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William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare: Shakespeares life; The

plays preserved (Luck and fame); The drama

(The commercial theatre, Christopher

Marlowe); Histories (Richard II, Henry IV,Henry

V); Comedy (A Midsummer Nights Dream,

Twelfth Night); The poems; Tragedy (Hamlet,

King Lear); Romances (The Tempest),Shakespeares achievement; Ben Jonson (The

Alchemist,Volpone).

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Shakespeares life

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at

Stratford, a market town on the river Avon in

Warwickshire.

He was the eldest son and the third of eight

children of John Shakespeare, a glover, and

Mary Arden, a landowners daughter. In 1568

John was bailiff (mayor) of Stratford.

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Shakespeares life

William kept up his links with Stratford, but his

professional life was in London, writing and

acting.

He was a partner in the leading company of

actors, the Lord Chamberlains Men, founded

in 1594. It played at Court and in the theatre,

the Curtain, and in its own Globe theatre, builtin 1599.

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Shakespeares life

From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford.

On 23 April 1616 he died: he was buried in the

chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford. There,

before 1623, his monument was erected.

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The plays preserved

At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeares

plays had not been printed, but in 1623 two of

his fellow-actors brought out a collected

edition: thirty-six plays in a book of nearly

nine hundred double-column pages in a large

Folio, entitled Comedies, Histories, and

Tragedies.

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The commercial theatre

Shakespeare came in on a rising tide. After 1594Marlowe and Kyd were dead, and he was the leadingplaywright, sharing in the profits of his Company.

He began with the sexual knockabout of The Taming ofthe Shrew, the classical atrocities of Titus Andronicus,and the martial pageantry of Henry VI, but in hisromance comedies combined action with literary highspirits.

Public drama was crude and refined, sensational andcomplex; private theatres were indoor, smaller, quieter.

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Histories

He wrote ten English histories in all, listed inthe Folio in the order of the reigns of the kingsin their titles.

But the order of reigns was not the order ofcomposition. The first tetralogy - the threeparts of Henry VI and Richard III - was writtenin 1590-3. We shall look at the secondtetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2,and Henry V - composed in 1595-9.

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Comedy

Shakespearesearly plays are mostly comedy and

history, kinds of play more open and inclusive

than tragedy.

Comedy came easily to Shakespeare. Half of his

dramatic output is comic, and his earlier critics,

from Jonson to Johnson, preferred his comedy.

Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors,The Shrew, Loves Labours Lost, A Midsummer

NightsDream, Twelfth Night.

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The poems

What Shakespeare wrote before he was 28

does not survive. His best non-dramatic

poems are found in the volume entitled

Shake-speares Sonnets, published in 1609. His

sonneteering began in 1593-4, the year in

which he also published Venus and Adonis and

The Rape of Lucrece, longish versenarrativesof sexual passion, modelled on Ovid.

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Tragedey

The four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello,

King Lear and Macbeth - do not conform

strictly to a defined type, except that each

ends in the death of the hero, just as the

comedies end in marriage.

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Romances

Shakespeare ended his career with romance andtragicomedy. His plays do not state his views, buthis choice of subject indicates changing interests.In his last plays, he fixes on the relation of father

and daughter. The strong and often subversive role played by

sexual attraction in Shakespeares writing, fromHamlet onwards, takes a different turn after

Antony. In the Sonnets, Measure for Measure,Troilus, Hamlet, Othello and Lear, the power ofsexual passion to destroy other ties is shown.

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Christopher Marlowe

Shakespeare outshone Kyd, but learned from

his own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe

(b.1564), who was killed in a tavern in 1593.

Marlowe announced his talent in Tamburlaine

the Great (1587).

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Christopher Marlowe

Marlowes Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus,Tamburlaine is an arrogant upstart who scornshuman limits. A Romantic view of the

Renaissance saw Dr Faustus as transcendingworn-out teachings like Galileo, or as an emblemof human aspiration like GoethesFaust.

But Faustus doesnt believe in hell, and sells his

soul for twenty-four years of fun. The knowledgehe seeks is paltry, and he wastes his powers onschoolboy tricks.

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Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson (1572-1632), eighteen years

Shakespeares junior, knew him well; they

acted in each others plays. As playwright,

poet, critic and man of letters, Jonson

dominated his generation. He was a great

poet and a great dramatist. Jonson and

Marlowe belong with Shakespeare.

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Ben Jonson

Every Man in His Humour (1598) is set in

Florence (Shakespeare is listed in the cast),

and Volpone (1605) in Venice; but London is

the scene of Epicoene, or the Silent Woman

(1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew

Fair (1614).

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Stuart Literature: to 1700

The Stuart century: Drama to 1642 (Comedy,

Tragedy); John Donne, Prose to 1642 (Sir

Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, Robert

Burton, Sir Thomas Browne); Poetry to Milton

(Ben Jonson, Metaphysical poets, Devotional

poets, Cavalier poets); John Milton (Paradise

Lost).

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Augustan and Romantic

(Augustan Literature to 1970)

The eighteenth century: The Enlightenment

(Sense and Sensibility); Alexander Pope and

18thcentury civilization; Joseph Addison;

Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope (Translation as

tradition, The Rape o f the Lock, Mature

verse); John Gay; Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu; The novel: Daniel Defoe; Cross-currents; Samuel Richardson; Henry Fielding,

Tobias Smollett; Laurence Sterne;

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Augustan and Romantic

(The Romantics 1790-1837)

The emergence of Sensibility: Thomas Gray;

Pre-Romantic sensibility: `Ossian; Gothic

fiction; The Age of Johnson: Dr Samuel

Johnson (The Dictionary, Literary criticism);

James Boswell; Non-fiction (Edward Gibbon,

Edmund Burke); Oliver Goldsmith; Fanny

Burney; Richard Brinsley Sheridan;Christopher Smart; William Cowper; Robert

Burns

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Augustan and Romantic

(The Romantics 1790-1837)

The Romantic poets: Early Romantics; WilliamBlake; Subjectivity; Romanticism and Revolution(William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

Sir Walter Scott); Younger Romantics (Lord Byron,Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats).

Romantic prose: Belles litres (Charles Lamb,William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey); Fiction

(Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Shelley, MariaEdgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen);Towards Victoria