William Shakespeare: The

Man, His World, and His

Works ENG 225: Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
• A name synonymous with great literature.

• Known as the Bard of Avon, was an English

poet and dramatist whose reputation has
transcended boundaries of space and time.

Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all

time.”
----Ben Jonson
• His works, in their original texts, in translation into
most of the world’s languages, and in an
enormous range of adaptations, are read, taught,
and performed all over the globe.
• They have influenced countless other works of
art.
• Productions of his plays abounded in a
spectacular range of modes – from theatrical
reproductions, films, TV adaptations, and
Broadway musicals to such oddities as kabuki, the
traditional, highly stylized Japanese drama form
and Manga!

His timeless appeal

• He was a master of both prose and verse,
rhetoric (Mark Antony’s speech to the
Roman citizens in Julius Caesar)and lyrical
verse (love scenes of Romeo and Juliet
and the exquisite speeches of Oberon and
Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

• Themes include the quintessential

elements of human life common to
everyone's experience - love, longing,
honor and deceit, age, death.

His timeless appeal

Shakespeare, the
Man
Shakespeare, the Man
• The greatest of all writers remains the great
unknowable.

• Mark Twain compared piecing together

Shakespeare's life to reconstructing a dinosaur from
a few bits of bone stuck together with plaster.

• According to Twain's theory, we know more about

the Stegosaurus than we do about Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, the Man
• Actually, Shakespeare's life is unusually well-documented for a
normal man of his time.

• Mostly gleaned from documents of an official character, from

drab entries in church registers and city archives.
• Dates of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and burials; wills,
conveyances, legal processes, and payments by the court.
• No manuscripts for major plays, no annotated sources, no
intimate correspondence.

• Little of that dusty evidence gives us access to the man himself,

still less the nature of his genius.
Shakespeare, the Man

• Born in April, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, about 100 miles northwest of London to a well
to do family.

• Not a man of learning in the same league as fellow writers Ben Jonson and John Milton, but he is assumed
to have attended the local Grammar School.

• Jonson, in particular, was quite scornful of what he perceived as Shakespeare's educational shortcomings.

• In November 1582, married Anne Hathaway and had three children.

• Known as a man of various abilities, an actor, playwright, and play reviser, also someone with sharp
business acumen, a share holder of the theatre company for whom he wrote his plays.
The World of Shakespeare
• The Renaissance was the cultural flowering that took place in Europe during
the 15th and 16th centuries.
• As England increased in importance, her literature, art, and music began
to flourish. The Elizabethan era was the English Renaissance at its
height.
• Age of exploration
• England was swiftly transforming herself from an island off the coast of
Europe into a dominant sea power and an emerging colonial empire
• Discovering worlds where everyone had thought nothing existed
• Age of discovery
• from Harvey's discovery of circulation of blood to the invention of the
telescope. In between, decimal fractions, valves in veins, and the laws of
planetary motion were discovered.
 Career in the
Theatre
• How his career in the theatre began is unclear.

• In 1592, we get the first documentary evidence of Shakespeare's rise to

prominence in the London theater.

• From roughly 1594 onward, he was an important member of the Lord

Chamberline Company of Players ( Called the King’s Men after the
accession of James I in 1603).

• In 1599, he became part owner in the most prestigious public theatre in

London, the Globe.

• Highly successful, he invested in real estate and retired a rich man.

• The Renaissance was the cultural flowering that took place in Europe during
the 15th and 16th centuries.
• As England increased in importance, her literature, art, and music began
to flourish. The Elizabethan era was the English Renaissance at its
height.
• Age of exploration
• England was swiftly transforming herself from an island off the coast of
Europe into a dominant sea power and an emerging colonial empire
• Discovering worlds where everyone had thought nothing existed
• Age of discovery
• from Harvey's discovery of circulation of blood to the invention of the
telescope. In between, decimal fractions, valves in veins, and the laws
of planetary motion were discovered.

The World of Shakespeare

 • Theater
• Bear- or bull-baiting (several
dogs attack a bear or bull
tied to a stake)
• Cockfighting (lots of feathers
and chicken blood)
• Brawling and rioting
• Witch burnings
• Public executions

Leading amusements of the day

Doubts and Skepticism

• Also a time of disconcerting change.

• As new horizons opened and old assumptions melted away.
• European astronomers were challenging age-old beliefs about the
universe
• The Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli’s practical code of
politics caused Englishmen to fear the Italian “Machiavillain” and yet
prompted them to ask what men do, rather than what they should do,
‘how’ instead of the ‘why’ of Aristotle.
• The Christian faith was no longer single.
• the Church had been seesawing from Catholic (Henry VII) to Protestant
(Henry VIII) to Catholic (Queen Mary) back to Protestant (Queen
Elizabeth I). Politics and religion were intimately intertwined.
• Politics (The State) and religion (the Church) were integrally intertwined.
The Skepticism of the Jacobean
World
• The Gunpowder plot (1605) by a small minority
challenged the state.

• James’s struggles with the House of Commons in

successive Parliaments, in addition to indicating the
strength of the “new men,” also revealed the
inadequacies of the administration.

• Shakespeare’s plays written between 1603 and 1606

unmistakably reflect a new, Jacobean distrust.
 The Order in the
Land
• To cope with this social upheaval, many people clung tenaciously to
traditional hierarchy and old concept of order.
• The concept of Primum Mobile: order in the heavenly bodies, The
heavens themselves, the planets, and this center observe degree,
priority and place.

• The Great Chain of Being

• The concept through which Heavens and its inhabitants were joined
to the rest of the universe.
• Almighty God hath created and appointed all things in the most
excellent and perfect order.
• To an Elizabethan, anything out of the ordinary- storms, floods,
unexpected deaths – signaled a violation of order.

This view of the universe came from Ptolemy, a Roman astronomer

born in Egypt during the second century A.D. Here's how
Shakespeare's contemporaries imagined the universe looked.
This view of the universe came from Ptolemy, a Roman astronomer
born in Egypt during the second century A.D. Here's how
Shakespeare's contemporaries imagined the universe looked.
Shakespeare’s Plays

• Scholarly consensus usually attributes 37

plays to him.

• In addition, he produced plays in

collaboration with other writers of his
time.
 Genre
• Comedy (Romance)
• Tragedy
• History plays – English and
Roman history
• Problem plays
Shakespeare's Theater
• Both English dramatic literature and the theatrical profession
developed greatly during the early years of Shakespeare’s
working life.
• The construction of the first successful professional playhouse,
called the Theatre, in London In 1576.
• A new generation of dramatic writers emerged
• John Lyly and George Peele
• Growth in the size of acting companies and in the popularity of
theatrical entertainment
• Encouraged the writing of longer and more ambitious
plays, interweaving plot with subplot, tragedy with
comedy, and diversifying with songs, dances, masques,
and spectacular effects made possible by the increasing
sophistication of theatrical design.
Shakespeare's
Theater
• Exclusive indoor theater, the Black friars, which had more
elaborate stage machinery. These new possibilities are
reflected in the stage effects required by, for instance,
Cymbeline and The Tempest.
• The division into five acts was also necessitated by the way
the interior stage was lit by candles and its design.

• All female roles were played by boys—no professional

female actors appeared on the English stage before 1660.
This explains the relatively small number of female parts in
each play: for instance, only two in Julius Caesar—Portia
and Calpurnia— and the same number in Hamlet—
Ophelia and Gertrude.

• Music played an important part in performances, as is

evident from the number of songs and dances in the plays.
Thank you