William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He wrote comedies, tragedies, histories and late romances for the commercial theatres of London, and he was a part-owner of the acting company that performed them. He is often considered the greatest writer in the English language.

Shakespeare was not famous only after his death. By the 1590s his poems were bestsellers, and a writer named Francis Meres listed him in 1598 among the best English authors for both comedy and tragedy. But he was also a working professional who wrote for actors, audiences and box-office income, not a solitary genius writing for posterity.

Today his works are studied in schools worldwide, performed in almost every language, and adapted into films, operas, ballets, musicals, novels and comics. Words and phrases from his plays have entered everyday English.

Shakespeare lived at a turning point in English history. England was a Protestant kingdom after decades of religious upheaval, London was growing rapidly, and English was becoming a language of ambitious literature alongside Latin, Italian and French. His career overlapped with those of other gifted dramatists, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and John Webster, and he learned from and competed with them.

Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564; his exact birthday is unknown, though it is traditionally celebrated on 23 April. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker and wool dealer who served as the town’s bailiff (mayor), and his mother, Mary Arden, came from a farming family. William probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford, where pupils learned Latin grammar, rhetoric and classical literature, though no school records survive.

In November 1582, at eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26. Their daughter Susanna was baptized in May 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith in February 1585. Hamnet died in 1596 at the age of eleven. After the twins’ birth, records fall silent for several years, which scholars call the “lost years” (1585–1592).

By 1592 Shakespeare was known in London: a pamphlet attributed to the playwright Robert Greene mocked an “upstart Crow” who thought himself “the only Shake-scene in a country”, which is usually taken as a jealous attack on him. From 1594 he belonged to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the leading company of the age, and in 1599 members of the company built the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames.

Shakespeare became prosperous. In 1597 he bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, a year after his father had been granted a coat of arms. After about 1610 he seems to have spent more time in Stratford, while still collaborating on plays. He died on 23 April 1616, aged 52, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church. In his will he famously left his wife his “second best bed”.

London’s first purpose-built commercial playhouses opened in the 1560s and 1570s. The open-air theatres, such as the Globe, were round or many-sided wooden buildings with a thrust stage surrounded on three sides by standing spectators (the “groundlings”), who paid a penny, and by galleries for those who paid more. Performances took place in daylight with little scenery, so the words themselves had to create night, storms, battlefields and forests.

All the actors were men and boys; women’s roles were played by boy actors. Companies needed patrons, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were protected by a high court official. When James I became king in 1603, he took the company under his own patronage, and it became the King’s Men. From 1608 the company also used the Blackfriars, an indoor theatre lit by candles, which suited quieter music and more intimate effects.

Theatre was controversial. City authorities and Puritan preachers attacked playhouses as places of idleness and disorder, and theatres were closed for long periods when plague struck, as in 1592–94 and 1603. During the 1613 performance of Henry VIII, a cannon shot set the Globe’s thatched roof on fire and the theatre burned down; it was rebuilt the next year.

Being a shareholder mattered. Shakespeare was not only paid for his scripts; he owned a share in the company and, from 1599, in the Globe building itself, so he earned a portion of the profits. This business model, unusual among playwrights, helps explain both his wealth and the steady output of about two plays a year that he wrote for the same group of actors, including the famous tragedian Richard Burbage and comic actors such as Will Kemp and later Robert Armin.

In the early 1590s Shakespeare wrote English history plays (the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III), early comedies such as The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and the bloody Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus. When plague closed the theatres, he published two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton.

The later 1590s brought Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, the history cycle from Richard II to Henry V, and the mature comedies Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Around 1599–1608 came the great tragedies: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, along with darker “problem plays” such as Measure for Measure.

His final period includes the romances Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, stories of loss, wandering, reconciliation and magic. His last works were collaborations with John Fletcher: Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and a lost play, Cardenio, apparently based on an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published in 1609. Most are addressed to or concern a young man, and later ones a mysterious “dark lady”; they explore love, time, beauty, jealousy and the power of poetry to outlast death. Who the people behind the poems were, and whether the order and publication were authorized by Shakespeare, remain unresolved.

Much of Shakespeare’s drama is written in blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, five pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables. He used this form flexibly, breaking lines between speakers, shifting the stresses and, in his later plays, packing verse with dense, interrupted thought. He switched to prose for comic scenes, servants, letters and characters in madness or disguise, and used rhyme for songs, spells and endings of scenes.

His vocabulary is exceptionally rich, and the Oxford English Dictionary records many words and phrases whose earliest known written use is in his works. Some of these he probably coined; others were likely in speech before him, and digital searches of other writers have pushed back the first-known dates of some words. Either way, his plays fixed many expressions in the language.

Shakespeare borrowed most of his plots. His sources include Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles for the English histories and Macbeth, Thomas North’s English translation of Plutarch’s Lives for the Roman plays, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Italian novellas and older English plays. What he added was complexity: characters who speak in soliloquies that seem to reveal a changing inner life, plots that interweave several stories, and a mixture of comic and tragic tones that classical rules would have kept apart.

He also wrote for particular bodies and spaces. Clowns’ parts changed when the company’s leading comic actor changed; long, complex roles such as Hamlet, Othello and Lear were shaped for Burbage; and the late romances, with their music and spectacle, suit the candlelit Blackfriars. Stage directions are sparse, so much of the action is embedded in the dialogue, which is one reason directors have found the plays so open to reinterpretation in different periods, languages and staging styles.

The histories and Roman plays ask what makes power legitimate, what happens when a ruler is overthrown, and how ordinary people suffer in civil war. They were written in a monarchy anxious about who would succeed the childless Queen Elizabeth, and in which censorship limited what could be said openly.

The tragedies explore ambition (Macbeth), jealousy and racism (Othello), grief, revenge and doubt (Hamlet), and the collapse of family and kingdom (King Lear). The comedies play with disguise, gender and mistaken identity, often through heroines such as Rosalind and Viola who dress as young men, roles originally played by boy actors.

Modern readers also study how the plays treat outsiders and the people they portray: the Jewish moneylender Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the Black general Othello, Caliban on the island of The Tempest, and the women who are silenced or who resist. These plays reflect the prejudices of their time, and they also give such characters some of the most powerful speeches, which is why they continue to provoke debate in performance.

No manuscript of a Shakespeare play in his own hand survives, apart, probably, from three pages of the collaborative play Sir Thomas More, where a passage known as “Hand D” is widely attributed to him. Plays belonged to the acting companies, not to authors, and only some were printed during his lifetime.

About half of his plays first appeared individually as cheap small-format books called quartos. Some quarto texts differ greatly from later versions; the 1603 first quarto of Hamlet, for example, is much shorter and differently worded. Scholars once called such texts “bad quartos” produced from faulty memories, but many now see them as evidence of theatrical adaptation or early drafts, and the question remains open.

In 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors in the King’s Men, published Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known as the First Folio. It contained 36 plays, 18 of which had never been printed before, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. It includes Ben Jonson’s poem praising Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time”. About 235 copies are known to survive.

Because the texts differ, every modern edition is the result of choices. Editors decide whether to follow the quarto or the Folio, whether to combine them (as has long been done with King Lear and Hamlet), how to modernize spelling and punctuation, and how to explain difficult words. Since the 1980s many scholars have argued that some differences reflect Shakespeare’s own revisions, so that, for example, the quarto and Folio versions of King Lear may be treated as two versions of the play.

After the theatres reopened in 1660, Shakespeare’s plays were often rewritten to suit new tastes; for more than a century King Lear was performed with a happy ending. In the eighteenth century editors such as Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson produced scholarly editions, and the actor David Garrick organized the 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford, a milestone in turning Shakespeare into a national icon.

German Romantic writers, including Goethe and the translators A. W. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, embraced Shakespeare as a model of natural genius; French, Russian and Italian writers and composers followed, and Verdi’s operas Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff are among many musical adaptations. Shakespeare was also taught in schools across the British Empire, where he could be both a colonial instrument and material that local writers reworked for their own purposes.

In East Asia, Tsubouchi Shōyō completed a Japanese translation of all the plays by 1928, and Akira Kurosawa transposed Macbeth and King Lear to feudal Japan in Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985). Korean, Chinese, Indian and African theatre-makers have produced versions that blend Shakespeare with local performance traditions. Productions at the rebuilt Shakespeare’s Globe in London, which opened in 1997, have hosted companies from dozens of countries.

Shakespeare is better documented than most commoners of his time, but the records say little about his thoughts. The surviving documents include parish registers of baptism, marriage and burial; the 1582 marriage licence bond; records of property purchases and lawsuits; tax records; a deposition he gave in 1612 in the Belott–Mountjoy lawsuit in London; six signatures; and his will. Payment and patent records connect him with the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s Men, and printed title pages and literary references identify him as author.

Much that is popularly told about him comes from later anecdotes. Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 biographical essay passed on stories, such as that young Shakespeare fled Stratford after poaching deer, which cannot be verified. Biographers must separate documents from tradition, and Samuel Schoenbaum’s documentary studies were influential in insisting on this discipline.

Many biographies read the life through the works, for example linking Hamnet’s death to Hamlet or the sonnets to real affairs. Such connections are possible but speculative, and scholars disagree about how far the plays can be used as autobiography. Questions such as Shakespeare’s religious sympathies, given that his family had Catholic connections in a Protestant state, have been argued in both directions.

Scholars now agree that Shakespeare often worked with others, as was normal in the period. Titus Andronicus is widely thought to include work by George Peele, Pericles by George Wilkins, Timon of Athens by Thomas Middleton, and the late plays by John Fletcher. Middleton also appears to have revised Macbeth and, probably after Shakespeare’s death, Measure for Measure. The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) went further and credited Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the Henry VI plays, a claim that some scholars accept and others dispute.

These conclusions rest on stylometry and linguistic analysis: comparing vocabulary, function words, metrical habits, contractions and spelling preferences across large digital corpora of early modern drama. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s Oxford editions of the 1980s, with the Textual Companion (1987), made such evidence central, and debate continues about how reliable the methods are for short or revised passages.

The dates of most plays are also approximate, reconstructed from printing records, performance records, references in other works, topical allusions and changes in Shakespeare’s metrical style. Standard chronologies agree in broad outline but differ by a year or more for many plays.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, some people have claimed that the works were written by someone else, arguing that a glover’s son from a provincial town without a university education could not have written them. Proposed candidates include Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (promoted since J. Thomas Looney’s book of 1920), Christopher Marlowe and others.

The overwhelming consensus of historians and literary scholars rejects these theories. Contemporary title pages, the First Folio’s tributes by colleagues who knew him, and records linking the Stratford man to the London theatre all point to Shakespeare. Oxford died in 1604, before several plays were written, according to standard chronology. Scholars also point out that the grammar-school education of the time was rigorous, and that many Elizabethan dramatists, such as Ben Jonson, did not attend university either.

Historians of the controversy, notably James Shapiro in Contested Will (2010), have treated it as a phenomenon worth studying in its own right: it grew out of Romantic ideas of genius as autobiographical expression and of Victorian class assumptions, and it reveals how different ages imagine where great art comes from.