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The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had.
Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week. (The seventh day was probably given over largely to religious instruction.) For much of the year they can hardly have seen daylight.
In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.
Nowhere in the metropolis did life expectancy exceed thirty-five years, and in some poorer districts it was barely twenty-five. The London that William Shakespeare first encountered was overwhelmingly a youthful place.
A popular saying had it that London Bridge was made for wise men to pass over and fools to pass under.
Potatoes wouldn’t become a popular food until the eighteenth century.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history.
The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping—the box office.
As Marlowe’s biographer David Riggs has written, “There were no acquittals in Tudor state courts.”
To Elizabethan playwrights plots and characters were common property.
“Shakespeare was capable of prolixity, unnecessary obscurity, awkwardness of expression, pedestrian versifying and verbal inelegance,” writes Stanley Wells. “Even in his greatest plays we sometimes sense him struggling with plot at the expense of language, or allowing his pen to run away with him in speeches of greater length than the situation warrants.”
Shakespeare’s genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering—things that aren’t taught in school.
what really characterizes his work—every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career—is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language.
He coined—or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of—2,035 words,
His real gift was as a phrasemaker. “Shakespeare’s language,” says Stanley Wells, “has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language.” Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play,
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If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.
Thanks in no small measure to the work of Shakespeare and his fellows, English was at last rising to preeminence in the country of its creation. “It is telling,” observes Stanley Wells, “that William Shakespeare’s birth is recorded in Latin but that he dies in English, as ‘William Shakespeare, gentleman.’”
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
The Globe itself didn’t last long. It likewise burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years they were. No theater—perhaps no human enterprise—has seen more glory in only a decade or so than the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another, plays of unrivaled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra.
Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines.
It is important to bear in mind that to an Elizabethan audience a history play was not an emotionally remote account of something long since done; rather, it was perceived as a kind of mirror reflecting present conditions.
Whatever else he was, James was a generous patron of drama. One of his first acts as king was to award Shakespeare and his colleagues a royal patent, making them the King’s Men.
Though Shakespeare is frequently categorized as an Elizabethan playwright, in fact much of his greatest output was Jacobean
James made his own contribution to literary posterity, too, by presiding over the production of a new “Authorized Version”—the King James Version—of the Bible, a process which took a panel of worthies seven years of devoted labor from 1604 to 1611 to complete and in which he took an informed and leading interest.
Catholicism would never be a threat in England again. The challenge to orthodoxy now would come from the other end of the religious spectrum—from the Puritans.
Shakespeare’s will resides today in a box in a special locked room at Britain’s National Archives at Kew in London. The will is written on three sheets of parchment, each of a different size, and bears three of Shakespeare’s six known signatures, one on each page.
Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, who equally might have shed light on many Shakespearean mysteries, lived until 1670. She married twice but had no children either, and so with her died the Shakespeare line.
Heminges and Condell are unquestionably the greatest literary heroes of all time. It really does bear repeating: only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Such are the vagaries of reputation,”
After his death William Shakespeare was laid to rest in the chancel of Holy Trinity, a large, lovely church beside the Avon. As we might by now expect, his life concludes with a mystery—indeed, with a small series of them. His gravestone bears no name, but merely a curious piece of doggerel: Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare. Bleste be the man that spares thes stones And curst be he that moves my bones.
So it needs to be said that nearly all of the anti-Shakespeare sentiment—actually all of it, every bit—involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact.
