In the early
stages of their existence, the actors’ companies performed their plays in the
open yards of some of the inns of the City Council, from where they were
expelled in due course. The first theater was built by James Burbage in 1576.
It was circular and open to the sky, the spectators stood in the pit, as they
had done in the inn yards. The movable stage was rectangular and the audience could stand on three sides of it. A retiring house was curtained off behind the
stage. After Burbage’s death, it was pulled down and its timber used in the
construction of The Globe (one of the 2 theaters Shakespeare was intimately associated with, the other being the Blackfriars). Theaters that came after Burbage’s were also in the form of an amphitheatre where spectators stood in
the pit. There were 2 or 3 galleries where seats were provided. There were also
boxes for more privileged spectators. Aristocrats were seated on the stage
itself. There they would carry on active and very audible criticism of the
performance before the eyes of the whole house. The stage was rectangular, open
on 3 sides to the public. There was no curtain and the close of an act or scene
was indicated by the exit of all the performers. In the case of the dead,
provision was always made for their removal. There was an upper stage or
balcony and a rear stage that could be curtained off. Scenery, in the modern
sense, did not exist and places and scenes were indicated either by suitable
properties or possibly by a placard and more commonly by the words of actors.
Costume, however, was elaborate and expensive. Since there was no artificial
lighting plays could be performed only during the daytime. The Elizabethan
audience was fun loving, yet enjoyed philosophizing on stage. They were very
critical of drama and if they did not enjoy a play, it was immediately hissed
off the stage. They wanted amusement and melodrama and plays of contemporary,
social and historical interest. Hence Elizabethan drama was at times crude,
farcical and indecent but on the whole full-blooded and imaginative with a
remarkable human quality.
SHAKESPEARE'S
WORLD
Most of
Shakespeare's career unfolded during the monarchy of Elizabeth I, the Queen
from whom the historical period of the Bard's life takes its name as the
Elizabethan Age. Elizabeth came to the throne under turbulent circumstances in
1558 (before Shakespeare was born) and ruled until 1603. Under her reign, not
only did England prosper as a rising commercial power at the expense of
Catholic Spain, Shakespeare's homeland undertook an enormous expansion into the
New World and laid the foundations of what would become the British Empire.
This ascendance came in the wake of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the
former regaining Greek and Roman classics and stimulating an outburst of
creative endeavour throughout Europe, the latter transforming England into a
Protestant/Anglican state, and generating continuing religious strife,
especially during the civil wars of Elizabeth's Catholic sister, Queen Margaret
or "Bloody Mary." The Elizabethan
Age, then, was an Age of Discovery, of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and
the exploration of human nature itself. The basic assumptions underpinning
feudalism/Scholasticism were openly challenged with the support of Elizabeth
and, equally so, by her successor on the throne, James I. There was in all this
an optimism about humanity and its future and an even greater optimism about
the destiny of England in the world at large. Nevertheless, the Elizabethans
also recognized that the course of history is problematic, that Fortune can
undo even the greatest and most promising, as Shakespeare reveals in such plays
as Antony & Cleopatra. More specifically, Shakespeare and his
audiences were keenly aware of the prior century's prolonged bloodshed during
the War of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. Many Elizabethans,
particularly the prosperous, feared the prospect of civil insurrection and the
destruction of the commonwealth, whether as a result of an uprising from below
or of usurpation at the top. Thus, whether or not we consider Shakespeare to
have been a political conservative, his histories, tragedies and even his
romances and comedies are slanted toward the restoration or maintenance of
civil harmony and the status quo of legitimate rule.
SHAKESPEARE’S
LIFE
His father, John
Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early
childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous
years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of
alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's
boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would
have been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature.
Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had
“small Latine, and less Greeke,” much of his work clearly depends on a
knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology. In 1582
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the
time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and
twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between
the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London
(c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time,
including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer,
that he joined a group of travelling players, and that he was a country
schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style
of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors,
for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus. In 1594 Shakespeare
became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that
later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career
Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played
old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It.
In 1596 he obtained a coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy
New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In
1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he
was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to
Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his
career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man.
I. COMEDIES
‘Comedy’ refers
to drama that provokes laughter at human behaviour, usually involving romantic
love and with a happy ending. In Shakespeare’s day, the conventional comedy
enacted the struggle of young lovers to surmount some difficulty, usually
presented by their elders, and the play ended happily in marriage or the
prospect of marriage. Sometimes the struggle was to bring separated lovers or
family members together, and their reunion was the happy culmination.
Shakespeare generally observed these conventions, though his inventiveness
within them yielded many variations. Eighteen plays
are generally included among Shakespeare’s comedies. They are divided into –
early comedies (The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming
of the Shrew), middle comedies (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer
Nights’ Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night)
tragi-comedies or problem plays (Troilus andCressida, Measure for
Measure, All’s well That Ends Well), romances (Pericles, Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen)
All of
Shakespeare’s comedies are driven by love. Love, in Shakespearean comedy, is
stronger than the inertia of custom, the power of evil, or the fortunes of
chance and time. In all these plays except one (Troilus) the obstacles
presented to love are triumphantly overcome, as conflicts are resolved and
errors forgiven in a general aura of reconciliation and marital bliss at the
play’s close. Such intransigent characters as Shylock (Merchant of Venice),
Malvolio (Twelfth Night) and Don John (Much Ado About Nothing),
who choose not to act out of love, cannot be accommodated here, and are
carefully isolated from the action before the climax. In their resolutions
Shakespeare’s comedies resemble the medieval morality play, which centers on a sinful human being who receives God’s mercy. In Shakespeare’s secular comedies
a human authority figure (for instance, Don Pedro in Much Ado or Duke
Senior in As You Like It) is symbolically divine, the opponents of love
are the representatives of sin, and all the characters partake of the love and
forgiveness at the play’s closing. Moreover, the context of marriage – at least
alluded to at the close of all comedies except Troilus and Cressida – is
the cap-stone of the comedic situation, for these plays not only delight and
entertain, they affirm, guaranteeing the future. Marriage, with its promise of
offspring, reinvigorates society and transcends the purely personal element in
sexual attraction and romantic love. Tragedy’s focus on the individual makes
death the central fact of life, but comedy, with its insistence on the on going
process of love and sex and birth, confirms our awareness that life transcends
the individual.
II. TRAGEDIES
A tragedy is a
drama dealing with a noble protagonist placed in a highly stressful situation
that leads to a disastrous, usually fatal conclusion. The 10 plays generally
included among Shakespeare’s tragedies are Titus Andronicus, Romeo
and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth,
King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon
of Athens. A central group of 4 plays: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King
Lear offer Shakespeare’s fullest development of tragedy, and they are
sometimes collectively labelled the great tragedies. These plays focus on a
powerful central character whose most outstanding personal quality—tragic flaw,
as it is called—is the source of his catastrophe. He is the victim of his own
strength, which will not allow accommodation with his situation, and we are
appalled at this paradox and at the inexorability of his fate. These works,
sometimes with the addition of Antony and Cleopatra, are often thought to
constitute Shakespeare’s greatest achievement as a playwright.
Shakespeare’s
tragedies developed out of earlier 16th century tragedies, which had
antecedents in medieval poetry – verse accounts of disaster, suffering and
death usually of mighty rulers. These medieval poems, however, did not lend
themselves to the stage because they simply made a single point – that disaster
comes even to the great, in the same fashion every time. Renaissance authors,
imbued with a sense of the value of human experience, began to alter the
pattern. A wider range of subjects was assembled and moral lessons incorporated
into them. A good instance, and an important influence to Shakespeare, was A
Mirror for Magistrates, in which the settings range from classical and
biblical worlds to recent history. The typical subject of the biographies of
this compilation is a villainous tyrant whose fall is amply deserved.
Retribution becomes the theme rather than simple inevitability. The ancient
plays of Seneca were similar in subject and tone and these works were exploited
by 16th century playwrights. The immediate result was the revenge play,
pioneered by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. However, the
emphasis on evil figures was gradually eroded by an awareness of the dramatic
value of virtue. The medieval heritage of the Morality Play was an important
influence on this development. Sometimes the good were simply victims as in Titus
Andronicus; sometimes virtuous deeds resulted in death or disaster as in The
Rape of Lucrece, and sometimes the two motifs combined, in virtuous victims
whosedeaths are redemptive, spiritually cleansing the world of the play as in Romeo
and Juliet. Shakespeare’s first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, is a
simple melodrama, frankly imitative of Seneca. With Romeo and Juliet,
the young playwright advances considerably, developing human and credible
protagonists. An essential tragic theme is established in Romeo: the
superiority of the human spirit to its mortal destiny. It is in Julius Caesar
that Shakespeare first achieves the distinctive element of the major tragedies,
a protagonist. In Julius Caesar, the protagonist Brutus, who is undone
precisely by his own virtues, as he pursues a flawed political ideal. A
paradoxical sense of the interconnectedness of good and evil permeates the
play, as the hero’s idealism leads to disaster for both him and his world. Only
with Hamlet does the hero’s personal sense of that paradox become the
play’s central concern. In Hamlet and its three great successors,
Shakespeare composes four variations on the overarching theme that humanity’s
weaknesses must be recognised as our inevitable human lot, for only by
accepting our destiny can we transcend our morality. Hamlet, unable to alter
the evil around him because of his fixation on the uncertainties of moral
judgement, himself falls into evil in killing Polonius and rejecting Ophelia
but finally recovers his humanity by recognizing his ties to others. He accepts
his own fate, knowing that “readiness is all”. Lear, his world in ruins of his
own making, can find salvation only through madness, but in his reconciliation
with Cordelia, he too finds that destiny can be identified with, “as if we were
God’s spies”. As Edgar puts it, sounding very like Hamlet, “Ripeness is all”.
Othello, drawn into evil by an incapacity for trust, recognizes his failing and
kills himself. The power of love—the importance of our bonds to others—is again
upheld. In Macbeth, the same point is made negatively, as the
protagonist’s rejection of love and loyalty leads to an extreme human
isolation, where “Life’s but a walking shadow”. In each of the 4 major
tragedies, a single protagonist grows in self-awareness and knowledge of human
nature, though he cannot stop his disaster. In the later Roman tragedies, Antony
and Cleopatra and Coriolanus we find the same pattern. But these
differ from their predecessors in that the central figures are placed in a
complex social and political context, and the plays are strongly concerned with
the relationship between the individual and the society, with less focus on the
emotional development of the tragic hero. Timon of Athens is a flawed
effort that Shakespeare left incomplete. Shakespeare’s tragedies are disturbing
plays. We feel horror at the stories, and pity for the victims. That this pity
extends to doers of evil as well – Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Coriolanus – attests
to the dramatist’s power. We recognise the nobility of the human spirit, which
may err catastrophically but which does so through an excess of strength,
challenging its own limits. In a tragic universe, we are all flawed precisely
because we are human, and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes embody this inexorable
feature of life.
III. HISTORY PLAYS
Shakespeare’s 10
plays deal with events in English history.
(1) Minor
Tetralogy - Henry VI 3 Parts, and Richard III
(2) King John
(3) Major
Tetralogy - Richard II, Henry IV 2 Parts, and Henry V.
(4) Henry VIII.
The Tetralogies
are Shakespeare’s major achievement in the histories and deal with English
history from 1398 to 1485. The central theme of the history plays is political
– they deal with the gain and loss of power – ut Shakespeare transcended this
subject. As he wrote his histories, the playwright increasingly pursued the definition of
the perfect king. After presenting two distinctly bad rulers, the ineffectual
Henry VI and the villainous Richard III, he turned to a consideration of kingly
virtues. He began to explore the psychology of political
leaders, and these plays are at their best as much psychological as historical.
Not content to deal with the nature of kingship solely from the point of view
of the rulers, Shakespeare also focuses on the lives of the common people of
England, especially in the major tetralogy. Sometimes fictitious minor figures,
such as the Gardener in Richard III, fulfill an important function simply by
offering their own interpretation of political events and historical
personalities and thus influencing the reader’s responses. But many common
people are developed as characters in their own right. Indeed, in the Henry
IV plays, often considered the greatest of his histories, Falstaff and a
number of fully sketched minor characters offer a sort of national group
portrait that is contrasted with political history. The juxtaposition generates
a richly stimulating set of relationships. Those secular accounts of the past,
neither legendary nor religious, that were presented on the stage— and were
highly popular—reflect the Elizabethan era’s intense interest in history. In
the late 16th century, when these plays were written, England was undergoing a
great crisis. As a leading Protestant state, it found itself at odds, with the
great Catholic powers of counter-Reformation Europe, including its traditional
enemy, France, and a new foe, Spain. The latter, at the height of its power,
was a very dangerous adversary, and England felt seriously imperiled until the
defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This situation sparked a tremendous
patriotism among all classes of English society, and with that came an
increasing interest in the nation’s history, an interest that the theatre was
of course delighted to serve. Written not long after the peak of nationalistic
fervour in 1588, the history plays, which were extremely popular, deal with
political events of England, like the Wars of the Roses, the significance of
which the Elizabethans were very much aware. Moreover, even though in hindsight
the reign of Elizabeth seems very different from those
of the troubled 15th century, this was not so clear at the time. A number of
threats to the government arose and the people felt a strong fear of civil war
and anarchy; for both moral and practical reasons they valued an orderly
society ruled by a strong monarch. The history plays addressed this attitude by
presenting a lesson in the evils of national disunity. This view of
English history was held not only by both the playwright and most of his
audience, but also by the historians whose works Shakespeare consulted. When
the Tudor dynasty came to power, among the policies adopted by King Henry VII
was the use of scholarly propaganda to justify his seizure of the throne. He encouraged
and commissioned various works of history and biography to emphasize the faults
of earlier rulers and
present his own accession as the nation’s salvation. Among them was an official
history of England by the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil, which was to have a
strong influence on subsequent historians including Holinshed and Hall, whose
chronicles were Shakespeare’s chief sources. Thus Shakespeare saw, and passed
on, a story of inevitable progress towards the benevolent reign of the Tudors.
The sources available to Shakespeare were highly unreliable by modern
historical standards. In any case, Shakespeare was not writing history; he was
concerned with dramatic values more than with historical accuracy. Other
Elizabethan playwrights also wrote histories but only Shakespeare’s work has
survived. In writing history plays Shakespeare always pursued his own concerns,
exploring political values and social relations. Throughout his career he was
preoccupied with the value of order in society. Shakespeare believed, as is
evident in Henry V, in the need for authority, but he also showed a
distrust of those who held authority. Thus the history plays point to an
underlying characteristic of human societies—the fact that political power
inspires disturbing fears as well as profound ideals.
IV. PROBLEM
PLAYS
Three of
Shakespeare’s comedies—All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and
Troilus and Cressida are called problem plays. They are potent satires
characterised by disturbingly ambiguous points of view and seemingly cynical
attitudes towards sexual and social relations. These plays – written around
1602- 1604 – are concerned with basic elements of life, sex and death, and the
psychological and social complications they give rise to. These issues are
problematic, and the plays further stress this by pointedly offering no
clear-cut resolutions, leaving audiences with a painful awareness of life’s
difficulties. The phrase ‘problem play’ was first applied to these plays – as
well as to Hamlet – by Frederick Boas in his book Shakespeare and his
Predecessors. In Boas’s time the phrase was used to refer to the works of
playwrights like Ibsen and Shaw whose plays dealt frankly and purposefully with
social problems. Shakespeare’s problem plays too are indeed concerned with
society and its discontents.
V. ROMAN PLAYS
Three plays of
Shakespeare are set in ancient Rome – Julius Caesar, Antony and
Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The much earlier Titus Andronicus,
though Roman in setting, is generally excluded from this classification because
it is a timeless tale that does not involve any real, historical world. Each of
the Roman plays is a tragedy, but they are unlike the other tragedies, which
are placed in virtually imaginary historical situations. These works are
complicated by the history of ancient Rome, which is reasonably accurately
presented, and they are thus similar to the history plays. When he wrote
plays about ancient Rome, Shakespeare dealt with material that was highly
meaningful to his age. Due to the Renaissance rediscovery of classical
literature and art, the Roman era in the Mediterranean world was seen as the
high-watermark of Western culture, and the general outlines of its history were
familiar to all educated people. Thus the politics of that world, and the lives
of its illustrious personages were viewed with great interest. The moral
questions found in the careers of Coriolanus, Brutus and Antony had particular
importance as they were examples taken from the most important epoch in the
development of western polities. Rome’s history
also had importance to Christianity because it was thought of as the period of
Christianity’s birth. In particular, the establishment of the empire was often
perceived as evidence of God’s intervention in human affairs. In fact, it is
important to the Roman plays that the Roman Republic was pre-Christian.
Shakespeare’s repeated allusions to suicide as an honourable alternative to
defeat marks a striking difference in pre-Christian morality. The suicides
indeed point to the most important distinction of the Roman tragedies: they
lack Christianity’s belief in divine providence as a final arbiter of human
affairs. Without God’s promised redemption, the moral questions of the
classical world had to be resolved within an earth–bound universe of
references. The protagonists of Roman plays cannot recognize an error and gain
divine forgiveness, nor can they be confident that he is right in the face of
worldly defeat. Hence there is a paradox in their characters. The consequence
is that Rome’s conflicts are never clearly organized on lines of ‘good’ and
‘evil’ – each side contains elements of both.
VI. ROMANCES
Shakespeare’s
late comedies are called romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale,
The Tempest and (sometimes) The Two Noble Kinsmen. They are
tragicomedies in the broadest sense of the term. All of the romances share a
number of themes. The theme of separation and reunion of family members is
highly important. The related idea of exile also features in the romances, with
the banished characters—usually rulers or rulers–to be—restored to their
rightful homes at the play’s end. Another theme, jealousy, is prominent in The
Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen; it has
minor importance in Pericles and The Tempest. Most significant,
the romances all speak to the need for patience in adversity and the importance
of providence in human affairs. This visionary conception outweighs any given
individual’s fate or even the development of individual personalities. Compared
with earlier plays, realistic characterization in the romances is weak,
instead, the characters’ symbolic meaning in pronounced. The plots of these
plays offer improbable events in exotic locales. Their characters are
frequently subject to long journeys, often involving shipwrecks. Seemingly
magical developments arise—with real sorcery in The Tempest—and
supernatural beings appear. These developments are elaborately represented, and
all of the romances rely heavily on spectacular scenic effects. In all these
respects, the romances are based on a tradition of romantic literature going
back at least to Hellenistic Greece, in which love serves as the trigger for extraordinary
adventures. In this tradition love is subjected to abnormal strains – often
involving jealous intrigues and conflicts between male friendship and romantic
love - and there are fantastic journeys to exotic lands, encounters with
chivalrous knights and allegorical appearances of supernatural beings. Absurdly
improbable coincidences and mistaken identities complicate the plot, though
everything is resolved in a conventional happy ending. The protagonists are
also conventional, their chief distinction being their noble or royal blood. In
the romances Shakespeare returned to an idea that had been prominent in his
earlier comedies— young lovers are united after various tribulations. Now,
however, the focus is not only on the young lovers, but also encompasses the
older generation, once the opponents of love. At the end of these plays, the
emphasis is not on reward and punishment but rather on the reunion of parents
and children and the hopeful prospect of new generations to come. The romances
concern themselves with the lovers not for their own sake but for their effect
on the whole continuum of life. This broad canvas is enlarged even further to
cosmic dimensions with the many images of the supernatural. The romances
conclude in a spirit of hope, as the main characters are reunited in an aura of
reconciliation—a favourite motif throughout Shakespeare’s career. The natural
good in humanity is put under pressure but preserved through the action of
providence. An emphasis on the cycle of regeneration—both in the traditional
comedic emphasis on marriage and in the theme of reunited families—offers a
guarantee that the preservation will be lasting.
VII. POETRY
Shakespeare's
first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593)
and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The
Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare.
However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in
other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labours Lost. A
love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the
1980s and 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612
entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed “W.S.” exhibits many Shakespearean
characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon.
Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important non-dramatic poetry. They
were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been
circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems
were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the
poems and the degree of autobiographical content. The first 126 of the 154
sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars.
The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which
he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some
have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley,
3rd earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece; or they are possibly the initials of William
Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, whose connection with Shakespeare is more
tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127-152 has also
been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the
recurring themes of beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of
love and art to transcend time and even death.
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