Titans of History

SHAKESPEARE

1564–1616

He was not of an age, but for all time!

Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” (1623)

It is almost universally acknowledged—and not just in the English-speaking world—that William Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever to have lived. He was a peerless poet, playwright and storyteller, and his understanding of human emotions, and the complexities and ambivalences of the human condition, are unparalleled in literature.

Famously, little is known about Shakespeare’s life. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a burgess of fluctuating fortunes, and his wife, Mary Arden. William attended the local grammar school, and at the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, who was some years his senior and already pregnant. At some point in the ensuing decade, Shakespeare moved to London. He was probably a jobbing actor but began to make a mark as a poet and a playwright. By 1594 he was the established dramatist for the theater company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (which renamed itself the King’s Men after James I’s accession).

For the next twenty years Shakespeare wrote play after dazzling play—comedies, tragedies, histories—which brought audiences flocking to the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s fortunes flourished. He probably supported his father’s application for a coat of arms and bought one of Stratford’s largest houses, New Place. On his death in 1616, he was buried in the chancel of Stratford’s parish church. There is little more that we know about Shakespeare’s life.

But Shakespeare’s works tell us all we need to know about the man. He has an extraordinary sympathy with men and women of all ages, from all strata of society, demonstrating a deep understanding of their faults and frailties, their kindnesses and cruelties, their loves and hates, their vanities and self-delusions. Joy and despair, anger and resignation, jealousy and lust, vigor and weakness are all depicted with searing honesty. There is the dangerous infatuation of first love in Romeo and Juliet, the destructiveness of middle-aged passion in Antony and Cleopatra, the heart-rending follies of old age in King Lear. Shakespeare also subjects the nature of power to his unflinching gaze: the burdens of kingship in Henry IV, the nature of tyranny in Richard III, the abuse of trust in Measure for Measure. At its heart, Shakespeare’s work asks: what is a man? What makes a man? What makes a king?

Shakespeare’s characters are multifaceted, complex, ambiguous. Hamlet, faced with his father’s apparent murder, is beset by moral qualms and indecision as to whether he should take revenge. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seize the throne by violence and then become mired in bloodshed, guilt and madness. In Twelfth Night, the jolly, roistering characters play a trick upon the pompous, puritanical steward Malvolio, but the trick goes beyond a joke and plunges into cruelty. In The Tempest, possibly Shakespeare’s last play, Prospero, having used his magic powers to bring those who have wronged him into his power, decides “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.” And then, in what is often taken to be an autobiographical touch on Shakespeare’s part, Prospero, the magus, abandons his magical arts: “deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.”

All this wealth of human experience Shakespeare embodies in language of astounding power and precision, from soaring passages of poetic intensity, through quick-fire witty dialogue, to the earthy prose of the common people who crowded into the pits of London’s theaters. Shakespeare’s richness of vocabulary is astonishing, drawing imagery from a range of fields and activities, from flora and fauna to warfare and heraldry, from astrology and astronomy to seafaring and horticulture. Puns and double entendres abound throughout his work, and virtually every line has layers of meanings. Not content with the vast vocabulary at his command, Shakespeare introduced many new words into English, from “meditate” and “tranquil” to “alligator” and “apostrophe.” He also gave us myriad phrases that have entered everyday speech: “Discretion is the better part of valor,” “At one fell swoop,” “In one’s heart of hearts,” “Seen better days,” and many, many more.

As a master of dramatic art, Shakespeare has no peer. Many of his stories were not original—they were drawn, for example, from Boccaccio’s fables, or folk tales, or Plutarch’s Lives, or the Tudor chroniclers—but it is what he did with them that counts. He not only gave the two-dimensional figures in these tales fully rounded characters, he also knew how to build up tension, to create a mood of impending doom, and then to heighten that mood by interleaving an apparently incongruous comic scene (as he does, for example, in Macbeth). He was also a master of the coup de théâtre, such as the moment in Much Ado About Nothing when the hitherto lightweight, bantering world of the play is overthrown by Beatrice’s sudden injunction to Benedict: “Kill Claudio.” Thus none of Shakespeare’s tragedies are unremittingly tragic, nor are his comedies filled with nonstop laughter. At the end of Twelfth Night, for example, although all the lovers are paired off happily, the action closes with a melancholy song from the Clown, bringing us back to the quotidian world where “the rain it raineth every day.” Such simple, poignant touches are typical of Shakespeare and mark him out, just as much as his complexities, as a writer of genius.

But there are many who have argued that an undistinguished provincial who never went to university could not have written some of the finest plays known to humankind. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, claims have been made that either “William Shakespeare” was a fabricated pseudonym or his identity was simply used by someone else.

The instigator of the trend was an American schoolteacher who claimed descent from Sir Francis Bacon, the lawyer, statesman and philosopher. The Baconian Theory insists that Bacon co-authored the plays with a coterie of courtly writers such as Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh. Unable to reveal their identities because of the controversial content of the plays, they left clues hidden among the texts.

Another candidate is the feisty and brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated shoemaker’s son who dabbled in espionage, and who was suspected of atheism and homosexuality. Conspiracy theorists insist that he did not die in a bar-room brawl in 1593, as is widely believed, but that he went underground to avoid the authorities and continued to write plays, using “William Shakespeare” as a pseudonym.

A third candidate is the earl of Derby, whose aristocratic status precluded him from dabbling in the theatrical world as a professional. He had a company of actors, and among his papers were found several poems authored by a “W.S.” His wedding may have been the first occasion on which A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed.

A final favorite in some quarters is the earl of Oxford, a poet, playwright (although no plays survive) and patron of an acting company. Oxford stopped producing poetry just before Shakespeare first went into print with the dramatic poem Venus and Adonis in 1593 (although his first plays had already been produced). The case for Oxford is, however, handicapped by the fact that the earl died in 1604, before at least a dozen of Shakespeare’s works were written. In 2011, Hollywood even produced a film—Anonymous—about the “real” Shakespeare. It was not a hit.

Despite all these ingenious arguments, Shakespeare’s contemporaries seemed in no doubt that he was the author of his works, and in 1623 his former colleagues compiled the First Folio edition of his plays “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” Modern textual analysis backs up the theory that all the poems and plays are by a single author whose name was William Shakespeare.