Introducing Shakespeare E-Book

Nick Groom

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Shakespeare's absolute pre-eminence is simply unparalleled. His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood with block-buster scripts; his works inspire mountains of scholarship and criticism every year. He has given us many of the very words we speak, and even some of the thoughts we think. Nick Groom and Piero explore how Shakespeare became so famous and influential, and why he is still widely considered the greatest writer ever. They investigate how the Bard has been worshiped at different times and in different places, used and abused to cultural and political ends, and the roots of intense controversies which have surrounded his work.  Much more than a biography or a guide to his plays and sonnets, Introducing Shakespeare is a tour through the world of Will and concludes that even after centuries, Shakespeare remains the battlefield on which our very comprehension of humanity is being fought out.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-115-2

Text copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd Nick Groom

Illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Identifying Shakespeare

Born on St George’s Day

Family Ambitions

Debts and Troubles

School Days

Lost Years

Marriage

The Hireling Actor

The Influence of Acting on Writing

The Hireling Playwright

Elizabethan Theatre Work

London Life

Shakespeare’s Facility of Expression

Shakespeare’s English History

Henry VI

The Hireling Poet

The Spelling of “Shak(e)speare”

An Upstart Crow

Kit Marlowe

Hony-tongued

Shaxpier Gains Success

Published Plays

Comparing the Bad Quarto of Hamlet

Hamlet’s Revision

A “Personal” Hamlet?

The Original or “Ur-Hamlet”

The Essex Rebellion

Changing Fortunes

Retirement

Death

Early Myths of Shakespeare’s Life

Shakespeare the Entrepreneur

A Gentrified Shakespeare

The Bard’s Relics

Manuscripts and Shakespeare’s Books

Souvenirs and National Heritage

Natural Genius

Shakespeare’s Sources

“By the dim light of Nature”

A Peculiarly English Freedom

A Gothic and Sublime Genius

The Splendours of Shakespeare

The Rise of Shakespeare’s Popularity

18th-Century Editions

Subsequent Tonson Editions

The Shakespeare Apocrypha

Cardenio, or The Double Falsehood

18th-Century Miscellany

Preposterous Facts and Scholarly Scepticism

Biographical Fact and Fiction

Inventions of Anecdotes

The Sonnets as Autobiography

Shakespeare’s “Confessions”?

Mr W.H.

Oscar Wilde’s Solution

The Dark Lady

“Lust in Action” …

Romantic Poets

Romantic Hamlets

Shelley and Byron Discuss Hamlet …

Romantic versus Modernist Hamlets

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Shakespeare Everywhere

The Biographical Pattern

The Merger of Life and Drama

The Scholarly Project

Rejects from the Canon

Theatrical Traditions

The Curse of Macbeth

A National Theatre

The Modernist Approach

Multi-media Shakespeare

Unearthing the Rose Theatre

Rebuilding the Globe Theatre

Shakespeare in Cinema

The Spectrum of Shakespeare Films

Cinematic and TV Adaptations

Shakespeare on a Global Scale

Bardolatry

The World’s Compulsory Author

The Englishness of Shakespeare?

Is there a German Shakespeare?

And Now a European Shakespeare?

The Criticism of Close Reading

Mouthpiece of the Conservative Establishment

The Political Misuse of Shakespeare

New Historicism

Cultural Materialism

The Late Capitalist Show

Post-Colonial Criticism

Shakespeare’s Views on Race?

Feminist Criticism

Twentieth-Century Feminist Criticism

The Gender Question

Queer Theory

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Authorship Controversy

Shakespeare Gets his Bacon

Other Bacon Partisans

Decoding Shakespeare

Cryptograms, Ciphers and Acrostics

The Oxford Controversy – and Looney Tunes

And So, in Conclusion

The Editing of Shakespeare’s Texts

Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Identifying Shakespeare

Shakespeare is performed, read and studied in most parts of the world today. Why is there such interest - or, more important - why should there be any interest in an English writer from Stratford who died nearly 400 years ago? Is it because he is often said to be the world’s “greatest” writer? In other words, he has transcended the limits of time and place to become a figure of global significance. That is an astonishing claim. We can begin to understand this phenomenon by asking first: “Who is the real William Shakespeare?”

WILL THE REAL SHAKESPEARE PLEASE IDENTIFY HIMSELF?

Born on St George’s Day

23 April 1564, St George’s Day: William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-upon-Avon. The National Poet arrives on the day celebrating the canonization of the patron saint of England - or did he? Historical facts have been massaged to support national or cultural interests. The only reliable evidence is that Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564, so he could have been born on the 21st, or the 22nd, or the 23rd - it was later “Bardolaters” (worshippers of “The Bard”) who agreed that Shakespeare’s birthday was St George’s Day, marrying the nation to his verse.

AND LOCAL LEGEND HAS IT THAT 23 APRIL IS THE DAY THAT THE FIRST NIGHTINGALE SINGS IN STRATFORD.. ENTRY IN PARISH REGISTER… 1564, APR. 26 GULIELMUS FILIUS JOHANNES SHAKSPERE.

He was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glovemaker, who had married the Catholic girl Mary Arden in about 1557.

THEY HAD EIGHT CHILDREN…

FOUR SONS AND A DAUGHTER SURVIVED CHILDHOOD. WILL HIMSELF WAS ESPECIALLY LUCKY. WITHIN A FEW WEEKS OF THIS BIRTH, AN EPIDEMIC OF BUBONIC PLAGUE SWEPT DOWN ON STRATFORD.

Family Ambitions

Will’s father, the glover of Henley Street, may not have been an educated man. He could probably read, but couldn’t write much more than his accounts (though his wife signed documents with an elaborate mark that demonstrates she had some facility with a quill pen).

BUT HE EXHIBITED THE CHARACTERISTIC CIVIC AMBITION OF THE RISING MIDDLE-CLASS ENGLISH TRADESMAN.I SERVED ON THE BOROUGH COUNCIL, BECAME MAYOR (OR HIGH BAILIFF) AND SAT AS A JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.

But in 1570, as Will was about to start at school, his respectable father was fined for breaking money-lending laws, and the family fortunes began to decline. Two years later, he was accused of “wool bragging”: illegally dealing in fleeces. His eldest son was certainly privy to these goings-on - he remembered the details for the rest of his life.

Let me see. Every ’leven wether tods, every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to?

This reference occurs in Shakespeare’s play

The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, scene iii, lines 32-4.

In modern English:

Debts and Troubles

The Privy Council clamped down on broggers and suspended licensed wool-dealing. John Shakespeare fell into debt and mortgaged some of his property. He stopped attending Anglican services, claiming to be afraid of meeting creditors - and he may also have declared his faith as a Catholic. His application to the Heralds’ College for a coat of arms was rejected, and he was eventually expelled from the Stratford council for absenteeism.

YET THROUGH THIS HE REMAINED “A MERRY CHEEKD OLD MAN”, WORKING IN HIS SHOP, FATHERING MORE SHAKESPEARES AND JESTING WITH HIS SON.

Will was by now attending the local grammar school and doing his bit to maintain the family honour.

School Days

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like snailUnwillingly to school.

As You Like It, II.vii.145-7

In Elizabethan England, the grammar school day ran from 6:00 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon, six days a week. Lessons were spent learning Latin, translating to and from Latin, and memorizing and reciting Latin poetry and prose.

BY THE TIME BOYS REACHED THE UPPER CLASSES, IT WAS FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK ENGLISH IN SCHOOL.

Will spent probably eight years studying Latin, covering grammar, logic, rhetoric, the drama of Terence and Plautus, Virgil, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a favourite.

His friend the playwright Ben Jonson later jested that Shakespeare had only “smalle Latine and lesse Greeke”, but Latin poetry and rhetoric trained his ear and shaped his imagination. For his early tragedy, Titus Andronicus, Will was inspired by Ovid, Seneca and the Roman historians.

BUT I ALSO DEVELOPED THE PRACTICAL IDEAS OF CONTEMPORARY PLAYWRIGHTS LIKE THOMAS KYD (1558-94), CHRISTOPEHR MARLOWE (1564-93) AND GEORGE PEELE (1556-96).

He continued to use Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in Arthur Golding’s translation) for inspiration throughout his writing career, checking it against the original Latin.

Lost Years

Will may then have spent another two years teaching Latin as a schoolmaster for the Hoghton family in Lancashire. These are Shakespeare’s “lost years”. There is no reliable record of his activities, although the scholarly detail in his early plays might suggest a brief teaching placement. Many academics (being teachers themselves) support this theory, but there are others.

The wit and diplomat Duff Cooper wrote a book just after the war called Sergeant Shakespeare (1949) ...

… ABOUT MY SUPPOSED LIFE IN THE ARMY.

The canoeist William Bliss imagined that Shakespeare circumnavigated the world with Sir Francis Drake ...

… BEFORE BEING SHIPWRECKED ON A LATER VOYAGE.

Shakespeare’s life has many blank passages in it, in which critics and biographers are liable to see their own reflections as clearly as they can - or not, as Anthony Burgess wrote in his biography of Shakespeare …

BEING MYOPIC MYSELF, I SUSPECT THAT SHAKESPEARE WAS MYOPIC.

There are studies presenting Shakespeare as a Catholic, a Puritan, a Royalist, a Republican, etc., etc., but there is no firm evidence for these beliefs, just lines taken from the characters who speak in his plays. Shakespeare’s own faith and politics are not evident from his writing.

Marriage

We do know that Will Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in late 1582. This union has provoked much biographical speculation. She was eight or nine years older than he was, and also three months pregnant. A predatory older woman? Or did Shakespeare woo her with his poems? His Sonnet 145 ends with a pun on her name, “Hathaway” ...

The newly-weds moved in with the Shakespeare family at Henley Street, where Will probably helped out his father whose trade was now declining. Perhaps he worked as a part-time professional scribe as well.

OUR DAUGHTER SUSANNA WAS BORN IN MAY. THREE YEARS LATER, STILL IN THE CROWDED FAMILY HOUSE, WE HAD TWINS - HAMNET AND JUDITH. SHORTLY THEREAFTER, WILL LEFT FOR LONDON TO WORK IN THE THEATRE.

Although he regularly returned to Stratford and invested his money there, he had effectively abandoned his young family for a precarious career.

The Hireling Actor

Shakespeare probably began working as a hireling actor, taking whatever small roles were available.

PLAYS ROTATED EVERY DAY, SO IN A SINGLE SEASON I WOULD HAVE TO LEARN 100 MINOR PARTS OR SO.

He “did act exceedingly well”, according to the literary historian John Aubrey (1626-97), and played in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).

Shakespeare also acted in his own plays. There is a story of his brother …

“… having once seen him act a part in one of his own comedies, wherein being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among company, who were eating, and one of them sung a song.”

This is the part of Adam in As You Like It, ll.iii.47-51.

He also reputedly played the Ghost in Hamlet, l.v.15-20.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest wordWould harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,Thy knotted and combined locks to part,And each particular hair to stand an end,Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.

The Influence of Acting on Writing

Shakespeare might also (according to recent computer analysis) have played the First Player in Hamlet, the black character Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antonio in Twelfth Night, even Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, as well as miscellaneous kings, old men and choruses - such as Friar Laurence and the chorus in Romeo and Juliet, and old John of Gaunt and the Gardener in Richard II.

SHORT PARTS THAT WOULD USUALLY HAVE ME ON AND OFF IN EARLY SCENES - SOMETIMES WITH THE FIRST LINE - AND DELIVERING FINE SET - PLECE SPEECHES. THE PARTS HE MEMORIZED FOR ONE PERFORMANCE, WHILE HE WAS COMPOSING A NEW PLAY, COULD ALSO HAVE INFLUENCED HIS WRITING STYLE.

His plays are in any case often linked. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, possibly staged a few days after Romeo and Juliet, is a sharp parody of the earlier romantic tragedy. Shakespeare often alluded to his earlier works – and often ironically.

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) later said …

“GREAT DRAMATISTS MAKE GREAT ACTORS. BUT LOOKING AT HIM MERELY AS A PERFORMER, I AM CERTAIN HE WAS GREATER AS ADAM, IN ‘AS YOU LIKE IT,’ THAN BURBAGE, AS HAMLET, OR RICHARD THE THIRD. THINK OF THE SCENE BETWEEN HIM AND ORLANDO; AND THINK AGAIN, THAT THE ACTOR OF THAT PART HAD TO CARRY THE AUTHOR OF THAT PLAY IN HIS ARMS! THINK OF HAVING HAD SHAKESPEARE IN ONE’S ARMS! IT IS WORTH HAVING DIED TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO TO HAVE HEARD SHAKESPEARE DELIVER A SINGLE LINE. HE MUST HAVE BEEN A GREAT ACTOR.”

The Hireling Playwright

He had been writing poetry, and he began writing plays. His first might have been The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or an early version of Hamlet. He possibly wrote the first two acts of Edward III and collaborated on The Book of sir Thomas More (adapted by Anthony Munday). The manuscript of Sir Thomas More survives. It is written in six different hands. The three folio pages of “Hand D” were identified in 1916 as being by Shakespeare.

IF THIS IS SO, THEY ARE THE ONLY SCENES WE HAVE IN SHAKESPEARE’S OWN HANDWRITING.