Shakespeare the man

POETIC AND DRAMATIC POWERS

The early poems

Shakespeare dedicated the poem Venus and Adonis to his patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3^rd earl of Southampton, whom he further promised to honour with "some graver labour"--perhaps The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared a year later and was also dedicated to Southampton. As these two poems were something on which Shakespeare was intending to base his reputation with the public and to establish himself with his patron, they were displays of his virtuosity--diploma pieces. They were certainly the most popular of his writings with the reading public and impressed them with his poetic genius. Seven editions of Venus and Adonis had appeared by 1602 and 16 by 1640; Lucrece, a more serious poem, went through eight editions by 1640; and there are numerous allusions to them in the literature of the time. But after that, until the 19th century, they were little regarded. Even then the critics did not know what to make of them: on the one hand, Venus and Adonis is licentiously erotic (though its sensuality is often rather comic); while Lucrece may seem to be tragic enough, the treatment of the poem is yet somewhat cold and distant. In both cases the poet seems to be displaying dexterity rather than being "sincere." But Shakespeare's detachment from his subjects has come to be admired in more recent assessments.

Above all, the poems give evidence for the growth of Shakespeare's imagination. Venus and Adonis is full of vivid imagery of the countryside; birds, beasts, the hunt, the sky, and the weather, the overflowing Avon--these give freshness to the poem and contrast strangely with the sensuous love scenes. Lucrece is more rhetorical and elaborate than Venus and Adonis and also aims higher. Its disquisitions (upon night, time, opportunity, and lust, for example) anticipate brilliant speeches on general themes in the plays--on mercy in The Merchant of Venice, suicide in Hamlet, and "degree" in Troilus and Cressida.

There are a few other poems attributed to Shakespeare. When the Sonnets were printed in 1609, a 329-line poem, "A Lovers complaint," was added at the end of the volume, plainly ascribed by the publisher to Shakespeare. There has been a good deal of discussion about the authorship of this poem. Only the evidence of style, however, could call into question the publisher's ascription, and this is conflicting. Parts of the poem and some lines are brilliant, but other parts seem poor in a way that is not like Shakespeare's careless writing. Its narrative structure is remarkable, however, and the poem deserves more attention than it usually receives. It is now generally thought to be from Shakespeare's pen, possibly an early poem revised by him at a more mature stage of his poetical style. Whether the poem in its extant form is later or earlier than Venus and Adonis and Lucrece cannot be decided. No one could doubt the authenticity of "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a 67-line poem that appeared with other "poetical essays" (by John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson) appended to Robert Chester's poem Loves Martyr in 1601. The poem is attractive and memorable, but very obscure, partly because of its style and partly because it contains allusions to real persons and situations whose identity can now only be guessed at.

The sonnets

In 1609 appeared SHAKESPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted. At this date Shakespeare was already a successful author, a country gentleman, and an affluent member of the most important theatrical enterprise in London. How long before 1609 the sonnets were written is unknown. The phrase "never before imprinted" may imply that they had existed for some time but were now at last printed. Two of them (nos. 138 and 144) had in fact already appeared (in a slightly different form) in an anthology, The Passionate Pilgrime (1599). Shakespeare had certainly written some sonnets by 1598, for in that year Francis Meres, in a "survey" of literature, made reference to "his sugared sonnets among his private friends," but whether these "sugared sonnets" were those eventually published in 1609 cannot be ascertained--Shakespeare may have written other sets of sonnets, now lost. Nevertheless, the sonnets included in The Passionate Pilgrime are among his most striking and mature, so it is likely that most of the 154 sonnets that appeared in the 1609 printing belong to Shakespeare's early 30s rather than to his 40s--to the time when he was writing Richard II and Romeo and Juliet rather than when he was writing King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. But, of course, some of them may belong to any year of Shakespeare's life as a poet before 1609.

The early plays

Although the record of Shakespeare's early theatrical success is obscure, clearly the newcomer soon made himself felt. His brilliant two-part play on the Wars of the Roses, The Whole Contention between the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke, was among his earliest achievements. He showed, in The Comedy of Errors, how hilariously comic situations could be shot through with wonder and sentiment. In Titus Andronicus he scored a popular success with tragedy in the high Roman fashion. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was a new kind of romantic comedy. The world has never ceased to enjoy The Taming of the Shrew. Love’s Labour’s Lost is an experiment in witty and satirical observation of society. Romeo and Juliet combines and interconnects a tragic situation with comedy and gaiety. All this represents the probable achievement of Shakespeare's first half-dozen years as a writer for the London stage, perhaps by the time he had reached 30. It shows astonishing versatility and originality.

The histories

For his plays on subjects from English history, Shakespeare primarily drew upon Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which appeared in 1587, and on Edward Hall's earlier account of The union of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre and York (1548). From these and numerous secondary sources he inherited traditional themes: the divine right of royal succession, the need for unity and order in the realm, the evil of dissension and treason, the cruelty and hardship of war, the power of money to corrupt, the strength of family ties, the need for human understanding and careful calculation, and the power of God's providence, which protected his followers, punished evil, and led England toward the stability of Tudor rule.

The Roman plays

After the last group of English history plays, Shakespeare chose to write about Julius Caesar, who held particular fascination for the Elizabethans. Then, for six or seven years Shakespeare did not return to a Roman theme, but, after completing Macbeth and King Lear, he again used Thomas North's translation of Plutarch as a source for two more Roman plays, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, both tragedies that seem as much concerned to depict the broad context of history as to present tragic heroes.

The "great," or "middle," comedies

The comedies written between 1596 and 1602 have much in common and are as well considered together as individually. With the exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor, all are set in some "imaginary" country. Whether called Illyria, Messina, Venice and Belmont, Athens, or the Forest of Arden, the sun shines as the dramatist wills. A lioness, snakes, magic caskets, fairy spells, identical twins, disguise of sex, the sudden conversion of a tyrannous duke or the defeat offstage of a treacherous brother can all change the course of the plot and bring the characters to a conclusion in which almost all are happy and just deserts are found. Lovers are young and witty and almost always rich. The action concerns wooing; and its conclusion is marriage, beyond which the audience is scarcely concerned. Whether Shakespeare's source was an Italian novel (The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing), an English pastoral tale (As You Like It), an Italian comedy (the Malvolio story in Twelfth Night), or something of his own invention (probably A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and parts of each), always in his hands story and sentiments are instinct with idealism and capable of magic transformations.

In some ways these are intellectual plays. Each comedy has a multiple plot and moves from one set of characters to another, between whom Shakespeare invites his audience to seek connections and explanations. Despite very different classes of people (or immortals) in different strands of the narrative, the plays are unified by Shakespeare's idealistic vision and by an implicit judgment of human relationships, and all their characters are brought together--with certain significant exceptions--at, or near, the end.

The great tragedies

It is a usual and reasonable opinion that Shakespeare's greatness is nowhere more visible than in the series of tragedies--Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Julius Caesar, which was written before these, and Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, which were written after, have many links with the four. But, because of their rather strict relationship with the historical materials, they are best dealt with in a group by themselves. Timon of Athens, probably written after the above-named seven plays, shows signs of having been unfinished or abandoned by Shakespeare. It has its own splendours but has rarely been considered equal in achievement to the other tragedies of Shakespeare's maturity.

The "dark" comedies

Before the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 the country was ill at ease: the House of Commons became more outspoken about monopolies and royal prerogative, and uncertainty about the succession to the throne made the future of the realm unsettled. In 1603 the Plague again struck London, closing the theatres. In 1601 Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was arrested on charges of treason; he was subsequently released, but such scares did not betoken confidence in the new reign. About Shakespeare's private reaction to these events there can be only speculation, but three of the five plays usually assigned to these years—Troilus and Cressida,, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, --have become known as "dark" comedies for their distempered vision of the world. Only during the 20th century have these plays been frequently performed in anything like Shakespeare's texts, an indication that their questioning, satiric, intense, and shifting comedy could not please earlier audiences.

The late plays

Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Henry VIII, written between 1608 and 1612, are commonly known as Shakespeare's "late plays," or his "last plays," and sometimes, with reference to their tragicomic form, they are called his "romances." Works written by an author in his 40s hardly deserve to be classified as "late" in any critical sense, yet these plays are often discussed as if they had been written by a venerable old author, tottering on the edge of a well-earned grave. On the contrary, Shakespeare must have believed that plenty of writing years lay before him, and indeed the theatrical effectiveness and experimental nature of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest in particular make them very unlike the fatigued work of a writer about to break his staff and drown his book.

The contribution of textual criticism

The early editors of Shakespeare saw their task chiefly as one of correction and regularization of the faulty printing and imperfect texts of the original editions or their reprints. Many changes in the text of the quartos and folios that are now accepted derive from Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Alexander Pope (1723-25), but these editors also introduced many thousands of small changes that have since been rejected. Later in the 18th century, editors compiled collations of alternative and rejected readings. Samuel Johnson (1765), Edward Capell (1767-68), and Edmund Malone (1790) were notable pioneers. Their work reached its most comprehensive form in the Cambridge edition in nine volumes by W.G. Clark, J. Glover, and W.A. Wright, published in 1863-66. A famous one-volume Globe edition of 1864 was based on this Cambridge text.

Romeo and Juliet

play by William Shakespeare, performed about 1594-95 and first published in a "bad" quarto in 1597. The characters of Romeo and Juliet have been depicted in literature, music, dance, and theatre. The appeal of the young hero and heroine--whose families, the Montagues and Capulets, respectively, are implacable enemies--is such that they have become, in the popular imagination, the representative type of star-crossed lovers.

Shakespeare's principal source for the plot was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), a long narrative poem by the English poet Arthur Broke (d. 1563). Broke had based his poem on a French translation of a tale by the Italian Matteo Bandello (1485-1561).

Shakespeare set the scene in Verona, Italy, during July. Juliet and Romeo meet and fall instantly in love at a masked ball of the Capulets and profess their love when Romeo later visits her at her private balcony in her family's home. Because the two noble families are enemies, the couple is married secretly by Friar Laurence. When Tybald, a Capulet, kills Romeo's friend Mercutio in a quarrel, Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished to Mantua. Juliet's father insists on her marrying Count Paris, and Juliet goes to consult the friar. He gives her a potion that will make her appear to be dead and proposes that she take it and that Romeo rescue her; she complies. Unaware of the friar's scheme, Romeo returns to Verona on hearing of Juliet's apparent death. He encounters Paris, kills him, and finds Juliet in the burial vault. There he gives her a last kiss and kills himself with poison. Juliet awakens, sees the dead Romeo, and kills herself. The families learn what has happened and end their feud.

The most complex of Shakespeare's early plays, Romeo and Juliet is far more than "a play of young love" or "the world's typical love-tragedy." Weaving together a large number of related impressions and judgments, it is as much about hate as love. It tells of a family and its home as well as a feud and a tragic marriage. The public life of Verona and the private lives of the Veronese make up the setting for the love of Juliet and Romeo and provide the background against which their love can be assessed. It is not the deaths of the lovers that conclude the play but the public revelation of what has happened, with the admonitions of the Prince and the reconciliation of the two families.

Shakespeare enriched an already old story by surrounding the guileless mutual passion of Romeo and Juliet with the mature bawdry of the other characters--the Capulet servants Sampson and Gregory open the play with their fantasies of exploits with the Montague women; the tongues of the Nurse and Mercutio are seldom free from sexual matters--but the innocence of the lovers is unimpaired.

Romeo and Juliet made a strong impression on contemporary audiences. It was also one of Shakespeare's first plays to be pirated; a very bad text appeared in 1597. Detestable though it is, this version does derive from a performance of the play, and a good deal of what was seen on stage was recorded. Two years later another version of the play appeared, issued by a different, more respectable publisher, and this is essentially the play known today, for the printer was working from a manuscript fairly close to Shakespeare's own. Yet in neither edition did Shakespeare's name appear on the title page, and it was only with the publication of Love's Labour's Lost in 1598 that publishers had come to feel that the name of Shakespeare as a dramatist, as well as the public esteem of the company of actors to which he belonged, could make an impression on potential purchasers of playbooks.

Bibliographies.

WALTER EBISCH and LEVIN L. SCHÜCKING, A Shakespeare Bibliography (1931, reprinted 1968), and a supplement for the years 1930-35 (1937, reissued 1968), are comprehensive. They are updated by GORDON ROSS SMITH, A Classified Shakespeare Bibliography, 1936-1958 (1963). JAMES G. McMANAWAY, A Selective Bibliography of Shakespeare: Editions, Textual Studies, Commentary (1975), covers more than 4,500 items published between 1930 and 1970, mainly in English. LARRY S. CHAMPION, The Essential Shakespeare: An Annotated Bibliography of Major Modern Studies, 2nd ed. (1993), includes works in English published from 1900 through 1984. STANLEY WELLS (ed.), Shakespeare, new ed. (1990), provides bibliographies on topics ranging from the poet to the text to the performances. Shakespeare Quarterly publishes an annual classified bibliography. Shakespeare Survey (quarterly) publishes annual accounts of "Contributions to Shakespearian Study," as well as retrospective articles on work done on particular aspects. A selection of important scholarly essays published during the previous year is collected in Shakespearean Criticism (annual).