Рассказ про уильяма шекспира

Уильям Шекспир — биография

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Уильям Шекспир – английский драматург, поэт. Автор многочисленных пьес, поэм, сонетов, эпитафий, национальный поэт Англии. Именно его перу принадлежит трагедия Ромео и Джульетты

Сложно найти человека, который бы никогда не слышал имя Уильяма Шекспира – поэта и драматурга, гуманиста и человека Возрождения. Он самый великий англоязычный писатель, национальный поэт Великобритании и лучших драматург среди всех, известных в мире. Его произведения переведены и изданы практически на всех языках, некоторые из них входят в обязательную школьную программу. Фильмы, снятые на основе его пьес, остаются актуальными даже спустя несколько веков после их создания.

Детство

Родился Уильям Шекспир предположительно 23 апреля 1564 года в английском городе Стратфорд-апон-Эйвоне, недалеко от Лондона. Точная дата рождения поэта неизвестна, есть только данные о дне его крещения – 26 апреля.

Отца звали Джон Шекспир, он занимался земледелием, изготавливал перчатки и слыл мелким ростовщиком. Потом занимал должность олдермена, то есть, возглавлял муниципальное собрание, а потом стал во главе совета города. Мама мальчика – Мэри Арден принадлежала к старинному и очень уважаемому саксонскому роду.

Сохранились сведения о том, что Джон придерживался католической веры, за что впоследствии его преследовала церковь. Он был вынужден продать все земли, которые приобрел за свою жизнь. Джон постоянно платил штрафы протестантской церкви за то, что не ходил на службы. У супругов родилось восемь детей, Уильям был третьим из них.

Начальное образование Шекспир получил в родном городе Стратфорд. Он учился в грамматической школе, где основной упор делался на изучение латыни и древнегреческого языка.

В школе постоянно ставили пьесы на латыни, педагоги считали, что только таким образом можно глубоко изучить древние языки.

Есть мнение, что кроме грамматической школы, Уильям учился еще и в королевской школе. Там он впервые прочел труды древнеримских поэтов.

Загадочные семь лет

Поэт принадлежит к тем историческим личностям, биографию которых пришлось складывать как мозаику из мелких частиц. Нет никаких биографических записей о его жизни, поэтому источники сведений о жизни Шекспира были в основном второстепенными. К примеру, записи каких-то административных учреждений или высказывание о нем современников.

Самым загадочным отрезком его жизни стали семь лет, которые прошли между рождением двойняшек и первыми упоминаниями о его деятельности в Лондоне. Для исследователей этот отрезок стал настоящей загадкой.

Говорили, что он поступил на службу к знатному землевладельцу, потом учительствовал, работал в театре в качестве суфлера, рабочего сцены, и некоторое время коневода. Однако насколько эти сведения достоверны, никто сказать не может.

Лондон

Первое упоминание о Шекспире появляется в 1592 году. Английский поэт Роберт Грин дал свою оценку творчеству Уильяма, и его высказывание появилось в прессе. Аристократ посмеивался над молодым драматургом, потому что понимал, что перед ним достойный конкурент, хотя и без благородного происхождения и достойного образования. Примерно в это время появляются упоминания о первой постановке пьесы «Генрих VI», авторство которой принадлежит Шекспиру. Она вышла на сцене лондонского театра «Роза».

Пьеса написана в жанре хроники, очень модном в те годы в Англии. Это было типичным для эпохи Возрождения, повествование имело эпический характер, и зачастую состояло из разрозненных картин и сценок, не имеющих связи между собой. В хрониках воспевалась государственность страны, порицались междоусобные войны и феодальная раздробленность. В 1594 году Уильям Шекспир вступил в сообщество актеров под названием «Слуги лорда-камергера». Прошло немного времени, и он стал одним из его соучредителей.

Спектакли пользовались большим успехом, что позволило труппе разбогатеть буквально за короткий промежуток времени. Поэтому было принято решение о строительстве отдельного здания для театра, получившего название «Глобус». Стройка длилась пять лет. В 1608 году сообщество стало владельцем еще и закрытого помещения «Блэкфрайерс».

Такого успеха артисты достигли благодаря благосклонности английских монархов. Елизавета I и ее сын Яков I имели особое отношение к театру. Яков даже разрешил коллективу сменить статус, и в 1603-м труппа стала называться «Слуги Короля».

Уильям был не только автором пьес, он активно участвовал в постановках спектаклей. До наших дней дошли сведения, что всех главных героев своих произведений автор играл сам.

Творчество

Вклад Шекспира в сокровищницу мировой литературы сложно переоценить. Более пяти веков его произведения вдохновляют актеров и композиторов, театральных и кинорежиссеров. Творческая деятельность Уильяма состоит из нескольких периодов, в каждом из которых он полностью менял стиль написания своих шедевров.

Его первые произведения были копиями популярных в те годы сюжетов и жанров – «Укрощение строптивой», «Тит Андроник» реальное тому подтверждение. Первая написана в комедийном жанре, вторая в «трагедии ужаса». Произведения имели громоздкую форму, большое количество ролей и очень сложный в восприятии слог. Это было время учебы, постижения азов написания драматических произведений.

Во второй половине 90-х годов 16 века в драматургии появились сочинения, которые характеризовались отточенными формами и содержанием. Шекспир занялся поисками новой формы, при этом он по-прежнему творит в рамках ренессансной трагедии и комедии. В старых, изживших себя формах, прослеживается новое содержание. Так родились гениальные произведения «Сон в летнюю ночь», «Ромео и Джульетта», «Венецианский купец». Они отличались свежестью повествования, облаченной в запоминающийся своей необычностью сюжет. Пьесы Шекспира набирают популярность у самого разного зрителя.

Одновременно с этим, Уильям стал автором цикла сонетов, используя очень популярный жанр любовной лирики в стихах. На протяжении двух столетий об этих сонетах не вспоминали, а когда наступила эпоха романтизма, они снова оказались на вершине славы. В 19-м веке стало модным цитировать именно эти бессмертные строки Шекспира.

Эти стихи стали своеобразным посланием неизвестному молодому человеку, и только 26 последних из ста пятидесяти четырех сочинений обращены к прекрасной брюнетке. По мнению некоторых исследователей, в сонетах можно найти указание на моменты из биографии автора, в том числе и на его нетрадиционную ориентацию. Однако другие историки предполагают, что посредством своих сочинений поэт общается со своим другом и покровителем графом Саутгемптоном. Именно таким образом тогда происходило общение в светском обществе.

На границе двух веков Уильям создал свои бессмертные произведения, увековечившие его имя в истории литературы и театра. В это время он уже был состоявшимся и успешным литератором, достаточно обеспеченным в финансовом плане. Он пишет пьесы, принесшие ему известность далеко за пределами родной Англии. Одна за одной выходят трагедии «Макбет», «Гамлет», «Отелло», «Король Лир». Благодаря этим произведениям театр «Глобус» приобрел невероятную популярность и стал самым посещаемым увеселительным заведением в Лондоне. Вскоре владельцы театра прочувствовали эту славу на собственном финансовом состоянии – они стали в несколько раз богаче.

Третий период творчества великого драматурга начался уже на закате его профессиональной деятельности. Он стал автором произведений, которые имели совершенно новую форму, где трагедия вплотную переплетается с комедийным жанром, а сказка соседствует с повседневной жизнью. Среди них стоит отметить «Зимнюю сказку», «Бурю», «Антония и Клеопатру», «Кориолана». Эти шедевры мастера лишний раз подтверждают, что он стал настоящим знатоком драматического жанра, с легкостью собирающего в одном месте трагедийные и сказочные черты, высокий слог и обычную речь.

Многие произведения Шекспира увидели свет еще при жизни автора. А вот до издания полного собрания сочинений дело дошло только в 1623-м. Сборник вышел только благодаря участию ближайших друзей драматурга – Генри Кондела и Джона Хеминга, артистов труппы театра «Глобус». В книгу вошло тридцать шесть пьес Шекспира, и ее назвали «Первое фолио».

На протяжении 17 века удалось напечатать еще три таких фолио, некоторые из них содержали изменения в тексте в сравнении с первоисточником.

Личная жизнь

Поэт очень рано устроил свою личную жизнь. Ему исполнилось всего 18, когда он завел романтические отношения с соседской девушкой Энн Хататуй. Ей на тот момент исполнилось 26, и вскоре влюбленные поженились. Такая спешка была вызвана беременностью Энн. В те годы добрачная беременность считалась чем-то закономерным, очень часто молодые люди женились, когда невеста уже находилась в интересном положении. Важно было только успеть обвенчаться до того, как родится малыш. В 1583-м Уильям стал отцом дочери Сьюзен, которую любил больше остальных своих детей. Спустя два года супруга подарила Шекспиру двойню – сына Хемнета и дочь Джудит.

Детей у них больше не было, скорее всего, по причине тяжелейших вторых родов Энн. В 1556-м семью постигло несчастье – Хемнет заболел дизентерией, и доктора не смогли спасти единственного наследника поэта. Вскоре Шекспир переехал в Лондон, а жена и дети остались жить в родном городе. Уильям регулярно навещал семью, хотя эти посещения были достаточно редкими.

О том, как устроилась личная жизнь Шекспира в Лондоне, точно ничего неизвестно. Ходило много слухов и пересудов о том, что он коротал ее не в полном одиночестве. По мнению исследователей биографии Шекспира, он имел любовные связи, причем, не только с женщинами. Однако проверить достоверность этой информации не представляется возможным.

Смерть

За несколько лет до смерти Уильям мучился от серьезного заболевания, в результате которого у него сильно изменился почерк. По этой же причине он не мог самостоятельно писать, и свои последние сочинения создал вместе с Джоном Флетчером, драматургом театра «Глобус».

В 1613 году Шекспир окончательно уезжает из Лондона, однако продолжает заниматься некоторыми делами театра. Он стал свидетелем со стороны защиты на суде у своего приятеля, успевает стать владельцем еще одного роскошного особняка в Блэкфриарском приходе. Несколько недель драматург живет у своего зятя – Джона Холла, супруга старшей дочери.

В том же, 1613-м, поэт составил завещание, по которому все нажитое имущество отписывает старшей дочери. Днем смерти Шекспира принято считать 23 апреля 1616 года, хотя эти сведения тоже ничем не подтверждены. Супруга скончалась через семь лет после его смерти.

На тот момент старшая дочь Сьюзен уже родила Шекспиру внучку Элизабет. Она потом дважды была замужем, но в 1867 году умерла, так и оставшись бездетной. Младшая дочь поэта – Джудит вышла замуж за Томаса Куини, вскоре после смерти Уильяма. В этом браке родилось три мальчика, однако они все умерли молодыми. Таким образом, прервался род гениального поэта, ни одного прямого наследника у него не осталось.

Состояние

Существуют некоторые свидетельства приличного состояния Шекспира. Судя по приобретенной недвижимости, поэт хорошо зарабатывал, и его финансовые дела шли отлично. Поговаривали, что он занимался ростовщичеством.

Значительные накопления драматурга помогли приобретению шикарного особняка в родном городе Стратфорде. Помимо этого, после смерти для Уильяма уже было готово место упокоения – алтарь церкви Святой Троицы, тоже в родном городе. И все это не благодаря особым заслугам перед городом, а потому, что он заранее оплатил приличную сумму за это место.

Факты

• Точную дату рождения Шекспира выяснить не удалось никому. Историки располагают только церковной записью об обряде его крещения, состоявшемся 26 апреля 1564 года. Биографы приходят к выводу, что мальчика крестили спустя три дня после рождения, поэтому ориентировочно ставят дату рождения 23 апреля, точно так же, что и дату смерти.
• Шекспир имел феноменальную память, обладал энциклопедическими знаниями. Он говорил на двух древних языках, помимо этого свободно общался на современном итальянском, французском, испанском языках, хотя дальше Англии никогда не выезжал. Уильям был знатоком истории и политики, музыки и живописи, досконально разбирался в ботанике.
• Историки постоянно обсуждают нетрадиционную ориентацию поэта, мотивируя тем, что он слишком долго жил без семьи и поддерживал тесную связь с графом Саутгемптоном. Последний был большим оригиналом, его часто видели в женской одежде и с накрашенным лицом. Хотя найти прямые доказательства этому пока никому не удалось.
• Много вопросов возникает и по поводу протестантского вероисповедания драматурга и его родных. Его отец был католиком, хотя прямых доказательств этому нет, да и во времена правления Елизаветы I эта вера была практически под запретом. Многим католикам приходилось откупаться и таким образом иметь возможность тайно бывать на католических богослужениях.
• Единственным автографом Шекспира, сохранившимся для потомков, стало его завещание. Там перечислено все состояние поэта, вплоть до незначительных мелочей, однако о литературных работах нет ни слова.
• На протяжении жизни Шекспир успел сменить множество профессий. Он охранял конюшню в театре, в качестве актера выходил на сцену, был одним из соучредителей и главным постановщиком «Глобуса». Кроме этого занимался ростовщичеством, варил пиво и даже сдавал в аренду жилье.
• Существует версия, по которой был некий неизвестный писатель, который использовал Шекспира в качестве подставного лица. В Британской энциклопедии написано, что автором пьес, подписанных от имени Шекспира, мог стать граф Эдуард де Вер. Некоторые приписывают авторство произведений Уильяма лорду Фрэнсису Бэкону и даже королеве Елизавете I.
• Благодаря поэтическому слогу драматурга сформировалась современная английская грамматика, обогатилась литературная речь жителей туманного Альбиона. В ней часто встречаются фразы, взятые из произведений великого Шекспира. После себя поэт оставил огромное наследие – свыше 1700 новых слов.

Цитаты великого драматурга

В популярных фразах поэта и драматурга встречаются настоящие философские выражения, причем очень лаконичные и точные. В основном, они касаются любовной сферы.

Каждый читающий эти крылатые выражения находит именно то, что касается лично его. Классик призывал не судить других за грехи, лучше обратить внимание на свои, тогда и до чужих не будет дела.

Труды

Трагедии

• Ромео и Джульетта
• Кориолан
• Тит Андроник
• Тимон Афинский
• Юлий Цезарь
• Макбет
• Гамлет
• Троил и Крессида
• Король Лир
• Отелло
• Антоний и Клеопатра
• Цимбелин

Поэмы

• Сонеты Уильяма Шекспира
• Венера и Адонис
• Обесчещенная Лукреция
• Страстный пилигрим
• Феникс и голубка
• Жалоба влюблённой

Комедии

• Всё хорошо, что хорошо кончается
• Как вам это понравится
• Комедия ошибок
• Бесплодные усилия любви
• Мера за меру
• Венецианский купец
• Виндзорские насмешницы
• Сон в летнюю ночь
• Много шума из ничего
• Перикл
• Укрощение строптивой
• Буря
• Двенадцатая ночь
• Два веронца
• Два знатных родича
• Зимняя сказка

Ссылки

• Страница в Википедии

Роль и место в литературе

Творчество Уильяма Шекспира – это значимая страница в большой книге мировой Литературы. Созданные драматургом образы пополнили ряды вечных художественных образов. Гамлет, Ромео и Джульетта, Отелло, Король Лир – герои, которые давно вышли за пределы сочинений Шекспира и до сих пор живут в искусстве.

Происхождение

Великий драматург Уильям Шекспир появился на свет в 1564 году. Точные данные о дне рождения не сохранились. Город Стратфорд-апон-Эйвон (Англия) считается местом его рождения.

Отец – Джон Шекспир, зажиточный ремесленник. Он принимал активное участие в жизни города, был не единожды избранным на разные общественные должности. Так же о нем известно, что он не ходил на церковные собрания, за что платил большие штрафы. Это послужило поводом предположить, что Джон Шекспир был тайным католиком.

Мать – Мэри Шекспир (в девичестве Арден), представительница одного из старейших саксонских родов. Вышла замуж за Джона и родила ему восьмерых детей. Уильям стал третьим.

Детство будущего драматурга прошло в состоятельной многодетной семье.

Образование

Принято считать, что начальное образование Шекспир получил в Стратфордской грамматической школе. Там делали уклон на изучение латыни, учитель даже писал стихи по латыни. Есть версия, что продолжил учебу Вильям в школе короля Эдуарда Шестого. К сожалению, школьные журналы этой школы не сохранились, поэтому нельзя это утверждать.

Юношеская пора

Шекспир обзаводится собственной семьей в довольно юном возрасте – в 18 лет. Его избранницей стала Энн Хатауэй, дочь землевладельца. Девушка была старше Уильяма на 8 лет. В 1582 году состоялась их женитьба. На момент регистрации брака Энн уже ждала ребенка.

Когда Уильяму было 20 лет, он вместе с семьей переезжает в Лондон. Молодой мужчина устраивается разнорабочим в театр. Чтобы нормально жить, ему приходилось соглашаться там на любую работу. Со временем, заметив рвение молодого Уильяма, ему все же стали доверять играть небольшие роли.

Творчество

Литературный дебют Шекспира состоялся в 1594 году, когда была издана его первая книга. С этого момента он становится известным. Но, несмотря на успех, Уильям продолжает работать в театре.

В 1599 году Вильям Шекспир становится одним из совладельцев театра «Глобус».

Творчество Шекспира принято делить на четыре периода:

1. Первый – ранний период. В это время он создает свои первые комедии и поэмы. Известными стали такие сочинения: «Комедия ошибок», «Укрощение строптивой» и т. д.
2. Второй – романтический период. Наиболее значимые произведения этого периода – «Венецианский купец», «Сон в летнюю ночь».
3. Третий – философский период. Именно в этот период рождаются самые глубокие произведения автора, такие как: «Отелло» и «Гамлет».
4. Четвертый – вершина творчества. Автор уже был на этот момент опытным мастером слова и создавал такие изящные произведения, как «Антоний и Клеопатра».

Основные произведения

К основным произведениям Шекспира относят такие его трагедии: «Гамлет», «Ромео и Джульетта», «Король Лир», «Отелло». Их читатели изучают еще со школьных лет. Именно эти произведения до сих пор на пике популярности в театре, музыке и кино.

Чем же они так привлекают сердца и умы поклонников? «Гамлет» заставляет нас задуматься о смысле человеческой жизни, о сложных противоречивых моментах, о том, что порой сложно понять: «быть или не быть»? А история Ромео и Джульетты навсегда останется примером настоящей любви!

Последние годы

Есть мнение, что последние годы жизни драматург проводил в родном городе, Стратфорде. Скорее всего, его мучила какая-то болезнь, потому что на всех его последних документах стоит неразборчивая подпись. После 1613 года автор не создает пьес. В 1616 году его не стало.

Хронологическая таблица

Год (годы)	Событие
1564	Год рождения Уильяма Шекспира
1571-1578	Годы обучения в Стратфордской грамматической школе
1582	Брак с Энн Хатауэй
1584(5)	Переезд в Лондон
Конец 80-ых годов	Начало работы в театре
1594	Выход первой книги
1599	Открылся театр «Глобус»
1601-1602	Работа над трагедией «Гамлет»
1605	Работа над трагедией «Король Лир»
1613	Переезд в родной город Стратфорд
1616	Не стало драматурга

Интересные факты

1. Кроме литературного таланта, у Шекспира была способность к иностранным языкам и отменная память. Он знал французский, итальянский и испанский языки.
2. Шекспир был человеком с разносторонними интересами: варил пиво, занимался арендой квартир.
3. Точно неизвестно, кем был Вильям Шекспир: католиком или протестантом. Он это скрывал, как и его отец.

Музей писателя

Дом, в котором провел детство Уильям Шекспир, сейчас является музеем и одним из достояний Великой Британии. Дом-музей находится в городе Стратфорде на улице Хенли.

Ирина Зарицкая | Просмотров: 9.9k

Уильям Шекспир – один из самых великих драматургов и поэтов в истории. Его произведения изучают во всех школах мира, а пьесы переведены на все основные языки и ставятся на сценах театров чаще, чем пьесы каких-либо других авторов.

Работы Шекспира состоят из 38 пьес, 154 сонетов, 4 поэм и 3 эпитафий. Шекспир именуется национальным поэтом Англии, а его фамилия с английского языка переводится как «потрясающий копьём».

В биографии Шекспира много темных пятен, которые едва ли когда-то прояснятся. Однако это делает фигуру величайшего драматурга еще более загадочной, таинственной и привлекательной.

Итак, вашему вниманию предлагается биография Уильяма Шекспира. К слову, самые интересные факты про Шекспира читайте здесь.

Биография Шекспира

Биографы Уильяма Шекспира до сих пор спорят об истинной дате его рождения. Считается, что он родился 23 апреля 1564 г. в небольшом английском городе Стратфорд-на-Эйвоне.

Однако эта дата точно соответствует дню его смерти, отчего ее корректность еще больше подвергается сомнению.

Более того, 23 апреля отмечается день святого Георгия, покровителя Англии, поэтому вполне возможно, что благодарные потомки попросту приурочили к этому дню рождение величайшего национального поэта.

Любопытно происхождение фамилии «Шекспир», которая переводится с английского языка как «потрясающий копьём».

Детство и юность

Уильям Шекспир рос в обеспеченной семье. Его отец, Джон, занимался изготовлением перчаток. Благодаря этому он нажил неплохое состояние и неоднократно избирался на разные государственные должности.

Интересен факт, что отец Шекспира намеренно не ходил в храмы во время богослужений официальной Англиканской церкви, вследствие чего ему приходилось платить большие штрафы. Биографы считают, что возможно он был тайным католиком.

Мать Шекспира, Мэри Арден, являлась урожденной саксонкой, принадлежавшей к древнему роду. Кроме Уильяма в семье Шекспиров родилось еще 7 детей.

Образование

О том где учился Уильям Шекспир также точно неизвестно. Считается, что он ходил в грамматическую школу, находящуюся в его родном городе. Он хорошо учился и глубоко изучал латинский язык.

Существует мнение, что будущий драматург продолжил учебу в королевской школе, где ему удалось познакомиться с трудами древних римских поэтов.

Так или иначе, но судя по произведениям Шекспира можно смело утверждать, что он был чрезвычайно образованным человеком.

Личная жизнь

В 18 лет в биографии Шекспира произошло знаковое событие. Он женился на дочке землевладельца Энн Хатауэй, с которой жил по соседству. Интересен факт, что избранница Уильяма была старше его на 8 лет.

Исследователи Шекспира считают, что этот брак был вынужденным, по причине беременности Энн. Через несколько месяцев после женитьбы у них родилась дочка Сьюзен, а через 2 года у пары появились двойняшки – мальчик Хемнет, и девочка Джудит.

При этом стоит заметить, что ряд биографов Шекспира считают, что он вообще никогда не был женат.

Существует даже предположение, будто драматург имел отношения с мужчинами, однако такая версия не подтверждена никакими серьезными фактами.

Театральная карьера в Лондоне

Любопытно, что о семи годах (1585-1592) биографии Шекспира вообще ничего не известно. Только в 1592 г. появляется первое свидетельство о том, что он занимается театральной деятельностью.

Поэтому достоверно узнать о том, в каком возрасте Шекспир начал писать свои пьесы – не представляется возможным.

На сегодняшний день известно, что он состоял в труппе «Слуги лорда-камергера», будучи одним из ее соучредителей. Шекспир писал для труппы пьесы, и сам же выступал на сцене в качестве актера.

Постановки имели невероятный успех у публики, которая с интересом смотрела на игру артистов. Интересно, что на спектакли ходили не только простые люди, но и вся королевская знать.

Благодаря этому актеры стали очень хорошо зарабатывать и смогли построить собственный театр, который был назван «Глобус».

Спустя несколько лет они выкупили театр «Блэкфрайер», а Уильям Шекспир стал одним из самых богатых людей Лондона.

Литературная деятельность

Принято считать, что Шекспир одновременно занимался, как актерской, так и литературной деятельностью. Его первое произведение было опубликовано в 1594 г.

Творческий период драматурга можно условно разделить на 4 части:

1. Написание легких комедий, «трагедий ужаса», хроник и двух поэм. В это время его произведения были еще достаточно сырыми и отличались наличием большого количества персонажей.
2. Появление зрелой драматургии, хроник с драматическим повествованием, античных пьес и сонетов.
3. Написание античных и мрачных трагедий.
4. Сочинение драматических сказок.

Драматургия

Уильям Шекспир по праву считается самым великим драматургом всех времен и народов. В конце 16 века многие литераторы стремились писать исторические драмы.

В связи с этим в биографии Шекспира появились пьесы «Ричард 3» и «Генрих 6».

Как уже говорилось, первые произведения Шекспира отличались легкостью и ироничностью. В поздний период его пьесы становятся уже более интересными и содержательными.

Одними из самых известных его трагедий являются «Гамлет», «Отелло» и «Король Лир».

С каждым годом его произведения становились все лучше и содержательнее. Ему удавалось в тонкостях передавать детали разных исторических событий, а также мастерски описывать характеры своих героев.

Шекспировские драмы «Антоний и Клеопатра» и «Кориолан» считаются эталоном совершенства.

Интересно, что некоторые биографы Шекспира убеждены в том, что несколько своих пьес он написал в соавторстве с другими писателями.

Но даже если предположить, что это действительно так было, в этом нет ничего удивительного, поскольку такая практика была вполне распространенной в то время.

Поэмы и сонеты

В 1593 г. в Англии свирепствовала эпидемия чумы, унесшая десятки тысяч жизней. На протяжении 2 лет люди умирали в страшных мучениях думая, что их постигла кара Божья. Само собой разумеется, что театральное искусство в то время было не очень актуальным.

В связи с этим Уильям Шекспир какое-то время не участвовал в спектаклях. Вместо этого он много читал. После прочтения «Метаморфоз» Овидия из-под его пера вышло 2 эротических поэмы.

Однако больше всего драматург прославился, как автор сонетов. За свою биографию Шекспир написал 154 сонета, каждый из которых состоит из 14 строк.

Стиль Шекспира

Изначально творчество Шекспира сильно не отличалась от литераторов того времени.

Однако почувствовав уверенность в собственных силах, ему захотелось достичь больших успехов на писательском поприще, поэтому он часто экспериментировал с различными стилями написания пьес и сонетов.

В своих произведениях Уильям Шекспир нередко прибегал к так называемым анжамбеманам, когда автор использует нестандартные конструкции и меняет длину предложений.

Кроме этого, он неоднократно предлагал читателю самостоятельно додумывать окончание той или иной фразы.

Критика

Бесспорно, Шекспир считается литературным гением мирового значения. Его творчеством восхищались такие русские поэты и писатели, как Пушкин, Лермонтов, Тургенев, Достоевский, Некрасов и многие другие.

Интересен факт, что при жизни талант драматурга не был оценен по достоинству. Лишь столетие спустя Шекспир станет национальным героем Англии, после чего его книги начнут переводить на все языки мира.

Однако были и те, кто скептически относился к творчеству английского писателя. Одним из самых авторитетных его критиков являлся Лев Толстой. Он публично критиковал способности Шекспира, как драматурга.

При этом великий русский драматург Антон Чехов называл Шекспира «объективным поэтом» и очень восхищался им. Станиславский считал Чехова продолжателем шекспировских традиций.

Смерть

В последние годы жизни Уильям Шекспир жил в родном городе, где продолжал писать пьесы. Чем он занимался еще невозможно сказать по причине отсутствия какой-либо достоверной исторической информации.

Биографы, изучающие рукописи Шекспира, отмечали, что в конце жизни его почерк стал более размашистым и неуверенным. На основании этого некоторые из них выдвинули версию о том, что драматург был серьезно болен.

23 апреля 1616 г. Уильям Шекспир умер в возрасте 52 лет.

После смерти все его имущество перешло дочерям. Интересен факт, что на том месте, где Шекспир прожил свои последние годы, ему был позже установлен памятник.

Если вам понравилась биография Шекспира – поделитесь ею в социальных сетях. Если же вам нравятся биографии великих людей вообще, и интересные истории из их жизни в частности – подписывайтесь на сайт InteresnyeFakty.org. С нами всегда интересно!

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Уильям Шекспир (1564-1616) – великий английский поэт и драматург, входит в число лучших писателей мира, национальный поэт Англии. Произведения Шекспира имеют переводы на все основные языки мира и наибольшее количество театральных постановок по сравнению со всеми другими драматургами.

Рождение и семья

Уильям родился в 1564 году в небольшом местечке Стратфорд-апон-Эйвон. Точно неизвестен день его рождения, есть только запись о крещении малыша, которая прошла 26 апреля. Так как в то время младенцев крестили на третий день после рождения, предполагается, что поэт появился на свет 23 апреля.

Отец будущего гения, Джон Шекспир (1530-1601), – зажиточный горожанин, занимался торговлей мясом, шерстью и зерном, имел перчаточное ремесло, позднее увлёкся политикой. Он часто избирался на значимые в обществе должности: в 1565 году олдерменом (членом муниципального собрания), в 1568 году бальи (мэром города). В Стратфорде отец имел много домов, так что семья далеко не бедствовала. Отец никогда не ходил на службу в церковь, за это на него возлагались немалые штрафы, предполагается, что он тайно исповедовал католицизм.

Мама поэта, Мэри Арден (1537-1608), вышла из старейшего дворянского рода Саксонии. Уильям был третьим из восьми детей, родившихся в семье Шекспиров.

Учёба

Маленький Шекспир посещал местную «грамматическую» школу, где занимался риторикой, латынью и грамматикой. Дети в подлиннике знакомились с произведениями знаменитых древних мыслителей и поэтов: Сенеки, Виргилия, Цицерона, Горация, Овидия. Это раннее изучение лучших умов отложило отпечаток на дальнейшее творчество Уильяма.

Провинциальный городок Стратфорд был маленький, все люди знали там друг друга в лицо, общались независимо от сословия. Шекспир играл с детьми обычных горожан и знакомился с их жизнью. Он познавал фольклор и впоследствии списывал со стратфордских жителей многих героев своих произведений. В его пьесах появятся хитрые слуги, высокомерные вельможи, простые люди, страдающие из-за рамок условностей, все эти образы он черпал в детских воспоминаниях.

Молодые годы

Шекспир был очень трудолюбивым, тем более что жизнь заставила его рано начать работать. Когда Уильяму было 16 лет, отец совсем запутался в своих торговых делах, обанкротился и не мог содержать семью. Будущий поэт пробовал себя в качестве сельского учителя и подмастерья в мясной лавке. Уже тогда проявлялась его творческая натура, перед тем, как забить животное, он произносил торжественную речь.

Когда Шекспиру было 18 лет, он сочетался браком с 26-летней Энн Хатауэй. Отец Энн был местным землевладельцем, на момент бракосочетания девушка ждала ребёнка. В 1583 году Энн родила девочку Сьюзен, в 1585 году в семье появилась двойня – девочка Джудит и мальчик Хемнет (умер в 11 лет).

Спустя три года после женитьбы семья уехала в Лондон, потому что Уильяму пришлось скрываться от местного помещика Томаса Люси. В те времена считалось особой доблестью убить оленя в поместье местного богача. Этим занимался Шекспир, и Томас начал его преследование.

Творчество

В английской столице Шекспир устроился работать в театр. Сначала его работа заключалась в присмотре за лошадьми посетителей театра. Потом ему доверили «штопать пьесы», на современный лад он был рерайтером, то есть переделывал старые произведения для новых спектаклей. Пробовал играть на сцене, но знаменитого актёра из него не вышло.

Со временем Уильяму предложили работу театрального драматурга. Его комедии и трагедии играла труппа «Слуги лорда-камергера», которая занимала одну из ведущих позиций среди театральных лондонских коллективов. В 1594 году Уильям стал совладельцем этой труппы. В 1603 году после кончины королевы Елизаветы коллектив переименовали в «Слуги Короля».

В 1599 году на южном берегу реки Темзы Уильям с партнёрами выстроил новый театр, получивший название «Глобус». К 1608 году относится приобретение закрытого театра «Блэкфрайерс». Шекспир стал довольно состоятельным человеком и приобрёл дом Нью-Плэйс, в родном городке Стратфорде это строение было вторым по величине.

С 1589 по 1613 годы Уильям сочинил основную часть своих произведений. Его раннее творчество состоит в большей степени из хроник и комедий:

• «Всё хорошо, что хорошо кончается»;
• «Виндзорские насмешницы»;
• «Комедия ошибок»;
• «Много шума из ничего»;
• «Венецианский купец»;
• «Двенадцатая ночь»;
• «Сон в летнюю ночь»;
• «Укрощение строптивой».

Позднее у драматурга наступил период трагедий:

• «Ромео и Джульетта»;
• «Юлий Цезарь»;
• «Гамлет»;
• «Отелло»;
• «Король Лир»;
• «Антоний и Клеопатра».

Всего Шекспиром написано 4 поэмы, 3 эпитафии, 154 сонета и 38 пьес.

Смерть и наследие

Начиная с 1613 года, Уильям больше не писал, а три последние его произведения были созданы уже в творческом союзе с другим автором.

Шекспир умер 3 мая 1616 года. Супруга пережила его на семь лет.

Свою недвижимость поэт завещал старшей дочке Сьюзен, а после неё уже прямым наследникам. Сьюзен в 1607 году сочеталась браком с Джоном Холлом, у них родилась девочка Элизабет, которая потом два раза выходила замуж, но оба брака были бездетными.

Младшая дочь Шекспира Джудит вступила в брак с виноделом Томасом Куини вскоре после смерти отца. У них было трое детей, но все они умерли, не успев создать семьи и родить наследников.

Всё творческое наследие великого драматурга досталось благодарным потомкам. В мире установлено огромное количество монументов, памятников и статуй, посвящённых Уильяму. Сам он захоронен в церкви Святой Троицы города Стратфорда.

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
Notable work	Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Sonnets
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]

In Shakespeare’s day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[218] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[219] 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.^[220] Expressions such as «with bated breath» (Merchant of Venice) and «a foregone conclusion» (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[221][222]

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.^[223][224] 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.»^[225]

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.^[226]

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.^[228][229] 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.^[230][231] The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John’s College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser.^[232] 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).^[227]

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.^[233] 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».^[234] 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.»^[235] 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.^[236][237] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.^[238] 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.^[239][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.^[241] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius often bordered on adulation.^[242] «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».^[243] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.^[244] 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.^[245]

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.^[246] 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.^[247] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.^[248][249] 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.»^[250]

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.^[251] 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.^[252][253] 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.^[254][255] 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.^[256] «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.»^[257] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.^{[258][259][260]}

Speculation

Around 230 years after Shakespeare’s death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.^[261] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.^[262] Several «group theories» have also been proposed.^[263] 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,^[264] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.^{[265][266][267]}

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.^[269] 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.^[270][271] In 1591, the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church «for fear of process for debt», a common Catholic excuse.^{[272][273][274]} In 1606, the name of William’s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.^{[272][273][274]} 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.^[275][276]

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,^[277] 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.^{[278][279][280]} The 26 so-called «Dark Lady» sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.^[281]

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,^[282] 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.^[283]

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
Notable work	Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Sonnets
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]

In Shakespeare’s day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,^[218] and his use of language helped shape modern English.^[219] 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.^[220] Expressions such as «with bated breath» (Merchant of Venice) and «a foregone conclusion» (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.^[221][222]

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.^[223][224] 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.»^[225]

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.^[226]

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.^[228][229] 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.^[230][231] The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John’s College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser.^[232] 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).^[227]

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.^[233] 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».^[234] 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.»^[235] 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.^[236][237] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.^[238] 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.^[239][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.^[241] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare’s genius often bordered on adulation.^[242] «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».^[243] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.^[244] 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.^[245]

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.^[246] 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.^[247] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.^[248][249] 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.»^[250]

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.^[251] 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.^[252][253] 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.^[254][255] 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.^[256] «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.»^[257] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.^{[258][259][260]}

Speculation

Around 230 years after Shakespeare’s death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.^[261] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.^[262] Several «group theories» have also been proposed.^[263] 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,^[264] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.^{[265][266][267]}

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.^[269] 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.^[270][271] In 1591, the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church «for fear of process for debt», a common Catholic excuse.^{[272][273][274]} In 1606, the name of William’s daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.^{[272][273][274]} 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.^[275][276]

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,^[277] 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.^{[278][279][280]} The 26 so-called «Dark Lady» sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.^[281]

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,^[282] 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.^[283]

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, Уильям (Shakespeare, William) (1564–1616), англий­ский дра­ма­тург, поэт, актер эпо­хи Воз­рож­де­ния. В миро­вой исто­рии – несо­мнен­но, самый зна­ме­ни­тый и зна­чи­мый дра­ма­тург, ока­зав­ший огром­ное вли­я­ние на раз­ви­тие все­го теат­раль­но­го искус­ства. Сце­ни­че­ские про­из­ве­де­ния Шекс­пи­ра и сего­дня не схо­дят с теат­раль­ных под­мост­ков все­го мира. Здесь нахо­дить­ся пол­ное собра­ние сочи­не­ний The Complete Works of William Shakespeare как вы дога­да­лись в оригинале.

Биография Шекспира

Уильям Шекс­пир родил­ся в малень­ком город­ке Страт­форд-на-Эйвоне 23 апре­ля 1654. Про­ис­хо­дил из семьи тор­гов­цев и ремес­лен­ни­ков. Учил­ся в т.н. «грам­ма­ти­че­ской шко­ле», где основ­ным пред­ме­том был латин­ский язык и осно­вы гре­че­ско­го. В шко­ле полу­чил широ­кие зна­ния антич­ной мифо­ло­гии, исто­рии и лите­ра­ту­ры, отра­зив­ши­е­ся в его творчестве.

В 1582 женил­ся на А.Хэсуэй (Хатау­эй), от бра­ка с кото­рой имел тро­их детей. Одна­ко око­ло 1587 поки­нул Страд­форд-на-Эйвоне и свою семью и пере­се­лил­ся в Лон­дон. Далее о его жиз­ни нет ника­ких све­де­ний до 1592, когда мы впер­вые нахо­дим упо­ми­на­ние о нем, как об акте­ре и дра­ма­тур­ге – в пред­смерт­ном пам­фле­те дра­ма­тур­га Р. Гри­на На грош ума, куп­лен­но­го за мил­ли­он рас­ка­я­ния. Более точ­ные био­гра­фи­че­ские све­де­ния о Шекс­пи­ре дати­ру­ют­ся 1593–1594, когда он всту­пил в одну из веду­щих англий­ских теат­раль­ных трупп того вре­ме­ни – труп­пу Р. Бер­беджа «Слу­ги лор­да-камер­ге­ра» (Chamberlain’s Men).

Боль­шин­ство работ Шекс­пи­ра напи­са­ны в пери­од с 1589 по 1613 год. Его ран­ние пье­сы в основ­ном отно­сят­ся к коме­ди­ям и хро­ни­кам, в кото­рых Шекс­пир зна­чи­тель­но пре­успел. Затем в его твор­че­стве настал пери­од тра­ге­дий, вклю­ча­ю­щих про­из­ве­де­ния «Гам­лет», «Король Лир», «Отел­ло» и «Мак­бет», кото­рые счи­та­ют­ся одни­ми из луч­ших на англий­ском язы­ке. В кон­це сво­е­го твор­че­ства Шекс­пир напи­сал несколь­ко тра­ги­ко­ме­дий, а так­же сотруд­ни­чал с дру­ги­ми писателями.

Мно­гие пье­сы Шекс­пи­ра изда­ва­лись ещё при его жиз­ни. В 1623 году два дру­га Шекс­пи­ра, Джон Хеминг и Ген­ри Кон­делл, опуб­ли­ко­ва­ли Пер­вое фолио, собра­ние всех, кро­ме двух, пьес Шекс­пи­ра, в насто­я­щее вре­мя вклю­ча­е­мых в канон. Поз­же Шекс­пи­ру раз­лич­ны­ми иссле­до­ва­те­ля­ми было с раз­лич­ной сте­пе­нью дока­за­тель­но­сти атри­бу­ти­ро­ва­но ещё несколь­ко пьес (или их фрагменты).

Телец по горо­ско­пу, Уильям отли­чал­ся тру­до­лю­би­ем, тем более что начать рабо­тать ему при­шлось очень рано — с 16 лет, пото­му что его отец запу­тал­ся в делах и не мог содер­жать всю семью. Био­гра­фи­че­ские све­де­ния об этом вре­ме­ни раз­нят­ся. По одним дан­ным, Уильям рабо­тал сель­ским учи­те­лем. По дру­гой леген­де он был под­ма­сте­рьем в лав­ке мяс­ни­ка, и, по пре­да­нию, уже тогда был гума­ни­стом — перед забо­ем живот­ных «он про­из­но­сил над ними тор­же­ствен­ную речь». В восем­на­дца­ти­лет­нем воз­расте Уильям женил­ся на Анне Хатау­эй, кото­рой было в то вре­мя 26 лет. Через три года после женить­бы он пере­ехал в Лондон.

По леген­де, Шекс­пир бежал от мест­но­го поме­щи­ка, кото­рый пре­сле­до­вал его за то, что Уильям уби­вал оле­ней во вла­де­ни­ях вель­мо­жи (убить оле­ня бога­ча счи­та­лось доблестью).

В Лон­доне Шекс­пир полу­чил рабо­ту в теат­ре. Он при­смат­ри­вал за лошадь­ми при­ез­жа­ю­щих, и был пона­ча­лу «што­паль­щи­ком пьес» («playpatcher»), или, гово­ря совре­мен­ным язы­ком, рерай­те­ром — пере­ра­ба­ты­вал ста­рые пье­сы для новых поста­но­вок. Веро­ят­но, он про­бо­вал себя как актер, но не стал зна­ме­нит. Вско­ре Шек­пир стал дра­ма­тур­гом теат­ра. Его твор­че­ство еще при жиз­ни было оце­не­но совре­мен­ни­ка­ми по досто­ин­ству — в 1599 году, когда был обра­зо­ван театр «Гло­бус» (Globe), Шекс­пир стал одним из пай­щи­ков. Види­мо, в мате­ри­аль­ном плане его жизнь сло­жи­лась благополучно.

О творчестве

Уильям Шекс­пир по сво­ей зна­чи­мо­сти для Англии зани­ма­ет такое же место, как для Рос­сии Пуш­кин. В тра­ге­ди­ях, и осо­бен­но коме­ди­ях, Шекс­пир широ­ко исполь­зо­вал обо­ро­ты народ­ной речи, кото­рые впо­след­ствии орга­нич­но вошли в лите­ра­тур­ный язык. Но цен­ность его твор­че­ства была не толь­ко в этом. За 20 лет твор­че­ской жиз­ни он создал то, что оста­ет­ся акту­аль­ным на про­тя­же­нии пяти сто­ле­тий. Его соне­ты, тра­ге­дии и коме­дии ста­ли клас­си­кой. Бла­го­да­ря Шекс­пи­ру в лите­ра­ту­ре появи­лись новые идеи, новый взгляд на жизнь. В теат­ре на сцене геро­я­ми ста­ли живые люди, а не носи­те­ли стро­го опре­де­лен­ных идей, как это было свой­ствен­но дра­ма­тур­гии того вре­ме­ни. Уильям брал за осно­ву рас­про­стра­нен­ные сюже­ты, и при­вно­сил в них пере­до­вые идеи того вре­ме­ни — эпо­хи Возрождения.

Театральная карьера. Жизнь в Лондоне

В 20-лет­нем воз­расте Уильям Шекс­пир поки­да­ет род­ной город, пере­би­ра­ет­ся в Лон­дон. Там его жизнь скла­ды­ва­ет­ся нелег­ко: что­бы зара­бо­тать сред­ства, он вынуж­ден согла­шать­ся на любую рабо­ту в теат­ре. Затем ему дове­ря­ют играть неболь­шие роли. В 1603 году на сцене теат­ра появ­ля­ют­ся его пье­сы и Шекс­пир ста­но­вит­ся совла­дель­цем труп­пы под назва­ни­ем «Слу­ги коро­ля».  Поз­же театр полу­ча­ет назва­ние «Гло­бус», пере­би­ра­ет­ся в новое здание.

Твор­че­ство Лите­ра­тур­ное насле­дие Шекс­пи­ра рас­па­да­ет­ся на две нерав­ные части: сти­хо­твор­ную (поэ­мы и соне­ты) и драматическую.

Пер­вый пери­од (1590—1594) По лите­ра­тур­ным при­ё­мам его мож­но назвать пери­о­дом под­ра­жа­тель­но­сти: Шекс­пир ещё весь во вла­сти сво­их пред­ше­ствен­ни­ков. По настро­е­нию этот пери­од сто­рон­ни­ки био­гра­фи­че­ско­го под­хо­да к иссле­до­ва­нию твор­че­ства Шекс­пи­ра опре­де­ля­ли как пери­од иде­а­ли­сти­че­ской веры в луч­шие сто­ро­ны жиз­ни: «С увле­че­ни­ем нака­зы­ва­ет моло­дой Шекс­пир порок в сво­их исто­ри­че­ских тра­ге­ди­ях и с вос­тор­гом вос­пе­ва­ет высо­кие и поэ­ти­че­ские чув­ства — друж­бу, само­по­жерт­во­ва­ние и в осо­бен­но­сти любовь» (Вен­ге­ров).

Вто­рой пери­од (1594—1601) Око­ло 1595 года Шекс­пир созда­ёт одну из самых попу­ляр­ных сво­их тра­ге­дий — «Ромео и Джу­льет­ту» , — исто­рию раз­ви­тия чело­ве­че­ской лич­но­сти в борь­бе с внеш­ни­ми обсто­я­тель­ства­ми за пра­во на сво­бод­ную любовь.

Тре­тий пери­од (1600—1609) Тре­тий пери­од его худо­же­ствен­ной дея­тель­но­сти, при­бли­зи­тель­но охва­ты­ва­ю­щий 1600—1609 годы, сто­рон­ни­ки субъ­ек­ти­вист­ско­го био­гра­фи­че­ско­го под­хо­да к твор­че­ству Шекс­пи­ра назы­ва­ют пери­о­дом «глу­бо­ко­го душев­но­го мрака».Герои «вели­ких тра­ге­дий» Шекс­пи­ра — люди выда­ю­щи­е­ся, в кото­рых пере­ме­ша­но доб­ро и зло. Стал­ки­ва­ясь с дис­гар­мо­ни­ей окру­жа­ю­ще­го мира, они совер­ша­ют нелёг­кий выбор — как суще­ство­вать в нём, они сами тво­рят свою судь­бу и несут всю пол­но­ту ответ­ствен­но­сти за это.

Чет­вёр­тый пери­од (1609—1612) В пье­сах послед­не­го пери­о­да тяжё­лые испы­та­ния под­чёр­ки­ва­ют радость избав­ле­ния от бед­ствий. Кле­ве­та ули­ча­ет­ся, невин­ность оправ­ды­ва­ет себя, вер­ность полу­ча­ет награ­ду, безу­мие рев­но­сти не име­ет тра­ги­че­ских послед­ствий, любя­щие соеди­ня­ют­ся в счаст­ли­вом бра­ке. Опти­мизм этих про­из­ве­де­ний кри­ти­ка­ми вос­при­ни­ма­ет­ся как знак при­ми­рён­но­сти их автора.

За свою твор­че­скую жизнь вели­кий дра­ма­тург напи­сал 17 коме­дий, 11 тра­ге­дий, 5 поэм, более 150 соне­тов и око­ло 10 хро­ник. До сих пор не ути­ха­ют спо­ры о том, был ли Шекс­пир авто­ром всех этих и дру­гих про­из­ве­де­ний. Вско­ре по неиз­вест­ным при­чи­нам Шекс­пир ухо­дит в отстав­ку и воз­вра­ща­ет­ся из Лон­до­на домой, где в кру­гу семьи и про­во­дит свои послед­ние годы жиз­ни. Есть пред­по­ло­же­ния, что он был в этот пери­од болен: его заве­ща­ние, дати­ро­ван­ное 15 мар­та 1616, напи­са­но весь­ма неразборчиво.

Уильям Шекспир, библиография

Все кни­ги Уилья­ма Шекспира:

• «Всё хоро­шо, что хоро­шо кончается»
• «Как вам это понравится»
• «Бес­плод­ные уси­лия любви»
• «Сон в лет­нюю ночь»
• «Мно­го шума из ничего»
• «Два знат­ных родича»
• «Соне­ты Уилья­ма Шекспира»
• «Вене­ра и Адонис»
• «Феникс и голубка»
• «Ген­рих IV», часть 1,2
• «Ген­рих VI», часть 1,2,3
• «Ромео и Джульетта»
• «Тро­ил и Крессида»
• «Анто­ний и Клеопатра»

Цитаты Шекспира

• If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. – Если у вас есть сле­зы, готовь­тесь про­лить их сейчас.
• As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. – Посколь­ку он был отва­жен, я чту его. Но посколь­ку он был често­лю­бив, я его убил.
• Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. – Любовь – это дым, порож­ден­ный пара­ми вздохов.
• If music be the food of love, play on. – Если музы­ка – пища для люб­ви, играй­те ее.
• To be, or not to be, that is the question. – Быть или не быть – вот в чем вопрос.
• God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. – Бог дал вам одно лицо, а вы рису­е­те себе другое.
• There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. – Нет ниче­го ни хоро­ше­го, ни пло­хо­го, но сво­и­ми мыс­ля­ми мы дела­ем это таковым.
• It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves. – Наша судь­ба не в звез­дах, а в нас самих.
• Let every man be master of his time. – Поз­воль­те каж­до­му чело­ве­ку быть хозя­и­ном сво­е­го времени.
•  My soul is in the sky. – Моя душа нахо­дит­ся в небе.

Произведения Уильяма Шекспира

Мы не смо­жем в этой ста­тье пере­чис­лить все рабо­ты вели­чай­ше­го англий­ско­го дра­ма­тур­га. Но ука­жем самые извест­ные про­из­ве­де­ния Шекс­пи­ра. Спи­сок следующий:

•  «Ромео и Джульетта».
•  «Гам­лет».
• «Мак­бет».
• «Сон в лет­нюю ночь».
• «Отел­ло».
• «Король Лир».
• «Вене­ци­ан­ский купец».
• «Мно­го шума из ничего».
• «Буря». «Два веронца».

Эти пье­сы най­дут­ся в репер­ту­а­ре любо­го ува­жа­ю­ще­го себя теат­ра. И, конеч­но же, пере­фра­зи­руя зна­ме­ни­тую пого­вор­ку, мы можем ска­зать, что плох тот актер, кото­рый не меч­та­ет сыг­рать Гам­ле­та, пло­ха та актри­са, кото­рая не хочет сыг­рать Джульетту.

Интересные факты

• Несмот­ря на то, что дей­ствие пьес Шекс­пи­ра раз­во­ра­чи­ва­ет­ся в самых раз­ных угол­ках Евро­пы, в том чис­ле во Фран­ции и Ита­лии, сам дра­ма­тург, веро­ят­нее все­го, нико­гда не поки­дал Англию.
• Финал зна­ме­ни­той пье­сы Шекс­пи­ра «Король Лир» в тече­ние 150 лет счи­тал­ся столь печаль­ным, что про­из­ве­де­ние на про­тя­же­нии все­го это­го пери­о­да нико­гда не ста­ви­ли в оригинале.
• Уильям Шекс­пир обо­га­тил англий­ский язык на 1 700 новых слов.
• Сло­вар­ный запас Шекс­пи­ра состав­ля­ет от 15 000 до 29 000 слов.
• При жиз­ни дра­ма­тур­га его самым попу­ляр­ным сочи­не­ни­ем счи­та­лось мало­из­вест­ное сей­час сти­хо­тво­ре­ние «Вене­ра и Адонис».
• Как мини­мум две пье­сы Шекс­пи­ра бес­след­но исчез­ли из лите­ра­тур­но­го насле­дия дра­ма­тур­га: Love’s Labour’s Won («Побе­до­нос­ные уси­лия люб­ви») и Cardenio («Кар­де­нио»).

Уход Шекспира

При­мер­но в 1610 Уильям Шекс­пир поки­нул Лон­дон и воз­вра­тил­ся в Страт­форд-на-Эйвоне. До 1612 не терял свя­зи с теат­ром: в 1611 напи­са­на Зим­няя сказ­ка, в 1612 – послед­нее дра­ма­тур­ги­че­ское про­из­ве­де­ние, Буря. Послед­ние годы жиз­ни ото­шел от лите­ра­тур­ной дея­тель­но­сти, и жил тихо и неза­мет­но в кру­гу семьи. Веро­ят­но, это было свя­за­но с тяже­лой болез­нью – на это ука­зы­ва­ет сохра­нив­ше­е­ся заве­ща­ние Шекс­пи­ра, состав­лен­ное явно наспех 15 мар­та 1616 и под­пи­сан­ное изме­нив­шим­ся почер­ком. 23 апре­ля 1616 в Страт­фор­де-на-Эйвоне скон­чал­ся самый зна­ме­ни­тый дра­ма­тург всех вре­мен и народов.

После 1607 года Шекс­пир напи­сал очень мало пьес, а в 1613 году вооб­ще пре­кра­тил их писать. Три свои послед­ние пье­сы он напи­сал в соав­тор­стве с ещё одним сочи­ни­те­лем. Исто­ри­ки допус­ка­ют, что это был Джон Флет­чер, посколь­ку имен­но он заме­нил Шекс­пи­ра на посту глав­но­го дра­ма­тур­га «Слуг Короля».

Посколь­ку в послед­ние годы жиз­ни почерк Шекс­пи­ра на бума­гах силь­но меня­ет­ся, мно­гие учё­ные счи­та­ют, что он болел.

Его похо­ро­ни­ли в церк­ви Свя­той Тро­и­цы в род­ном Страт­фор­де. Тем не менее во мно­гих горо­дах мира есть погре­баль­ные мону­мен­ты Шекс­пи­ру. Напри­мер в угол­ке поэтов в Вест­мин­стер­ском аббат­стве. Уи́льям Шекспи́р был одним из луч­ших сре­ди самых попу­ляр­ных англий­ских писа­те­лей, даже на сего­дняш­ний день.

Видео: Уильям Шекспир

Видео: Соне­ты Шекс­пи­ра на англий­ском языке