William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare: Shakespeares life; The plays preserved (Luck and fame); The drama (The commercial theatre, Christopher Marlowe); Histories (Richard II, Henry IV,Henry V); Comedy (A Midsummer Nights Dream, Twelfth Night); The poems; Tragedy (Hamlet, King Lear); Romances (The Tempest), Shakespeares achievement; Ben Jonson (The Alchemist,Volpone).

Shakespeares life
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at Stratford, a market town on the river Avon in Warwickshire. He was the eldest son and the third of eight children of John Shakespeare, a glover, and Mary Arden, a landowners daughter. In 1568 John was bailiff (mayor) of Stratford.

Shakespeares life
William kept up his links with Stratford, but his professional life was in London, writing and acting. He was a partner in the leading company of actors, the Lord Chamberlains Men, founded in 1594. It played at Court and in the theatre, the Curtain, and in its own Globe theatre, built in 1599.

Shakespeares life
From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford. On 23 April 1616 he died: he was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford. There, before 1623, his monument was erected.

The plays preserved

At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeares plays had not been printed, but in 1623 two of his fellow-actors brought out a collected edition: thirty-six plays in a book of nearly nine hundred double-column pages in a large Folio, entitled Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.

The commercial theatre

Shakespeare came in on a rising tide. After 1594 Marlowe and Kyd were dead, and he was the leading playwright, sharing in the profits of his Company. He began with the sexual knockabout of The Taming of the Shrew, the classical atrocities of Titus Andronicus, and the martial pageantry of Henry VI, but in his romance comedies combined action with literary high spirits. Public drama was crude and refined, sensational and complex; private theatres were indoor, smaller, quieter.

Histories
He wrote ten English histories in all, listed in the Folio in the order of the reigns of the kings in their titles. But the order of reigns was not the order of composition. The first tetralogy - the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III - was written in 1590-3. We shall look at the second tetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V - composed in 1595-9.

Comedy
Shakespeares early plays are mostly comedy and history, kinds of play more open and inclusive than tragedy. Comedy came easily to Shakespeare. Half of his dramatic output is comic, and his earlier critics, from Jonson to Johnson, preferred his comedy. Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Shrew, Loves Labours Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Twelfth Night.

The poems
What Shakespeare wrote before he was 28 does not survive. His best non-dramatic poems are found in the volume entitled Shake-speares Sonnets, published in 1609. His sonneteering began in 1593-4, the year in which he also published Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, longish versenarratives of sexual passion, modelled on Ovid.

Tragedey
The four great tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth - do not conform strictly to a defined type, except that each ends in the death of the hero, just as the comedies end in marriage.

Romances
Shakespeare ended his career with romance and tragicomedy. His plays do not state his views, but his choice of subject indicates changing interests. In his last plays, he fixes on the relation of father and daughter. The strong and often subversive role played by sexual attraction in Shakespeares writing, from Hamlet onwards, takes a different turn after Antony. In the Sonnets, Measure for Measure, Troilus, Hamlet, Othello and Lear, the power of sexual passion to destroy other ties is shown.

Christopher Marlowe
Shakespeare outshone Kyd, but learned from his own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (b.1564), who was killed in a tavern in 1593. Marlowe announced his talent in Tamburlaine the Great (1587).

Christopher Marlowe
Marlowes Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine is an arrogant upstart who scorns human limits. A Romantic view of the Renaissance saw Dr Faustus as transcending worn-out teachings like Galileo, or as an emblem of human aspiration like Goethes Faust. But Faustus doesnt believe in hell, and sells his soul for twenty-four years of fun. The knowledge he seeks is paltry, and he wastes his powers on schoolboy tricks.

Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson (1572-1632), eighteen years Shakespeares junior, knew him well; they acted in each others plays. As playwright, poet, critic and man of letters, Jonson dominated his generation. He was a great poet and a great dramatist. Jonson and Marlowe belong with Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson
Every Man in His Humour (1598) is set in Florence (Shakespeare is listed in the cast), and Volpone (1605) in Venice; but London is the scene of Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614).

Stuart Literature: to 1700

The Stuart century: Drama to 1642 (Comedy, Tragedy); John Donne, Prose to 1642 (Sir Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne); Poetry to Milton (Ben Jonson, Metaphysical poets, Devotional poets, Cavalier poets); John Milton (Paradise Lost).

Augustan and Romantic (Augustan Literature to 1970)

The eighteenth century: The Enlightenment (Sense and Sensibility); Alexander Pope and 18thcentury civilization; Joseph Addison; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope (Translation as tradition, The Rape o f the Lock, Mature verse); John Gay; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; The novel: Daniel Defoe; Crosscurrents; Samuel Richardson; Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett; Laurence Sterne;

Augustan and Romantic (The Romantics 1790-1837)

The emergence of Sensibility: Thomas Gray; Pre-Romantic sensibility: `Ossian; Gothic fiction; The Age of Johnson: Dr Samuel Johnson (The Dictionary, Literary criticism); James Boswell; Non-fiction (Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke); Oliver Goldsmith; Fanny Burney; Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Christopher Smart; William Cowper; Robert Burns

Augustan and Romantic (The Romantics 1790-1837)

The Romantic poets: Early Romantics; William Blake; Subjectivity; Romanticism and Revolution (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott); Younger Romantics (Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats). Romantic prose: Belles litres (Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey); Fiction (Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen); Towards Victoria