What are Shakespeare's works about? Shakespeare's career is divided into three periods

Dozens of historical documents have been preserved about the life and work of William Shakespeare. He was well known to his contemporaries as a poet and playwright, whose works were repeatedly published and quoted in poetry and prose. Circumstances of his birth, education, lifestyle The overwhelming number of playwrights came from craft families (Shakespeare is the son of a glover, Marlowe is the son of a shoemaker, Ben Jonson is the son of a mason, etc.). As early as the 15th century, acting troupes were replenished from the children of artisans in England (perhaps this is due to the medieval tradition of staging mysteries in which craft guilds took part). In general, the theatrical profession presupposed a non-aristocratic origin. At the same time, Shakespeare's level of education was sufficient for this activity. He went through an ordinary grammar school (a type of English school where ancient languages ​​and literature were taught), but it gave everything for the profession of a playwright.- everything corresponded to the time when the profession of a playwright was still considered low, but theaters were already bringing considerable income to their owners. Finally, Shakespeare was an actor, an author of plays, and a shareholder in a theater troupe; he spent almost twenty years rehearsing and performing on stage. Despite all this, there is still debate whether William Shakespeare was the author of the plays, sonnets and poems published under his name. Doubts first arose in the mid-19th century. Since then, many hypotheses have emerged that attribute the authorship of Shakespeare's works to someone else.

The list of potential candidates for Shakespeare, of course, is not limited to the names of Bacon, Oxford, Rutland, Derby and Marlowe. There are several dozen of them in total, including such exotic ones as Queen Elizabeth, her successor King James I Stuart, the author of Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe or the English romantic poet George Gordon Byron. But, in essence, it doesn’t matter who exactly these or those “researchers” consider to be the original Shakespeare. It is more important to understand why Shakespeare is repeatedly denied the right to be called the author of his works.

The point is not that nothing is known reliably about Shakespeare’s life. On the contrary, after 200 years of research about Shakespeare, an amazing amount of evidence has been collected, and there is no doubt about the authorship of his works: there is absolutely no historical basis for this.

There are, however, emotional grounds for doubt. We are the heirs of the romantic turning point that occurred in European culture at the beginning of the 19th century, when new ideas about the work and figure of the poet arose, unknown to previous centuries (it is no coincidence that the first doubts about Shakespeare arose in the 1840s). In the most general form, this new idea can be reduced to two interrelated features. First: the poet is a genius in everything, including in ordinary life, and the existence of a poet is inseparable from his creativity; he is sharply different from the ordinary man in the street, his life is like a bright comet that flies quickly and burns out just as quickly; At first glance it is impossible to confuse him with a person of a non-poetic nature. And secondly: no matter what this poet writes, he will always talk about himself, about the uniqueness of his existence; any of his works will be a confession, any line will reflect his whole life, the body of his texts will be his poetic biography.

Shakespeare does not fit into such a view. In this he is similar to his contemporaries, but only he had the fortune to become, to paraphrase Erasmus, a playwright for all times. We do not demand that Racine, Moliere, Calderon or Lope de Vega live according to the laws of romantic art: we feel that there is a barrier between us and them. Shakespeare's work is able to overcome this barrier. Consequently, Shakespeare is in special demand: in the eyes of many, he must correspond to the norms (or rather, myths) of our time.

However, there is a reliable cure for this misconception - scientific historical knowledge, a critical approach to the popular ideas of the century. Shakespeare is no worse and no better than his time, and it is no worse and no better than other historical eras - they do not need to be embellished or remade, one must try to understand them.

Arzamas offers six of the longest-lived versions of who could write for Shakespeare.

Version No. 1

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - philosopher, writer, statesman

Francis Bacon. Engraving by William Marshall. England, 1640

Delia Bacon. 1853 Wikimedia Commons

The daughter of a bankrupt settler from the American state of Connecticut, Delia Bacon (1811-1859) was not the first who tried to attribute the works of Shakespeare to the pen of Francis Bacon, but it was she who introduced this version to the general public. Her faith in her own discovery was so infectious that the famous writers to whom she turned for help - the Americans Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the British Thomas Carlyle - could not refuse her. Thanks to their support, Delia Bacon came to England and in 1857 published the 675-page The True Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays. This book said that William Shakespeare was just an illiterate actor and a greedy businessman, and plays and poems under his name were composed by a group of “high-ranking thinkers and poets” led by Bacon - supposedly in this way the author of the New Organon hoped to circumvent censorship restrictions, who did not allow him to openly express his innovative philosophy (Delia apparently knew nothing that plays were also censored in Elizabethan England).

However, the author of “Genuine Philosophy” did not provide any evidence in favor of her hypothesis: the evidence, Delia believed, lay either in the grave of Francis Bacon or in the grave of Shakespeare. Since then, many anti-Shakespeareans are confident that the real author ordered the manuscripts of “Shakespeare’s” plays to be buried with himself, and if they are found, the issue will be resolved once and for all At one time, this led to a veritable siege of historical burial sites throughout England. Delia was the first to apply for permission to open Bacon's grave in St. Albany, but without success..

Delia's ideas found many followers. As evidence, they presented minor literary parallels between the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, which are quite explainable by the unity of the written culture of that time, as well as the fact that the author of Shakespeare's plays had a taste for philosophy and was aware of the life of a number of European royal houses For example, this is the Navarrese court depicted in the comedy Love's Labour's Lost..

A significant development of the original hypothesis can be considered attempts to solve the “Bacon cipher”. The fact is that Francis Bacon worked on improving the methods of steganography - secret writing, which, to the eyes of an uninitiated person, looks like a full-fledged message with its own meaning In particular, he proposed a method for encrypting letters of the English alphabet, reminiscent of modern binary code.. Baconians are confident that their hero wrote plays under the guise of Shakespeare not at all for the sake of success with the public - “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet” and “King Lear”, “Twelfth Night” and “The Tempest” served as a cover for some secret knowledge.

Version No. 2

Edward de Vere (1550-1604), 17th Earl of Oxford, courtier, poet, playwright, patron of the arts and sciences

A simple English teacher who called himself a descendant of the Earls of Derby, Thomas Lowney (1870-1944) did not believe that The Merchant of Venice Lowney read this play to his class year after year. could have been written by a person of ignoble origin who had never been to Italy. Having doubts about the authorship of the comedy about Shylock, Lawney picked up an anthology of Elizabethan poetry and discovered that Shakespeare's poem "Venus and Adonis" (1593) was written in the same stanza and the same meter as Edward de Vere's poem "Female Variability" ( 1587). De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, could boast of the antiquity of his family and good acquaintance with Italy, and was known to his contemporaries not only as a poet, but also as the author of comedies (not preserved).

Lowney did not hide the amateurish nature of his research and was even proud of it: “Probably, the problem is still not solved precisely because,” he wrote in the preface to “Shakespeare Identified,” “that until now scientists have been studying it.” Later Oxfordians That is, followers of Lowney's version. The name was taken from the title of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. decided to call on lawyers for help: in 1987 and 1988, in the presence of judges of the US Supreme Court and the London Middle Temple, respectively, followers of Lowney's hypothesis entered into an open debate with Shakespeare scholars (in London, in particular, they were opposed by the most venerable living Shakespeare specialist, Professor Stanley Wells). Unfortunately for the organizers, the judges awarded the victory to the scientists both times. But the Oxfordians managed to oust the Baconians - today the Oxfordian version of anti-Shakespeareanism is the most popular.

Among Lowney's most famous followers was the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who in his youth leaned towards Baconianism and in 1923, after encountering Shakespeare Identified, converted to Oxfordianism. So, in the 1930s, Freud began to develop parallels between the fate of King Lear and the biography of the Earl of Oxford: both had three daughters, and if the English count did not care about his own, the legendary British king, by contrast, gave everything to his daughters, what he had. Having fled from the Nazis to London in 1938, Freud wrote Lowney a warm letter and called him the author of a “wonderful book”, and shortly before his death, on the basis that Oxford had lost his beloved father in childhood and allegedly hated his mother for her next marriage, he attributed Hamlet Oedipus complex.

Version No. 3

Roger Manners (1576-1612), 5th Earl of Rutland - courtier, patron of the arts

The Belgian socialist politician, teacher of French literature and symbolist writer Célestin Damblon (1859-1924) became interested in the Shakespearean issue after learning about a document discovered in one of the family archives in 1908. It showed that in 1613, the butler of Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, paid a large sum to "Mr. Shakespeare" and his fellow actor Richard Burbage, who invented and painted an ingenious emblem on the earl's shield so that Manners would appear with dignity at a knightly tournament . This discovery alarmed Damblon: he noticed that Francis's elder brother, Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, died in 1612 - almost the same time that Shakespeare stopped writing for the stage. In addition, Roger Manners was on friendly terms with the Earl of Southampton (the aristocrat to whom Shakespeare dedicated two of his poems and who is considered the main addressee of Shakespeare's sonnets), as well as with the Earl of Essex, whose fall in 1601 indirectly affected the actors of the Globe Theater. In February 1601, Essex attempted to rebel against the queen. The day before, the count's supporters persuaded the actors to stage Shakespeare's old chronicle "Richard II", which dealt with the overthrow of the monarch. The uprising failed, Essex was executed (his accuser was Francis Bacon). Southampton went to prison for a long time. The Globe actors were called for explanations, but this had no consequences for them.. Manners traveled to the countries that served as the setting for many of Shakespeare's plays (France, Italy, Denmark), and even studied in Padua with two Danes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (widespread Danish surnames of the time). In 1913, Dumbleon summarized these and other arguments in a book written in French, Lord Rutland is Shakespeare.

Damblon's version also has followers in Russia: for example, Ilya Gililov Ilya Gililov(1924-2007) - literary critic, writer, scientific secretary of the Shakespeare Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences for almost three decades., author of The Play of William Shakespeare, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix (1997), argued that Shakespeare was written by a group of authors led by the young wife of the Earl of Rutland, Elizabeth, the daughter of the famous courtier, writer and poet Philip Sidney. In this case, Gililov was based on a completely arbitrary adaptation of the Chester collection, which included Shakespeare’s poem “The Phoenix and the Dove” (1601, according to Gililov - 1613). He argued that Rutland, Elizabeth and others composed plays and sonnets for purely conspiracy purposes - to perpetuate their close circle, in which some rituals known only to them were performed. The scientific world, with the exception of a few sharp rebuke, ignored Gililov’s book.

Version No. 4

William Stanley (1561-1642), 6th Earl of Derby, playwright, statesman

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. Portrait by William Derby. England, 19th centuryThe Right Hon. Earl of Derby/Bridgeman Images/Fotodom

Abel Lefranc. Circa 1910s Library of Congress

The historian of French literature and specialist on François Rabelais Abel Lefranc (1863-1952) first thought about the chances of William Stanley becoming a candidate for the “real Shakespeare” after the publication of a book by the respected English scholar James Greenstreet entitled “The Previously Unknown Noble Author of the Elizabethan Comedies” (1891). Greenstreet was able to discover a letter dated 1599 signed by George Fenner, a secret agent of the Catholic Church, which stated that the Earl of Derby could not be useful to Catholics, since he was “busy writing plays for common actors.”

In 1918, Lefranc published the book “Under the Mask of William Shakespeare,” in which he recognized Derby as a much more suitable candidate for Shakespeare than previous contenders, if only because the count’s name was William and his initials coincided with Shakespeare’s. Moreover, in private letters he signed himself in the same way as the lyrical hero of the 135th sonnet - Will, and not Wm and not Willm, as Stratford Shakespeare himself did on surviving documents. Further, Derby was an experienced traveler, in particular closely acquainted with the Navarrese court.

It is not surprising, Lefranc believed, that Henry V contains several extensive inserts in French, which Derby had a good command of. In addition, the specialist on Rabelais believed, the famous image of Falstaff was created under the influence of “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” which had not yet been translated into English in Shakespeare’s time.

For all the ingenuity of these arguments, the Derbyan version had little chance of standing on a par with the Oxfordian one: Lefranc's book was written in French, and by the time it was published, Thomas Lowney (by the way, who called himself a descendant of the Earl of Derby) had already put forward his arguments in favor of Edward de Vere.

Version No. 5

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) - playwright, poet

The son of a shoemaker, born in the same year as Shakespeare and who managed to graduate from Cambridge only thanks to the generosity of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christopher Marlowe turned out to be almost the only candidate for Shakespeare of ignoble origin. However, Calvin Hoffman (1906-1986), an American advertising agent, poet and playwright, who published the book “The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare” in 1955, attributed to Marlowe a love affair with the noble Thomas Walsingham, patron of poets and younger brother of the powerful Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State and Chief of the Secret Service under Queen Elizabeth. According to Hoffman, it was Thomas Walsingham, who learned that Marlowe was facing arrest on charges of atheism and blasphemy, and decided to save his lover by simulating his murder. Accordingly, in a tavern quarrel in Deptford in 1593, it was not Marlowe who was killed, but some tramp, whose corpse was passed off as the disfigured body of the playwright (he was killed by a dagger in the eye). Marlowe himself, under an assumed name, hastily sailed to France, hid in Italy, but soon returned to England, settling secluded near Scedbury, the estate of Thomas Walsingham in Kent. There he composed “Shakespearean” works, handing over the manuscripts to his patron. He sent them first to a copyist, and then, for production on stage, to the London actor William Shakespeare - a man completely devoid of imagination, but faithful and silent.

Hoffman began his research by counting phraseological parallelisms in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and later became acquainted with the works of the American professor Thomas Mendenhall, who compiled “dictionary profiles” of various writers (with the help of a whole team of women who hardworkingly counted millions of words and letters in words). Based on these investigations, Hoffman declared the complete similarity of the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare. However, most of all these “parallelisms” were not actually such, the other part related to commonly used words and constructions, and a certain layer of obvious parallels testified to a well-known fact: young Shakespeare was inspired by the tragedies of Marlowe, having learned a lot from the author of “Tamerlane the Great,” “ The Jew of Malta" and "Doctor Faustus" Today one can only guess what the creative rivalry between the two Elizabethan geniuses would have resulted in if not for the death of Marlowe in 1593 - by the way, recorded in detail by the royal coroner, whose findings were witnessed by a jury of 16 people..

Attempts to discover a whole group of authors behind Shakespeare’s works have been made more than once, although supporters of this version cannot agree on a specific composition. Here are some examples.

In 1923, H. T. S. Forrest, a British administration official in India, published a book entitled The Five Writers of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in which he spoke about a poetry tournament organized by the Earl of Southampton. For the award announced by the earl in the art of composing sonnets, according to Forrest, five major poets of the Elizabethan era competed at once: Samuel Daniel, Barnaby Barnes, William Warner, John Donne and William Shakespeare. Accordingly, all five are the authors of the sonnets, which, Forrest believed, have since been erroneously attributed to Shakespeare alone. It is characteristic that one of this company, the author of the epic poem "Albion's England" Warner, did not write sonnets at all, and the other, John Donne, resorted to the sonnet form only for composing religious poetry.

In 1931, Gilbert Slater, an economist and historian, published the book “The Seven Shakespeares,” in which he combined the names of almost all the contenders most popular among anti-Shakespeareans. According to his version, the following people participated in the composition of Shakespeare's works: Francis Bacon, the Earls of Oxford, Rutland and Derby, Christopher Marlowe Slater believed that Marlowe was "reborn" to life in 1594 under the name of Shakespeare., as well as Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary, Countess of Pembroke (literary writer and sister of Sir Philip Sidney). Women were not often proposed and proposed for the role of Shakespeare, but for the Countess of Pembroke Slater made an exception: in his opinion, the clear presence of female intuition is marked by “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra”, and also, especially, “As You Like It” which Mary not only wrote, but also portrayed herself in the image of Rosalind.

Often called the national poet of England. The extant works, including some written jointly with other authors, consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 4 poems and 3 epitaphs. Shakespeare's plays have been translated into all major languages ​​and are performed more often than the works of other playwrights.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: daughter Suzanne and twins Hamnet and Judith. Shakespeare's career began between 1585 and 1592, when he moved to London. He soon became a successful actor, playwright, and co-owner of a theater company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men.

Around 1613, at the age of 48, he returned to Stratford, where he died three years later. Little historical evidence of Shakespeare's life has been preserved, and theories about his life are created on the basis of official documents and testimonies of his contemporaries, so questions regarding his appearance and religious views are still discussed in the scientific community, and there is also a point of view that the works attributed to him were created by whom something else; it is popular in culture, although rejected by the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars.

Most of Shakespeare's works were written between 1589 and 1613. His early plays are mainly comedies and chronicles, in which Shakespeare excelled considerably. Then came a period of tragedy in his work, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth, which are considered among the best in the English language. At the end of his career, Shakespeare wrote several tragicomedies and also collaborated with other writers.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime. In 1623, two of Shakespeare's friends, John Heming and Henry Condell, published the First Folio, a collection of all but two of Shakespeare's plays currently included in the canon. Later, various researchers attributed several more plays (or their fragments) to Shakespeare with varying degrees of evidence.

Already during his lifetime, Shakespeare received praise for his works, but he truly became popular only in the 19th century. In particular, the Romanticists and Victorians worshiped Shakespeare so much that they called it “bardolatry,” which translated into English means “bardo-worship.” Shakespeare's works remain popular today and are constantly being studied and reinterpreted to suit political and cultural conditions.

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) in 1564, baptized on April 26, the exact date of birth is unknown. Tradition places his birth on April 23: this date coincides with the precisely known day of his death. In addition, April 23 marks the day of St. George, the patron saint of England, and legend could specially coincide with this day the birth of the greatest national poet. From English, the surname “Shakespeare” is translated as “shaking with a spear.”

His father, John Shakespeare (1530-1601), was a wealthy artisan (glover) who was often elected to various significant public positions.

In 1565, John Shakespeare was an alderman, and in 1568 he was a bailiff (head of the city council). He did not attend church services, for which he paid large fines (it is possible that he was a secret Catholic).

Shakespeare's mother, born Mary Arden (1537-1608), belonged to one of the oldest Saxon families. The couple had 8 children in total, William was born third.

It is believed that Shakespeare studied at the Stratford “grammar school” (English grammar school), where he was supposed to gain good knowledge of Latin: the Stratford teacher of Latin language and literature wrote poetry in Latin. Some scholars claim that Shakespeare attended King Edward VI's school in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he studied the works of poets such as Ovid and Plautus, but the school's journals have not survived and nothing can be said for sure.

In 1582, at the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a local landowner, who was 8 years his senior. At the time of the marriage, Anne was pregnant.

In 1583, the couple had a daughter, Susan (baptized on May 23), and in 1585, twins: a son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in August 1596, and a daughter, Judith (baptized on February 2).

There are only assumptions about the further (over seven years) events in Shakespeare's life. The first mention of a London theatrical career dates back to 1592, and the period between 1585 and 1592 is what scholars call Shakespeare's "lost years."

Attempts by biographers to learn about Shakespeare's actions during this period have resulted in many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, believed that he left Stratford to avoid prosecution for poaching the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy.

It is also assumed that Shakespeare took revenge on Lucy by writing several obscene ballads about him.

According to another 18th-century version, Shakespeare began his theatrical career by looking after the horses of London theater patrons. John Aubrey wrote that Shakespeare was a schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars believed that Shakespeare was the teacher of Alexander Naughton from Lancashire, since this Catholic landowner had a certain “William Shakeshaft.” There is little basis for this theory, other than rumors that spread after Shakespeare's death, and, furthermore, "Shakeshaft" is a fairly common surname in Lancashire.

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing theatrical works and also moved to London, but the first sources that have reached us that speak about this date back to 1592. This year, the diary of entrepreneur Philip Henslowe mentions Shakespeare's historical chronicle Henry VI, which was shown at Henslowe's Rose Theater.

In the same year, a pamphlet by playwright and prose writer Robert Greene was published posthumously, where the latter angrily attacked Shakespeare, without naming his last name, but ironically playing with it - “shake-scene,” paraphrasing a line from the third part of “Henry VI” “ Oh, the heart of a tiger in this woman’s skin!” like “the heart of a tiger in the skin of a performer.”

Scholars disagree as to the exact meaning of these words, but it is generally accepted that Greene accused Shakespeare of trying to catch up with highly educated writers ("university minds") such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, and Greene himself.

Biographers believe that Shakespeare's career could have begun at any time from the mid-1580s.

Since 1594, Shakespeare's plays have only been performed by a company "The Lord Chamberlain's Men". This troupe also included Shakespeare, who at the end of the same 1594 became its co-owner. The troupe soon became one of the leading theater groups in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the troupe received a royal patent from the new ruler, James I, and became known as the King's Men.

In 1599, a partnership of group members built a new theater on the south bank of the Thames, called "Globe".

In 1608 they also purchased the Blackfriars closed theatre. Records of Shakespeare's real estate purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597 he bought the second largest house in Stratford, New Place.

In 1598, his name began to appear on the title pages of publications. But even after Shakespeare became famous as a playwright, he continued to play in theaters. In the 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's works, Shakespeare's name is included in the list of actors who performed the plays Every One Has His Folly (1598) and The Fall of Sejanus (1603). However, his name was absent from the cast lists of Jonson's 1605 play Volpone, which some scholars perceive as a sign of the end of Shakespeare's London career.

However, the First Folio of 1623 names Shakespeare as "the chief actor in all these plays", and some of them were first performed after Volpone, although it is not known for certain what roles Shakespeare played in them.

In 1610, John Davis wrote that "good Will" played "royal" roles.

In 1709, in his work, Rowe recorded the already established opinion that Shakespeare was playing the shadow of Hamlet's father. It was also later claimed that he played the roles of Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, although scholars doubt the veracity of this information.

During his acting and dramatic career, Shakespeare lived in London, but also spent some of his time in Stratford.

In 1596, the year after purchasing New Place, he was residing in the parish of St Helena, Bishopgate, on the north side of the Thames. After the Globe Theater was built in 1599, Shakespeare moved to the other side of the river - to Southwark, where the theater was located.

In 1604 he moved across the river again, this time to the area north of St Paul's Cathedral, where there were a large number of good houses. He rented rooms from a Huguenot Frenchman named Christopher Mountjoy, a manufacturer of women's wigs and hats.

There is a traditional belief that Shakespeare moved to Stratford a few years before his death. The first Shakespeare biographer to convey this opinion was Rowe. One reason for this may be that London's public theaters were repeatedly closed due to outbreaks of plague, and actors did not have enough work. Complete retirement was rare in those days, and Shakespeare continued to visit London.

In 1612, Shakespeare testified in the case of Bellot v. Mountjoy, a trial over the wedding dowry of Mountjoy's daughter Mary.

In March 1613 he bought a house in the former parish of Blackfriar. In November 1614 he spent several weeks with his brother-in-law, John Hall.

After 1606-1607, Shakespeare wrote only a few plays, and after 1613 he stopped writing them altogether. He co-wrote his last three plays with another playwright, possibly John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as chief playwright of the King's Men.

All of Shakespeare's surviving signatures on documents (1612-1613) are distinguished by very poor handwriting, on the basis of which some researchers believe that he was seriously ill at that time.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. It is traditionally believed that he died on his birthday, but there is no certainty that Shakespeare was born on April 23. Shakespeare was survived by his widow, Anne (d. 1623), and two daughters. Susan Shakespeare had been married to John Hall since 1607, and Judith Shakespeare married winemaker Thomas Quiney two months after Shakespeare's death.

In his will, Shakespeare left most of his real estate to his eldest daughter, Susan. After her, it was to be inherited by her direct descendants. Judith had three children, all of whom died without marrying. Susan had one daughter, Elizabeth, who married twice but died childless in 1670. She was the last direct descendant of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's will, his wife is mentioned only briefly, but she was already supposed to receive a third of her husband's entire estate. However, it indicated that he was leaving her “my second best bed,” and this fact led to many different assumptions. Some scholars consider this an insult to Anne, while others argue that the second best bed is the marital bed, and therefore there is nothing offensive about it.

Three days later, Shakespeare's body was buried in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church.

The epitaph is written on his tombstone:

“Good friend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased hear.
Bleste be ye man yt spares the stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones".

"Friend, for God's sake, don't swarm
The remains taken by this earth;
He who is untouched is blessed for centuries,
And cursed is the one who touched my ashes".

Some time before 1623, a painted bust of Shakespeare was erected in the church, showing him in the act of writing. Epitaphs in English and Latin compare Shakespeare to the wise King of Pylos, Nestor, Socrates and Virgil.

There are many statues of Shakespeare around the world, including funerary monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.

To mark the quadcentenary of the playwright's death, the Royal Mint issued three two-pound coins (dated 2016), symbolizing the three groups of his works: comedies, chronicles and tragedies.

Shakespeare's literary heritage is divided into two unequal parts: poetic (poems and sonnets) and dramatic. wrote that “it would be too bold and strange to give Shakespeare a decisive advantage over all the poets of mankind, as a poet himself, but as a playwright he is now left without a rival whose name could be put next to his name.”

William Shakespeare. The Greatest Show on Earth

Works of William Shakespeare

Comedies of William Shakespeare

All is well that ends well
How do you like it
Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A dream in a summer night
Much ado about nothing
Pericles
The Taming of the Shrew
Storm
twelfth Night
Two Veronese
Two noble relatives
Winter's Tale

Chronicles of William Shakespeare

King John
Richard II
Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII

Tragedies of William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline

Sonnets of William Shakespeare

Venus and Adonis
Dishonored Lucretia
Passionate Pilgrim
Phoenix and dove
Lover's complaint

Lost works of William Shakespeare

Love's Efforts Rewarded
History of Cardenio

Apocrypha of William Shakespeare

Judgment of Paris
Arden Feversham
George Green
Locrin
Edward III
Musedore
Sir John Oldcastle
Thomas, Lord Cromwell
Cheerful Edmont devil
London Prodigal Son
Puritan
Yorkshire tragedy
Beautiful Emma
Birth of Merlin
Sir Thomas More
The Tragedy of the Second Maid
Passionate Pilgrim

William Shakespeare, an outstanding playwright, one of the most famous in the world, and a poet, was a native of Stratford-upon-Avon. Here, in Warwickshire, he was born in 1564. His date of birth is unknown. It is generally accepted that this is April 23, but the day of baptism, April 26, is reliably established. His father was a wealthy artisan, a respected man in the city, and his mother was a representative of an old Saxon family.

During 1569-1571. Shakespeare was a student at Junior School and later at Stratford High School. She had a decent level of education, but it is not known for certain whether William graduated from her or not - most likely, due to family financial difficulties, he had to leave his studies and help his father. As an 18-year-old boy, William married the pregnant Anne Hathaway, who was 8 years older than him; By getting married, the young people were saved from dishonor and punishment. In 1583, the Shakespeare couple had a daughter, and 2 years later, a pair of opposite-sex twins. Shakespeare left Stratford in the 2nd half of the 80s. and moved to London.

The period of Shakespeare's biography, affecting subsequent years, is usually called the dark, or lost years, because... There is no information about his life at this time. It is generally accepted that the move to London took place approximately in 1587, but there are other versions. Be that as it may, in 1592 Shakespeare was already the author of the historical chronicle “Henry VI”.

During 1592-1594. theaters in the English capital were closed due to the plague epidemic. To fill the gap, Shakespeare writes plays, in particular, “The Taming of the Shrew,” the tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” the poems “Lucretia” and “Venus and Adonis.” Also in the period from 1594 to 1600, Shakespeare wrote a large number of sonnets. All this makes him a famous writer. When the theaters opened, in 1594 Shakespeare entered a new line-up - the so-called. a troupe of the Lord Chamberlain's servants, named after its patron. Shakespeare was not only an actor, but also a shareholder.

Throughout 1595-1596. The famous tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” was written, as well as “The Merchant of Venice” - a comedy that was later called “serious” for the first time. If earlier the authors of plays for the theater were “university minds,” then by this time their role was lost: someone stopped writing, someone died. They were replaced by Shakespeare, thereby marking a new era in the development of theatrical art.

In 1599, another significant event took place in Shakespeare’s biography - the opening of the Globe Theater, in which he was an actor, chief playwright and one of the owners. A year after this, the famous “Hamlet” was released, opening the period of “great tragedies”, which include “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”. The comedies written at this time also had a much more serious and sometimes pessimistic content. During the same period of his life, Shakespeare became a nobleman and acquired a large house in Stratford, the second largest in the city.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and the rise to power of James I, the king himself became the patron of the Lord Chamberlain's troupe. 1606 became the starting point for the last period in Shakespeare’s literary activity, marked, in particular, by the creation of tragedies based on the plots of antiquity (“Coriolanus”, “Antony and Cleopatra”), as well as the romantic tragicomedies “The Tempest”, “The Winter’s Tale” and etc.

Around 1612, Shakespeare, whose career was developing very successfully, unexpectedly left the capital and returned to Stratford, to his family. Researchers suggest that the reason for such a drastic step was a serious illness. In March 1616, Shakespeare drew up his famous will, which later created the ground for the so-called. Shakespeare's question, which considers the problem of the authorship of his works and his very personality. On May 3, 1616, one of the world's greatest playwrights died; he was buried on the outskirts of his hometown in the church of St. Trinity.

During his lifetime, William Shakespeare's works were published only in separate form, sometimes in the form of collections (sonnets). The first complete collection of works by friends was prepared and published in 1623. The so-called Shakespearean canon included 37 plays; During the playwright's lifetime, only 18 of them were published. His work marked the end of the process of creating the English language and culture and drew a line under the European Renaissance. To this day, his plays are an integral part and the basis of the repertoire of theaters around the world. In the age of new technologies, almost all of Shakespeare's drama has been filmed.

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Biography

Shakespeare's life is little known; he shares the fate of the vast majority of other English playwrights of the era, whose personal lives were of little interest to contemporaries. There are different views on the personality and biography of Shakespeare. The main scientific trend, supported by most researchers, is the biographical tradition that has developed over several centuries, according to which William Shakespeare was born in the city of Stratford-upon-Avon into a wealthy but not noble family and was a member of the acting troupe of Richard Burbage. This direction of studying Shakespeare is called “Stratfordianism.”

There is also an opposing point of view, the so-called “anti-Stratfordianism” or “non-Stratfordianism,” whose supporters deny the authorship of Shakespeare (Shakespere) of Stratford and believe that “William Shakespeare” is a pseudonym under which another person or group of persons was hiding. Doubts about the correctness of the traditional point of view have been known since the 18th century. At the same time, there is no unity among non-Stratfordians as to who exactly was the real author of Shakespeare's works. The number of possible candidates proposed by various researchers currently numbers several dozen.

Traditional views ("Stratfordianism")

William Shakespeare was born in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) in 1564, according to legend, on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a wealthy artisan (glover) and moneylender, often elected to various public positions, and was once elected mayor of the city. He did not attend church services, for which he paid large fines (it is possible that he was a secret Catholic). His mother, née Arden, belonged to one of the oldest English families. It is believed that Shakespeare studied at the Stratford “grammar school”, where he received a serious education: the Stratford teacher of Latin language and literature wrote poetry in Latin. Some scholars claim that Shakespeare attended King Edward VI's school in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he studied the works of poets such as Ovid and Plautus, but the school's journals have not survived and nothing can be said for sure.

In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a local landowner, who was 8 years his senior; in 1583 their daughter Suzanne was born, in 1585 they had twins: son Khemnet, who died in childhood (1596), and daughter Judith. Around 1587 Shakespeare left Stratford and moved to London.

In 1592, Shakespeare became a member of the London acting troupe of Burbage, and from 1599, also one of the shareholders of the enterprise. Under James I, Shakespeare's troupe received royal status (1603), and Shakespeare himself, along with other old members of the troupe, received the title of valet. For many years Shakespeare was engaged in usury, and in 1605 he became a tax farmer of church tithes.

In 1612, Shakespeare retired for unknown reasons and returned to his native Stratford, where his wife and daughters lived. Shakespeare's will, dated March 15, 1616, was signed in illegible handwriting, leading some researchers to believe that he was seriously ill at the time. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616.

Three days later, Shakespeare's body was buried under the altar of Stratford Church. The epitaph is written on his tombstone:
Good friend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased hear.
Blest be ye man yt spares the stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.

Friend, for God's sake, don't swarm
The remains taken by this earth;
He who is untouched is blessed for centuries,
And cursed is the one who touched my ashes.
(Translation by A. Velichansky)

Criticism of traditional views ("Non-Stratfordianism")

The "non-Stratfordian" line of research questions the possibility of Shakespeare from Stratford writing a "Shakespearean canon" of works. Supporters of this theory believe that the facts known about him contradict the content and style of the plays and poems being studied. Numerous theories have been put forward by non-Stratfordians regarding their real authorship. In particular, non-Stratfordians name Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Roger Manners (Earl of Rutland), Queen Elizabeth and others as candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays (respectively, “Baconian”, “Rutlandian”, etc. hypotheses).

Non-Stratfordians are based, among other things, on the following circumstances:

Documents show that Shakespeare's parents, wife and children from Stratford were illiterate.

Not a single book belonging to Shakespeare from Stratford has survived. His authentic autographs are only the signatures of his last name and first name; his handwriting is quite sloppy, which gives non-Stratfordians reason to assume that he was not very accustomed to writing or even illiterate. A number of Stratfordians believe that one creative signature of Shakespeare is still known: perhaps, part of the censored play “Sir Thomas More” was written by the same hand as the signatures (this is not just a copy, but a draft with the author’s corrections).

The lexical dictionary of William Shakespeare's works contains 15 thousand different words, while the contemporary English translation of the King James Bible contains only 5 thousand. Many experts doubt that the poorly educated son of a craftsman (Shakespeare never studied at universities or traveled abroad; his education at a “grammar school” is also questionable) could have such a rich vocabulary. On the other hand, the writers of Shakespeare's contemporaries - Marlowe, Johnson, John Donne and others - were of no less, or even more modest origin (Shakespeare's father from Stratford was rich and was part of the city government), but their learning surpassed Shakespeare's.

During Shakspere's lifetime and for several years after his death, no one ever called him a poet or playwright.

Performances of Shakespeare's plays took place in Oxford and Cambridge, while according to the rules, only works by their graduates could be staged within the walls of these ancient universities.

Contrary to the customs of Shakespeare's time, no one in all of England responded with a single word to Shakspere's death.

Shakspere's will is a very voluminous and detailed document, but it does not mention any books, papers, poems, or plays. When Shakespeare died, 18 plays remained unpublished; however, nothing is said about them in the will either.

The author of one of the fundamental works in this direction is the Russian Shakespeare scholar I. M. Gililov (1924-2007), whose research book “The Play of William Shakespeare, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix,” published in 1997, aroused interest and resonance among specialists. As those who wrote Shakespearean masterpieces under a literary guise, Gililov names Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, and Elizabeth Sidney-Rutland, daughter of the English poet Philip Sidney, who were in a platonic marriage.

In 2003, the book “Shakespeare. Secret History" by authors who spoke under the pseudonym "O. Kozminius" and "O. Melechtius." The authors conduct a detailed investigation, talking about the Great Hoax, the result of which (allegedly) was not only the personality of Shakespeare, but also many other famous figures of the era.

In Igor Frolov’s book “Shakespeare’s Equation, or “Hamlet,” which we have not read,” based on the text of the first editions of “Hamlet” (1603, 1604, 1623), a hypothesis is put forward about which historical figures are hidden behind the masks of Shakespeare’s heroes .

In 2008, Sergei Stepanov’s book “William Shakespeare” was published, where, based on his own translation, the author proves that W. Shakespeare’s sonnets are correspondence between Rutland, Pembroke and Elizabeth Sidney-Rutland. In the same year, Marina Litvinova’s book “The Vindication of Shakespeare” was published, where the author defends the version that the works of William Shakespeare were created by two authors - Francis Bacon and Manners, the fifth Earl of Rutland.

Creation

Shakespeare's literary heritage is divided into two unequal parts: poetic (poems and sonnets) and dramatic. V. G. Belinsky wrote that “it would be too bold and strange to give Shakespeare a decisive advantage over all the poets of mankind, as a poet himself, but as a playwright he is now left without a rival whose name could be placed next to his name.”

Dramaturgy

The question of periodization

Researchers of Shakespeare's work (Danish literary critic G. Brandes, publisher of the Russian complete works of Shakespeare S. A. Vengerov) at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, based on the chronology of the works, presented his spiritual evolution from a “cheerful mood”, faith in the triumph of justice, humanistic ideals at the beginning of the journey until disappointment and the destruction of all illusions at the end.

However, in recent years, an opinion has emerged that inferring the identity of an author from his works is a mistake.

In 1930, Shakespeare scholar E. C. Chambers proposed a chronology of Shakespeare's work according to genre criteria; it was later corrected by J. McManway. Four periods were distinguished: first (1590-1594) - early: chronicles, Renaissance comedies, “tragedy of horror” (“Titus Andronicus”), two poems; the second (1594-1600) - Renaissance comedies, the first mature tragedy (“Romeo and Juliet”), chronicles with elements of tragedy, chronicles with elements of comedy, ancient tragedy (“Julius Caesar”), sonnets; third (1601-1608) - great tragedies, ancient tragedies, “dark comedies”; fourth (1609-1613) - drama-fairy tales with a tragic beginning and a happy ending. Some Shakespeare scholars, including A. A. Smirnov, combined the first and second periods into one early one.

First period (1590-1594)

The first period approximately falls on the years 1590-1594.

In terms of literary techniques, it can be called a period of imitation: Shakespeare is still entirely at the mercy of his predecessors. In terms of mood, this period was defined by supporters of the biographical approach to the study of Shakespeare’s work as a period of idealistic faith in the best aspects of life: “Young Shakespeare enthusiastically punishes vice in his historical tragedies and enthusiastically glorifies high and poetic feelings - friendship, self-sacrifice and especially love” ( Vengerov).

In the tragedy “Titus Andronicus”, Shakespeare fully paid tribute to the tradition of contemporary playwrights to hold the attention of the audience by whipping up passions, cruelty and naturalism. The comic horrors of Titus Andronicus are a direct and immediate reflection of the horrors of the plays of Kyd and Marlowe.

Shakespeare's first plays were probably the three parts of Henry VI. The source for this and subsequent historical chronicles was Holinshed's Chronicles. The theme that unites all Shakespeare's chronicles is the succession of weak and incapable rulers who led the country to civil strife and civil war and the restoration of order with the accession of the Tudor dynasty. Like Marlowe in Edward II, Shakespeare does not simply describe historical events, but explores the motives behind the actions of the heroes.

“The Comedy of Errors” is an early, “student” comedy, a comedy of situations. According to the custom of that time, a reworking of the play by a modern English author, the source for which was the Italian version of Plautus’s comedy “Menechmes”, which describes the adventures of twin brothers. The action takes place in Ephesus, which bears little resemblance to the ancient Greek city: the author transfers the signs of contemporary England into an ancient setting. Shakespeare adds a plot line of double servants, thereby confusing the action even more. It is characteristic that already in this work there is a mixture of the comic and tragic, usual for Shakespeare: the old man Egeon, who unwittingly violated the Ephesian law, faces execution and only through a chain of incredible coincidences and absurd mistakes does salvation come to him in the finale. Interrupting a tragic plot with a comic scene even in the darkest works of Shakespeare is a reminder, rooted in medieval tradition, of the proximity of death and, at the same time, the incessant flow of life and its constant renewal.

The play “The Taming of the Shrew,” created in the tradition of farcical comedy, is built on crude comic techniques. This is a variation of a plot popular in London theaters in the 1590s about the pacification of a wife by her husband. Two extraordinary personalities come together in an exciting duel and the woman is defeated. The author proclaims the inviolability of the established order, where the head of the family is a man.

In subsequent plays, Shakespeare moves away from external comedic techniques. “Love's Labour's Lost” is a comedy created under the influence of Lily's plays, which he wrote for production at the mask theater at the royal court and in aristocratic houses. With a rather simple plot, the play is a continuous tournament, a competition between characters in witty dialogues, complex verbal games, and the writing of poems and sonnets (by this time Shakespeare already mastered a complex poetic form). The language of "Love's Labour's Lost" - pretentious, flowery, the so-called euphuism - is the language of the English aristocratic elite of that time, which became popular after the publication of Lily's novel "Euphues or the Anatomy of Wit."

Second period (1594-1601)

Around 1595, Shakespeare created one of his most popular tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, the story of the development of the human personality in the struggle against external circumstances for the right to free love. The plot, known from Italian short stories (Masuccio, Bandello), was used by Arthur Brooke as the basis for the poem of the same name (1562). It is likely that Brooke's work served as a source for Shakespeare. He enhanced the lyricism and drama of the action, rethought and enriched the characters, created poetic monologues that revealed the inner experiences of the main characters, thus transforming an ordinary work into a Renaissance love poem. This is a tragedy of a special type, lyrical, optimistic, despite the death of the main characters in the finale. Their names have become a byword for the highest poetry of passion.

Another of Shakespeare's most famous works, The Merchant of Venice, dates back to approximately 1596. Shylock, like another famous Jew of Elizabethan drama - Barabbas (Marlowe's "Jew of Malta"), seeks revenge. But, unlike Barabbas, Shylock, who remains a negative character, is much more complex. On the one hand, he is a greedy, cunning, even cruel moneylender, on the other, he is an insulted person whose offense evokes sympathy. Shylock’s famous monologue about the identity of a Jew and any other person, “Hasn’t a Jew eyes?..” (Act III, Scene 1) is considered by some critics to be the best speech in defense of the equality of Jews in all literature. The play contrasts the power of money over a person and the cult of friendship - an integral component of life harmony.

Despite the “problematic nature” of the play and the dramatic nature of the storyline of Antonio and Shylock, in its atmosphere “The Merchant of Venice” is close to fairy tale plays like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1596). The magical play was probably written for the wedding celebrations of one of the Elizabethan nobles. For the first time in literature, Shakespeare imbues fantastic creatures with human weaknesses and contradictions, creating characters. As always, he intersperses dramatic scenes with comic ones: Athenian artisans, very similar to English workers, diligently and ineptly prepare for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta the play “Pyramus and Thisbe,” which is a story of unhappy love told in a parody form. Researchers were surprised by the choice of plot for the “wedding” play: its external plot - misunderstandings between two pairs of lovers, resolved only thanks to Oberon’s goodwill and magic, a mockery of women’s quirks (Titania’s sudden passion for the Base) - expresses an extremely skeptical view of love. However, this “one of the most poetic works” has a serious connotation - the exaltation of a sincere feeling that has a moral basis.

S. A. Vengerov saw the transition to the second period “in the absence of that poetry of youth that was so characteristic of the first period. The heroes are still young, but they have already lived a decent life and the main thing for them in life is pleasure. The portion is piquant, lively, but the gentle charm of the girls of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, and especially Juliet, is not in it at all.”

At the same time, Shakespeare creates an immortal and most interesting type, which has so far had no analogues in world literature - Sir John Falstaff. The success of both parts of “Henry IV” is not least due to this most prominent character in the chronicle, who immediately became popular. The character is undoubtedly negative, but with a complex character. A materialist, an egoist, a man without ideals: honor is nothing to him, an observant and insightful skeptic. He denies honor, power and wealth: he needs money only as a means of getting food, wine and women. But the essence of comedy, the grain of Falstaff’s image, is not only his wit, but also his cheerful laughter at himself and the world around him. His strength lies in his knowledge of human nature, he is disgusted by everything that binds a person, he is the personification of freedom of spirit and unprincipledness. A man of a bygone era, he is not needed where the state is powerful. Realizing that such a character is inappropriate in a drama about an ideal ruler, Shakespeare removes him in Henry V: the audience is simply informed of Falstaff's death. According to tradition, it is generally accepted that, at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see Falstaff on stage again, Shakespeare resurrected him in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this is only a pale copy of the old Falstaff. He has lost his knowledge of the world around him; there is no healthier irony, no laughter at oneself. All that was left was the smug scoundrel.

A much more successful attempt was to return to the Falstaffian type in the final play of the second period - Twelfth Night. Here, in the person of Sir Toby and his entourage, we have, as it were, the second edition of Sir John, however, without his sparkling wit, but with the same infectious good-natured zhuirstvo. The crude mockery of women in “The Taming of the Shrew” also fits perfectly into the framework of the predominantly “Falstaffian” period.

Third period (1600-1609)

The third period of his artistic activity, approximately covering the years 1600-1609, is called by supporters of the subjectivist biographical approach to Shakespeare’s work a period of “deep spiritual darkness,” considering the appearance of the melancholic character Jacques in the comedy “As You Like It” as a sign of a changed worldview and calling him almost not Hamlet's predecessor. However, some researchers believe that Shakespeare in the image of Jacques only ridiculed melancholy, and the period of supposed life disappointments (according to supporters of the biographical method) is in fact not confirmed by the facts of Shakespeare’s biography. The time when the playwright created the greatest tragedies coincides with the flowering of his creative powers, the solution of material difficulties and the achievement of a high position in society.

Around 1600, Shakespeare creates Hamlet, which, according to many critics, is his most profound work. Shakespeare preserved the plot of the famous revenge tragedy, but shifted all his attention to the spiritual discord and the internal drama of the protagonist. A new type of hero was introduced into the traditional revenge drama. Shakespeare was ahead of his time - Hamlet is not the usual tragic hero, carrying out vengeance for the sake of Divine justice. Coming to the conclusion that it is impossible to restore harmony with one blow, he experiences the tragedy of alienation from the world and dooms himself to loneliness. According to L. E. Pinsky, Hamlet is the first “reflective” hero of world literature.

The heroes of Shakespeare's “great tragedies” are outstanding people, in whom good and evil are mixed. Faced with the disharmony of the world around them, they make a difficult choice - how to exist in it; they create their own destiny and bear full responsibility for it.

At the same time, Shakespeare created the drama Measure for Measure. Despite the fact that in the First Folio of 1623 it is classified as a comedy, there is almost no comedy in this serious work about an unjust judge. Its title refers to Christ's teaching about mercy; during the course of the action, one of the heroes is in mortal danger, and the ending can be considered conditionally happy. This problematic work does not fit into a specific genre, but exists on the edge of genres: going back to the morality play, it strives towards tragicomedy.

True misanthropy appears only in “Timon of Athens” - the story of a generous and kind man who was ruined by those to whom he helped and became a misanthrope. The play leaves a painful impression, despite the fact that ungrateful Athens suffers punishment after the death of Timon. According to researchers, Shakespeare failed: the play was written in uneven language and, along with its advantages, has even greater disadvantages. It is possible that more than one Shakespeare worked on it. The character of Timon himself was not successful, sometimes he gives the impression of a caricature, other characters are simply pale. “Antony and Cleopatra” can be considered a transition to a new period of Shakespeare’s creativity. In “Antony and Cleopatra,” the talented, but devoid of any moral principles, predator from “Julius Caesar” is surrounded by a truly poetic aura, and the semi-traitor Cleopatra largely atones for her sins with a heroic death.

Fourth period (1609-1612)

The fourth period, with the exception of the play “Henry VIII” (most researchers agree that it was almost entirely written by John Fletcher), covers only three or four years and four plays - the so-called “romantic dramas” or tragicomedies. In the plays of the latter period, difficult trials emphasize the joy of deliverance from disasters. Slander is exposed, innocence is justified, fidelity is rewarded, the madness of jealousy has no tragic consequences, lovers are united in a happy marriage. The optimism of these works is perceived by critics as a sign of the reconciliation of their author. "Pericles", a play significantly different from everything previously written, marks the emergence of new works. Naivety bordering on primitiveness, the absence of complex characters and problems, a return to the construction of action characteristic of early English Renaissance drama - everything indicates that Shakespeare was in search of a new form. "The Winter's Tale" is a whimsical fantasy, a story "about the incredible , where everything is probable." The story is about a jealous person who succumbed to evil, suffering mental anguish and earning forgiveness through his repentance. In the finale, good defeats evil, according to some researchers, affirming faith in humanistic ideals; according to others, the triumph of Christian morality. "The Tempest" is the most successful of the last plays and, in a sense, the finale of Shakespeare's work. Instead of struggle, the spirit of humanity and forgiveness reigns here. The poetic girls created now - Marina from Pericles, Loss from The Winter's Tale, Miranda from The Tempest - are images of daughters beautiful in their virtue. Researchers tend to see in the final scene of The Tempest, where Prospero renounces his magic and retires, Shakespeare’s farewell to the world of theater.

Poems and poems

In general, Shakespeare's poems, of course, cannot be compared with his brilliant dramas. But taken by themselves, they bear the imprint of extraordinary talent, and if they had not been drowned in the glory of Shakespeare the playwright, they could well have brought and indeed brought great fame to the author: we know that the scholar Meares saw in Shakespeare the poet a second Ovid. But, in addition, there are a number of reviews from other contemporaries who speak of the “new Catullus” with the greatest delight.

Poems

The poem “Venus and Adonis” was published in 1593, when Shakespeare was already known as a playwright, but the author himself calls it his literary firstborn, and therefore it is quite possible that it was either conceived or even partly written in Stretford. There is also an assumption that Shakespeare considered the poem (as opposed to plays for the public theater) a genre worthy of the attention of a noble patron and a work of high art. Echoes of the homeland clearly make themselves felt. The local Middle English flavor is vividly felt in the landscape; there is nothing southern in it, as required by the plot; before the spiritual gaze of the poet, undoubtedly, there were native pictures of the peaceful fields of Warwickshire with their soft tones and calm beauty. One can also feel in the poem an excellent connoisseur of horses and an excellent hunter. The plot is largely taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses; in addition, much is borrowed from Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis. The poem was developed with all the unceremoniousness of the Renaissance, but still without any frivolity. And this was mainly due to the talent of the young author, in addition to the fact that the poem was written in sonorous and picturesque verse. If Venus’s efforts to kindle desires in Adonis amaze the later reader with their frankness, then at the same time they do not give the impression of something cynical and not worthy of artistic description. Before us is passion, real, frenzied, clouding the mind and therefore poetically legitimate, like everything that is bright and strong.

The second poem, “Lucretia,” was much more mannered, published the following year (1594) and dedicated, like the first, to the Earl of Southampton. In the new poem, not only is there nothing unbridled, but, on the contrary, everything, like in the ancient legend, revolves around the most refined understanding of a completely conventional concept of female honor. Insulted by Sextus Tarquinius, Lucretia does not consider it possible to live after the theft of her marital honor and expresses her feelings in long monologues. Brilliant, but rather strained metaphors, allegories and antitheses deprive these monologues of real feelings and give the entire poem a rhetorical quality. However, this kind of pomp when writing poetry was very popular with the public, and “Lucretia” was as successful as “Venus and Adonis.” Booksellers, who alone benefited from literary success at that time, since literary property for authors did not then exist, published edition after edition. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, “Venus and Adonis” went through 7 editions, “Lucretia” - 5.

Two more small, weak, mannered works are attributed to Shakespeare, one of which, “A Lover's Complaint,” may have been written by Shakespeare in his youth. The poem "The Passionate Pilgrim" was published in 1599, when Shakespeare was already famous. Its authorship is questioned: it is possible that thirteen of the nineteen poems were not written by Shakespeare. In 1601, Chester's collection Jove's Martyr of Rosalind published Shakespeare's faint allegorical poem "The Phoenix and the Dove."

Sonnets

A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines. In the English tradition, which is based primarily on Shakespeare's sonnets, the following rhyme scheme is adopted: abab cdcd efef gg, that is, three quatrains with cross rhymes, and one couplet (a type introduced by the poet Earl of Surrey, executed under Henry VIII).

In total, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and most of them were created in the years 1592-1599. They were first printed without the author's knowledge in 1609. Two of them were published back in 1599 in the collection “The Passionate Pilgrim”. These are sonnets 138 and 144.

The entire cycle of sonnets falls into separate thematic groups:
Sonnets dedicated to a friend: 1-126
Chanting a Friend: 1-26
Trials of Friendship: 27-99
The bitterness of separation: 27-32
First disappointment in a friend: 33-42
Longing and fears: 43-55
Growing alienation and melancholy: 56-75
Rivalry and jealousy of other poets: 76-96
“Winter” of separation: 97-99
A Celebration of Renewed Friendship: 100-126
Sonnets dedicated to a dark-skinned lover: 127-152
Conclusion - the joy and beauty of love: 153-154

First publications

It is believed that half (18) of Shakespeare's plays were published in one way or another during the playwright's lifetime. The most important publication of Shakespeare's heritage is rightfully considered the 1623 folio (the so-called “First Folio”), published by the actors of the Shakespeare troupe John Heming and Henry Condel. This edition includes 36 plays by Shakespeare - all except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is this publication that underlies all research in the field of Shakespearean studies.

Biography

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) - English playwright, poet; was an actor in the royal troupe. The poems “Venus and Adonis” (1593) are on a mythological subject, “Lucretia” (1594) is from Roman history. The Shakespearean canon (the plays that undoubtedly belong to him) includes 37 dramas.

Shakespeare's early plays are imbued with a life-affirming principle: the comedies The Taming of the Shrew (1593), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596), Much Ado About Nothing (1598). A tragedy about love and fidelity at the cost of life “Romeo and Juliet” (1595). In historical chronicles (“Richard III”, 1593; “Henry IV”, 1597-98), tragedies (“Hamlet”, 1601; “Othello”, 1604; “King Lear”, 1605; “Macbeth”, 1606), in “Roman tragedies” (political - “Julius Caesar”, 1599; “Antony and Cleopatra”, 1607; “Coriolanus”, 1607), lyrical and philosophical “Sonnets” (1592-1600, published in 1609) moral, social and political conflicts He interpreted the eras as eternal, irremovable, as laws of the world order, under which the highest human values ​​- goodness, dignity, honor, justice - are inevitably perverted and suffer tragic defeat.

William Shakespeare created bright characters, endowed with a powerful will and strong passions, capable of heroic confrontation with fate and circumstances, self-sacrifice, experiencing responsibility for the discord of the world (“the broken connection of times”), and ready to break the moral “law” and die for the sake of an all-consuming their ideas or passions (ambition, power, love). The search for an optimistic solution to conflicts led to the creation of romantic dramas “The Winter's Tale” (1611) and “The Tempest” (1612). Shakespeare's tragedies are the greatest examples of the tragic in world literature.

W. Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, Stratford-on-Avon. Died on April 23, 1616, in the same place. Zodiac sign - Taurus.

Stratford. Departure for London

William was born into the family of a merchant and respectable townsman, John Shakespeare. Shakespeare's ancestors spent several centuries farming in the vicinity of Stratford. 1568-69 - the years of greatest prosperity for the family, followed by slow ruin. Around 1580, William had to leave school, which was excellent in Stratford, and start working. It is believed that, after leaving school, William Shakespeare helped his father for some time as an apprentice.

In November 1582, William married Anne Hathaway. Perhaps the marriage was forced: their first child, daughter Susan, was born in May of the following year. In February 1585, twins were born - a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith. In the second half of the 1580s. Shakespeare leaves Stratford. The so-called “lost” or “dark years” are coming, about which nothing is known.

At the turn of the 1590s. William Shakespeare comes to London. During these years, his first play was created - the chronicle “Henry VI”. Having become a fairly prominent figure, Shakespeare immediately received a jealous attack from one of the playwrights of the “university minds” group that reigned on the stage at that time, Robert Greene, who called him a “stage shaker” (a pun on Shakespeare’s surname: Shake-speare, that is, “spear shaker” ") and the crow that "dresses itself in our feathers" (an altered quote from "Henry VI"). This was the first surviving review.

The emergence of a new playwright

In 1592-94 London theaters were closed due to the plague epidemic. During an involuntary pause, William Shakespeare created several plays: the chronicle “Richard III”, “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”, his first tragedy (still in the prevailing style of “bloody tragedy”) “Titus Andronicus”, and also released published for the first time under his own name the poems “Venus and Adonis” and “Lucretia”. In 1594, after the opening of the theaters, Shakespeare joined the new cast of the Lord Chamberlain's troupe, so named after the position of its patron Hunsdon. The “university minds” left the stage (died or stopped writing for the theater). The era of Shakespeare begins. Here is what one of his contemporaries F. Merez wrote in 1597: “Just as Plautus and Seneca were considered the best among the Romans in terms of comedy and tragedy, so William Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both types of plays intended for the stage...

Creative takeoff. "Globe"

In the 1590s. (the period that is considered to be the first in Shakespeare's work) Shakespeare creates all of his main chronicles as well as most of the comedies. In 1595-96, the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” was written, followed by “The Merchant of Venice” - the first comedy that would later be called “serious”.

In the fall of 1599, the Globus Theater opened. Above the entrance are the winged words: “The whole world is a theater” (“Totus mundis agit histrionem”). Shakespeare is one of its co-owners, an actor of the troupe and the main playwright. In the year the Globe opened, he wrote the Roman tragedy “Julius Caesar” and the comedy “As You Like It,” which, with the development of melancholic characters, paved the way for “Hamlet,” created a year later. With his appearance, the period of “great tragedies” begins (1601-1606). These include Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), Macbeth (1606). The tone of the comedies now became more serious, and sometimes became even darker in such works as Troilus and Cressida (1601-1602), All's Well That Ends Well (1603-1603), and Measure for Measure (1604).

Unexpected departure to Stratford

On March 28, 1603, Queen Elizabeth dies. The English throne passes to James I, the son of the executed Mary Stuart, who inherits the crown of Scotland. The new king signs a patent, according to which he accepts the troupe of actors of the Lord Chamberlain under his highest patronage. From now on they will be called "the servants of His Majesty the King." After 1606, the last period of Shakespeare's creativity began, ending in 1613 with his departure to his native Stratford. At this time, tragedies based on ancient subjects were created (“Antony and Cleopatra”, “Coriolanus”, “Timon of Athens”, 1607-08). These were followed by later "romantic" plays, including The Winter's Tale and The Tempest (1610-12).

The reason for the unexpected termination of such a successful career as a playwright and departure from the capital was, apparently, illness. In March 1616, William Shakespeare draws up and signs a will, which will subsequently cause so many confusion about his identity, authorship and will become the reason for what will be called the “Shakespearean question.” It is generally accepted that Shakespeare died on the same day that he was born - April 23. Two days later, burial followed in the altar of the Church of the Holy Trinity on the outskirts of Stratford, in the registry of which this was recorded.

During William Shakespeare's lifetime, his works were not collected. Poems and a collection of sonnets were published separately. The plays initially appeared in so-called “pirate editions” with corrupted text, which were usually followed in the form of a refutation by an edition prepared by the author. The format of these publications is called quarto. After Shakespeare's death, through the efforts of his actor friends Heming and Condell, the first complete edition of his works, including 36 plays, the so-called First Folio, was prepared. Eighteen of them had never been published before.

Chronicles

Shakespeare began with chronicles - plays about the events of national history, the law of which is designated by the word Time. The main Shakespearean chronicles form two cycles of four plays (tetralogy). The first is “Henry VI” (three parts) and “Richard III”. The second is “Richard II” (1595), “Henry IV” (two parts; 1596-1598) and “Henry V” (1599).

In the first tetralogy, a strong historical figure emerges from the chaos of turmoil, striving to subjugate Fate and Time - Richard III. Power is capable of securing the throne, but is not capable of maintaining it if the sovereign violates the laws of morality and turns history into a political performance.

The theme of the second tetralogy is the formation of a national state. The chronicle “Henry IV” tells the story of the seizure of power by Henry IV, the founder of the Lancaster dynasty, and the youth of the future ideal king Henry V. Under the leadership of Sir John Falstaff, Prince Henry undergoes the school of life in taverns and on the high road. The Prince draws strength from the earth, from everything that is corporeal and material and which Falstaff, the jester of Time, embodies. To the laughter of Falstaff, the Middle Ages with its knightly freemen, embodied in the image of Harry Hotspur, the prince's rival, leaves the stage. Shakespeare considers it necessary to bring his ideal monarch through the background of the people's laughter. However, in the finale, when the prince is crowned, Falstaff is expelled, because state order does not exist according to the laws of nature. Their contradiction is the source of Shakespearean tragedy.

Comedy

Shakespeare's comedy was not satirical and this sharply differed from all subsequent development of the genre. Her laughter comes from a feeling of the fullness of life, its strength, beauty, variability. Shakespeare's comedy has its own great theme - Nature. She has her favorite hero - the jester, full of knowledge of life not as it seems, but as it is.

All of Shakespeare's early comedies can be identified by the title of the first of them - The Comedy of Errors. However, the source and tradition of the comic in them vary. If the basis of The Comedy of Errors were examples of ancient, Roman comedy, then the comedy The Taming of the Shrew (1594) indicates the connection between Shakespeare's laughter and the folk carnival.

The shrew, it turns out, is not so difficult to tame, if the whole point is not in her character - strong, devoid of pettiness, and therefore in fact much less obstinate than many other heroines, but in the fact that a tamer has not yet been found. Bianca's suitors? It is impossible to imagine them next to Katarina. Petruchio appeared, and everything fell into place. Everything in this comedy is presented with a carnival excess: the initial obstinacy of the wife, and the tyranny of her husband as a means of correction for her, and, finally, morality at the end. Without adjusting for carnivalism, one cannot perceive either the re-education of the heroine, or the edifying speech she delivered as a lesson to other obstinate women.

The comedy “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (1595-96) tells about the whimsical feeling of love, about its right, confirmed by a miracle of nature, which is here materialized by the magical world of the forest, where Oberon, Titania, and elves rule. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is one of Shakespeare's brightest, most musical, and elegant comedies. It seems that it arose just as easily, in one inspired breath. Perhaps it was so. But then Shakespeare’s other ability is striking - to bring together the most diverse plot material and, on its basis, create a completely new work.

Correctable mistakes, misunderstandings, and misrecognitions lie at the heart of the conflict in early comedies. But gradually Shakespeare’s attitude towards light, unpretentious ups and downs is changing. In the late comedies that appeared at the turn of the century and at the beginning of the new century (they are called serious, dramatic, problematic), the accumulating changes become obvious. Habitually playing off the title of one of them (“All’s well that ends well,” 1602-1603), they say that now all’s well that ends well with Shakespeare. The happy ending implied by the comedy genre ceases to convince us that harmony has been restored, since violations of the harmonious world order are no longer accidental. The conflict entered into characters and circumstances. Discord has become an integral feature of the world in which the heroes live.

Sonnets

The most likely time of creation of the sonnets is 1593-1600. In 1609, the only lifetime edition was published with a dedication, which to this day continues to remain one of Shakespeare’s mysteries. It was addressed to the mysterious W.H.: is this the “beautiful young man”, the friend to whom most of the sonnets are addressed (1-126 out of a total of 154)?

The most defined thematic cycle in Shakespeare's collection is represented by the first seventeen sonnets. They have one theme: the wish for a wonderful young man to continue himself in his offspring, not to forget how fleeting earthly life and earthly beauty are. This is a kind of introduction to the book, which could have been written to order and, perhaps, even before the poet’s personal relationship with his friend, filled with admiration and sincere love, arose. The poet forever maintains a distance, either necessary for his feeling close to worship, or dictated by social difference, if we accept the version that the addressee of the sonnets was a young aristocrat (Earl of Southampton or Earl of Pembroke?). Love gives poetry inspiration, but it receives eternity from it. The power of poetry to conquer Time is spoken of in sonnets 15, 18, 19, 55, 60, 63, 81, 101.

The poet's love is accompanied by a painful feeling that a friend is fickle in his affection. This also applies to his poetic passions. A rival poet appears (sonnets 76, 78, 79, 80, 82-86).

The second part of the collection (127-154) is dedicated to the Dark Lady. The changed type of beauty sounds like a challenge to tradition, going back to the heavenly love of F. Petrarch, and is contrasted with his angelic-blond donna. Shakespeare emphasizes that, refuting the cliches of Petrarchism, his “darling treads the earth” (translation by S. Marshak; sonnet 130).

Although love is sung by Shakespeare as unshakable in its value (sonnet 116), descended from heaven to earth, it is open to all the imperfections of the world, its suffering, which it is ready to take upon itself (sonnet 66).

Tragedies

The first truly Shakespearean tragedy - Romeo and Juliet - arose surrounded by comedies and sonnets. It is sonnet-like in its linguistic nature, for its main character Romeo not only speaks, but also loves in this conventional tradition. In his love for Juliet, he has to recognize himself and face the world. At the same time, the sonnet word, which came into tragedy, opened up new lyrical possibilities for this genre in depicting a person, which made it possible to replace pre-Shakespearean rhetoric with depth of thought and feeling. Without this, Hamlet would not have been possible five years later.

Hamlet

The unprecedented novelty and dignity of Hamlet is reflected in the fact that, reflecting on the necessity of an act, he weighs its consequences and, as it were, anticipates what can be called moral responsibility. Encouraged to take revenge not only by his father’s call, but by all the usual logic of the “tragedy of revenge,” Hamlet does not believe that his only blow is capable of restoring anything in world harmony, that he alone can set the “dislocated eyelid.” Hamlet's alienation is catastrophic, growing as the action progresses.

Ophelia

The hero's discord with historical Time will continue to tragically increase in Shakespeare's plays. True, in the “great tragedies” written after Hamlet, the last attempt of an epically integral and beautiful hero is made to break into the world: with love - Othello, with force - Macbeth, with goodness - Lear. This fails: Time is impenetrable to them. Moreover, they are not able to internally resist the destructive effects of Time. The greater the man, the more terrible his fall. “Evil is good, good is evil...” (translation by Russian writer Boris Leonidovich Pasternak) - the witches’ spell in Macbeth sounds like an ominous refrain.

Shakespeare's last plays are written as an afterword to tragedies: "Cymbeline", "The Winter's Tale", "The Tempest". Initially they were classified as comedies. Now they are usually called “romantic dramas” (romances). Repeating the situations of tragic plots, they end happily - as if returning the utopian hope for the best.

The main idea of ​​the Renaissance was the idea of ​​a worthy individual. Time subjected this idea to a tragic test, evidence of which was the work of Shakespeare. Towards the end, the metaphor of a storm grows in it, because, as in a storm, everything suddenly began to spin, become confused, and lost. Greatness and baseness began to easily change places. Man, fleeing from himself, like King Lear, rushed back to nature, tore off his clothes in order to discover in the naked nakedness of the soul the previously unknown complexity of inner existence, his simultaneously Divine and bestially cruel essence. “Time has gone out of its groove”, the former unity disintegrated, a multitude of faces flashed, perhaps striking not with heroic greatness, but with previously unprecedented diversity, which was first and forever captured in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.

"Shakespearean Question"

Shakespeare's will was a source of grief and doubt for his biographers. It talks about houses and property, about rings as keepsakes for friends, but not a word about books or manuscripts. It was as if it was not a great writer who had died, but an ordinary man in the street. The will became the first reason to ask the so-called “Shakespearean question”: was William Shakespeare from Stratford the author of all those works that we know under his name?

For a hundred years now, there have been many supporters of the negative answer: there was no, there could not be, because he was uneducated, did not travel, did not study at the university. Many ingenious arguments have been made by Stratfordians (supporters of the traditional version) and anti-Stratfordians. More than two dozen candidates for “Shakespeare” were proposed. Among the most popular candidates are the philosopher Francis Bacon and Shakespeare's predecessor in transforming dramatic art, the greatest of the "university minds" Christopher Marlowe. However, they were mainly looking for titled persons: the Earls of Derby, Oxford, Rutland were called - the rights of the latter were supported in Russia. It was believed that only their inherent education, position in society and at court, and the opportunity to travel, opened up a broad overview of life, which is in the plays. They could have had reasons to hide their real name, which, according to the ideas of that time, would have been a stain of shame on the craft of a playwright.

However, the main argument in favor of Shakespeare is: during his lifetime, his name appeared on dozens of editions of individual plays, poems, and a collection of sonnets. Shakespeare was spoken of as the author of these works (why, with every mention of the name, should one expect a clarification that we were talking about a native of Stratford, and not about someone else?). Immediately after Shakespeare's death, two of his actor friends published his works, and four poets, including Shakespeare's greatest of his contemporaries, his friend Ben Jonson, eulogized him. And not once have there been any refutations or revelations. None of his contemporaries and descendants, until the end of the 18th century. did not doubt Shakespeare's authorship. Is it possible to assume that a secret into which dozens of people had to be privy was kept so jealously?

How can we explain that the playwright of the next generation, William Davenant, well-versed in theatrical affairs and gossip, came up with a legend according to which it turned out that his mother was the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, and he himself was Shakespeare’s own son from Stratford-on-Avon? What was there to be proud of?

The Shakespearean mystery certainly exists, but it is not a biographical mystery, but the mystery of a genius, accompanied by what the Romantic poet John Keats would call Shakespeare's "negative ability", his poetic vision - to see everything and not reveal his presence in anything. A unique Shakespearean secret that belongs to the individual and the time, when the personal first cuts through the impersonality of existence, and the great playwright, who created a portrait gallery of a new era for centuries to come, hides only one face - his own.

William Shakespeare completes the process of creating a national culture and the English language; his work sums up the tragic outcome of the entire era of the European Renaissance. In the perception of subsequent generations, an image of Shakespeare emerges as a comprehensive genius, who, at the beginnings of the New Age, created a gallery of his human types and life situations. Shakespeare's plays still form the basis of the world's theatrical repertoire. Most of them have been filmed many times for film and television.

(I. O. Shaitanov)

Biography

William Shakespeare is the greatest of the English-speaking writers. In the treasury of his plays and poems, each new generation finds its own, hidden meaning.

Shakespeare worked for twenty years, from 1592 to 1612, during the reign of two monarchs - Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and James I (1603-25). During this period, Shakespeare wrote two major poems, a cycle of interlocking sonnets—rhymed poems consisting of 14 lines of ten syllables each—and 37 plays. William Shakespeare was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on April 26, 1564, meaning he was most likely born a day or two earlier. His father John Shakespeare, a successful glover, was elected bailiff (mayor) of the city shortly after William's birth. However, starting in 1576, he began to experience financial difficulties, and, probably, it was for this reason that the capable William was not sent to study at the university. However, an analysis of Shakespeare's work shows that he received a good school education - apparently in his native Stratford.

In 1582, Shakespeare, only 18 years old, married Anne Gathaway, 8 years older than himself and already expecting a baby. In total, the Shakespeare family had two daughters, Susanna and Judith, and a son, Hamlet, who died when he was 11 years old.

Actor and playwright

The next time Shakespeare's name is mentioned is in 1592: he is successful, working in London, where his plays about Henry VI are being staged, and his colleague Robert Greene, in a harsh pamphlet, enviously calls him a loudmouth and an upstart. The reason for the ridicule is that Shakespeare did not receive a university education, and many snobs, following Greene, over the centuries believed that Shakespeare was just a gifted “child of nature” - or that he did not exist at all, and under this name was hiding someone outstanding , for example, the famous philosopher and writer Francis Bacon, who allegedly dabbled in writing plays in his spare time!

In 1593-94. Due to the epidemic, London theaters were closed, and Shakespeare turned to lyric poetry, which his friend the Earl of Southampton encouraged him to do. When the epidemic ended, Shakespeare joined another theater troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, for several years. He played with them and wrote plays for them, mainly historical chronicles and comedies, although the outstanding tragedy Romeo and Juliet also occurred during this period.

Many of his early works, and especially “Love for Love” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” breathe youth and freshness, and their style and rhymes are surprisingly melodious. Other plays of those years - for example, "The Merchant of Venice" - seem to anticipate the gloomy comedies of a later period of creativity. (After all, a comedy doesn’t have to be funny - it just has to have a happy ending, not a sad one).

Around the same time, Shakespeare completed work on two plays about the era of Henry IV, which featured his funniest character - the liar and fat man Falstaff. The misadventures of this colorful figure amused Elizabeth so much that she requested another play about Falstaff, and Shakespeare very soon presented his “The Merry Wives of Windsor” to the queen.

Financial success of William Shakespeare

In 1599, the troupe moved to the other side of the Thames, to the Globe Theater, a tenth of which belonged to Shakespeare. Being a shareholder in a successful enterprise turned out to be more profitable than writing plays, for each of which the author was entitled to only 6 pounds. In 1603, Elizabeth I died, and King James I ascended the throne. His beloved troupe was immediately renamed the “Royal Servants” and was often invited to perform at court. By this time, Shakespeare had become rich and began buying real estate in his hometown. At the same time, he wrote his greatest, soul-shattering tragedies - “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra”.

In his tragedies, Shakespeare achieved unprecedented brightness of poetic language and unsurpassed freedom in using blank verse. These qualities manifested themselves even more clearly in his latest works, from which the tragic moods have almost disappeared: both “The Winter's Tale” and “The Storm” end on a note of reconciliation, logically completing the work of the great playwright.

Around 1610 Shakespeare retired. He spent the remaining years of his life in peace and prosperity in his native Stratford, although at first, for two or three years, he constantly kept in touch with his theater in the capital. On April 23, 1616 (possibly his 52nd birthday), he died without showing much interest in the fate of his plays. Fortunately, they were all collected and published by two Shakespearean actors, Geminge and Condell. The collection opened with a poem by Ben Jonson, who said that Shakespeare is “a poet not of the century, but of all ages!”

Biography

English playwright, poet

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) on April 23, 1564. in the family of the artisan and merchant John Shakespeare, who was a prominent person in Stratford and held various positions in the system of city government, up to the mayor of Stratford (in 1568).

From 7 to 14 years old, Shakespeare studied at Stratford Grammar School, one of the best provincial schools in England, where the sons of townspeople received a free education, mainly studying Latin language and literature. The worsening financial situation of his father forces Shakespeare to leave school early and help his family.

May 1583 – birth of the first child, daughter Susan. February

1585 – birth of twins Judith and Hamnet (died at an early age).

Circa 1585 - Shakespeare leaves Stratford. The so-called “lost” or “dark” years are coming, about which Shakespeare’s biographers know nothing.

Some time later, Shakespeare finds himself in London.

At the end of the 1580s. Shakespeare's work in the theater (actor and playwright) begins. During these years, his first play was created - the chronicle “Henry VI” (Henry VI, 1590).

1592-94 – London theaters close due to the plague epidemic. During an involuntary pause (this period of the 1590s is considered to be the first in Shakespeare’s work), Shakespeare creates several plays, chronicles, comedies: the chronicle “Richard III” (Richard III, 1593), The Comedy of Errors (1592) and “The Taming of the Shrew” (1593), etc.

1592 - Shakespeare publishes for the first time under his own name the poem "Venus and Adonis", written in a fashionable erotic genre, preceded by a humble dedication to the Duke of Southampton, a brilliant young nobleman and patron of literature. The poem was an extraordinary success and was published eight times during the author’s lifetime.

1593 - a longer and more serious poem, Lucrece, is published, also dedicated to Southampton. The play “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” was also written - the playwright’s first experience in a romantic comedy, addressing the theme of first love. This play is one of the shortest and most unsuccessful in his work. The first certified production was in 1762, already in D. Garrick’s adaptation.

1594 – Shakespeare’s first tragedy is published, still in the prevailing style of “bloody tragedy” – Titus Andronicus, without the author’s name on the title page). In 1594 After the opening of the theaters, Shakespeare joined the new cast of the Lord Chamberlain's Men troupe as a shareholder and actor, with which he remained associated until his retirement. Since this year, accurate evidence of Shakespeare's theatrical activities has appeared. The play “Love's Labor's Lost” was written, later revised for a court performance (1597). There is reason to think that it was written for a private performance and contains many satirical attacks against real people that are unclear to us.

December 28, 1594 - The Comedy of Errors is presented at Gray's Inn. This is the only time when Shakespeare turns to the traditional Elizabethan practice of remaking ancient comedies for the modern stage.

1595 - the play "The Taming of the Shrew" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" - Shakespeare's first bright triumph in the field of romantic comedy.

March 1595 - Shakespeare, W. Kemp and R. Burbage receive compensation for two plays presented at court by the Lord Chamberlain's troupe during the Christmas holidays. Theatrical activities under the patronage of Southampton quickly brought Shakespeare wealth - this is evident from the fact that in 1596. John Shakespeare, after several years of financial difficulties, receives from the Chamber of Heraldry the right to a coat of arms, the famous Shakespearean shield, which William undoubtedly paid for; the title granted gives Shakespeare the right to sign "William Shakespeare, gentleman." Another proof of his success: in 1597 he acquired New Place, a large house with a garden in Stratford. Shakespeare remodels the house, moves his wife and daughters there, and later, when he leaves the London stage, moves into it himself.

1595-96 - the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” was written, followed by “The Merchant of Venice” - the first comedy that would later be called “serious”.

1596 - The Merchant of Venice, a play more serious than Shakespeare's other early comedies, was written. Perhaps the reason for the composition was the desire of the Shakespeare troupe to stage a play that could compete with Marlowe’s popular play “The Jew of Malta,” revived in 1595-1596. troupe "The Admiral's Servants". Shakespeare takes the plot outline from an Italian novella, where an insidious Jew threatens the life of a Christian merchant. The well-thought-out course of the intrigue and its unexpected outcome anticipate the tragicomedies of Fr. Beaumont and D. Fletcher.

1597-1598 – no less than five plays by Shakespeare were published.

1598 - The Burbage brothers dismantle the old Theater - a building on the northern outskirts of London, where Shakespeare's troupe played, and from its logs they build the Globe Theater on the south bank of the Thames, in Southwark. Shakespeare becomes one of the shareholders of the new theater; he received the same right in 1608, when the troupe got the even more profitable Blackfriars Theater, within the city limits.

Autumn 1599 – the Globe Theater opens. Above the entrance are the winged words: “The whole world is a theater” (Totus mundis agit histrionem). Shakespeare is one of its co-owners, an actor in the troupe and the main playwright. In the year the Globe opened, he wrote the Roman tragedy Julius Caesar and the comedy As You Like It (1599-1600), which, with the development of melancholy characters, paved the way for Hamlet, created a year later. . With his appearance, the period of great tragedies begins (1601-1606).

1599-1600 – comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor”.

1601-1602 - the comedy “The Twelfth Night”, after which Shakespeare moves on to more serious topics. The turn to tragedy is due to several reasons. The theatrical fashion that changed towards the end of the century again brings tragedy to the stage, displacing patriotic chronicles. Writing for mass audiences, Shakespeare had to respond to new public demands. A more significant reason may be his desire to try his hand at tragedy - by all accounts the highest poetic genre. He hasn't touched this area since his first audition for Romeo and Juliet. Having completed the cycle of chronicles, he again turns to tragedy. The transition to the tragic genre is marked by the play “Hamlet” (Hamlet, 1600-1601). It is based on an old lost play (c. 1588–1589; probably written by T. Kyd), but an idea of ​​it can be gleaned from a later and corrupted German translation, Fratricide Punished, or Prince Hamlet of Denmark. Apparently, Shakespeare's troupe received the rights to stage Kyd's play, since it is known that back in 1594. and 1596 she represented a certain “Hamlet”. If we were talking about Shakespeare's tragedy, it would have managed to get into Meres's list, compiled in 1598. It is more likely that, having finished Julius Caesar, Shakespeare took the manuscript of the old play from the troupe's archives and remade it. The play is a huge success, which is clear from the instant allusions, quotes and even parodies that appeared. She created a fashion for “vengeful tragedy” that lasted until the theaters closed in 1642.

March 28, 1603 – Queen Elizabeth dies. The English throne passes to James I, the son of the executed Mary Stuart, who inherits the crown of Scotland. The new king signs a patent, according to which he accepts the troupe of actors of the Lord Chamberlain under his highest patronage. From now on they will be called "the servants of His Majesty the King." His Majesty's servants are especially loved at court; the troupe performs there often and for good remuneration, of which Shakespeare, of course, also receives a share. Growing income allows him to invest widely in estates and real estate in both London and Stratford.

November 1, 1604 - the tragedy “Othello” was performed at court, more than any other play by Shakespeare, close to the Elizabethan genre of “family tragedy”. Successful in its first productions, it was resumed after the Restoration; At the same time, for the first time, the role of Desdemona was played by a woman - Margaret Hughes.

1605 – the tragedy “King Lear”, the action of which is dated back to the distant barbarian past; the plot is more symbolic than realistic, and lacks the unity and integrity that distinguish the tragedy of the Venetian Moor. Productions of King Lear were never very successful; Moreover, during the Restoration era, Shakespeare's play was displaced from the stage by the sentimental adaptation of N. Tate (1652-1715). It is staged less frequently than other Shakespearean tragedies even today.

1606 - Macbeth - one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, apparently composed in great haste to fulfill King James's wish to present a new play during the festivities in honor of Christian Danish, who came to England, a relative of the king. The theme may have been suggested by the event held at Oxford in 1605. performance for the king. Three students dressed as Sibyls recited a Latin poem containing an ancient prophecy that Banquo, a distant ancestor of James, would give birth to a dynasty of kings who would rule three kingdoms - England, Scotland and Ireland. The king was very pleased, and Shakespeare apparently concluded that a play about Banquo and his murderer Macbeth would be well received at court. For material for the play, he turns to the then exemplary “Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland” (1577) by R. Holinshed (d. ca. 1580).

1606 - the last period of Shakespeare's creativity begins, ending in 1613 with his departure to his native Stratford. It includes three plays on ancient subjects - Timon of Athens (1605-1606), Antony and Cleopatra (1607-1608) and Coriolanus (1608-1609).

1609 – the only lifetime edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets is published with a dedication to W. H, which has not been solved to this day. The most likely time of creation of the sonnets is 1593-1600.

1611 - tragicomedy "The Winter's Tale". In accordance with the genre requirements, the play is full of theatrical effects and surprises.

1612 – tragicomedy “The Tempest”, apparently Shakespeare’s last independent play.

1613 – Shakespeare leaves for Stratford. The reason for the unexpected termination of such a successful career as a playwright and departure from the capital was, apparently, illness.

March 1616 – Shakespeare draws up and signs his will.

April 23, 1616 - William Shakespeare died and was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church on the outskirts of Stratford.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, his works were not collected. Poems and a collection of sonnets were published separately. The plays initially appeared in so-called pirated editions with damaged text, which were usually followed in the form of a refutation by an edition prepared by the author. The format of these publications is called quarto. After Shakespeare's death, through the efforts of his actor friends Heming and Condell, the first complete edition of his works, including 36 plays, the so-called “The First Folio” (1623), was prepared. Eighteen of them had never been published before. The Shakespearean canon (the undisputed plays of Shakespeare) includes 37 dramas. The early plays are imbued with a life-affirming principle: the comedies The Taming of the Shrew (1593), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596), Much Ado About Nothing (1598). A tragedy about love and fidelity at the cost of life “Romeo and Juliet” (1595). In historical chronicles (“Richard III”, 1593; “Henry IV”, 1597-98), tragedies (“Hamlet”, 1601; “Othello”, 1604; “King Lear”, 1605; “Macbeth”, 1606), in Roman tragedies (political - “Julius Caesar”, 1599; “Antony and Cleopatra”, 1607; “Coriolanus”, 1607), lyrical and philosophical “Sonnets” (1592-1600, published in 1609) he comprehended the moral, social and political conflicts of the era as eternal, irremovable, as the laws of the world order, under which the highest human values ​​- goodness, dignity, honor, justice - are inevitably perverted and suffer a tragic defeat. The search for an optimistic solution to conflicts led to the creation of romantic dramas “The Winter's Tale” (1611) and “The Tempest” (1612). Shakespeare completes the process of creating a national culture and the English language; his work sums up the tragic outcome of the entire era of the European Renaissance. In the perception of subsequent generations, an image of Shakespeare emerges as a comprehensive genius, who, at the beginnings of the New Age, created a gallery of his human types and life situations. Shakespeare's plays still form the basis of the world's theatrical repertoire. Most of them have been filmed many times for film and television. For more than two centuries after Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that William Shakespeare of Stratford, an actor in the troupe of His Majesty's Men, wrote both the poems published under his name and the plays in 1623. collected in folio by his actor friends. However, around 1850 Doubts arose about Shakespeare's authorship, which are still shared by many today. It's hard to say where this idea came from. Perhaps the reason was that the Victorians believed in the need for education for a writer, and Shakespeare was considered uneducated - as T. Carlyle, "a poor peasant from Warwickshire." In search of the probable author of the works that survived under the name of Shakespeare, skeptics, of course, turned to the most learned Elizabethan - Francis Bacon. The choice was unfortunate, since of all the educated people of that era, Bacon was the least capable of writing anything like that - as can be easily seen by comparing his essay “Love” with “Romeo and Juliet” or with the sonnets. There are other contenders along with Bacon. Chief among them is Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, whose candidacy for authorship enjoys the support of many influential voices in England. Oxford is a much more likely candidate than Bacon, since he was a poet, a patron of acting troupes, and, according to Meres, considered, along with D. Lyly, R. Greene and Shakespeare, "the best comedy among us." Unfortunately for Oxford supporters, he died in 1604. - before many of Shakespeare's plays, including The Tempest, were written. In America, the former stronghold of Baconian theory, the authorship of E. Dyer (c. 1545-1607) was defended by O. Brooks, who wrote a book about how Shakespeare of Stratford was not a poet at all, but only a secretary and literary agent. But Dyer, like Oxford, died too early and could not write the later plays of the Shakespearean Canon. To prove the rights to the authorship of his plays to anyone other than Shakespeare himself means, simply put, to ignore the entire body of evidence of that time. The most compelling of these belongs to Ben Jonson - he knew the actor Shakespeare, who regularly played in Jonson's plays; he criticized the extravagance of Shakespeare's style and noted his mistakes, but he also praised him as a playwright who could compete "with everything that insolent Greece or haughty Rome has created."

Brief literary encyclopedia: In 8 volumes. M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1962. Literary Encyclopedia: In 11 vols. – M., 1929-1939.

Biography

SHAKESPEARE

Interest in Shakespeare is growing steadily. More and more people are becoming familiar with his works, and in connection with this, naturally, the circle of those who want to learn about his life and what kind of person he was is expanding. But if it is easy to get acquainted with his work, then Shakespeare’s personality is by no means so open to us.

Shakespeare is now recognized as one of the world's greatest writers. He is the pride of humanity. But in the eyes of his contemporaries, Shakespeare was not a significant figure. Then he was not considered so great, and his fame was much less.

Shakespeare wrote his main works for the public theater. In those days, theater was considered a relatively low-grade entertainment. Suffice it to say that within London, the city authorities did not allow the construction of theaters or the giving of public performances. The bourgeois puritans who ruled the municipality of the capital saw in theaters a source of corruption of morals and one of the reasons for the spread of plague epidemics. Theaters were built outside the city limits, where there were all kinds of hot spots and such entertainment as bear baiting pens and cockfighting arenas.

Although actors were favored at court and invited to give performances, drama was by no means considered high art. The authority of the ancient Roman playwrights - Seneca, Terence and Plautus - was recognized. Modern authors who wrote for theaters were not respected in wide circles. The audience was not interested in who wrote this or that popular play, just as the public now does not know the names of screenwriters who write for films.

Shakespeare's surname first appeared in print in 1593. He signed with it the dedication of the poem "Venus and Adonis" to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. He also dedicated his second poem, “Dishonored Lucretia,” published the following year, to him.

Shakespeare called "Venus and Adonis" "the first fruit of my creativity." Meanwhile, by the time the poem was published, no less than six plays had already been staged, including Richard III, The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew. What did it mean to recognize the poem as the first fruit of poetic creativity? Perhaps the fact that it was created before the plays? Not at all. The simple fact is that real literature was considered to be works that belonged to high and generally recognized literary genres. Plays for the folk theater have not yet been recognized as such.

The first editions of Shakespeare's plays that followed the poems were anonymous. The author's last name was not indicated. It should not be thought that this was due to "discrimination" against Shakespeare. The plays of other writers were also first published this way. Note that in those days copyright did not yet exist. Having sold the play to the theater, the writer ceased to be the owner of his work. It belonged to the theater. As a rule, the troupe did not sell plays from its repertoire so that competing theaters would not stage them. But the plague epidemic of 1592-1594. caused the closure of theaters. Needing money, the troupes sold many plays to publishers. Among them were the works of Shakespeare. In addition, if the play was popular, the publishers obtained it through dishonest “pirating” methods, sometimes they simply stole it, and sometimes they sent stenographers to record the performance. Editions of some of Shakespeare's plays were also pirated.

It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare's name appeared for the first time on the title page of an edition of the play. It was the comedy Love's Labour's Lost. And the next year, a book by one literature and theater lover, Francis Merez, “Palladis Tamia, or Treasury of the Mind” was published. It contained a survey of English literature, with Russian writers compared with ancient Roman and Italian authors. Shakespeare is given his due here. He is described as a playwright "most excellent in both types of plays," that is, in tragedy and comedy. At the same time, Merez listed ten plays by Shakespeare.

To reiterate, Shakespeare's position as a playwright was neither honorable nor respected. Writers still had a long struggle ahead for a worthy position in society. Of course, people who understood art already appreciated Shakespeare during his lifetime, as evidenced by a number of reviews from his contemporaries. But his social position does not in the least compare with how he was treated a hundred and fifty years later and later. In the middle of the 18th century. he was recognized as a classic. A genuine cult of Shakespeare arose and developed, and at the beginning of the 19th century. he was hailed as the greatest poet.

Nothing like this even remotely happened during Shakespeare’s lifetime and could not have happened. Therefore, one should not be surprised that it did not occur to any of his contemporaries to collect information about him and write his biography. However, to be precise, it should be mentioned that Shakespeare’s contemporary playwright Thomas Heywood (1573-1641) began writing “Lives of the Poets”, but did not finish this work, and, like most of his plays - and he claimed that he was alone and co-author composed over two hundred of them - it has not survived.

In general, in those days only royalty, the highest prelates and persons canonized were awarded biographies. Renaissance humanists wanted to overcome this bad tradition by creating biographies of poets and artists. The English thinker and writer Thomas More (1478-1535) translated the biography of the Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Thomas More himself was written about by his son-in-law Roper. But about no other writer of the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries. At that time no biographical work was created.

The genre of biography of cultural figures began to develop in England only a quarter of a century after Shakespeare's death, when Isaac Walton wrote a biography of the poet John Donne (1640). Then biographies of other writers appeared.

It was then that we first realized that we needed to collect information about famous people of the past. One of the collectors was the priest Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), who graduated from Cambridge University. The History of the Worthies of England, written by him, was published after his death (1662). He also found Shakespeare's contemporaries alive and wrote down their stories. They are presented in this book, and S. Shenbaum examines the degree of their reliability. Oxford University student John Aubrey (1626-1697) also collected various information about Shakespeare. According to those who knew him, he was not very thorough in checking information, and the legends he collected about Shakespeare were not very accurate. His notes were not fully processed; they were discovered and first published in the 18th century. The reader will become acquainted with them in the interpretation of S. Shenbaum.

So, both during Shakespeare's life and after his death, biographical information about him remained almost unknown. Stratford old-timers told something about him, some legends were preserved and passed on from generation to generation in the acting community. But nothing reliable was known about Shakespeare's life.

Serious study of Shakespeare began in the 18th century. Writers and scientists began to study the life and work of Shakespeare. The first place of honor among them belongs to the playwright Nicholas Rowe (1676-1718). In 1709, he published the collected works of Shakespeare, accompanied by a biography of the poet. He collected various information for her, both reliable and dubious. Be that as it may, he created the first coherent biography of Shakespeare, which formed the basis for all subsequent biographies.

While several scientists and critics of the 18th century. began editing and publishing increasingly advanced texts of Shakespeare's works; they also collected information about Shakespeare's life, his era, other writers of that time, theater and actors, and as a result, a special branch of knowledge arose - Shakespearean studies.

It should not be surprising that scholars have also had to study the texts of Shakespeare's works. In his time, publishing was at a relatively early stage of development. The first book in England was printed in 1475, that is, just ninety years before the birth of Shakespeare. Typesetting and printing were still carried out in a rather primitive way. Norms of the English language and even an ordered, uniform grammar for all did not yet exist. Spelling was not established. It was up to the typesetter to write the words as they were in the author's manuscript, or to enter his own spelling. Without making out what was written in the manuscript, the typographer could read and change the text in his own way. This is how Shakespeare's plays appeared during his lifetime. To the editors The 18th century had to work hard to clear the early printed texts of errors, and this work continues to this day.

It may be asked: didn’t Shakespeare himself oversee the publication of his works? Alas, we can be sure of the accuracy of Shakespeare's text only in relation to the poems "Venus and Adonis" and "Dishonored Lucretia": Shakespeare himself put them into print, and his fellow countryman, who became a London printer, typed and printed them. As for the rest of Shakespeare's works, the situation is this: a number of editions were “pirated”, and, therefore, Shakespeare was not able to monitor how they were typed. But in other cases, things worked out without him. The theater sold the manuscript of the play to the publisher, and the publisher himself oversaw the typesetting and printing. This is how nineteen of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays were published. Eighteen plays were not published at all during his lifetime. The first collection of his plays, the so-called 1623 folio, appeared seven years after Shakespeare's death. It was published by his friends, actors John Heming and Henry Condel. Consequently, Shakespeare did not follow up on the publication of the first complete collection of his plays.

The reader should keep all this in mind when trying to understand the fate of Shakespeare. It is unlike the fate of such great writers as Goethe, Balzac, Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen - in a word, those writers of modern times whose life path is known to the smallest detail.

If, however, we now have an idea about the life of Shakespeare and the conditions under which he worked, then we owe this to many generations of scientists who have long and diligently searched for information about the great playwright.

Shakespeare studies has its own luminaries. I do not mean textual critics who have done a gigantic job of cleaning up texts, and not critics who have created profound interpretations of Shakespeare’s works, but those who have enriched this section of Shakespearean studies - the biography of the writer. I will limit myself to mentioning the most significant scientists.

In the 18th century there were two such scientists. They summarized the results of the research of their predecessors and created fundamental works. George Stevens (1736-1800) accompanied his edition of Shakespeare's works (1778) with an extensive collection of documents and various materials about the life of Shakespeare and the theater of his time. A titan of Shakespearean studies was Edmund Malone (1741-1812), who began his work in collaboration with Stevens and then went his own way. The second edition of Shakespeare he prepared was published after his death in 1821. It was a bridge from Shakespearean studies in the 18th century. to Shakespearean studies of the 19th century. The 21st volume of this edition is the richest collection of commentaries on Shakespeare's works, supplemented by various types of research.

Among the Shakespeare scholars of the 19th century who dealt with the biography of Shakespeare, James Orchard Holywell-Phillips (1820-1889) should be highlighted. A tireless collector and researcher of materials about the life of Shakespeare, he published his first book about him in 1848. Three decades later he produced Sketches of the Life of Shakespeare (1881). Finally, in 1887, he published the final version of his essays.

Holywell-Phillips stuck strictly to the facts. He collected a lot of them. But I left the interpretation to others. In the 19th century Several good works came out that combined facts collected by Shakespeare scholars with attempts to connect them with Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps the most significant of these experiments is the extensive work of the Danish critic and literary scholar Georg Brandes (1842-1927). His William Shakespeare (1896) connects Shakespeare's biography with the culture of the Renaissance in Europe and England, while offering a psychological portrait of Shakespeare as a thinker and artist. Brandes' work exists in two Russian translations.

Rowe, Malone, Holywell-Phillips, Chambers - these are the main milestones on the path to establishing the biography of Shakespeare. It must be said that Chambers’ work was written not for a wide range of readers, but for specialists. This is not a coherent biography, but a collection of documents and legends, carefully commented by scholars.

The work of S. Shenbaum, brought to the attention of the Soviet reader, is structured differently. The American scholar strives to present in clear chronological order everything that is known about each period of Shakespeare's life. It does not concern the playwright’s work at all. Before us is the experience of a biography based on documents. But Shenbaum does not exclude from the field of consideration the legends that have been preserved from those distant times. He carefully examines them, trying to separate the reliable from the fictitious.

Let's face it, Shakespeare himself remains mysterious. It cannot be otherwise, since no documents have been preserved that lift the veil over the writer’s personal life. But the reader gets a broad picture of Shakespeare’s environment, the morals of that era, and learns what Shakespeare was like in everyday life.

Some readers may be disappointed by the fact that many documents indicate how much the great playwright cared about his property wealth. The romantic idea of ​​great poets as beings not of this world, soaring in the skies, is still alive. The documents show that Shakespeare was not like that. Yes, he made efforts to earn enough money to purchase real estate, bought the best stone house in Stratford, acquired several plots of land.

In order to correctly evaluate these facts, we must remember what was said above about the position of William Shakespeare as a playwright. G. Ibsen, B. Shaw, G. Hauptmann could provide themselves with creative work. Shakespeare was not given this. Suffice it to say that he apparently received ten pounds sterling for Hamlet. Even if we take into account that at that time the money was thirty times more expensive, then such a fee can hardly be considered sufficient for a play that was later recognized as perhaps the most popular in the world repertoire. Having received a one-time payment, the playwright no longer had any income from the play. He was not paid for repeated performances of it, nor did he receive anything for publishing the play.

How did Shakespeare support himself? He lived on income from his participation in an acting partnership. Shakespeare invested his funds in the common fund of actor-shareholders. Part of the funds went to rent the land on which the theater was built, the other part went to the construction of the building itself; it was necessary to pay the running costs of organizing performances and hire actors for minor roles. These were the main expenses of the troupe. The smallest share was the payment for new plays.

The income consisted of the money that the collector received from visitors at the entrance to the theater. Money was deducted from the collection amount to cover expenses, and the remainder was divided among the shareholders according to the share contributed to the total capital.

The business side of the troupe was not handled by Shakespeare, but, apparently, by someone else - at one time Augustine Philips, then John Heming. But Shakespeare regularly received his share and invested, as said, in real estate. There is nothing wrong with the fact that he showed enough efficiency in accumulating property that allowed him to live comfortably.

Are we wrong to assume that Shakespeare sought independence? He, a man of low rank and social status, wanted to take a place in society that would make him relatively free and independent of his superiors in class and wealth. In his time, many did not shy away from the most dishonest means of getting rich. Even the philosopher F. Bacon was removed from a high government post for taking bribes. Documents show that Shakespeare was completely clean in property matters. Here's what you should pay attention to for those who feel that property matters take up too much space in Shakespeare's documentation. Moreover, the documents indicate that, having the means, Shakespeare, when required, helped his fellow countrymen and they were confident that they could contact him with a request to lend money.

There is no denying that facts and documents reveal the prosaic side of Shakespeare's life. But this side is in the biography of all great poets and writers. Only in many of them we know other sides, so we neglect the prose of their lives. But everyone had it. Many lived beyond their means and lacked them, but we forget about this, getting carried away by the more interesting circumstances of their lives. As a shareholder in the theater and an actor, Shakespeare earned enough not to borrow. They borrowed from him. Isn't this a testament to a person's character and abilities?

What affected young Shakespeare in this regard? Perhaps it was the sudden ruin of his father, perhaps the pitiful fate of Greene, a playwright and writer, who died at an inn, leaving no money even for a funeral... One way or another, Shakespeare managed to arrange his life in a worthy manner. It’s strange that there are people who almost condemn him for this.

Even worse, there are those who, from the facts we know about Shakespeare’s life, conclude that he was not the author of the plays that are known under his name.

This issue must be addressed, because slander denying Shakespeare's authorship has become widespread.

I am afraid that S. Shenbaum’s book may strengthen the opinion of skeptics and those who do not believe in the authorship of Shakespeare. The author deals with documentation all the time, and it is mainly not related to Shakespeare's creative activity. Only a small number of not so much documents as legends concern Shakespeare, the playwright and poet.

The undoubted gap between the prosaic facts of Shakespeare's everyday activity and his poetic dramaturgy has long raised the question: how to combine the careful collector of property and the owner of the beautiful New Place house with the author of "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear", " Antony and Cleopatra"?

We have to remind again that sentimental ideas about great artists have nothing to do with reality. Voltaire was a rich and tight-fisted landowner. Goethe managed to obtain from publishers the highest literary fees of that time, Balzac and Dostoevsky suffered in the clutches of creditors, and financial issues were very important to them. Let us recall the words of Pushkin: “Inspiration is not for sale, but you can sell a manuscript.” Of course, it is sad that some of the great writers, composers, and artists died in poverty, but unfavorable social circumstances are to blame for this. If Mozart could not get out of poverty, it was not due to lack of enterprise. Businesslike behavior and the ability to stand up for one’s interests do not diminish talent.

Let us therefore discard the supposed moral considerations.

Other opponents of Shakespeare are based on the paucity of documents about his life. Indeed, we know less about Shakespeare than we would like, and a number of circumstances of his life remain unclear (S. Shenbaum very correctly shows which ones). But aren’t there ambiguities in the biographies of people from a time closer to us?

We don’t know as much about any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries as we do about him. Even about Ben Jonson, who cared about his posthumous fame, unlike Shakespeare, who was indifferent to it, we know less.

S. Shenbaum did not try to give a complete picture of Shakespeare in his book. He clearly defined his task - to talk only about facts, documents, legends, without allowing any speculation. The book barely touches on the activities of Shakespeare the playwright. Meanwhile, this side of Shakespeare’s life is documented in its own way. It was possible to establish when certain of his plays were created. We sometimes know when they were performed on stage, we know exactly when they were printed. There are a large number of facts undeniably connected with the personality of Shakespeare. They are not touched upon here, but they exist. The reader only needs to turn to any book about Shakespeare’s work to find out when this or that play was written, where Shakespeare got its plot, when it was staged and published. Sometimes we even know the opinions of contemporaries about Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeare's biography is not only his path to prosperity, but also the path of an artist, poet and playwright, and we know a lot about this. We know how, for example, plays are connected with certain topical events. We know that in the prologue to "Henry V" there is a laudatory allusion to the Earl of Essex, who was Queen Elizabeth's favorite. We know that the accession to the throne of King James I, a Scot by birth, caused the appearance in the troupe's repertoire of Macbeth, a play based on a plot from Scottish history, into which a flattering allusion to the new monarch was inserted. We know that the mentions of recent eclipses of celestial bodies in “King Lear” were a response to these astronomical phenomena, that the wonders of distant lands, which were told by sailors who traveled to America, inspired the fantasy of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. It would be long to list everything that in Shakespeare’s works directly or indirectly reflected what he and his contemporaries lived by.

Anyone who has read Shakespeare carefully and more than once gets an idea of ​​his personality in the same way as those who love Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky create their own image of these writers in their souls. Of course, everyone has their own perception of genius. But any genius has certain and generally recognized traits. So it is with Shakespeare.

One of the main "charges" against the Stratford native is lack of education. It is true that he did not graduate from university, like his predecessors Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene, but this did not prevent him from surpassing them artistically.

It has been doubted whether Shakespeare graduated from school, since no list of pupils at Stratford Grammar School has survived. But the absence of an education document does not mean a lack of education.

Others say that Shakespeare could not write at all. But even the most ardent opponents of the Stratfordian do not deny that he was an actor. And to master this profession required the ability to read and memorize the role. If he could read, then somehow, one must assume, he managed to learn to write.

If, on the one hand, opponents of Shakespeare's authorship in every possible way belittle the knowledge and abilities of the actor Shakespeare, then, on the other hand, they place an unusually high value on the intelligence and knowledge of the one who wrote the plays, and believe that their author could only be a person who belonged to the circles of the highest society. The “theory” that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the philosopher F. Bacon has long since collapsed, although supporters of Bacon’s authorship still exist.

But most of the opponents of the Stratfordian put forward as the author of Shakespeare's plays such representatives of the Elizabethan nobility as the Earl of Oxford, Earl Darby, Earl of Retland, Lord Strange. Since few people know their biographies, supporters of these “theories” are free to come up with all sorts of “facts” and coincidences that supposedly confirm their authorship. Let me give you an illustrative example. If we accept the version of the supporters of Earl Rutland, then he should have written Shakespeare's first play when he was twelve years old. It's hard to believe that this prodigy created Richard III at the age of fifteen.

In addition to the earls, playwright Christopher Marlowe was proposed as the author of Shakespeare's plays. The creator of this version, the American K. Hoffman, argued that Marlowe was not killed in the brawl of 1593, but went into hiding and continued to write plays, one better than the other, which the actor Shakespeare handed over to the troupe, keeping the secret of authorship. But if we talk about documents, Marlowe’s death is documented very thoroughly. The fantastic nature of the Marlowe-Shakespeare version is obvious. But this is not the most ridiculous “theory”. It occurred to someone that Shakespeare's plays were written by none other than Queen Elizabeth. Someone invented that Shakespeare's wife was engaged in writing, and he only arranged her plays in the theater and acted in them himself.

What is the main flaw of all anti-Shakespearean hypotheses? It’s not even that their authors are trying to replace Shakespeare with a man with a more or less romantic biography (mostly unreliable and fictitious), but that the creator of Shakespeare’s plays reflected his life in them, was in turn Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Prospero. Here, however, there is a problem. If Shakespeare's plays are a reflection of the life of their author, then shouldn't he be considered a cruel and treacherous murderer like Richard III or Macbeth?

The naive identification of the author's personality with his heroes is refuted by the entire history of world literature. True, writers have always used personal experience when creating images of their heroes, but rarely directly. In Shakespeare's time, confessional motifs had not yet been found in drama. They began to appear only in romantic art, and then not so much in drama as in poetry and novels. In the XVI-XVII centuries. this has not yet taken place.

In this regard, the authors of anti-Shakespearean “theories” reveal a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. It has long been generally accepted that Shakespeare is objective in his work, and therefore it is in vain to look for personal motives in his plays. In general, it should be noted that for anti-Shakespeareanists, Shakespeare’s works in themselves as phenomena of art are of no interest; they only serve them to search for the “key” to the imaginary mystery of Shakespeare’s authorship.

In fact, there is no mystery. Shakespeare's plays, written by actor William Shakespeare. It's him! There can be no doubt about this, and for a very simple reason. The whole world recognized Shakespeare as the greatest playwright. Could any of the above-mentioned counts, during leisure hours, by the way, write plays that have stood the test of time and still excite audiences with the depth of their understanding of life and the skill of depicting human characters? Of course not. Shakespeare's plays are the fruit of high professional skill. They could only be written by a person who knew the theater thoroughly and deeply understood the laws of influencing the audience.

Shakespeare's plays were not written for the theater in general, but for a very specific troupe. Beginning in 1594, when an acting partnership was formed, taken under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare created plays designed for the actors of his troupe. The main roles in each play were intended for shareholders of the acting partnership. By carefully reading the plays, you can determine what acting roles the roles in Shakespeare's chronicles, tragedies and comedies are intended for.

The company's premier was Richard Burbage (1568-1619). The roles of Richard III, Romeo, Brutus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Antony, and Prospero were written for him. But the troupe included actors for the second most important roles. So, in the second half of the 1590s. Shakespeare wrote roles for an actor with a hot and stormy temperament. He played the bully Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and the fiery, warlike Harry Percy, nicknamed Hot Spur. It is quite obvious that the troupe had a magnificent comedian, a fat and middle-aged actor, who shone so much as Falstaff in the first part of Henry IV that Shakespeare wrote a sequel for him - the second part of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

There were no actresses at that time, and female roles were played by boys specially trained by adult actors in whose families they lived. Judging by the number of female roles in Shakespeare's plays, one can determine how many boy actors were in the troupe at one time or another. In the 1590s, when Shakespeare created his cheerful comedies, there were up to four boys in the troupe, three at any rate. In A Midsummer Night's Dream there are four female roles - Hippolyta, Titania, Hermia, Helen. However, the two roles - Hippolyta and Titania - could have been played by the same boy, since these two characters do not appear together. In Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It.

"Twelfth Night" three female roles. At the beginning of the 17th century. There are fewer boy actors in the troupe. In "Hamlet", "Julius Caesar", "Troilus and Cressida" there are two female roles each. Such facts are not accidental. Shakespeare always adapted his plays to the characteristics of the troupe's actors, using their physical and vocal abilities.

Taking a look at the list of characters in any of Shakespeare's plays, it is easy to see that their number reaches thirty, or even more. Meanwhile, the troupe usually had no more than eight main actors (shareholders) and eight to ten actors hired for minor roles. It was established that actors who worked in a hired troupe usually played at least two roles - one at the beginning of the play, the other in its second half.

Later actors who played the roles of Shakespearean heroes made an interesting discovery. It turned out that Shakespeare took into account the physical capabilities of the actor and created pauses for him throughout the play when he did not participate in the action and could rest behind the scenes, preparing for the next scene, which required a lot of effort. This is especially noticeable between the third and fifth acts of the play; In the fourth acts of tragedies, the leading actor in some scenes does not appear to the audience at all. What count, who supposedly wrote plays, could have come up with such calculations? Only a playwright who was also an actor could take into account all the details necessary for the successful performance of a play on stage.

After reading what is written here, some readers will still not believe us and will demand unconditional documentary evidence that it was the actor Shakespeare who wrote all the plays attributed to him. Such evidence was left by Shakespeare's contemporaries, primarily those associated with the theater. This evidence is either given in S. Shenbaum’s book or is briefly mentioned in it. Since S. Shenbaum himself does not doubt that the plays belong to Shakespeare, he considers the statements of his contemporaries from a slightly different aspect.

An acknowledgment that Shakespeare was both an actor and a playwright is given by the writer Robert Greene. Dying, he warned his fellow writers against actors: “Do not trust them [actors]; there is an upstart - a crow among them, adorned with our plumage, who, “with the heart of a tiger in the skin of a performer,” believes that he is able to pompously pronounce his blank verse, like the best of you, and he is a pure “jack of all trades” - in his imagination he believes himself to be the only stage-shaker in the country."

Gabriel Harvey, in his personal notes of the same kind, made between 1598 and 1601, notes: "The youth greatly like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and those who are more mature in mind prefer his Lucretia and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark "(Ibid., p. 197).

The epithet “honey-tongued” was first applied to Shakespeare by F. Merez in 1598, and, as we see, it quickly stuck with him.

One passage from Return from Parnassus is especially important. Here, among the characters are actors from Shakespeare's troupe, comedian Kemp and tragedian Richard Burbage. Cambridge pedants do not favor folk theater here either. They portray Kemp as ignorant. This is clear from his reasoning: “Few of these university ones know how to write plays well. They smell too much of this writer Ovid and this writer Metamorphosis and talk too much about Proserpina and Jupiter...” (Ibid.) This is an attack against the public folk theater in defense of academic drama, following the models of the Roman classics. And then we hear from Kemp a direct contrast between the “ignorant” Shakespeare and the “educated” writers: “But our friend Shakespeare puts them all to shame. And Ben Jonson to boot” (Ibid.). Supporters of academic drama bitterly admit that “unlearned” playwrights, like Shakespeare, enjoy great success with audiences. The Cambridges are outraged by this and laugh at the tastes of the “crowd”.

Other contemporary poets and playwrights also praised Shakespeare. No one had even a shadow of doubt that he was the author of the plays, poems and sonnets he created.

Of particular interest are those reviews that indicate a personal acquaintance of the writer with Shakespeare. S. Shenbaum cites in his book a review from the writer John Davis, who joked, saying that Shakespeare, who played kings, himself would have been a worthy interlocutor for monarchs, and noted that there was something regal in his personality. Davis entitled his epigram: “To our Terence, Mr. William Shakespeare.” This speaks directly about Shakespeare as an actor and playwright at the same time.

Doubts about Shakespeare's authorship are ridiculous and absurd. After all, it is even known how he wrote. This is evidenced by his actor friends, who published the first collection of Shakespeare's plays, Heming and Condel: "His thought always kept pace with the pen, and he expressed his plans with such ease that we did not find any blots in his manuscripts." Ben Jonson also knew Shakespeare's style of writing, but treated it differently than the actors. S. Shenbaum quotes him as saying that Shakespeare “wrote with such ease that sometimes it was necessary to stop him.”

Do we need any more proof that Shakespeare was the author of his works?

S. Shenbaum's book immerses the reader in the world of the everyday life that surrounded Shakespeare. Everyday little things and details should not, however, overshadow the great poet and playwright. Having satisfied, as far as possible, curiosity regarding the circumstances of Shakespeare's life, let us turn to his works. It is in them that he appears before us in all his gigantic stature as a great expert on human souls, a thinker who understood the course of world history, a playwright who skillfully expressed the contradictions and conflicts of reality, a wonderful master of poetry who had a perfect command of the word. It is this Shakespeare that most demands our attention. Shakespeare the artist is inexhaustibly rich in discoveries about life and man.

A. Anikst

Nottingham University professor Brean Hammond, one of Britain's leading Shakespeare scholars, concluded that the play, which for more than 250 years was considered a pastiche of Shakespeare, was in fact written by the classic.

When Theobald quarreled with the famous poet Alexander Pope, the latter declared "Double Lies" a falsification. This opinion was accepted by the public - "Double Lies" has since been staged only twice - in 1749. Now experts are working on a textual reconstruction of the 17th-century original (illustration from Wikimedia Commons).

Which is very symbolic, we are talking about a work called Double Falshood, or Distrest Lovers (“Double Lies, or Distressed Lovers”). The text was introduced in 1727 by theater impresario Lewis Theobald, who claimed that the production was based on Shakespeare's play Cardenio.

This work is now considered lost. "Cardenio", written by Shakespeare together with John Fletcher based on one of the plot lines of "Don Quixote", was staged only once during the author's lifetime, in 1613. Theobald stated that he had three versions of Shakespeare's play at once, which were subjected to "creative processing" (as was widespread at that time).

Hammond, who spent ten years studying Theobald's play, came to the conclusion that it was indeed based on Shakespeare's text. It was also possible to identify traces of the work of two other authors in the work. According to the scientist, the passages in the first part of the play are distinguished by “density, sophistication of rhythm and richness of metaphors,” characteristic of the style of the great playwright.

Some of the concrete evidence is already being given: for example, in “Double Lies” there are marker words that are not found in other texts by Fletcher and Theobald, for example, the epithet “absonant” in relation to sound (“harsh”, “dissonant”). "I think Shakespeare's hand is clearly visible in acts one and two, and two scenes in act three," says Hammond.

Material provided by the online magazine MEMBRANA (www.membrana.ru)

Shakespeare's body proposed to be exhumed ((June 24, 2011, 18:12 | Text: Dmitry Tselikov | http://culture.compulenta.ru/618417/))

Scientists have asked permission to exhume William Shakespeare's body in the hope of determining how he died.

Paleontologists sent an official statement to the Anglican Church, because the playwright’s grave is located in the local parish church in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Francis Thackeray from the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) believes that modern computer technology will make it possible to establish all the nuances of the health and lifestyle of the great writer (of course, if these are his works), who died in 1616 for unknown reasons. In addition, it would be possible to finally restore the appearance of Shakespeare, because the 400th anniversary of his death is coming.

Mr. Thackeray notes that technology has now reached such heights that a skeleton can be studied without moving it.

The scientist first made this proposal about ten years ago, after studying 24 pipes found during excavations in the playwright’s garden. He found that they were used to smoke hemp: in the era of Shakespeare, this plant was cultivated and consumed throughout Great Britain. Some fans of the playwright's work were furious: they say that a drug addict could not create anything great.

A spokesman for the Church of England said he was not aware of the request, but that in any case the decision would be taken at diocesan level.

English poet and playwright, often considered the greatest English-language writer and one of the world's best playwrights; often called England's national poet

short biography

An outstanding playwright, one of the most famous in the world, a poet, was a native of Stratford-upon-Avon. Here, in Warwickshire, he was born in 1564. His date of birth is unknown. It is generally accepted that this is April 23, but the day of baptism, April 26, is reliably established. His father was a wealthy artisan, a respected man in the city, and his mother was a representative of an old Saxon family.

During 1569-1571. Shakespeare was a student at Junior School and later at Stratford High School. She had a decent level of education, but it is not known for certain whether William graduated from her or not - most likely, due to family financial difficulties, he had to leave his studies and help his father. As an 18-year-old boy, William married the pregnant Anne Hathaway, who was 8 years older than him; By marrying, the young people were saved from dishonor and punishment. In 1583, the Shakespeare couple had a daughter, and 2 years later, a pair of opposite-sex twins. Shakespeare left Stratford in the 2nd half of the 80s. and moved to London.

The period of Shakespeare's biography, affecting subsequent years, is usually called the dark, or lost years, because... There is no information about his life at this time. It is generally accepted that the move to London took place approximately in 1587, but there are other versions. Be that as it may, in 1592 Shakespeare was already the author of the historical chronicle “Henry VI”.

During 1592-1594. theaters in the English capital were closed due to the plague epidemic. To fill the gap, Shakespeare writes plays, in particular, “The Taming of the Shrew,” the tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” the poems “Lucretia” and “Venus and Adonis.” Also in the period from 1594 to 1600, Shakespeare wrote a large number of sonnets. All this makes him a famous writer. When the theaters opened, in 1594 Shakespeare entered a new line-up - the so-called. a troupe of the Lord Chamberlain's servants, named after its patron. Shakespeare was not only an actor, but also a shareholder.

Throughout 1595-1596. The famous tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” was written, as well as “The Merchant of Venice” - a comedy that was later called “serious” for the first time. If earlier the authors of plays for the theater were “university minds,” then by this time their role was lost: someone stopped writing, someone died. They were replaced by Shakespeare, thereby marking a new era in the development of theatrical art.

In 1599, another significant event took place in Shakespeare’s biography - the opening of the Globe Theater, in which he was an actor, chief playwright and one of the owners. A year after this, the famous “Hamlet” was released, opening the period of “great tragedies”, which include “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”. The comedies written at this time also had a much more serious and sometimes pessimistic content. During the same period of his life, Shakespeare became a nobleman and acquired a large house in Stratford, the second largest in the city.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and the rise to power of James I, the king himself became the patron of the Lord Chamberlain's troupe. 1606 became the starting point for the last period in Shakespeare’s literary activity, marked, in particular, by the creation of tragedies based on the plots of antiquity (“Coriolanus”, “Antony and Cleopatra”), as well as the romantic tragicomedies “The Tempest”, “The Winter’s Tale” and etc.

Around 1612, Shakespeare, whose career was developing very successfully, unexpectedly left the capital and returned to Stratford, to his family. Researchers suggest that the reason for such a drastic step was a serious illness. In March 1616, Shakespeare drew up his famous will, which later created the ground for the so-called. Shakespeare's question, which considers the problem of the authorship of his works and his very personality. On April 3, 1616, one of the world's greatest playwrights died; he was buried on the outskirts of his hometown in the church of St. Trinity.

During his lifetime, William Shakespeare's works were published only in separate form, sometimes in the form of collections (sonnets). The first complete collection of works by friends was prepared and published in 1623. The so-called Shakespearean canon included 37 plays; During the playwright's lifetime, only 18 of them were published. His work marked the end of the process of creating the English language and culture and drew a line under the European Renaissance. To this day, his plays are an integral part and the basis of the repertoire of theaters around the world. In the age of new technologies, almost all of Shakespeare's drama has been filmed.

Biography from Wikipedia

Shakespeare born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: daughter Suzanne and twins Hamnet and Judith. Shakespeare's career began between 1585 and 1592, when he moved to London. He soon became a successful actor, playwright, and co-owner of a theater company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. Around 1613, at the age of 48, he returned to Stratford, where he died three years later. Little historical evidence of Shakespeare's life has been preserved, and theories about his life are created on the basis of official documents and testimonies of his contemporaries, so questions regarding his appearance and religious views are still discussed in the scientific community, and there is also a point of view that the works attributed to him were created by whom something else; it is popular in culture, although rejected by the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars.

Most of Shakespeare's works were written between 1589 and 1613. His early plays are mainly comedies and chronicles, in which Shakespeare excelled considerably. Then came a period of tragedy in his work, including Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth, which are considered among the best in the English language. At the end of his career, Shakespeare wrote several tragicomedies and also collaborated with other writers.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime. In 1623, two of Shakespeare's friends, John Heming and Henry Condell, published the First Folio, a collection of all but two of Shakespeare's plays currently included in the canon. Later, various researchers attributed several more plays (or their fragments) to Shakespeare with varying degrees of evidence.

Already during his lifetime, Shakespeare received praise for his works, but he truly became popular only in the 19th century. In particular, the Romanticists and Victorians worshiped Shakespeare so much that Bernard Shaw called it "bardolatry." Shakespeare's works remain popular today and are constantly being studied and reinterpreted to suit political and cultural conditions.

early years

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) in 1564, baptized on April 26, the exact date of birth is unknown. Tradition places his birth on April 23: this date coincides with the precisely known day of his death. In addition, April 23 marks the day of St. George, the patron saint of England, and legend could specially coincide with this day the birth of the greatest national poet. From English, the surname “Shakespeare” is translated as “shaking with a spear.”

His father, John Shakespeare (1530-1601), was a wealthy artisan (glover) who was often elected to various significant public positions. In 1565, John Shakespeare was an alderman, and in 1568 he was a bailiff (head of the city council). He did not attend church services, for which he paid large fines (it is possible that he was a secret Catholic).

Shakespeare's mother, born Mary Arden (1537-1608), belonged to one of the oldest Saxon families. The couple had 8 children in total, William was born third.

It is believed that Shakespeare studied at the Stratford “grammar school” (English grammar school), where he was supposed to gain good knowledge of Latin: the Stratford teacher of Latin language and literature wrote poetry in Latin. Some scholars claim that Shakespeare attended King Edward VI's school in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he studied the works of poets such as Ovid and Plautus, but the school's journals have not survived and nothing can be said for sure.

In 1582, at the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a local landowner, who was 8 years his senior. At the time of the marriage, Anne was pregnant. In 1583, the couple had a daughter, Susan (baptized on May 23), and in 1585, twins: a son, Hamnet, who died at age 11 in August 1596, and a daughter, Judith (baptized on February 2).

There are only assumptions about the further (over seven years) events in Shakespeare's life. The first mention of a London theatrical career dates back to 1592, and the period between 1585 and 1592 is what scholars call Shakespeare's "lost years." Attempts by biographers to learn about Shakespeare's actions during this period have resulted in many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, believed that he left Stratford to avoid prosecution for poaching the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. It is also assumed that Shakespeare took revenge on Lucy by writing several obscene ballads about him. According to another 18th-century version, Shakespeare began his theatrical career by looking after the horses of London theater patrons. John Aubrey wrote that Shakespeare was a schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars believed that Shakespeare was the teacher of Alexander Naughton from Lancashire, since this Catholic landowner had a certain “William Shakeshaft.” There is little basis for this theory, other than rumors that spread after Shakespeare's death, and, furthermore, "Shakeshaft" is a fairly common surname in Lancashire.

London and theatrical career

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing theatrical works and also moved to London, but the first sources that have reached us that speak about this date back to 1592. This year, the diary of entrepreneur Philip Henslowe mentions Shakespeare's historical chronicle Henry VI, which was shown at Henslowe's Rose Theater. In the same year, a pamphlet by playwright and prose writer Robert Greene was published posthumously, where the latter angrily attacked Shakespeare, without naming his last name, but ironically playing with it - “shake-scene,” paraphrasing a line from the third part of “Henry VI” “ Oh, the heart of a tiger in this woman’s skin!” like “the heart of a tiger in the skin of a performer.” Scholars disagree as to the exact meaning of these words, but it is generally accepted that Greene accused Shakespeare of trying to catch up with highly educated writers ("university minds") such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, and Greene himself.

Biographers believe that Shakespeare's career could have begun at any time from the mid-1580s. Since 1594, Shakespeare's plays have only been performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. This troupe also included Shakespeare, who at the end of the same 1594 became its co-owner. The troupe soon became one of the leading theater groups in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the troupe received a royal patent from the new ruler, James I, and became known as the King's Men.

In 1599, a partnership of group members built a new theater on the south bank of the Thames, called the Globe. In 1608 they also purchased the Blackfriars closed theatre. Records of Shakespeare's real estate purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597 he bought the second largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto in 1594. In 1598, his name began to appear on the title pages of publications. But even after Shakespeare became famous as a playwright, he continued to play in theaters. In the 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's works, Shakespeare's name is included in the list of actors who performed the plays. "Everyone has their own quirks"(1598) and "The Fall of Sejanus"(1603). However, his name was not on the list of actors for Johnson's play. "Volpone" 1605, which is perceived by some scholars as a sign of the end of Shakespeare's London career. However, in the First Folio of 1623 Shakespeare is called "the chief actor in all these plays", and some of them were first performed after "Volpone", although it is not known for certain what roles Shakespeare played in them. In 1610, John Davis wrote that "good Will" played "royal" roles. In 1709, in his work, Rowe recorded the already established opinion that Shakespeare was playing the shadow of Hamlet's father. It was also later claimed that he played the role of Adam in "As You Like It" and Chora's "Henry V", although scientists doubt the reliability of this information.

During his acting and dramatic career, Shakespeare lived in London, but also spent some of his time in Stratford. In 1596, the year after purchasing New Place, he was residing in the parish of St Helena, Bishopgate, on the north side of the Thames. After the Globe Theater was built in 1599, Shakespeare moved to the other side of the river - to Southwark, where the theater was located. In 1604 he moved across the river again, this time to the area north of St Paul's Cathedral, where there were a large number of good houses. He rented rooms from a Huguenot Frenchman named Christopher Mountjoy, a manufacturer of women's wigs and hats.

Last years and death

There is a traditional belief that Shakespeare moved to Stratford a few years before his death. The first Shakespeare biographer to convey this opinion was Rowe. One reason for this may be that London's public theaters were repeatedly closed due to outbreaks of plague, and actors did not have enough work. Complete retirement was rare in those days, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612, Shakespeare acted as a witness in the case Bellot v Mountjoy, a lawsuit over the wedding dowry of Mountjoy's daughter Mary. In March 1613 he bought a house in the former parish of Blackfriar; in November 1614 he spent several weeks with his brother-in-law, John Hall.

After 1606-1607, Shakespeare wrote only a few plays, and after 1613 he stopped writing them altogether. He co-wrote his last three plays with another playwright, possibly John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as chief playwright of the King's Men.

All of Shakespeare's surviving signatures on documents (1612-1613) are distinguished by very poor handwriting, on the basis of which some researchers believe that he was seriously ill at that time.

On April 23 (May 3), 1616, Shakespeare died. It is traditionally believed that he died on his birthday, but there is no certainty that Shakespeare was born on April 23. Shakespeare was survived by his widow, Anne (d. 1623), and two daughters. Susan Shakespeare had been married to John Hall since 1607, and Judith Shakespeare married winemaker Thomas Quiney two months after Shakespeare's death.

In his will, Shakespeare left most of his real estate to his eldest daughter, Susan. After her, it was to be inherited by her direct descendants. Judith had three children, all of whom died without marrying. Susan had one daughter, Elizabeth, who married twice but died childless in 1670. She was the last direct descendant of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's will, his wife is mentioned only briefly, but she was already supposed to receive a third of her husband's entire estate. However, it indicated that he was leaving her “my second best bed,” and this fact led to many different assumptions. Some scholars consider this an insult to Anne, while others argue that the second best bed is the marital bed, and therefore there is nothing offensive about it.

Three days later, Shakespeare's body was buried in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church. The epitaph is written on his tombstone:

Good friend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased hear.
Bleste be ye man yt spares the stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.

Friend, for God's sake, don't swarm
The remains taken by this earth;
He who is untouched is blessed for centuries,
And cursed is the one who touched my ashes.
(Translation by A. Velichansky)

Some time before 1623, a painted bust of Shakespeare was erected in the church, showing him in the act of writing. Epitaphs in English and Latin compare Shakespeare to the wise King of Pylos, Nestor, Socrates and Virgil.

There are many statues of Shakespeare around the world, including funerary monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.

To mark the quadcentenary of the playwright's death, the Royal Mint issued three two-pound coins (dated 2016), symbolizing the three groups of his works: comedies, chronicles and tragedies.

Creation

Shakespeare's literary heritage is divided into two unequal parts: poetic (poems and sonnets) and dramatic. V. G. Belinsky wrote that “it would be too bold and strange to give Shakespeare a decisive advantage over all the poets of mankind, as a poet himself, but as a playwright he is now left without a rival whose name could be put next to his name.”

The question of periodization

Researchers of Shakespeare's work (Danish literary critic G. Brandes, publisher of the Russian complete works of Shakespeare S. A. Vengerov) at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, based on the chronology of the works, presented his spiritual evolution from a “cheerful mood”, faith in the triumph of justice , humanistic ideals at the beginning of the journey until disappointment and the destruction of all illusions at the end. However, in recent years, an opinion has emerged that inferring the identity of an author from his works is a mistake.

In 1930, Shakespeare scholar E. C. Chambers proposed a chronology of Shakespeare's work according to genre criteria; it was later corrected by J. McManway. Four periods were distinguished: first (1590-1594) - early: chronicles, Renaissance comedies, “tragedy of horror” (“Titus Andronicus”), two poems; the second (1594-1600) - Renaissance comedies, the first mature tragedy (Romeo and Juliet), chronicles with elements of tragedy, ancient tragedy (Julius Caesar), sonnets; third (1601-1608) - great tragedies, ancient tragedies, “dark comedies”; fourth (1609-1613) - drama-fairy tales with a tragic beginning and a happy ending. Some Shakespeare scholars, including A. A. Smirnov, combined the first and second periods into one early one.

Dramaturgy

Most playwrights of the period co-authored their works, and critics believe that Shakespeare also co-wrote some of his plays; This mainly applies to early and late works. For some works, such as "Titus Andronicus" and early history plays, it is not established that they were definitely co-written, whereas for "Two noble relatives" and the lost play "Cardenio" this is documented. Evidence obtained from the texts also suggests that some works were reworked by other writers in relation to the original text.

Some of Shakespeare's earliest works are "Richard III" and three parts "Henry VI", written in the early 1590s, a period when historical drama was in vogue. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, but textual scholars suggest that "Titus Andronicus", "Comedy of Errors", "The Taming of the Shrew" And "Two Gentlemen of Verona" also refer to the beginning of Shakespeare's career. His first chronicles, most likely based on the 1587 edition "Chronicle of England, Scotland and Ireland" Raphael Holinshed, represented the destructive results of the rule of weak and corrupt rulers and, to some extent, served as justification for the emergence of the Tudor dynasty. Shakespeare's early plays were influenced by the work of other Elizabethan playwrights, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, the tradition of medieval drama, and the plays of Seneca. "Comedy of Errors" also built according to the classical model, no sources were found for "The Taming of the Shrew", although it is related to another play of a similar name played in London theaters in the 1590s and may have folk roots.

Oberon, Titania and Puck dance with the fairies. William Blake, 1786 Tate Britain.

In the mid-1590s, Shakespeare made a transition from comedies that were mocking and farcical in style to romantic works. "A dream in a summer night" is a witty mixture of romance, fairytale magic and low-life life. In the next, also romantic, comedy by Shakespeare "The Merchant of Venice" contains a portrait of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects the racial prejudices of the Elizabethan English. A witty play "Much ado about nothing", beautifully depicting life in the provinces "As You Like It" and enlivened by fun "Twelfth Night" complement a number of Shakespeare's comedies. After the lyrical "Richard II", written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into his chronicles "Henry IV, Part 1" And 2 , And "Henry V". His characters become more complex and tender, he switches very deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, so that his mature works achieve narrative diversity. This period began and ended with tragedies: "Romeo and Juliet", the famous story of love and death of a girl and a boy, and "Julius Caesar", based on "Comparative Lives" Plutarch.

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Henry Fuseli, 1780-85. Kunsthaus (Zurich)

At the beginning of the 17th century, Shakespeare wrote several so-called “problem plays”: "Measure for measure", "Troilus and Cressida" And , as well as a number of the most famous tragedies. Many critics believe that the tragedies of this period represent the peak of Shakespeare's work. Hamlet, the title character of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, is perhaps the playwright's most explored character; This is especially true of the famous soliloquy, which begins “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Unlike the introverted Hamlet, the hesitant hero, the heroes of subsequent tragedies, King Lear and Othello, suffer from too hasty decisions. Often Shakespeare's tragedy is built on the shortcomings or fatal actions of the heroes that destroy him and his loved ones. IN "Othello" The villain Iago brings the title character's jealousy to a point, and he kills his innocent wife. IN "King Lear" the old king makes the fatal mistake of abandoning his right to rule, which leads to horrific events such as the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. IN "Macbeth", Shakespeare's shortest and most condensed tragedy, uncontrollable ambition drives Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, and are ultimately destroyed by the realization of their guilt. In this play, Shakespeare adds an element of the supernatural to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, "Antony and Cleopatra" And "Coriolanus", according to some critics, contain some of his most beautiful poetry.

In the final period of his work, Shakespeare turned to the genre of romance or tragicomedy and completed three major plays: "Cymbeline", "Winter's Tale" And "Storm", and also, together with another playwright, a play "Pericles". The works of this period are less gloomy than the tragedies that preceded them, but more serious than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and deliverance from troubles. Some researchers believe that these changes arose from Shakespeare's changing outlook on life, which became more relaxed, but perhaps the plays simply reflected the theatrical fashion of the time. Shakespeare's two other surviving plays were written by him in collaboration, possibly with John Fletcher: "Henry VIII" And "Two noble relatives".

Lifetime productions

It is not yet known exactly for which theater companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. So, on the title page of the publication "Titus Andronicus" 1594 indicates that the play was performed by three different groups. After the plague of 1592-1593, Shakespeare's plays were already staged by his own company at the Theater and Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. The first part was staged there "Henry IV". After a quarrel with its owner, the company left the Playhouse and built the Globe Theater on the south side of the Thames, in Southwark, the first theater built by actors for actors. The Globe opened in the fall of 1599, and one of the first plays staged there was "Julius Caesar". Most of Shakespeare's best-known plays written after 1599 were produced for the Globe, including "Hamlet", "Othello" And "King Lear".

Shakespeare's troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had a special relationship with King James I, especially after it was renamed the King's Men in 1603. Although records of productions are sparse, it can be said that there were 7 productions of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two "The Merchant of Venice". After 1608 they began performing at the Blackfriars indoor theater in the winter and working at the Globe in the summer. Good premises, combined with royal patronage, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more complex devices into the props of his plays. For example, in "Cymbeline" Jupiter descends “with thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle: He throws lightning. Ghosts fall to their knees."

Shakespeare's troupe included such famous actors as Richard Burbage, William Kemp, Neri Condell and John Heminges. Burbage was the original leading actor in many of Shakespeare's plays, including "Richard III", "Hamlet", "Othello" And "King Lear". Popular comic actor William Kemp, among other characters, played Pietro in "Romeo and Juliet" and Dogwood in "Much ado about nothing". At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries he was replaced by Robert Armin, who played such roles as Touchstone from "As You Like It" and the Jester from "King Lear". In 1613, Henry Wotton reported that the play had been staged. "Henry VIII". On June 29, during the production of this performance, the cannon misfired and set fire to the thatched roof of the building, so that the entire theater burned down. This fact allows us to establish with good accuracy the time when the play was written.

First publications

It is believed that half (18) of Shakespeare's plays were published in one way or another during the playwright's lifetime. The most important publication of Shakespeare's heritage is rightfully considered the 1623 folio (the so-called “First Folio”), published by Edward Blount and William Jaggard as part of the so-called “Chester Collection”; printers Worrall and Col. This edition includes 36 plays by Shakespeare - all except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is this publication that underlies all research in the field of Shakespearean studies.

This project was made possible thanks to the efforts of John Heminge and Henry Condell, friends and colleagues of Shakespeare. The book is preceded by a message to readers on behalf of Heminge and Condell, as well as a poetic dedication to Shakespeare by playwright Ben Jonson, who also contributed to the publication of the First Folio.

Poems

In 1593 and 1594, when theaters were closed due to the plague, Shakespeare wrote two erotic poems, "Venus and Adonis" And "Dishonored Lucretia". These poems were dedicated to Henry Risley, Earl of Southampton. IN "Venus and Adonis" innocent Adonis rejects Venus's sexual advances; whereas in "Dishonored Lucretia" the virtuous wife Lucretia is raped by Tarquinius. Influenced Metamorphosis Ovid, the poems show the feeling of guilt and the terrible consequences of uncontrolled love. Both poems were popular and were republished several times during Shakespeare's lifetime. Third poem "A Lover's Complaint", in which a girl complains about a seductive deceiver, was published in the first edition Sonnets in 1609. Most scientists now accept that "A Lover's Complaint" Shakespeare wrote it. In the poem "Phoenix and the Dove", printed in 1601 in the collection of Robert Chester "Love's Martyr", tells the story of the sad death of the mythological phoenix and his lover, the faithful dove. In 1599, two sonnets by Shakespeare in the name of Shakespeare, but without his consent in "The Passionate Pilgrim".

Sonnets

A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines. In Shakespeare's sonnets, the following rhyme scheme is adopted: abab cdcd efef gg, that is, three quatrains with cross rhymes, and one couplet (a type introduced by the poet Earl of Surrey, executed under Henry VIII).

In total, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and most of them were created in the years 1592-1599. They were first printed without the author's knowledge in 1609. Two of them were published back in 1599 in the collection “The Passionate Pilgrim”. These are sonnets 138 And 144 .

The entire cycle of sonnets falls into separate thematic groups:

• Sonnets dedicated to a friend: 1 -126
• Chanting a friend: 1 -26
• Friendship Tests: 27 -99
• The bitterness of separation: 27 -32
• First disappointment in a friend: 33 -42
• Longing and fears: 43 -55
• Growing alienation and melancholy: 56 -75
• Rivalry and jealousy towards other poets: 76 -96
• “Winter” of separation: 97 -99
• A celebration of renewed friendship: 100 -126
• Sonnets dedicated to a dark-skinned lover: 127 -152
• Conclusion - the joy and beauty of love: 153 -154

Sonnet 126 violates the canon - it has only 12 lines and a different rhyme pattern. Sometimes it is considered a division between two conventional parts of the cycle - sonnets dedicated to friendship (1-126) and addressed to the “dark lady” (127-154). Sonnet 145 written in iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter and differs in style from the others; it is sometimes referred to as an early period and its heroine is identified with Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway (whose surname, perhaps as a pun on "hate away", is introduced in the sonnet).

Style

The language of Shakespeare's first plays is the language common to plays of this period. This stylized language does not always allow the playwright to reveal his characters. Poetry is often laden with complex metaphors and sentences, and the language is more conducive to recitation than to live acting. For example, ceremonial speeches "Titus Andronicus", according to some critics, often slow down the action; character language "Two Gentlemen of Verona" seems unnatural.

Soon, however, Shakespeare begins to adapt the traditional style to his own purposes. Initial soliloquy from "Richard III" goes back to the self-talk of Vice, a traditional character in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's powerful monologues would later develop into the monologues of Shakespeare's later plays. All plays mark the transition from a traditional style to a new one. Throughout the rest of his career, Shakespeare combines them, and one of the most successful examples of mixing styles is "Romeo and Juliet". By the mid-1590s, the time of creation "Romeo and Juliet", "Richard II" And "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Shakespeare's style becomes more natural. Metaphors and figurative expressions are increasingly consistent with the needs of drama.

The standard poetic form used by Shakespeare is blank verse, written in iambic pentameter. The blank verse of the early and later plays differ significantly. The early one is often beautiful, but, as a rule, at the end of the line either the entire sentence or its semantic part ends, which creates monotony. After Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to modify it by breaking the sentence at the end of a line. The use of this technique gives poetry power and flexibility in plays such as "Julius Caesar" And "Hamlet". For example, Shakespeare uses it to convey Hamlet's shocked feelings:

In subsequent "Hamlet" plays, the poetic style continued to vary, especially in the emotional passages of his later tragedies. Literary critic Bradley described the style as "more concentrated, faster, more varied, with less repetition." Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare used a variety of techniques to achieve similar effects. He used techniques such as enjambment, unstructured pauses and stops, and various unusual variations in sentence construction and length. In many cases, the listener must figure out the meaning of the sentence himself. In late romantic plays, long and short sentences are contrasted with each other, the subject and object of the action are swapped, words are omitted, which creates a sense of spontaneity.

Shakespeare combined the art of poetry with an understanding of the practical details of theatrical production. Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatized stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshead. But the original source did not remain unchanged; Shakespeare introduced new and changed old plot lines so that the full complexity of the narrative was revealed to the audience. With the growth of Shakespeare's skill, his characters began to emerge more clearly and acquire distinctive features of speech. However, his later plays are more reminiscent of his earlier creations. In his later romantic works, he deliberately returned to an artificial style in order to emphasize the illusory nature of the theater.

Reputation and criticism

“He was not a man of an era, but of all times.”

Ben Jonson

Although Shakespeare was not considered a great playwright during his lifetime, he received praise for his works. In 1598, the clergyman writer Francis Merys singled him out among English writers as “the most excellent” in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors of the playbook "Parnassus" Shakespeare was compared to Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare: "The soul of the age, the applause-worthy, the delight, the wonder of our stage."

In the period between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, the ideas of classicism prevailed. Therefore, critics of the time generally ranked Shakespeare lower than John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Riemer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic and the tragic. However, the poet and critic John Dryden spoke highly of Shakespeare, saying of Jonson: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare." Still, for several decades, Riemer's views dominated, but in the 18th century, critics began to admire him and call him a genius. This reputation was only strengthened by a number of published scientific works devoted to the work of Shakespeare, for example the work of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790. By 1800, he was firmly established as the national poet of England. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Shakespeare also received a name outside the British Isles. He was supported by such writers as Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays into German in the spirit of German romanticism. In the 19th century, admiration for Shakespeare often bordered on adulation and adulation. “This King Shakespeare,” wrote the essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1840, “is above us all, noblest, gentlest, yet strong; indestructible." Bernard Shaw, however, criticized the romantic cult of Shakespeare, using the word “bardolatry.” He argued that Ibsen's naturalistic drama made Shakespeare obsolete.

Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in his critical essay “On Shakespeare and Drama”, based on a detailed analysis of some of Shakespeare’s most popular works, in particular: “King Lear”, “Othello”, “Falstaff”, “Hamlet”, etc. - subjected sharp criticism of Shakespeare's ability as a playwright.

After the modernist revolution of art at the beginning of the 20th century, Shakespeare was enrolled in the ranks of the avant-garde. German expressionists and Moscow futurists staged his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht developed epic theater under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot opposed Shaw, saying that Shakespeare's "primitivism" made his work modern. Eliot led the movement of researchers to examine Shakespeare's characters in more detail. In the 1950s, a wave of new approaches replaced modernism and marked the beginning of “postmodern” Shakespeare studies. In the 1980s, Shakespeare's work began to be studied by representatives of such movements as structuralism, feminism, new historicism, African-American studies and queer studies.

Influence

Shakespeare's works seriously influenced the theater and literature of the following years. In particular, he expanded the playwright's scope of work with characterization, plot, language, and genre. For example, before "Romeo and Juliet" romance has never been considered a worthy theme for tragedy. Soliloquies were primarily used to inform viewers of events that had occurred; Shakespeare began to use them to reveal the character of the character and his thoughts. His works greatly influenced subsequent poets. Poets of the Romantic era tried to revive Shakespeare's verse drama, but had little success. The critic George Steiner called all English drama from Coleridge to Tennyson "weak variations on Shakespearean themes."

Shakespeare influenced writers such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner and Charles Dickens. His influence also extended to Herman Melville; his captain Ahab from the novel "Moby Dick" is a classic tragic hero inspired by King Lear. Scholars estimate that 20,000 pieces of music are associated with the works of Shakespeare. Among them are 2 operas by Giuseppe Verdi, "Othello" And "Falstaff", the primary source of which is the plays of the same name. Shakespeare also inspired many artists, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated the play into German "Macbeth". The developer of the theory of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, relied on Shakespearean psychology, in particular on the image of Hamlet, in his theories about human nature.

In Shakespeare's time, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardized than they are today, and his language helped shape modern English. He is Samuel Johnson's most cited author in "A Dictionary of the English Language", the first essay of its kind. Expressions such as “with bated breath” (lit. bated breath = with a sinking heart) ( "The Merchant of Venice") and “a foregone conclusion” (lit. a foregone conclusion) ( "Othello") have entered modern everyday English speech.

Doubts surrounding Shakespeare's personality

"Shakespearean Question"

Some 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of works attributed to him. Alternative candidates were proposed, mostly well-born and well-educated, such as Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Theories have also been proposed according to which a group of writers was hiding behind the pseudonym “Shakespeare”. However, the traditional theory is generally accepted in the academic community, and interest in the non-Stratfordian movement, especially the Oxfordian theory, continues into the 21st century.

Non-Strafordians consider one of the proofs of their theory that no evidence of Shakespeare’s education has survived, while the vocabulary of his works, according to various estimates, ranges from 17,500 to 29,000 words, and also reveals a deep knowledge of history and literature. Since not a single manuscript written by Shakespeare's hand has survived, opponents of the traditional version conclude that his literary career was falsified.

Religion

Some scholars believe that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, although the Catholic religion was banned at the time. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, came from a Catholic family. The main evidence of Shakespeare's belonging to a Catholic family is considered to be the will of John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the attic of his house. The original document has been lost, and scholars disagree on its authenticity. In 1591 the authorities reported that he did not appear in the church. In 1606, the name of Shakespeare's daughter Suzanne was included in the list of those who did not show up for Easter communion in Stratford. Scholars have found evidence in Shakespeare's plays both for and against his Catholicism, but the truth has not been established with absolute certainty.

Sexual orientation

Despite the fact that Shakespeare married and had children, there are different opinions in the scientific community regarding his sexual orientation. Researchers often believe that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical, and some infer from them that Shakespeare was in love with a young man. Others, however, consider these sonnets to be merely expressions of friendship rather than sexual desire. The 26 so-called sonnets to "The Dark Lady", addressed to a married woman, are often cited as evidence of his heterosexual orientation.

Appearance

List of essays

Classification of plays

Shakespeare's works include 36 plays, published in 1623 in the First Folio, divided here into comedies, chronicles and tragedies according to that edition. Two plays were not included in the First Folio, Two noble relatives And Pericles, which are now considered part of the canon, and scholars agree that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their writing. Shakespeare's poems were never published in the First Folio.

At the end of the 19th century, Edward Dowden classified 4 of Shakespeare's later plays as romantic, and although most scholars call them tragicomedies, this option is widely used. These plays, as well as related "Two noble relatives", are marked with (). In 1896, Frederick Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe Shakespeare's plays that were difficult to classify by genre: "All is well that ends well", "Measure for measure", "Troilus and Cressida" And "Hamlet". The term has been much discussed and sometimes used in relation to other plays, and is still used today, although "Hamlet" often classified as simply tragedies. Problem plays are marked with ().

If a play is believed to have been only partially written by Shakespeare, it is marked with a (). Works sometimes attributed to Shakespeare are classified as apocrypha.

Essays

Comedy

• All is well that ends well
• How do you like it
• Comedy of Errors
• Love's Labour's Lost
• Measure for measure
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• A dream in a summer night
• Much ado about nothing
• Pericles
• The Taming of the Shrew
• Storm
• twelfth Night
• Two Veronese
• Two noble relatives
• Winter's Tale

Chronicles

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

Tragedies

• Romeo and Juliet
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus
• Timon of Athens
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Cymbeline

Poems

• Sonnets of William Shakespeare
• Venus and Adonis
• Dishonored Lucretia
• Passionate Pilgrim
• Phoenix and dove
• Lover's complaint

Lost works

• Love's Efforts Rewarded
• History of Cardenio

Apocrypha

• Judgment of Paris
• Arden Feversham
• George Green
• Locrin
• Edward III
• Musedore
• Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas, Lord Cromwell
• Cheerful Edmont devil
• London Prodigal Son
• Puritan
• Yorkshire tragedy
• Beautiful Emma
• Birth of Merlin
• Sir Thomas More
• The Tragedy of the Second Maid
• Passionate Pilgrim