Shakespeare’s Literary Career and his works

It is natural that we should be curious about the life of a writer who is almost unanimously consid­ered to be the greatest figure of English literature. Fortunately, more facts are known about Shake­speare than about most Elizabethan playwrights. We know that he was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April (probably on the 23rd), 1564 and that his fa­ther, John, was a fairly prominent citizen of the town who eventually became an alderman and bailiff.( Shakespeare was presumably educated at the local school in Stratford. He never attended a university. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. They had a daughter in 1583, and twins, a boy and a girl, in 1585. After this there is no factual infor­mation for seven years, but we know that by\1592 he was in London working as an actor and a play wright, for in this year he was attacked in writing by a resentful rivals

In 1593 the London theaters were closed because of an outbreak of the plague, and Shakespeare, tem­porarily out of work, needed the support of a pri­vate patron. He got such support from the Earl of Southampton, a wealthy young nobleman to whom Shakespeare dedicated two rather long nar­rative poems: Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Luciece (1594). When the theaters re­opened, Shakespeare became a member of the most successful company of actors in London, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He became a shareholder in this company and its principal playwright. By 1597, Shakespeare had prospered sufficiently to be able to buy a fine house back home in Stratford. In 1599 Shakespeare's company built the famous Globe Theater, where most of his best-known plays were performed. Queen Elizabeth often sum­moned the Lord Chamberlain's Men to put on pri­vate performances for her at court. When James I came to the throne in 1603, he took over the Lord Chamberlain's Men as his own acting company and renamed them The King's Men. By this time Shakespeare's status as the greatest dramatist of his day was securely established.

It is not possible to know exactly when Shake­speare wrote each of his thirty-seven plays. We know when most of the plays were first published, but an Elizabethan playwright would have been much more concerned with getting his plays per­formed than with seeing them in print, and the date of composition may have preceded the date of publication by several years. Still, scholars have tried to date the plays by poring over what evi­dence there is both inside and outside the text, and their hypotheses provide a reasonable basis for con­sidering the development of Shakespeare's art.^He . began, it seems, by writing comedies [The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labor's Lost) and plays based on English history (the three Henry VI plays, Richard III). His first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, was writ­ten about 1593 or 1594. Romeo and Juliet came between 1594 and 1596, along with the finest of his early comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Merchant of Venice was written about 1597, Julius Caesar about 1599. Just before the turn of the century, Shakespeare wrote a small group of marvelous romantic comedies: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Then, with the dawning of the new century, came the period of the great tragedies: Hamlet (1600-1601), Othello (1603-1604), King Lear and Macbeth (1605-1606), Antony and Cleopatra (1606-1607), and Coriolanus ' (1607-1609). Shakespeare's last plays, apart from a final dramatization of English history in Henry VIII, are often called the "ro­mances" because of their freely imaginative set­tings and themes and because they do not fit read­ily into established molds of comedy or tragedy. The greatest of these are The Winter's Tale (1610-1611) and The Tempest (1611). Shakespeare seems to have retired to Stratford about 1610, though he continued to write for the London stage. He had made considerable money from his career as an actor, playwright, and com­pany shareholder'} He invested substantially in Stratford real estate and he led the life of a promi­nent and respected citizen.lHe died on April 23, 1616 (probably his fifty-second birthday), and was buried in the local church. Seven years after his death, some of his friends and fellow actors col­lected and published an edition of thirty-six of the plays in one large volume —the famous First Folio (1623).