William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed (National Portrait Gallery, London, currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
Born	April 1564 (exact date unknown) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1616 Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
Signature

"Shakespeare" redirects here. For other uses, see Shakespeare (disambiguation).

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616)^[I] was an English poet and playwright. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He wrote approximately^[II] 38 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems. Already well-known in his lifetime, his fame grew considerably after his death and his work has been adulated by eminent figures through the centuries. He is often called England's national poet, the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard") or the "Swan of Avon".

Born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, at age eighteen Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. Sometime between 1585 and 1592 Shakespeare moved to London, where he was an actor, writer, and part-owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, with whom he found financial success. Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford in 1613, where he died three years later at the age of 52.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are uncertain. He is one of the few playwrights considered to have excelled in both tragedy and comedy, with his works having been translated into every major living language and his plays being continually performed all over the world. Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the history of the English-speaking world and has greatly influenced subsequent theatre, literature, and even the English language, with many of his quotations and neologisms now in everyday usage.

Because so few historical facts are known about Shakespeare, there are many speculations about the man, including whether the works attributed to him were actually written by another playwright, whether he maintained a monogamous relationship with his wife or was bisexual, and whether he was Catholic or atheist.

Life

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life

Shakespeare's signature, from his will: "By me William Shakespeare"

William Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, Shaxper, and Shake-speare)^[III][IV] was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. He was the eldest son, and the third child among eight. His birth is widely assumed to have occurred at the family house on Henley Street, the site now known as the "Shakespeare Birthplace"; but there is no firm evidence and other houses have been claimed as his place of birth. The record of Shakespeare's christening is dated 26 April of that year. Because his christening likely happened within 3 days of birth, tradition has settled on 23 April (Saint Georges day)^[V] as his birthday. This date has a convenient symmetry, for Shakespeare died on the same day: 23 April,^[VI] in 1616.

Shakespeare may have attended King Edward VI Grammar School in central Stratford, but no school records of the time survive. As the son of a prominent town official, he was entitled to attend free of charge. The school probably would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature, although Elizabethan-era grammar schools varied in quality.

Shakespeare's House in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Now home of the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust

At the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, aged twenty-six, under the authority of a bond dated 28 November 1582. One document identified her as being "of Temple Grafton," near Stratford, and the marriage may have taken place there. Two neighbours of Hathaway posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably because Anne was three months pregnant. On 26 May 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died aged 11 of the bubonic plague in 1596; his date of death is not known, but he was buried on 11 August.

After his marriage Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London theatrical scene. The period from 1585 (when his twin children were born) until 1592 has become known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence survives to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. Numerous stories attempt to account for Shakespeare's life during this time: including one that Shakespeare got in trouble for poaching deer, one that he worked as a schoolmaster for the Catholic Hoghton family in Lancashire, and one that he minded the horses of theatre patrons in London. However, there is no direct evidence to support these stories, and they all appear to have begun circulating after Shakespeare's death.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London; his reputation was high enough for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (Although interpretations differ, the italicised line certainly parodies the phrase "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)

"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..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, Act II Scene 7

By late 1594 Shakespeare was an actor, writer and part-owner of a playing company known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men — like others of the period, the company took its name from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough for the new king, James I (who acceded in 1603), to adopt the company himself, after which it became known as the King's Men. Shakespeare's writing displays a persistent engagement not only with the technical requirements of theater but also with theater as a shaping concept in human life.

By 1596 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and in 1598 appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson. There is a tradition that Shakespeare also continued to act in various parts of his plays, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V. These traditions, however, have little scholarly basis.

By 1598, his name also began to appear on the title pages of published quartos, a sign that his name itself was a selling point for the volume. He seems to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599. By 1604, he had moved north of the river, lodging just north of St Paul's Cathedral with a Huguenot family named Mountjoy. He helped arrange a marriage between the Mountjoys' daughter and their apprentice Stephen Bellott. Bellott later sued his father-in-law for defaulting on part of the promised dowry, and Shakespeare was called as a witness. Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford in 1613. He died on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. Supposedly, Shakespeare died on his birthday, if the tradition that he was born on April 23 is correct. He was married to Anne Hathaway until his death and was survived by her and their two daughters, Susanna and Judith. Although Susanna married Dr John Hall, there are no direct descendants of Shakespeare alive today. All of Judith's children (she married a man named Thomas Quiney) died very young, and Susanna's daughter Elizabeth Hall died in 1670, marking the official end of Shakespeare's lineage.

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel, not on account of his literary fame but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440. Shakespeare's funeral monument, on the church wall nearest his grave, has a bust of Shakespeare posed in the act of writing. (No documents have been found to suggest who commissioned the monument.) Shakespeare may have written the epitaph on his tombstone:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosèd here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Works

Plays

Image of Shakespeare from the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

Many of Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. The First Folio of his works, compiled and edited by actors John Hemminge and Henry Condell, divided these plays into tragedies, histories and comedies. They have been translated into every major living language, and are continually performed all over the world.

Like his many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare based his plays on the works of other playwrights or reworked earlier stories and historical material. Hamlet (c. 1601) is believed to be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear may be an adaptation of an earlier play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts: Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North) and the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (which provided material for Macbeth and King Lear). He used the former for his Roman plays and the latter for his history plays. Shakespeare may also have borrowed stylistic elements from contemporary playwrights like Christopher Marlowe.^[VII]

Shakespeare's plays tend to be placed into three main stylistic groups:

• early romantic comedies and histories (such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV, Part 1);
• middle period romantic comedies and tragedies (including his most famous tragedies, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, as well as "problem plays" such as Troilus and Cressida);
• later romances (such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest).

The earlier plays range from broad comedy to historical nostalgia. The middle-period plays have grander themes, addressing issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power, and ambition. The late romances have redemptive plotlines with ambiguous endings and various fantastical elements. However, the borders between these stylistic groupings are rarely clear.

Some of Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos; but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors who had been in Shakespeare's company. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the pattern of the First Folio. Modern criticism has also labeled some of his plays "problem plays." This term is applied to overlapping groups of plays by scholars beginning with F. S. Boas, W. W. Lawrence, and E. M. W. Tillyard. The common element in the definition is that the plays so labelled present "a perplexing or distressing problem" in a way that raises rather than answers ethical questions. Alternatively, many of the same plays have been classified generically as tragicomedies, because they seem to mingle comic and tragic motifs. The term "romances" has also been applied to the last comedies.

Little is definitely known about the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays. No authoritative print version appeared in his lifetime; nor is there any evidence that Shakespeare supervised the publication of any of his plays. Therefore there are signficant textual problems (difficulties in identifying which plays he wrote) and there are textual variants, small and large, in every play for which multiple texts have survived. Unlike some other dramatists (Jonson is the most notable example), Shakespeare seems to have taken no interest in publication of his play-texts. Textual variations resulted from printers' errors, compositors' misreadings, or wrongly scanned lines from the source material, whether Shakespeare's own foul papers or a scribe's fair copy.

A more serious texutal problem occurs when there are two significantly different versions of a play. Many so-called bad quartos are assumed to be so badly mangled that they must be among the "stol'n and surreptitious copies" that the editors of the First Folio complain about. Other textual variations are harder to discount. The quarto and folio versions of King Lear, for instance, differ in a significant degree. Traditionally, editors conflate Lear, including all scenes from both versions. Beginning with Madeleine Doran, however, there was a movement to see the two as meaningfully distinct. Gary Taylor and Roger Warren's The Division of the Kingdom made the case that textual differences such as those in the texts of Lear arose from different provenances for the two texts. Though not universally accepted, this hypothesis has influenced both critical and editorial practice in recent decades; both Cambridge and Oxford, for instance, have published separate editions of the quarto and folio Lear.

An important question in Shakespearean research addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that a number of his plays show signs of either collaboration or revision or both. This would not be uncommon, as collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre.

Sonnets

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 poems that deal with such themes as love, beauty, and mortality. The form he used has since been called the Shakespearean sonnet form, and is still used today. In a Shakesperean sonnet, poems are divided into 14 lines with 3 quatrains, followed by a closing couplet, the rhyme scheme being abab cdcd efef gg, each letter corresponding to a rhyming line.

All but two of the 154 poems first appeared in the 1609 publication entitled SHAKE-SPEARE'S Sonnets; numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") had previously been published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. Passionate Pilgrim and a reference to the poems by Francis Meres indicate that some of the sonnets are from the 1590s; however, the only reliable date for all but those named above is the terminus ante quem of 1609.

The conditions under which the sonnets were published are unclear. The 1609 text is dedicated to one "Mr. W.H.", who is described as "the only begetter" of the poems in the dedication. It is unknown if the dedication was written by Shakespeare or the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the bottom of the dedication page. It is also unknown who Mr. W.H. was, although there are many theories, including those who believe him to be the "fair youth" featured in the sonnets. In addition, it is not known whether the publication of the sonnets was even authorised by Shakespeare.

Other poems

Besides his sonnets, Shakespeare also wrote three known longer poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and A Lover's Complaint. These poems appear to have been written either in an attempt to win the patronage of a rich benefactor (as was common at the time) or as the result of such patronage. For example, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were both dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The two poems were written when the theatres were closed owing to plague, between 1593 and 1594.

Shakespeare also wrote the short poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. The anthology The Passionate Pilgrim was attributed to him upon its first publication in 1599, but in fact only five of its poems are certainly by Shakespeare and the attribution was withdrawn in the second edition.

Style

Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square, London.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "drama became the ideal means to capture and convey the diverse interests of the time." Stories of various genres were enacted for audiences consisting of both the wealthy and educated and the poor and illiterate. Shakespeare served his dramatic apprenticeship at the height of the Elizabethan period, in the years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada; he retired at the height of the Jacobean period, not long before the start of the Thirty Years' War. His verse style, his choice of subjects, and his stagecraft all bear the marks of both periods. His style changed not only in accordance with his own tastes and developing mastery, but also in accord with the tastes of the audiences for whom he wrote.

While many passages in Shakespeare's plays are written in prose, he almost always wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works (like Romeo and Juliet), he even added punctuation at the end of these iambic pentameter lines to make the rhythm even stronger. He and other dramatists at the time used this form of blank verse for a lot of the dialogue between characters in order to elevate drama to new poetic heights.

To end many scenes in his plays he used a rhyming couplet for suspense. A typical example is provided in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,

Hear it not Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

His plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a solo speech, so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict. Among his most famous soliloquies are To be, or not to be, All the world's a stage, and What a piece of work is a man. The character either speaks to the audience directly (such as choruses, or characters that become epilogues) or, more commonly, speaks to him- or herself in the fictional realm.

Shakespeare's writing (especially his plays) also feature extensive wordplay in which double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes are repeatedly used. Humor is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. Although a large amount of his comical talent is evident in his comedies, some of the most entertaining scenes and characters are found in tragedies such as Hamlet and histories such as Henry IV, Part 1. Shakespeare's humor was largely influenced by Plautus.

Influence on theatre, literature, and language

See also: Shakespeare's influence, Shakespeare's influence on the English language, and List of English words invented by Shakespeare

Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre and literature. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature (with Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear ranked among the world's greatest plays), but he also transformed English theatre by expanding the dramatic possibilities of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. For example, in plays such as Hamlet, Shakespeare made the hero's character development central to the plot. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy together to create a new genre—romantic tragedy. At the time, romance was not generally considered a worthy topic for tragedy, but Shakespeare's hybrid dramatic form made it respectable. Shakespeare also revolutionized the soliloquy; instead of using it only to "convey information" regarding a character or an event in the play, he often used it to explore a character's inner motivations and conflict.

Shakespeare's influence stretches beyond drama and includes major novelists such as Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. Dickens peppered his writings with Shakespearean quotations; even his titles, 25 of which were drawn from Shakespeare, reflect his admiration for the playwright. In Moby Dick Melville frequently used Shakespearean devices such as the extended soliloquy. The novel's protagonist, Captain Ahab, is a classic tragic hero—a "great man brought down by his faults"—inspired by such Shakespearean characters as King Lear. Shakespeare also influenced several British poets; Romantic poets, in particular, were drawn to Shakespeare because of themes he expounded that were important to them, such as self-consciousness. Critic George Steiner has called all English poetic dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."

Shakespeare's writings also helped shape modern English. Prior to and during Shakespeare's lifetime, the grammar and spelling of the language were not fixed, but once Shakespeare came to be considered a genius and his plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their language started to become an integral part of English. In the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, written by Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare was quoted more than any other author; such standardization projects embedded Shakespearean language within English, making many of Shakespeare's words and phrases a part of the solidifying language.

Reputation

Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

"He was not of an age, but for all time."

—Ben Jonson, in an epitaph to The Bard written in the early 1600s.

In Shakespeare's lifetime, the estimate of his contemporaries was generous, but not overwhelming. In 1598, Francis Meres singled out Shakespeare among a group of English poets which he compared with the greatest of Greece and Rome, while also describing Shakespeare as "one of the best" English playwrights of both comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare was also alluded to alongside Chaucer, Gower and Spenser by the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. In the years following Shakespeare's death, his rival Ben Jonson would record both praise and criticism, describing Shakespeare as "soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage" in his prefatory poem to the First Folio, yet elsewhere asserting that "Shakespeare wanted art".

In Restoration society, the vogue for neoclassicism, and tastes at the Royal courts, led to a consensus which ranked Shakespeare below Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. The influential critic John Dryden acknowledged this consensus, and sought to modify it in 1668, saying of Jonson: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". At this time the collaborative works of Beaumont and Fletcher were twice as popular as those of Shakespeare in the theatres.

Beginning in the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright and poet. Shakespeare's classic status was established by a series of critically annotated versions of his works, including those by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, Alexander Pope in 1725 and, most influentially, Samuel Johnson in 1765. Johnson's greatest criticism of Shakespeare was in the over-use of puns: "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare's reputation began to spread into Europe, largely as a result of the treatment of his works by Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

"There is no eminent writer ... whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

—George Bernard Shaw, on Shakespeare's mind.

Neoclassicism (the view that dramatic works should be judged by principles established by Aristotle) ceased to be regarded as a weakness of Shakespeare in the Romantic era, when his genius began to be acknowledged by other, more individual, standards: particularly as a result of the works of the translator and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel in Germany, and the poet and lecturer Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. This reverence for Shakespeare became parodied in the term bardolatry, which would be attacked by George Bernard Shaw who argued that, after Ibsen, Shakespeare had become antiquated and would need to be set aside. The plays of Shakespeare were also dismissed by Leo Tolstoy. In the theatres, throughout the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare became increasingly pictorial, using highly elaborate scenery, detailed costumes and props, spectacular effects and the frequent use of tableaux.

The twentieth century saw the development of the a professional field of study known as English. Critical methods applied to Shakespeare's works included structuralism, poststructuralism and semiotics, and his works were analysed from feminist and Marxist perspectives.

The widespread reverence for Shakespeare has provoked an unforeseen negative reaction in some of today's youth. Because most people in the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, there is an association by some students of his work with boredom and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture; an ironic fate considering the social mix of Shakespeare's original audience. Nonetheless, Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright. In addition, Shakespeare's plays are frequently adapted into film—including Hollywood movies specifically marketed to broad teenage audiences,^[VIII]—though many simply use his plots rather than his dialogue.^[IX] Shakespeare is often referred to as the most filmed author ever, with more than 420 feature-length film versions of his plays in existence.

Speculations about Shakespeare

Authorship

Main article: Shakespearean authorship question

Around one hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the plays and poetry attributed to him. Researchers who believe the works to have been written by another playwright, or group of playwrights, have since then proposed many candidates for alternative authorship, including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. While it is generally accepted in academic circles that Shakespeare's plays were written by Shakespeare of Stratford and not another author, popular interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory, has continued into the 21st century.

Religion

Main article: Shakespeare's religion

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics, at a time when many Catholic practices, most notably Mass, were illegal. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire, and in 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion, which may suggest Catholic sympathies.

While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, Clare Asquith has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing.^[X] Other scholars agree with the suggestion that Shakespeare was Catholic; but this is by no means universally accepted. The Catholic Encyclopedia questions not only his Catholicism but his Christianity, enquiring whether "Shakespeare was not infected with the atheism, which... was rampant in the more cultured society of the Elizabethan age."

Sexuality

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

There is little direct evidence of Shakespeare's sexuality. At 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was then then 26 and pregnant. Their first of their three children, Susanna, was born six months after the marriage, on 26 May 1583. It is possible that Shakespeare felt trapped by this marriage, speculation supported by the fact that he left his family and moved to London after only three years of marriage. While in London, Shakespeare may have had affairs with different women, as evidenced by an anecdote of uncertain validity about Shakespeare having an affair during the performance of one of his plays. Possible evidence of other affairs are that twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets are love poems addressed to a married woman (the so-called "Dark Lady").

In recent decades some scholars have taken another view of Shakespeare's sexuality, stating that possible homoerotic allusions in a number of his works suggest that Shakespeare was bisexual. Nonetheless, others interpret them as referring to intense friendship rather than sexual love.

Bibliography

The following list separates the plays according to their classification in the First Folio, entitled Mr. William Shakespeares [sic] Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the first published edition of Shakespeare's plays. Today, some of the comedies are usually considered as a separate subgenre, the 'romances'; these plays are highlighted with an asterisk (*). Plays that are thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a '†' symbol. The three plays marked with a '‡' symbol are often classified as the problem plays.

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

• The Tempest*
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure‡
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• As You Like It
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well‡
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale*
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre*†^[XI]
• The Two Noble Kinsmen*†^[XII]
• Cymbeline*

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean histories

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1†^[XIII]
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII†^[XIV]

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

• Romeo and Juliet
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus†^[XV]
• Timon of Athens†^[XVI]
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth†^[XVII]
• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida‡
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra

Poems

• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim
• The Phoenix and the Turtle
• A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won
• Cardenio†^[XVIII]

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

• The Birth of Merlin
• Locrine
• The London Prodigal
• The Puritan
• The Second Maiden's Tragedy
• Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas Lord Cromwell
• A Yorkshire Tragedy
• Edward III

See also

• Elizabethan era
• English Renaissance theatre
• Famous English people

• Globe Theatre
• King's Men
• Early Modern English language

Notes and references

Notes

1. ^ Dates use the Julian Calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar, Shakespeare was baptised on May 6 and died on May 3.
2. ^ The exact figures are unknowable. See Shakespearean authorship, Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
3. ^ The point is illustrated by reference to the Stratford Parish Register of 1579: it records the arrangements for the burial of Shakespeare's sister, Anne: "Mr Shaxpers dawter".
4. ^ Spelling was not fixed in Elizabethen times, hence the variation.
5. ^ Shakespeare would refer to the saint in the battle cry of Henry V: "Upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!"
6. ^ These dates use the Julian calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar, Shakespeare died on May 3.
7. ^ An essay by Harold Brooks suggests Marlowe's Edward II influenced Shakespeare's Richard III, Others scholars, though, discount this, stating that the parallels are simply commonplace.
8. ^ See particularly William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
9. ^ See particularly 10 Things I Hate About You, O (film) and She's the Man.
10. ^ "In spite of the difficulties of working under the eyes of the Cecil faction, Shakespeare appeared to have found a new métier—that of highly placed apologist for the Catholic opposition."
11. ^ Co-written with George Wilkins.
12. ^ Co-written with John Fletcher.
13. ^ Usually thought to be the work of a group of collaborators.
14. ^ Co-written with John Fletcher.
15. ^ Co-written with Thomas Middleton.
16. ^ Co-written with George Peele.
17. ^ The text which survives has been plainly altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615)
18. ^ Co-written with John Fletcher.

Further reading

• Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun (1964). Fictionalised biography ISBN 0-393-31507-X
• Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (1970). Biography
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (Jonathan Cape, 2004). Biography ISBN 0-224-06276-X
• Bertram Fields, Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare (2005) ISBN 0-060-83417-X
• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999). Literary Criticism ISBN 1-573-22751-X
• Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare BBC Books (2003). Companion to the television series of the same title. ISBN 0-563-53477-X
• Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography *(Chatto and Windus 2005). Biography. ISBN 1-856-19726-3
• A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man (St. Martin’s Press, revised ed. 1988). Biography ISBN 0-312-03425-3
• S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford U. Press, 1977). Biography ISBN 0-195-02433-8
• Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th century (Chatto and Windus, 1954)

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare includes the complete works, an advanced search function, a complete concordance, and some statistics about the works.
• The Internet Shakespeare Editions at the University of Victoria has old spelling versions of all the texts, with newly edited modern texts for some works; facsimiles, an extensive section on the life and times, a growing database of Shakespeare in performance, and a detailed section of links.
• Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet
• The Shakespeare Wiki
• William Shakespeare Search Engine
• National Geographic article about Shakespeare's coinages
• Designing Shakespeare - 40 years of Shakespearian performance in London and Stratford, featuring thousands of high-quality photographs, cast lists, reviews and interviews
• The Royal Shakespeare Company - probably the most famous classical theatre company in the world. This site has all the latest information on current and future productions, ticket sales, merchandising as well as press and educational resources.