Download File - VIMLESH KUMAR

General Introduction of Shakespeare
written by- Vimlesh kumar
Shakespeare’s Life and Career: a brief outline
What we know and can legitimately infer
from extant evidence, documentary and
circumstantial, is enough to give us some idea
of the man Shakespeare, his career and the
conditions and environment in which the
theatre-poet functioned. But le4gends and
anecdotes grew around the figure and, as one
would expect, went into the making of a
mythos about the supreme poet of England.
Besides, there have been the tireless
speculations of the anti-Stratfordians who
have asked the question, ‘Who was
Shakespeare? And answered that
Shakespeare was not Shakespeare but the
Earl of Oxford, Bacon, or Marlowe or
someone else, thus questioning the authorship
of the plays and the identity of the playwright
Scholarly consensus has more or less rejected
almost all the legends and the speculations.
What we gather through a sifting of the
evidence may be Sid to bring out the
‘normality’ Shakespeare. It shows that
Shakespeare was far form being a wild genius
or a freak of nature, and that the mind of this
poetic-dramatic genius was anchored in
reality. He was practical-minded in many
respects. In short, the centrality of his life
belongs with that side of his genius and
personality which makes his artistic
judgment and critical powers equal and
coextensive to his genius. We must also
perhaps note that every age tends to make its
image of Shakespeare after itself.
The town of Stratford-upon-Avon in
Warwickshire, England where Shakespeare
was born has long since become not only a
centre of literary pilgrimage but also one of
the major tourist centers. On the basis of the
baptismal entry in the local church of
Stratford of the infant Shakespeare dated 26
April 1564, the date of his birth is taken to be
23 April 1564, justifiably and also possibly for
the reason that 23 April is St George’s day,
the day of the patron-saint of England and
Shakespeare is in a sense England’s national
poet. William Shakespeare’s father, John
Shakespeare, was a prosperous glover and a
curer of skins, dealing in barley, timber and
also wool, who later had to face some
financial and other misfortunes like a charge
of religious non-conformism but evidently
overcame these. Given his family status, the
boy Shakespeare must have had a good
school education in the Stratford Grammar
school. In the later sixteenth century thanks
to the Renaissance, standards of education in
grammar schools were quite high.
Shakespeare would have absorbed whateve4r
learning he did, and his knowledge of Latin
would have been greater than the ‘small
Latin’ credited to him by his fellow and rival
poet-playwright Ben Jonson. The marriage
license issued to him in 1582 records
Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway
of a neighboring village and seven months
later the birth of their first daughter was
recorded in a church entry. Just as there is
nothing very unusual in a young man
marrying a woman eight years his senior, so
also if we keep in mind the the marriage
customs and contracts in general practice at
that time, Shakespeare’s actual marriage
could legitimately take place as it did months
before the church solemnization.
No extant record is really available about
Shakespeare for the years between 1589 and
1592, when we hear about him as actor and
playwright in London, for the decade of his
life called the ‘lost’ years. The legends that
Shakespeare poached deer in the park of
Thomas Lucy at Charleston near Stratford
and that he fled to London to escape
prosecution, and that he started his career as
a holder of horses near the theatre gates in
London are only legends, and they have more
or less been dismissed because the absence of
a deer park of Lucy’s at Charleston then and
the improbability of the second legend
disprove them. An old seventeenth-century
tradition that Shakespeare in his young years
what’s for some time a schoolmaster in the
countryside has been revived by cholars in
the twentieth century like j.s. Smart, Peter
Alert, and more recently, E.A.J Honiemann.
It is not improbable; though Shakespeare’s
portrayal of schoolmasters in his plays is
plays is satirical, that need not preclude his
having been one himself. Honigmann cites the
evidence of the will of a wealthy Lancashire
landlord of the period called Alexander
Hugoton in 1581 in which there is a reference
to a young play and schoolmaster under his
patronage called William Shakeshafte’, a
very possible variant spelling for
Shakespeare’s name, in those times when
spelling was unsettled. It would suggest that
Shakespeare started as an actor and a
schoolmaster as well.
In any case, by 1592 we have a satirical
reference to Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow’
by Robert Greene, the London playwrightpoet and prolific writer, in a work of deathbed repentance by him, called A Groatsworth
of Wit. The precise meaning of Greene’s
reference has been in sone dispute. But it is
clear from the reference, and even more from
a fort of apology put forward by Henry
Chattel who brought out Greene’s work, that
Shakespeare has by 1592 become an actor
and a playwright to reckon with, and also
that he had won regard, especially from
noblemen and patrons. Though the
chronology of Shakespeare’s early plays
cannot be exactly determined, it is likely that
he had written his early history plays as well
as two or three comedies by 1592. Though he
could learn from his predecessor playwrights
like Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, Lyly and Peele,
Shakespeare could make a striking difference
to the great flowering and development of
drama and the theatre at the time by making
it phenomenal through his individual
handling of dramatic traditions and practices.
During perhaps an intermission of playing in
theatres due to one of the periodical
outbreaks of the plague in London in 15931594, Shakespeare wrote and polished his two
main non-dramatic poems Venus and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucerne which he dedicated
to the Earl of Southampton. The first proved
to be enormously popular. His 156 Sonnets
came to be published in 1609, and some of
these, if not many, could have been written in
his early career and they were in private
circulation before they were published.
Shakespeare by 1594 came to be closely
associated with a leading theatrical company,
the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He was the
leading playwright of the company, an actor
and a sharer in it. Thus this great creative
artist was a true and complete man of the
theatre. The company which at first
performed its plays in the playhouse called
the Theatre, in the north of London, moved at
the end of 1598 into a new theatre called the
globe on the Backside south of the Thames. It
was built by its part-owner James Burbage,
father of Richard Burbage who was later to
become its leading tragic actor. Non only did
Shakespeare establish himself as a successful
playwright and man of the theatre but
evidently achieved financial and social
success. In 1597 he bought the second largest
house in his native town of Stratford, called
New Place, and in 1598 he acquired a coat of
arms for his family, thus obtaining for it and
himself gentlemanly status. Some years later
he bought property in the central Black friars
area in the city of London, besides acquiring
landed and residential property in the around
Stratford. He was a shrewd manager of his
resources, and appears to have also lent
money out on interest. He maintained his
connections with his native town well
throughout and remained a Stratford man,
though he spent most of his active career in
London. He perhaps was also not averse to
supporting certain landlords of Stratford
when they enclosed the commons for
cultivation thus preventing their use by
landless villagers for grazing and other
purposes. Also, he went to court suing a
debtor or two, and on one occasion as witness
in a case relating to a marriage.
The extant contemporary references to
Shakespeare as a person are all
complimentary speaking of his good
disposition besides praising him as poet and
playwright. There are no contemporary
references to his acting. He acted in Ben
Jo0hson’s Every Man in his Hour performed
by the Chamberlain’s Men. N old tradition
which came to be circulated in the eighteenthcentury has ti that Shakespeare played old
Adam in his As You Like it and the Gouts in
hamlet. He seems to have had friendly
interpersonal relationships with his
colleagues, actors and sharers in the theatre
and fellow playwrights like been Johnson who
was at once a rival and a friend, though
Shakespeare did not, except in perhaps two
or three very early and very late instances,
practice the then current habit of
collaborating with others in playwriting.
Evidently, his work in the theatre was
collaborative with others in playwriting.
Evidently, his work in the theatre was
collaborative in spirit in a larger sense. He
was a shrewd manager of his financial
matters, like investment in properties or
lending money on interest. Such worldly
prudence belongs with a practical side to the
personality of the greatest ppeot-playwright
in English which could did play the utmost
sensitivity, a phenomenal creative abundance,
an all but limitless ideational range and at the
same time the sharpest critical judgment and
at once a great inclusiveness and an irony of
vision. The ‘normality’ of his practical life
and the centrality and essential sanity of his
genius did not make Shakespeare the poetplaywright in any sense a blind adherent of
the received opinion and a mere conformist in
his thinking. The plays provide ample
evidence of a probing mind which could bring
to bear upon a situation a multiplicity of
points of view in implicit interaction.
The most comprehensive and reliable
reconstruction of Shakespeare’s life is Samuel
Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Documentary
Life (1975; abridged 1977). Schoenbaum’s
Shakespeare’s Lives (1970) is an engaging
account of the various attempts to construct a
Shakespeare biography and the attendant
various attempts to construct a Shakespeare
biography and the attendant vagaries.
Recently, Irving Matos, Shakespeare In fact
(1994) has provided evidence, if any further
were needed. To prove and establish the
identity of Shakespeare and thus to counter
the anti-Strantfordians. Three recent good
biographies Dutton and Dennis Kay. Another
book worth looking into is by Eric Sams, The
Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early
years, 1564-1594 (1995).