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Documentary
Examining Shakespeare's Extraordinary Understanding Of The Human Condition With
Contributions From Glenda Jackson, Germaine Greer, Jonathan Miller, Kenneth
Branagh, Mark Rylance, Baz Luhrmann And Many Other Theatrical Notables.
William
Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet,
playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English
language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's
national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including
collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two 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.
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. Such theories are often criticised for failing to adequately note that
few records survive of most commoners of the period.
Shakespeare
produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were
primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work
produced in these genres. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among
them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the
finest works in the English language. 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, two fellow actors and friends of
Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, 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. The volume was prefaced
with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hails Shakespeare in a
now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".
Throughout
the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have been continually adapted
and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays
remain popular and are studied, performed, and reinterpreted through various
cultural and political contexts around the world.
Life ...
Early Life :- William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman
and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield, and Mary
Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of
birth remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint
George's Day. This date, which can be traced to a mistake made by an
18th-century scholar, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare
died on the same date in 1616. He was the third of eight children, and the
eldest surviving son.
Although
no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that
Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free
school chartered in 1553, 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, and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar
based upon Latin classical authors.
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. 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, and six months after the marriage Anne gave
birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and
daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February
1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August
1596.
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. Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's
"lost years". 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. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare
starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.
John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some
20th-century scholars have 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. Little evidence
substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and
Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
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. 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.
Scholars
differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words, 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"). 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".
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. 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.
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.
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, 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.
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. 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).
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. 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 we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies
of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.
In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of
Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You
Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of that
information.
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. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his
company constructed the Globe Theatre there. 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 ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Later
Years And Death :- Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition,
repeated by Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years
before his death". 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.". However, it is perhaps relevant that the
bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609. 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), which meant there was
often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.
Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614. In 1612, he
was called as a witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the
marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613, he bought a
gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614, he was in
London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall. After 1610,
Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. His
last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who
succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men.
Shakespeare
died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52. 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", 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."
He was
survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John
Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months
before Shakespeare's death. 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.
Shakespeare
bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna under
stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her
body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.
The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children
in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions
his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his estate
automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second
best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. 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.
Shakespeare
was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.
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:
(Modern
spelling: 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. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of
the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.
Shakespeare
has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including
funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster
Abbey.
William
Shakespeare, An English Poet, Playwright, Actor, Greatest Writer, World's
Greatest Dramatist, Biography, Literature, Southwark Cathedral, Poets' Corner
In Westminster Abbey, scholars, Jack of all trades, Humour (1598) and Sejanus
His Fall (1603), Shakespeare's, Shakespeare,
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