On Greatest Lit list:
• A Midsummmer Night’s Dream (1594)
• Romeo and Juliet (c.1596)
• Henry IV, Part 1 (1597)
• The Merchant of Venice (c.1597)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• Hamlet (1601)
• Othello (1604)
• Macbeth (c.1606)
• King Lear (c.1606)
• Sonnets (c.1609)
• The Tempest (1611)
Also great:
• The Taming of the Shrew (c.1593)
• Richard III (c.1595)
• Henry V (c.1599)
• Twelfth Night (c.1601)
• Antony and Cleopatra (c.1601)
Further pages
How Shakespeare changed history: what he wrote and what really happened
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The histories
An hilarious mash-up on
Shakespearean monologues by Mark Twain
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The bare bodkin
The sometimes surprising things other writers have said about Shakespeare
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A deficiency of taste
Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare? A view on the authorship question.
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The Stratford controversy.
I once read all Shakespeare's historical plays in chronological order. Not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the historical events they supposedly relate.... more
This play ought to be called Brutus, since the central theme concerns that character's decision to join an assassination conspiracy and the repercussions of his action. Caesar is.... more
Hamlet is such a famous play—so much the great drama, the one play that everyone in the world can quote at least six words from—that we usually can't see how strange it.... more
A straightforward play really, about a dysfunctional family. People thinks it's cosmic because of that annoying storm in the middle. That's not my opinion but.... more
Macbeth was actually king of Scotland for seventeen years, though you would never get this from Shakespeare's most popular play. Historians consider Macbeth and.... more
Interesting thing about Othello is that it concerns a man of African heritage who is victimized in a white European society, and yet racism is never the central issue. Othello.... more
Who was this greatest of all writers?
William Shakespeare, if that indeed was his real name, was an obscure writer of Elizabethan entertainments about whom little is known....
Just kidding.
But only partly. For the poet and playwright generally considered the greatest ever is also one of the least known of all literary figures. And his works were indeed created for the popular entertainment of his day with little thought to their immortality. Shakespeare did not take any steps to preserve his writings past their immediate use. (Fortunately his friends did.)
With all the academic study of Shakespeare and the trappings of fine culture that have been wrapped around productions of his dramas over the centuries, we often forget what a rollicking, bawdy and entertaining spectacle his plays presented to their original audience — and still can to a modern audience, in the right hands.
Not that his writing is not also profound and deeply moving. Like Chaucer before him and later great English writers like Fielding and Dickens, Shakespeare was able to engage the mind, the heart and more primitive parts of the human psyche all at once.
Shakespeare was born and raised at Stratford-upon-Avon, the eldest son of a glover and a member of the local gentry. He married Anne Hathaway, had three children — Susanna (born 1583) and the twins Hamnet and Judith (born 1585). He is thought to have worked as a schoolmaster until moving to London.
Nothing is known about how he became involved in the theatre and became a writer, but he apparently was known as a playwright in 1592, judging by a comment from a rival about an "upstart crow". From the early 1590s until 1611, Shakespeare wrote at least 36 plays, more if you count collaborations and plays conjectured to have been lost. The plays are traditionally divided into three categories: histories (see my historically ordered notes on them), comedies and tragedies. These groupings are rough approximations however. Several of the so-called comedies are dark enough to be considered tragicomedies. The "tragedies" taking place in the ancient world are thematically similar to "histories", but the latter term is reserved for British subject matter. And some of the "histories" are quite comical.
His earliest plays to be produced in London are thought to be either the first two or all three parts of Henry VI around 1590-92. It is not certain whether he wrote all or just parts of these inferior histories. The lighter Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona were also early plays. His first published works were the long poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). His famous Sonnets were also likely begun in the early 1590s, though they were not collected and published together until 1609.
Also among his early works are the Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus; the comedies The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost; and the histories King John and Richard III, although dates of the latter two are the subject of debate.
From 1594, Shakespeare was associated with a theatrical company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, writing for it the great romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet; the comedies A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor; and the histories Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, and Henry V.
In 1599 the troupe moved to a new venue, the Globe Theatre, south of the Thames in London, which likely opened with a performance of Henry V. There also were performed over the next nine years Shakespeare's renowned tragedies Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Also produced in this period were the ever-popular comedy Twelfth Night and his ambiguous, dark comedies Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida.
In 1603 when James I succeeded Elizabeth I on the British throne, Shakespeare's company gained royal patronage and became known as the King's Men. In 1608 they took over the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, for which Shakespeare wrote the romantic comedies Pericles (or at least half of it), Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Timon of Athens is probably a collaboration in this period also. The final play written entirely by Shakespeare before retirement at the ripe old age of 47 is The Tempest in 1611.
He returned to Stratford-on-Avon, although he did come out of retirement to help on Henry VIII and possibly two other plays in 1613. William Shakespeare died in 1616.
Centuries after the Stratfordian's death, movements have grown to claim he wasn't the author of all those plays and poems. But that's another story. And has little to do with the more important issue of what those works by him—or by someone using that name—told us.
What Shakespeare is really all about
Seven years after his death, Shakespeare's friends and colleagues published the first collected edition of his works, known as the First Folio. A dedicatory poem by playwright Ben Jonson in that book declares Shakespeare "not of an age, but for all time".
This comment has set the standard for all discussion of Shakespeare ever since. We are continually told Shakespeare is "universal". He appeals to emotions and thoughts that are part of eternal human nature. He points out universal truths. His words transcend race and culture, as shown by their translation into every language on earth and by their worldwide popularity for four centuries.
But, Shakespeare fan as I am, I must disagree. There's universal and there's universal.
While Shakespeare's plays appear to reveal the hearts and minds of human beings "for all time", I believe this is because they have done so for as long as our current historical epoch has lasted. Each period thinks its insights and ideals are universal to all periods. Shakespeare's have applied much longer than most, ever since the first flowering of the capitalist era out of the decay of feudalism. They have held significance for us through the ups and downs of capitalism over hundreds of years, even as the social system was seriously challenged by others in the 20th century. However, we read his words and we take his meanings differently now from how his original audiences did in the first flush of the new era. And eventually, as social systems evolve and the people within them change, his words will come to mean less to us. His works may remain classics in the same way that the epic poetry of Homer and the plays of Sophocles are considered classics now. But they will not always strike us to the heart. They will not always haunt our culture's thinking, as they do now, just as The Iliad and Oedipus Rex are only sporadically interesting to us today.
But it's still wonderful stuff.
Shakespeare wrote at a time when the feudal, aristocratic world was being replaced by a new one based on commercial expansionism and individualism. Although he often wrote about kings and queens, these were not the God-appointed, mystically guided monarchs of ethereal thoughts and lofty morals found in medieval literature. Rather they were flesh-and-blood individuals with very human greeds and ambitions. The best of them are portrayed as ruling on behalf of the nation (the unified nation state being a recent development, replacing the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages), rather than for divine pleasure or inherited right.
Many of the questions raised in Shakespeare's works deal with the changes of mores that resulted from the historical transformation taking place.
For example, the old notion of honour—associated with chivalry and blood relations in the Middle Ages—has to be given a new meaning. Is it mere "air", as Falstaff proclaims, or something tied to taking up one's social responsibilities, as Prince Hal comes to accept?
Is there a place for compassion and forgiveness in a voracious profit-before-all-else system represented by Shylock?
Do individuals have the right to choose their own happiness over traditions, as Romeo and Juliet attempt? Does a wife belong to a husband?
Is wealth a guarantor of happiness? Should financial relations control familial relations, or vice versa? Do we choose our own destinies or are they fixed in the stars?
I could go on and on, listing the issues raised by Shakespeare that would have seemed ludicrous in other times. An 11th-century lord or peasant would not have found these to be questions even worth considering, any more than we are interested today in pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I'm not saying Shakespeare always sided with the rising bourgeoisie on these issues or always opposed feudal values. He was dealing with conflicts that arose in a mind shaped, as the minds of most people of his time, by the stories and glories of the past, as well as excited by the forward-looking society that was forming around new economic relations and new ideas. In the exhilarating tumult, he was trying to sort out how people should act. He was seeking the constants that go beyond the immediate, changing fashions—and not always successfully.
But always engagingly.
I doubt Shakespeare ever said, "In this play, I'll settle the issue of a child's obligations to a parent in the context of a society increasingly dominated by mercantilism." More likely he chose stories that he or his audience liked, and wrote them from his heart. But it is inevitable he and his audience would focus on the moral issues of the time that were given life by the changing social conditions.
Shakespeare isn't great because he dealt with these issues when no one else did. Others certainly did. I imagine most artists of the time did to some degree. Shakespeare is great because he just wrote better than anyone else on these matters—delving more deeply, exploring more nuance, writing more eloquently and movingly than any other playwright then or since.
To put it in a single sentence, Shakespeare was writing "Arise, the new human." Or as he put it in The Tempest, "O brave new world that has such people in't."
Today the "new human" is no longer new. The new humanity he heralded is very old now. But there resides in memory enough of youth to excite. There remains enough of our early character that we can still gain insight and comfort from Shakespeare, the sage of the old new human's youth. It is especially comforting now to think that those words and ideas from our adolescence, which once were challenging, are relevant still—appear still as universals for all time.
That's what I think Shakespeare is all about today. If all this is too heavy and you'd prefer some comic relief (and why not? Shakespeare is supposed to be entertaining), check out Mark Twain's travesty of a Shakespearean soliloquy.
You can also check out a short collection of quotations from other writers about Shakespeare—most of which are not at all what you might expect.
— Eric
