WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in April, 1564. He was the third child, and eldest son, of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. His father was one of the most prosperous men of Straford, who held in turn the chief offices in the town. His mother was of gentle birth, the daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmcote.
In December, 1582, Shakespeare married Ann Hathaway, daughter of a farmer of Shottery, near Stratford; their first child Susanna was baptized on May 6, 1585.
Little is known of Shakespeare's early life; but it is unlikely that a writer who dramatized such an incomparable range and variety of human kinds and experiences should have spent his early manhood entirely in placid pursuits in a country town. There is one tradition, not universally accepted, that he fled from Stratford because he was in trouble for deer stealing, and has fallen foul of Sir Thomas Lucy, the local magnate; another that he was for some time a schoolmaster.
From 1592 onwards the records are much fuller. In March, 1592, the Lord Stranges’s players produced a new play at the Rose Theatre called Harry the sixth, which was very successful, and was probably the First Part of Henry VI. In the autumn of 1592, Robert Greene, the best known of professional writers, as he was dying wrote a letter to three fellow writers in which he warned them against the ingratitude of players in general, and in particular against an ‘upstart crow’ who ‘supposes he is as much able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum is his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’. This is the first reference to Shakespeare, and the whole passage suggests that Shakespeare has become suddenly famous as a playwright. At this time Shakespeare was brought into touch with Edward Alleyne the great tragedian, and Christopher Marlowe, whose thundering parts of Tamburlaine, the Jew of Malta, and Dr Faustus Alleyne was acting, as well as Hieronimo, the hero of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the most famous of all Elizabethan plays.
In April, 1593, Shakespeare published his poem Venus and Adonis, which was dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: it was a great and lasting success, and was reprinted nine times in the next few years. In May, 1594, his second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was also dedicated to Southampton.
There was little playing in 1593, for the theatres were shut during a severe outbreak of the plague; but in the autumn of 1594, when the plague ceased, the playing companies were reorganized, and Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s company who went to play in the Theatre in Shoreditch. During these months Marlowe and Kyd had died. Shakespeare was thus for a time without a rival. He had already written the three parts of Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour Lost, The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew.Soon afterwards he wrote the first of his greater plays - Romeo and Juliet - and he followed his success in the next three years with A Midsummer Night’a Dream, Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice. The two parts of Henry IV, introducing Falstaff, the most popular of all his comic characters, were written in 1597-8.
The company left the Theatre in 1597 owing to disputes over a renewal of the ground lease, and went to play Curtain in the same neighbourhood. The disputes continued throughout 1598, and at Christmas the players settled the matter by demolishing the old Theatre and re-erecting a new playhouse on the South bank of the Thames, near Southwark Cathedral. This playouse was named the Globe. The epenses of the new building were shared by the chief members of the Company, including Shakespeare, who was by now a man of some means. In 1596, he had bought New Place, a large house in the center of Stratford, for £60, and through his father purchased the a coat-of-arms from the Heralds, which was the official recognition that he and his family were gentlefolk.
By the summer of 1598 Shakespeare was recognized as the greatest English dramatist. Booksellers we're printing his more popular plays, at times even in pirated or stolen versions, and he received a remarkable tribute from a young writer named Francis Meres, in his book Palladis Tamia. In a long catalogue of English authors Meres gave Shakespeare more prominence than any other writer, and mentioned by name twelve of his plays.
Shortly before the Globe was opened, Shakespeare has completed the cycle of plays dealing with the whole story of the Wars of the Roses with Henry V. It was followed by As You Like it, and Julius Caesar, the first of the maturer tragedies. In the next three years he wrote Troylus and Cressida, The Merry Wives of Windso, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night.
On March 24, 1603, Queen Elizabeth died. The company had often performed before her, but they found her successor a far more enthusiastic patron. One of the first acts of King James was to take over the company and to promote them to be his own servants so that hencefoward they were known as the King’s Men. They acted now very frequently at the Court, and prospered accordingly. In the early years of the reign Shakespeare wrote the more sombre comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, which were followed by Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. Then he returned to Roman themes with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.
Since 1601, Shakespeare had been writing less, and there’s were now a number of rival dramatists who were introducing new styles of drama, particularly Ben Jonson (whose first successful comedy, Every Man in his s. Humour, was acted by Shakespeare company in 1598), Chapman, Drekker, Marston, and d Beaumont Andy Fletcher who began to write in 1607. In 1608 the King’s Men acquired a second playhouse, an indoor private theatre in the fashionable quarter of Blackfriars. At private theaters, plays were performed indoors; the prices charged were higher than in the public playhouses, and the audiences consequently was more select. Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage about this time: his name does not occur in the various lists of players after 1607. Henceforward he lived for the most part at Stratford, where he was regarded as one of the most important citizens. He still wrote a few plays, and he tried his hand at the new form of tragi-comedy-a play with tragic incidents but a very happy ending - which Beaumont and Fletcher had popularized. He wrote four of these - Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, which was acted at Court in 1611. For the last four years of his life he lives in retirement. His son Hamnet has died in 1596: his two daughters were now married. Shakespeare died at Stratford upon Avon on April 23, 1616, and was buried in the chancel of the church, before the high altar. Shortly afterwards a memorial which still exists, with a portrait bust, was set up on the North wall.His wife survived him. When Shakespeare died fourteen of his plays had been separately published in Quarto booklets. In 1623 his surviving fellow actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, with the co-operation of a number of printers, published a collected edition of thirty-six plays in one Folio volume, with an engraved portrait, memorial verses by Ben Jonson and others, and an Epistle to the Reader in which Heming and Condell make the interesting note that Shakespeare’s ‘hand and mind went together, and what he thought, he uttered with the easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’
The plays as printed in the Quartos or the Folio differ considerably from the usual modern text. They are often not divided into scene, and sometimes not even into acts. Nor are there place-headings at the beginning of each scene, because in the Elizabethan theatre there was no scenery. They are carelessly printed the spelling is erratic.
THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
Although plays of one sort and another had been acted for man years generations, no permanent playhouse was erected in England until 1576. In the 1570’s the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London and the players were constantly at variance. As a result James Burbage, then the leader of the great Earl of Leicester’s players, decided that he would erect a playhouse outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, where the players would no lingering be hindered by the authorities. Accordingly in 1576 he built the Theatre in Shoreditch, at that time a suburb of London. The experiment was successful, and by 1592, there were two more playhouses in London, the Curtain ( also in Shoreditch, and the Rose on the south bank of the river, near Southwark Cathedral.
Elizabethan players we’re accustomed to act on a variety of stage; in the great hall of a nobleman’s house, or one of the Queen’a palaces, in town halls and in yard, as well as their own theatr.
The public playhouse for which most of Shakespeare’s plays were written was a small and intimate affair. The outside measurement of the Fortune Theatre, which was built in 1600 to rival the new Globe, was but eighty feet square. Playhouses we’re usually circular or octagonal, with three tiers of. galleries looking down upon the yard or put, which was open to the sky. The stage jutted out into the yard so that the actors came forward into the midst of their audience.
Over the stage there was a roof, and on either side doors by which the characters entered or disappeared. Over the back of the stage ran a gallery or upper stage which was used whenever an upper scene was needed, as when Romeo climbs up to Juliet’s
bedroom, or the citizens of Angiers address King John from the walls. The space beneath this upper stage was known as the tiring house; it was concealed from the audience by a curtain which would be drawn back to reveal an inner stage, for such scenes as the witches’ cave in Macbeth, Prospero’s cell or Juliet’s tomb.
There was no general curtain concealing the whole stage, so that all scenes on the main stage began with an entrance and ended with an exit. Thus in tragedies the dead must be carried away. There was no scenery, and therefore no limit to the number of scenes, for a scene came and to an end when the characters left the stage. When it was necessary for the exact locality of a scene to be known, then Shakespeare indicated it in the dialogue; otherwise a simple property or a garment was sufficient; a chair or stool showed an indoor scene, a man wearing boots was a messenger, a king wearing armour was on the battlefield, or the like. Such simplicity was on the whole an advantage; the spectator was not distracted by the setting and Shakespeare was able to use as many scenes as he wished. The action passed by very quickly: a play of 2500 lines of verse could be acted in two hours. Moreover, since the actor was so close to his audience, the slightest subtlety of voice and gesture was easily appreciated.
The company was a Fellowship of Players’, who were all partners and sharers. There were usually ten to fifteen full members, with three or four boys, and some paid servants. Shakespeare ha did therefore to write for his team. The chief actor in the company was Richard Burbage, who distinguished himself as Richard III; for him Shakespeare wrote his great tragic parts. An important member the company was the clown or low comedian. From 1594 to 1600 the company’s clown was Will Kemp; he was succeeded by Robert by Robert Armin. No women were allowed to appear on the stage, and all women’s parts were taken by boys.
