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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).