’s plays in any language.^[225][226] Actor and theatre director Simon Callow writes, «this master, this titan, this genius, so profoundly British and so effortlessly universal, each different culture – German, Italian, Russian – was obliged to respond to the Shakespearean example; for the most part, they embraced it, and him, with joyous abandon, as the possibilities of language and character in action that he celebrated liberated writers across the continent. Some of the most deeply affecting productions of Shakespeare have been non-English, and non-European. He is that unique writer: he has something for everyone.»^[227]

According to Guinness World Records, Shakespeare remains the world’s best-selling playwright, with sales of his plays and poetry believed to have achieved in excess of four billion copies in the almost 400 years since his death. He is also the third most translated author in history.^[228]

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.^[230][231] In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English playwrights as «the most excellent» in both comedy and tragedy.^[232][233] The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John’s College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser.^[234] In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the «Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage», although he had remarked elsewhere that «Shakespeare wanted art» (lacked skill).^[229]

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.^[235] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, «I admire him, but I love Shakespeare».^[236] He also famously remarked that Shakespeare «was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.»^[237] For several decades, Rymer’s view held sway. But during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and, like Dryden, to acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.^[238][239] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.^[240] In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo.^[241][l]

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.^[243] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius often bordered on adulation.^[244] «This King Shakespeare,» the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, «does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible».^[245] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.^[246] The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as «bardolatry», claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen’s plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.^[247]

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare’s «primitiveness» in fact made him truly modern.^[248] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare’s imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for post-modern studies of Shakespeare.^[249] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.^[250][251] Comparing Shakespeare’s accomplishments to those of leading figures in philosophy and theology, Harold Bloom wrote, «Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He encloses us because we see with his fundamental perceptions.»^[252]

Works

Classification of the plays

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.^[253] 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.^[254][255] 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.^[256][257] 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.^[258] «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.»^[259] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.^{[260][261][262]}

Speculation

Around 230 years after Shakespeare’s death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.^[263] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.^[264] Several «group theories» have also been proposed.^[265] All but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, with only a small minority of academics who believe that there is reason to question the traditional attribution,^[266] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.^{[267][268][269]}

Religion

Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion,^[m] 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.^[271] 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.^[272][273] In 1591, the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church «for fear of process for debt», a common Catholic excuse.^{[274][275][276]} In 1606, the name of William’s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.^{[274][275][276]} Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare’s Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove.^[277][278]

Sexuality

Few details of Shakespeare’s sexuality are known. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical,^[279] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love.^{[280][281][282]} The 26 so-called «Dark Lady» sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.^[283]

Portraiture

No written contemporary description of Shakespeare’s physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,^[284] and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings, and relabelling of portraits of other people.^[285]

See also

• Outline of William Shakespeare
• English Renaissance theatre
• Spelling of Shakespeare’s name
• World Shakespeare Bibliography

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

External links

Digital editions

• William Shakespeare’s plays on Bookwise
• Works by William Shakespeare in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Internet Shakespeare Editions
• The Folger Shakespeare
• Open Source Shakespeare complete works, with search engine and concordance
• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
• Works by William Shakespeare at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Shakespeare at Internet Archive
• Works by William Shakespeare at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Exhibitions

• Shakespeare Documented an online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time
• Shakespeare’s Will from The National Archives
• Discovering Literature: Shakespeare at the British Library
• The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
• William Shakespeare at the British Library
• Benjamin Blom Drama Collection: Shakespeare Materials at the Harry Ransom Center

Legacy and criticism

• Records on Shakespeare’s Theatre Legacy from the UK Parliamentary Collections
• Winston Churchill & Shakespeare – UK Parliament Living Heritage

Other links

• Works by William Shakespeare set to music: free scores in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)

William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait (held by the National Portrait Gallery, London)
Born	Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Baptised	26 April 1564
Died	23 April 1616 (aged 52)[a] Stratford-upon-Avon, England
Resting place	Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon
Occupations	Playwright poet actor
Years active	c. 1585–1613
Era	Elizabethan Jacobean
Movement	English Renaissance
Spouse	Anne Hathaway ​ (m. 1582)​
Children	Susanna Hall Hamnet Shakespeare Judith Quiney
Parents	John Shakespeare (father) Mary Arden (mother)
Signature

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April^[b] 1564 – 23 April 1616)^[c] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.^[2][3][4] He is often called England’s national poet and the «Bard of Avon» (or simply «the Bard»).^[5][d] His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays,^[e] 154 sonnets, three 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.^[7] He remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

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.^[8][9][10]

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.^[11][12][f] His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.^[2][3][4] 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. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare’s, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare’s dramatic works that included all but two of his plays.^[13] Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: «not of an age, but for all time».^[13]

Life

Early life

Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family.^[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George’s Day.^[15] This date, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.^[16][17] He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.^[18]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King’s New School in Stratford,^[19][20][21] a free school chartered in 1553,^[22] about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,^[23][24] and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.^[25]

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway’s neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.^[26] The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,^[27][28] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.^[29] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.^[30] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.^[31]

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the «complaints bill» of a law case before the Queen’s Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589.^[32] Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare’s «lost years».^[33] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.^[34][35] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.^[36] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.^[37] Some 20th-century scholars suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain «William Shakeshafte» in his will.^[38][39] Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.^[40][41]

London and theatrical career

It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.^[42] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

… 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: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.^[43]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene’s words,^[43][44] but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself (the so-called «University Wits»).^[45] The italicised phrase parodying the line «Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide» from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun «Shake-scene», clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene’s target. As used here, Johannes Factotum («Jack of all trades») refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common «universal genius».^[43][46]

Greene’s attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks.^[47][48][49] After 1594, Shakespeare’s plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.^[50] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King’s Men.^[51]

In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare’s property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man,^[53] and in 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.^[54]

Some of Shakespeare’s plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.^[55][56][57] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson’s Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).^[58] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.^[47] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of «the Principal Actors in all these Plays», some of which were first staged after Volpone, although one cannot know for certain which roles he played.^[59] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that «good Will» played «kingly» roles.^[60] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet’s father.^[35] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,^[61][62] though scholars doubt the sources of that information.^[63]

Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.^[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.^[64][66] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul’s Cathedral with many fine houses. There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of women’s wigs and other headgear.^[67][68]

Later years and death

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford «some years before his death».^[69][70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers’ petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King’s Men «placed men players» there, «which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.».^[71] However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.^[72][73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),^[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.^[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614.^[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary.^[76][77] In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;^[78] and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.^[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.^[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,^[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King’s Men. He retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of Henry VIII on 29 June.^[80]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.^[h] He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in «perfect health». No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: «Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted»,^[82][83] not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: «We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went’st so soon / From the world’s stage to the grave’s tiring room.»^[84][i]

He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,^[85] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.^[86] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day, his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.^[86]

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna^[87] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to «the first son of her body».^[88] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.^[89][90] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line.^[91][92] Shakespeare’s will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his estate automatically.^[j] He did make a point, however, of leaving her «my second best bed», a bequest that has led to much speculation.^[94][95][96] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.^[97]

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.^[98][99] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:^[100]

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[101][k]

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.^[102] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.^[103] Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.^[104][105]

Plays

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.^[106]

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare’s plays are difficult to date precisely, however,^[107][108] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.^[109][107] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,^[110] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.^[111] The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.^{[112][113][114]} The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.^[115][116] Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,^{[117][118][119]} the Shrew‘s story of the taming of a woman’s independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.^[120]

Shakespeare’s early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.^[121] A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.^[122] Shakespeare’s next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.^[123][124] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,^[125] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies.^[126] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.^{[127][128][129]} This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;^[130][131] and Julius Caesar— based on Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.^[132][133] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar, «the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other».^[134]

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called «problem plays» Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.^[135][136] Many critics believe that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins «To be or not to be; that is the question».^[137] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.^[138] The plots of Shakespeare’s tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.^[139] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello’s sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.^[140][141] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, «the play…offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty».^{[142][143][144]} In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare’s tragedies,^[145] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn.^[146] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare’s finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.^{[147][148][149]}

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.^[150] Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare’s part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.^{[151][152][153]} Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.^[154]

Performances

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.^[155] After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare’s plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.^[156] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, «Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest … and you scarce shall have a room».^[157] When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.^[158][159] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare’s greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.^{[158][160][161]}

After the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were renamed the King’s Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King’s Men performed seven of Shakespeare’s plays at court between 1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.^[62] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.^[162] The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends «in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.»^[163][164]

The actors in Shakespeare’s company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.^[165] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.^[166][167] He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.^[168] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII «was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony».^[169] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.^[169]

Textual sources

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends from the King’s Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.^[170] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.^[171] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as «stol’n and surreptitious copies».^[172] Nor did Shakespeare plan or expect his works to survive in any form at all; those works likely would have faded into oblivion but for his friends’ spontaneous idea, after his death, to create and publish the First Folio.^[173]

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as «bad quartos» because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.^{[171][172][174]} Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare’s own papers.^[175][176] In some cases, for example, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.^[177]

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.^[178] Influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses,^[179] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.^[180] 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.^{[181][182][183]} The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester’s 1601 Love’s Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare’s name but without his permission.^{[181][183][184]}

Sonnets

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.^[185][186] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare’s «sugred Sonnets among his private friends».^[187] Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare’s intended sequence.^[188] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the «dark lady»), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the «fair youth»). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial «I» who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets «Shakespeare unlocked his heart».^[187][186]

The 1609 edition was dedicated to a «Mr. W.H.», credited as «the only begetter» of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.^[190] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.^[191]

Style

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.^[192] 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.^[193][194]

However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s mature plays.^[196][197] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.^[198] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

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. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.^[199] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet’s mind:^[200]

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well …

— Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8^[200]

After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as «more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical».^[201] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.^[202] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: «was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?» (1.7.35–38); «… pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, hors’d/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air …» (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.^[202] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.^[203]

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.^[204] Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.^[205] He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting, and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.^[206] As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare’s late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.^[207][208]

Influence

Shakespeare’s work has made a significant and lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.^[209] Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.^[210] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore characters’ minds.^[211] 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.»^[212] John Milton, considered by many to be the most important English poet after Shakespeare, wrote in tribute: «Thou in our wonder and astonishment/ Has built thyself a live-long monument.»^[213]

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.^[214] 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.^[215] 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.^[216] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.^[217] Shakespeare has been a rich source for filmmakers; Akira Kurosawa adapted Macbeth and King Lear as Throne of Blood and Ran, respectively. Other examples of Shakespeare on film include Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Al Pacino’s documentary Looking For Richard.^[218] Orson Welles, a lifelong lover of Shakespeare, directed and starred in films of Macbeth and Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, in which he plays John Falstaff, which Welles himself called his best work.^[219]

In Shakespeare’s day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[220] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[221] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.^[222] Expressions such as «with bated breath» (Merchant of Venice) and «a foregone conclusion» (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[223][224]

Shakespeare’s influence extends far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; as early as the 18th century Shakespeare was widely translated and popularised in Germany, and gradually became a «classic of the German Weimar era;» Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce complete translations of Shakespeare’s plays in any language.^[225][226] Actor and theatre director Simon Callow writes, «this master, this titan, this genius, so profoundly British and so effortlessly universal, each different culture – German, Italian, Russian – was obliged to respond to the Shakespearean example; for the most part, they embraced it, and him, with joyous abandon, as the possibilities of language and character in action that he celebrated liberated writers across the continent. Some of the most deeply affecting productions of Shakespeare have been non-English, and non-European. He is that unique writer: he has something for everyone.»^[227]

According to Guinness World Records, Shakespeare remains the world’s best-selling playwright, with sales of his plays and poetry believed to have achieved in excess of four billion copies in the almost 400 years since his death. He is also the third most translated author in history.^[228]

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.^[230][231] In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English playwrights as «the most excellent» in both comedy and tragedy.^[232][233] The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John’s College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser.^[234] In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the «Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage», although he had remarked elsewhere that «Shakespeare wanted art» (lacked skill).^[229]

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.^[235] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, «I admire him, but I love Shakespeare».^[236] He also famously remarked that Shakespeare «was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.»^[237] For several decades, Rymer’s view held sway. But during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and, like Dryden, to acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.^[238][239] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.^[240] In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo.^[241][l]

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.^[243] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius often bordered on adulation.^[244] «This King Shakespeare,» the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, «does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible».^[245] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.^[246] The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as «bardolatry», claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen’s plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.^[247]

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare’s «primitiveness» in fact made him truly modern.^[248] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare’s imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for post-modern studies of Shakespeare.^[249] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.^[250][251] Comparing Shakespeare’s accomplishments to those of leading figures in philosophy and theology, Harold Bloom wrote, «Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He encloses us because we see with his fundamental perceptions.»^[252]

Works

Classification of the plays

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.^[253] 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.^[254][255] 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.^[256][257] 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.^[258] «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.»^[259] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.^{[260][261][262]}

Speculation

Around 230 years after Shakespeare’s death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.^[263] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.^[264] Several «group theories» have also been proposed.^[265] All but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, with only a small minority of academics who believe that there is reason to question the traditional attribution,^[266] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.^{[267][268][269]}

Religion

Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion,^[m] 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.^[271] 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.^[272][273] In 1591, the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church «for fear of process for debt», a common Catholic excuse.^{[274][275][276]} In 1606, the name of William’s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.^{[274][275][276]} Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare’s Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove.^[277][278]

Sexuality

Few details of Shakespeare’s sexuality are known. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical,^[279] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love.^{[280][281][282]} The 26 so-called «Dark Lady» sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.^[283]

Portraiture

No written contemporary description of Shakespeare’s physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,^[284] and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings, and relabelling of portraits of other people.^[285]

See also

• Outline of William Shakespeare
• English Renaissance theatre
• Spelling of Shakespeare’s name
• World Shakespeare Bibliography

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

External links

Digital editions

• William Shakespeare’s plays on Bookwise
• Works by William Shakespeare in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Internet Shakespeare Editions
• The Folger Shakespeare
• Open Source Shakespeare complete works, with search engine and concordance
• The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
• Works by William Shakespeare at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Shakespeare at Internet Archive
• Works by William Shakespeare at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Exhibitions

• Shakespeare Documented an online exhibition documenting Shakespeare in his own time
• Shakespeare’s Will from The National Archives
• Discovering Literature: Shakespeare at the British Library
• The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
• William Shakespeare at the British Library
• Benjamin Blom Drama Collection: Shakespeare Materials at the Harry Ransom Center

Legacy and criticism

• Records on Shakespeare’s Theatre Legacy from the UK Parliamentary Collections
• Winston Churchill & Shakespeare – UK Parliament Living Heritage

Other links

• Works by William Shakespeare set to music: free scores in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)

шекспир

Шекспир — перевод на английский

Показать ещё примеры для «shakespeare»…

Написание имени Уильяма Шекспира со временем менялось. При его жизни это не было написано ни в рукописи, ни в печатном виде. После его смерти редакторы его работ произносили это имя по-разному, и его правописание не было исправлено вплоть до 20-го века.

Стандартное написание фамилии как «Шекспир» было наиболее распространенной опубликованной формой при жизни Шекспира, но не использовалось в его собственных собственноручных подписях. Однако это написание использовалось в качестве печатной подписи к посвящениям первых изданий его стихов « Венера и Адонис» в 1593 году и «Похищение Лукреции» в 1594 году. Это также написание, используемое в Первом фолио , окончательном собрании стихов. его пьесы опубликованы в 1623 году, после его смерти.

Позднее написание имени было модернизировано: «Шекспир» получил широкое распространение в 18 веке, которое в конце 18 — начале 19 века было в значительной степени заменено на «Шекспир». В романтическую и викторианскую эпохи написание «Шекспир», используемое в собственной подписи поэта, получило более широкое распространение, поскольку считалось, что это наиболее достоверная версия. С середины 19-го до начала 20-го века по разным причинам использовались самые разные варианты написания; хотя после публикации в 1860-х годах изданий Шекспира в Кембридже и Глобусе «Шекспир» стал приобретать все большую популярность. Позже это стало привычкой у писателей, которые считали, что кто-то другой писал пьесы, используя другое написание, когда они имели в виду «настоящего» драматурга и человека из Стратфорда-на-Эйвоне . За редким исключением, написание в англоязычных странах теперь стандартизовано как «Шекспир».

Подписи Шекспира

Сохранились шесть подписей, написанных самим Шекспиром. Все они прилагаются к юридическим документам. Шесть подписей стоят на четырех документах:

• показания по делу Беллотт против Маунтджоя от 11 мая 1612 г.
• покупка дома в Блэкфрайарс, Лондон , датированная 10 марта 1613 г.
• ипотека того же дома от 11 марта 1613 г.
• его последняя воля и завещание, которое содержит три подписи, по одной на каждой странице, датированные 25 марта 1616 г.

Подписи выглядят следующим образом:

• Уилл Шакп
• Уильям Шакспер
• Wm Shakspe
• Уильям Шекспир
• Уилл Шекспир
• Автор: Уильям Шекспир

Большинство из них являются сокращенными версиями названия с использованием бревиографических соглашений того времени. Это была обычная практика. Например, Эдмунд Спенсер иногда писал свое имя полностью (записывая свое имя Эдмунд или Эдмонд), но часто использовал сокращенные формы «Ed: spser» или «Edm: spser».

Три подписи на завещании были впервые воспроизведены ученым XVIII века Джорджем Стивенсом в виде факсимильных гравюр. Двое, относящиеся к продаже дома, были идентифицированы в 1768 году, а сам документ был приобретен Эдмондом Мэлоун . Фотографии этих пяти подписей были опубликованы Сидни Ли . Последняя подпись была обнаружена в 1909 году Чарльзом Уильямом Уоллесом .

Хотя это и не считается подлинным, есть подпись на форзаце копии перевода Джона Флорио произведений Монтеня, которая гласит: «Уилл. Шекспир»; он был принят некоторыми учеными до конца 20 века. Другая, возможно, подлинная подпись есть на копии « Архаономии » Уильяма Ламбарда (1568 г.). Хотя и нечеткое, похоже, что написано «Шекспир».

Другое написание

Писатель Дэвид Катман составил таблицу вариантов написания имени Шекспира, воспроизведенных в « Уильям Шекспир: Документальная жизнь» Сэмюэля Шенбаума . Он утверждает, что среди «нелитературных ссылок» при жизни Шекспира (1564–1616) написание «Шекспир» встречается 71 раз, а «Шекспир» появляется вторым с 27 употреблениями. Далее идут «Шекспир» (16); «Шекспир» (13); «Шекспир» (12) и «Шекспир» (8). Есть также много других вариаций, которые появляются в небольшом количестве или как единичные. Критики подхода Катмана указывали на то, что он искажается из-за повторения написания в одном и том же документе, придает каждому вхождению одинаковый статистический вес независимо от контекста и не учитывает в достаточной мере исторические и хронологические факторы.

Р. К. Черчилль отмечает, что в елизаветинскую эпоху вариации имен были далеко не редкостью :

Имя сэра Уолтера Рэли было написано его современниками: Рэли, Рэли, Рэйли, Рэгли, Роули, Роули, Роули, Роули, Раулиге, Роули или Рэйли. Имя Томаса Деккера было написано Dekker, Decker, Deckar, Deckers, Dicker, Dickers, Dyckers или (что довольно интересно) Dickens.

Катман отмечает, что орфография обычно более единообразна в печатных версиях, чем в версиях рукописей, и что в провинциальных документах написано больше, чем в столичных.

Печатные варианты написания

Пятьдесят восемь квартальных (или Q ) выпусков пьес Шекспира и пять выпусков стихов были опубликованы до Первого фолио . На 20 пьесах автор не указан. На 15 титульных листах его имя расставлено через дефис: «Shake ‑ speare», 13 из этих написаний есть на титульных листах всего трех пьес: Ричард II ( 2 квартал 1598 г., 3 квартал 1598, 4 квартал 1608 и 5 квартал 1615 года), Ричард III ( 2 квартал 1598 г., 3 квартал 1602 г., 4 квартал 1605 г., 5 квартал 1612 и 6 квартал 1622) и Генрих IV, часть 1 (2 квартал 1599 г., 3 квартал 1604 г., 4 квартал 1608 г. и 5 квартал 1613 г.). Дефис также присутствует в первой четверти Гамлета (1603 г.) и второй четверти «Короля Лира» (1619 г.). Название печатается в конце стихотворения Феникс и черепаха , которая была опубликована в сборнике стихов в 1601 году , является дефис, как это имя на титульном листе и стихотворение Жалоба влюблённой из Shake-копья Сонеты (1609 ). Он используется в актерском списке бена Джонсона « Падение Сеянуса» и в шести литературных аллюзиях, опубликованных между 1594 и 1623 годами.

Написание «Шекспир» без дефиса (или «Шекспир» с длинным «s» ) встречается в 22 из 58 кварто. Так пишется он в первых четвертях «Венецианского купца» (1600), «Сон в летнюю ночь» (1600), « Много шума из ничего» (1600), «Веселых жен Виндзора» (1602), Перикла, принца Тира (1609). ), Троил и Крессида (1609 г.), Отелло (1622 г.). Второй, или «хороший», кварто Гамлета (1604 г.) также использует это написание. Это также написано таким образом в неверно приписанном кварто сэра Джона Олдкасла (1600; 1619) и в сборнике стихов «Страстный пилигрим» (1599).

Более редкие варианты написания — «Shak ‑ speare» в первой четверти « Короля Лира» (1608 г.) и « Shakepere» в первой четверти «Потерянных усилий любви» (1598 г.). В неверно приписанном кварто «Йоркширская трагедия» (1608) его имя написано «Шакопир», написание этого слова также встречается в кварто «Двух благородных родственников» (1634), который был опубликован после Первого фолио.

Джеймс С. Шапиро утверждает, что имя Шекспира создавало трудности для наборщиков, и это одна из причин, почему форма с буквой «е» в центре используется чаще всего и почему она иногда переносится через дефис. Катман утверждает, что любое имя, которое можно разделить на две четкие части, могло быть расставлено через дефис, особенно если части можно было интерпретировать как отдельные слова.

Орфография в более поздних публикациях

В более поздних изданиях произведений Шекспира использовалось другое написание в соответствии с модой современного правописания того времени или, позже, попытками принять то, что считалось наиболее исторически точной версией имени. Когда к нему обращались на иностранных языках, он приобрел еще больше вариантов написания. Известно, что французские критики XVIII века использовали слова «Шекпир, Шекспехар, Шекспир или Шакис Груша».

Шекспир

Переход от «Шекспира» к модернизированному написанию «Шекспир» происходит во втором издании Третьего фолио , опубликованном в 1664 году Филипом Четвинде . Это сохранило оригинальную титульную страницу, но включило раздел с дополнительными пьесами. Титульный лист этого нового дополнения принял новое написание. Его переняли и другие авторы эпохи Реставрации . Джон Даунс и Наум Тейт используют это правописание.

Затем последовали писатели 18 века. Первый биограф Шекспира, Николас Роу , также написал имя «Шекспир» в своей книге « Некоторые рассказы о жизни и т. Д.». г-на Уильяма Шекспира (1709) и в его новом издании произведений. Это написание последовало Александру Поупу в его издании произведений Шекспира (1725) и Джорджу Сьюэллу ( Произведения мистера Уильяма Шекспира ). Однако написание с буквой «е» в конце сохранилось. Соперник Папы Льюис Теобальд сохранил его в своем издании « Восстановленный Шекспир» (1726 г.), в котором категорически отвергались попытки модернизировать и дезинфицировать оригинальные произведения.

Правописание «Шекспир» продолжало использоваться учеными на протяжении 18 века, включая Уильяма Уорбертона . Однако многие, как Теобальд, предпочитали написание Первого фолио, особенно Сэмюэл Джонсон . «Шекспир» менее широко использовался в XIX и XX веках, все больше и больше сторонниками рационального правописания . Уильям Хэзлитт использовал его в своей книге « Персонажи пьес Шекспира» . Джордж Бернард Шоу , убежденный сторонник реформы правописания, настаивал на использовании этого правописания во всех своих публикациях.

Архаизирующее написание

Шекспир

Архивные материалы, относящиеся к Шекспиру, были впервые обнаружены учеными 18-го века, в первую очередь Эдмондом Мэлоун, который зафиксировал вариации в написании имени. Мэлоун заявил, что предпочитает написание «Шекспир», используя его в своих основных публикациях, включая 16-томное издание полного собрания сочинений драматурга 1790 года. Джордж Стивенс также использовал это написание. Стивенс и Мэлоун оба изучили завещание Шекспира и были убеждены, что последняя подпись была написана таким образом, что также соответствовало написанию, используемому на могиле Шекспира . Тем не менее, Мэлоун признал, что подпись была трудночитаема, а остальные были написаны без последней буквы «а». Это написание продолжало оставаться популярным в более поздний грузинский период . Действительно, «практически в каждом издании» произведений драматурга в начале 19 века до 1840 года использовалось это написание. Его приняли даже немецкие ученые, такие как Фридрих Шлегель и Людвиг Тик .

Антиквар Джозеф Хантер первым опубликовал все известные варианты написания имени, что он и сделал в 1845 году в своей книге « Иллюстрации к жизни, этюдам и сочинениям Шекспира» . Он дает отчет о том, что было известно во время истории имени Шекспира, и перечисляет все его разновидности, включая наиболее своеобразные примеры, такие как «Шагспер» и «Сакспир». Он связал это с историей семьи Шекспиров и ее потомков, хотя не смог ничего добавить к материалу, уже идентифицированному Эдмондом Мэлоун. Хантер отметил, что «существует бесконечное разнообразие форм, в которых было написано это имя». Он раскритиковал Мэлоуна и Стивенса, написав, что «в тяжелый час они согласились без всякой видимой причины отменить е в первом слоге». Хантер утверждал, что, вероятно, существует два варианта произношения этого имени, версия из Уорикшира и версия для Лондона, так что «честные соседи в Стратфорде и Шоттери могли назвать самого поэта мистером Шакспером, в то время как его друзья в Лондоне уважали его: как мы знаем исторически, они сделали это с более величественным именем Шекспир ». Катман утверждает, что, хотя вполне возможно, что существовали разные варианты произношения, нет веских оснований так думать на основании вариантов написания.

Шекспир

Согласно Хантеру, это было в 1785 году, когда антиквар Джон Пинкертон впервые возродил написание «Шекспир», полагая, что это правильная форма, «начерченная собственной рукой поэта» в его подписях. Пинкертон сделал это в « Письмах о литературе» , опубликованных под псевдонимом Роберт Херон. Однако более поздний ученый обнаружил ссылку в журнале Gentleman’s Magazine в 1784 году на прискорбную «новую моду написания имени Шекспира ШАКСПЕР», из чего следует, что эта тенденция возникла с тех пор, как Стивенс опубликовал факсимиле подписей в 1778 году. Тем не менее, Пинкертон дал ее. широкое распространение. Написание «Шекспира» было быстро принято рядом писателей, а в 1788 году лондонское издательство Белл присвоило ему официальный статус в своих изданиях пьес. Сэмюэл Тейлор Кольридж , опубликовавший большое количество влиятельной литературы о драматурге, использовал и это, и шекспировское написание. Его основные работы были опубликованы после его смерти в новом написании. Правописание по-прежнему предпочиталось многими писателями в викторианскую эпоху, в том числе Братством прерафаэлитов в The Germ .

Этот вопрос широко обсуждался. Журнал Gentleman’s Magazine стал форумом для обсуждения данной темы. В 1787 году разгорелись жаркие дебаты, за которыми последовала еще одна в 1840 году, когда орфография была продвинута в книге Фредерика Мэддена , который настаивал на том, что новые рукописные свидетельства доказывают, что поэт всегда писал свое имя «Шекспир». Исаак Д’Израэли написал резкое письмо, в котором осудил такое написание как «резкий варварский шок». Последовала длительная переписка, в основном между Джоном Брюсом, который настаивал на «Шекспере», потому что «следует придерживаться собственного способа написания своего имени», и Джоном Уильямом Бургоном, который утверждал, что «имена следует писать так, как они есть. написано в печатных книгах большинства образованных людей », настаивая на том, что это правило разрешает написание« Шекспир ». К дискуссии добавились и другие участники. Ряд других статей посвящен орфографическому спору в XIX веке, в котором правописание «Шекспир» в целом продвигалось на том основании, что оно принадлежит самому поэту. Альберт Ричард Смит в сатирическом журнале «Месяц» утверждал, что полемика окончательно «утихла» после открытия рукописи, которая доказывала, что написание менялось с погодой: «Когда светило солнце, он поставил свои пятерки, / Когда мокро он взял свои «Е». В 1879 году The New York Times опубликовала статью о споре, в которой сообщалось о брошюре Джеймса Холливелл- Филлиппса, критикующей «шекспировское» направление.

Многие из наиболее важных викторианских издателей и ученых Шекспира использовали это написание, включая Чарльза Найта , чье «Иллюстрированное издание произведений Шекспира» было очень популярно, и Эдварда Даудена в « Шекспире»: критическое исследование его разума и искусства . В Великобритании Новое общество Шекспира было основано в 1873 году Фредериком Джеймсом Ферниваллом, а в Америке Общество Шекспира из Филадельфии приняло это правописание. Первая закрылась в 1894 году, но вторая до сих пор существует под своим первоначальным названием. Орфография все еще была распространена в начале и середине 20-го века, например, в пьесах Брандера Мэтьюса, Шекспере как драматурга (1913), Шекспере Алвина Талера Шеридану (1922) и пятиактной структуре Шекспира Т.В. Болдуина (1947).

Шекспир

Правописание «Шекспир» решительно защищал Исаак Д’Израэли в своем оригинальном письме в Gentleman’s Magazine . Джозеф Хантер также прямо заявил, что это наиболее подходящее написание. Д’Израэли утверждал, что напечатанное написание стихов было выбрано автором. Он также настаивал на том, чтобы написание соответствовало правильному произношению, что подтверждается каламбурами слов «встряхнуть» и «копье» у современников Шекспира. Хантер также утверждал, что написание должно соответствовать установленному произношению, и указал на стихи, заявив, что «у нас есть напечатанные свидетельства, достаточно унифицированные от самого человека», поддерживающие «Шекспира».

Хотя Дауден, самый влиятельный голос в критике Шекспира в последней четверти XIX века, использовал написание «Шекспир», между 1863 и 1866 годами в девятитомном «Сочинении Уильяма Шекспира» под редакцией Уильяма Джорджа Кларка , Джона Гловера и Уильям Алдис Райт , все члены Тринити-колледжа Кембриджского университета, были опубликованы университетом. Это издание (вскоре известное как «Кембриджский Шекспир») было названо «Шекспир». Соответствующее издание, включающее текст Шекспира из Кембриджского Шекспира, но без научного аппарата, было выпущено в 1864 году как «Глобальное издание». Он стал настолько популярным, что оставался в печати и зарекомендовал себя как стандартный текст на протяжении почти столетия. Благодаря повсеместному распространению и авторитету изданий Cambridge и Globe, подкрепленным безупречной академической репутацией редакторов Кембриджа, написание имени «Шекспир» вскоре стало доминирующим в публикациях произведений Шекспира и о Шекспире. Хотя эта форма иногда использовалась в более ранних публикациях, и продолжали появляться другие варианты написания, с этого момента «Шекспир» приобрел господство, которое сохраняется по сей день.

Когда защитники вопроса об авторстве Шекспира начали утверждать, что пьесы написал кто-то другой, а не Шекспир из Стратфорда, они опирались на тот факт, что существовали варианты написания, чтобы различать предполагаемый псевдоним, используемый скрытым автором, и имя человека, родившегося в Стратфорд, который, как утверждается, выступал в роли «подставного лица».

Использование разных вариантов написания иногда было просто удобством, чтобы прояснить, о каком «Шекспире» идет речь. В других случаях это было связано со спором о значении, которое предполагается придать «Шекспиру» как псевдониму. В некоторых случаях это возникло из-за убеждения, что различное написание буквально подразумевает, как выражается Р.К. Черчилль, «что должно было быть два человека: один, актер, которого они в основном называют Шакспером или Шекспиром, а другой настоящий. автор (Бэкон, Дерби, Ратленд и т. д.), которого они называют «Шекспир» или «Шейк-копье» (с дефисом) ». В некоторых случаях даже воображалось, что это три Шекспира: автор, актер и человек из Стратфорда.

Выбор правописания для человека из Стратфорда был разнообразным. Поскольку известно, что он подписал свое имя «Шекспир», когда писал его полностью, иногда используется такое написание. Однако Х. Н. Гибсон отмечает, что диковинные варианты написания, кажется, иногда выбираются исключительно с целью высмеять его, заставляя имя казаться вульгарным и простоватым, что особенно характерно для бэконианцев, таких как Эдвин Дарнинг-Лоуренс :

Эта ненависть [к человеку из Стратфорда] принимает форму не только жестоких оскорблений и обвинений во всякого рода недостойном поведении, но также и в довольно детской уловке по поиску всех самых диковинных елизаветинских вариаций написания его имени, и наполнение их страниц «Шагспуром», «Шаксперсом» и прочими зверствами; в то время как сэр Эдвин Дёрнинг-Лоуренс завершает каждую главу своей книги надписью «Бэкон — это Шекспир», написанной заглавными буквами.

Некоторые авторы утверждают, что использование дефиса в ранее опубликованных версиях имени указывает на то, что это псевдоним. Они утверждают, что вымышленные описательные имена (такие как «Мастер галстука» и «Сэр Беззаботный Ву-все») часто переносились через дефис в пьесах, а псевдонимы, такие как «Том Говорящая правда», также иногда переносились через дефис. Катман утверждает, что это не так, и что настоящие имена, скорее всего, переносились через дефис, как и псевдонимы. Он утверждает, что псевдоним « Мартин Марпрелате » иногда переносился через дефис, но обычно — нет. Роберт Вальдегрейв , напечатавший трактаты Marprelate , никогда не переносил имя через дефис, но делал дефис в своем собственном: «Если перенос должен был указывать на псевдоним, любопытно, что Уолдегрейв неоднократно переносил свое собственное имя через дефис, не ставя через дефис бесспорный псевдоним в том же самом тексты «.

Смотрите также

• Список пьес Шекспира в кварто
• Мигель де Сервантес Сааведра , современник Шекспира, подписал свою фамилию как Чербантес .
• Чеспирито был мексиканским актером. Его сценический псевдоним означает «маленький Шекспир», как произносится на разговорном испанском языке.

Ноты

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