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William Shakespeare - An Analysis
(English Literature for BS English, M.A English, and competitive exams)
For College & University Students Why was William Shakespeare regarded as the best English playwright?
In his book Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt describes Shakespeare as “the greatest playwright not of his age alone but of all time”. This echoes the fact that ‘the Bard’ is often considered to be one of England’s greatest authors. Even today his work is read by thousands of schoolchildren, his plays are performed in many theatres (including the replica Globe in London which is named after him), his plays have been repeatedly filmed and turned into parts of popular culture, and his language is often quoted in various forms. In addition, his hometown of Stratford has become one of England’s premier tourist attractions.
Considering Shakespeare is such a famous figure, it is remarkable how little we actually know about his life. In fact, some critics have suggested that this is one reason for his continuing successor for the ‘cult’ of ‘The Bard’: if the man himself is a myth then he can be permanently recreated for many generations. However, there are some details that we can identify with relative confidence. Shakespeare was born in 1564, probably on April 23rd as he was baptized on the 26th. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwickshire where his father was a glover and alderman. He received a good education at the local grammar school, the Kings New School, where boys were taught Latin grammar and classical texts (he later used Latin sources for the plots of some of his plays, for example, Titus Andronicus refers to Ovid’s tales Metamorphoses).
By the time Shakespeare was 18 he was married to a relative and a local woman named Anne Hathaway, with whom he eventually had three children, called Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 there are few records to indicate where Shakespeare was living and under what occupation, though a number of different stories suggest he was already in London, or had fled accused of poaching, or was, in fact, himself a teacher: “He had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country” wrote John Aubrey. But by 1592 records suggest that he was established in London as
a playwright, where he continued to write and perform plays with considerable success until shortly before his death in 1616 (coincidentally, on April 23rd, his birthday).
When Shakespeare’s plays were originally published all together in the First Folio of 1623, they were collected for the first time and were divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories. While these generic categories are not always upheld today, and there are some plays such as Measure for Measure which do not easily fit into one group or another, there are consistencies between some of the plays which allow them to be grouped in this manner.
We can identify certain patterns based on genre. For example, in Othello, Othello’s murder of Desdemona followed by suicide restores the social status quo of a powerful state under white leadership. Hamlet’s death in Hamlet disrupts the royal line but succeeds in first purging the state of the corruption, the “something rotten”, that affects the country. However, both of these plays, like Macbeth, are mainly concerned not with social relations but with following the decline of a powerful character. It is true that there is often a comic subplot in the plays to provide a light relief, but the main plot follows a tragic flaw in character to a tragic conclusion usually of multiple deaths.
By contrast, where tragedy has multiple deaths, the comedy plays usually offer multiple marriages – this is one of their most characteristic features. Confusion and misinterpretations are resolved not in duels or deaths but in reconciliation and the restoration of characters to their proper social roles. At the end of Twelfth Night, Orsino responds to the revelation of Sebastian and Viola’s identities with the following lines:
“If this be so, as yet the glass seems true,
I shall have share in this most happy wrack” (V.i)
Although “wrack” suggests the potential for catastrophe, it has found its proper romantic conclusion, and the love plot is untangled. Viola is released from her disguise as the boy Cesaro and restored to her proper female role, and everyone’s identity is revealed. Social reconciliation usually takes this form in Shakespeare’s comedies as lovers are united in marriage, usually in groups of two or three pairs whose plots are followed together throughout the play. Multiple narratives are drawn together often in the final scene. The
pestilence” (I.i). Unlike in tragedy, when Gertrude “protests too much” in Hamlet and is then horribly implicated in the crimes which have so upset her son, this kind of exaggeration in comedies creates the effect of laughter because the audience realize that they have more knowledge than the characters in the play.
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Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. From simple essay plans, to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. One of the reasons often given for Shakespeare’s enduring popularity is his “universal” appeal: his stories cross many genres and different places and periods in history and thus they always seem relevant to a particular society at a particular moment in time, or can be adapted to seem relevant (and they have been adapted into many languages around the world). Sometimes this provides a political context for the plays, sometimes it merely serves to add fresh ways of interpreting the language and the scenery, for example in Baz Luhrman’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet the story takes place in a futuristic modern-day setting at ‘Verona Beach’ in America, where the commercial rivalry of the Capulets and Montagues replaces their social positions and where guns and advertising are everywhere, contrasting with the romantic poetry as it is retained from the play. But it remains a tragic and affecting story.
Shakespeare himself created an impression of universal drama in the language that he uses in suggesting that what was represented in the theatre could represent the whole world. In As You Like It he wrote the following famous lines,
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts” (II.vii)
Here he refers to the activities in the theatre, the actors coming on and off stage, to suggest a metaphor for how people live their lives. He suggests that anybody could play a different part, or any part, so we could all recognize ourselves in a Shakespeare play. It also hints towards the way that characters such as Olivia and Rosaline dress up as other than they are, assume different roles or become different ‘players’. It was common in Shakespeare’s time for the actors in each company to play many different roles, sometimes within the same plays and sometimes across several plays that were being performed in the same week. This kind of language is also reflected in plays such as Macbeth, in tragedy rather than in comedy, wherein the dying speech of the play’s hero or antihero Tomorrow
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” (V.v)
Here the metaphor extends to the process of life itself, which is only like a “poor player” who has only an “hour” to perform. This is perhaps wishful thinking on the part of Macbeth who would like to imagine that his actions were only “performed” and that they “signified nothing”, as he is now consumed by guilt for the murder of Duncan. The metaphors of theatre run right through the plays in a way that both playfully emphasizes their artificiality, as stories and characters who are performed many times in many different ways, and a way that makes them feel eternal, that they could be acted a countless number of times and still have something to say to us.
