William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed (National Portrait Gallery, London, currently on display at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
Born	April 1564 (exact date unknown) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1616 Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
Signature

"Shakespeare" redirects here. For other uses, see Shakespeare (disambiguation).

William Shakespeare (IPA: ['wɪliəm 'ʃeɪkspɪə]) (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616)^[I] was an English poet and playwright. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. His surviving works include approximately 38 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems.^[II] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard").

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, and at age eighteen married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. Sometime between 1585 and 1592 Shakespeare moved to London, where he was an actor, writer, and part-owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later known as the King's Men), with which he found financial success. Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford in 1613, where he died three years later at the age of 52.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1612. He is one of the few playwrights of his time considered to have excelled in both tragedy and comedy, and many of his dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, are ranked among the greatest plays of Western literature. His works have greatly influenced subsequent theatre and literature, through their innovative use of plot, language, and genre. He is perhaps best known for expressing the wide range of human experience. He created complete human beings at a time when characters in many plays were either flat, or merely archetypes. Thus characters such as Macbeth and Shylock could commit despicable acts, yet still command the audience's sympathy because they were flawed human beings, not monsters. Shakespeare's works have been translated into every major living language and performed all over the world. Shakespeare has even influenced the English language itself, and many of his quotations and neologisms have passed into everyday usage. There has been much speculation about Shakespeare, including whether the works attributed to him were actually written by another playwright, as well as his sexuality and religious beliefs.

Life

Main article: Shakespeare's life

Early life

Shakespeare's signature, from his will: "By me William Shakespeare"

William Shakespeare (also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, Shaxper, and Shake-speare)^[III][IV] was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. He was their eldest son, and the third child among eight. His birth is widely assumed to have occurred at the family house on Henley Street, the site now known as the "Shakespeare Birthplace"; however, there is no firm evidence and other houses have been claimed as his place of birth. The record of Shakespeare's christening is dated 26 April of that year. Because his christening is likely to have happened within 3 days of birth, tradition has settled on 23 April (St George's Day)^[V] as his birthday. This date has a convenient symmetry, for Shakespeare died on the same day: 23 April,^[VI] in 1616.

Shakespeare may have attended King Edward VI Grammar School in central Stratford, but no school records of the time survive. As the son of a prominent town official, he was entitled to attend free of charge. Although Elizabethan-era grammar schools varied in quality, the school probably would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature.

John Shakespeare's House in Stratford-Upon-Avon, now the home of the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust

On 28 November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married twenty-six year old Anne Hathaway. One document identifies her as being "of Temple Grafton," near Stratford, and the marriage may have taken place there. Two neighbours of Hathaway posted bonds stating there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony, presumably because Anne was three months pregnant. On 26 May 1583, Shakespeare's first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of the bubonic plague in 1596, aged 11. His date of death is unknown, but he was buried on 11 August.

From his marriage until his appearance on the London theatrical scene, Shakespeare left few historical traces. The period from 1585 (when his twin children were born) until 1592 has become known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence survives of exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. Numerous stories attempt to account for Shakespeare's life during this time: including one that Shakespeare got in trouble for poaching deer, one that he worked as a schoolmaster for the Catholic Hoghton family in Lancashire, and one that he minded the horses of theatre patrons in London. However, little direct evidence supports these stories, and they all appear to have begun circulating after Shakespeare's death.

London and theatrical career

By 1592 Shakespeare was a well-known playwright in London and his reputation came under attack by Robert Greene: "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (Although interpretations differ, the italicised line certainly parodies the phrase "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It, Act II Scene 7

By 1594 Shakespeare was an actor, writer and part-owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which, like others of the period, was named after its aristocratic sponsor. It became popular enough for the new king, James I, to adopt the company himself, after which it became the King's Men.

In 1596 Shakespeare moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate. In 1598 he appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson, and his name was featured on the title pages of published quartos—a sign that his name itself was a selling point for the volume.

He seems to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599, the year when he became part-owner of the Globe Theatre. By 1604 he had moved north of the river, lodging just north of St Paul's Cathedral with a Huguenot family named Mountjoy. He helped arrange a marriage between the Mountjoys' daughter and their apprentice Stephen Bellott. When Bellott later sued his father-in-law for defaulting on part of the promised dowry, Shakespeare was called as a witness. According to various documents of legal affairs and commercial transactions, Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London to buy a property in Blackfriars, London, and to own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

There is a tradition that Shakespeare continued to act in various parts of his plays, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V. This, however, has little scholarly basis.

Later years

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford in 1613. He died, aged 52, on 23 April 1616, the day traditionally presumed to be his birthday. He was married to Anne Hathaway until his death and was survived by her and their two daughters, Susanna and Judith. Although Susanna married Dr John Hall, there are no direct descendants of Shakespeare alive today. Judith married Thomas Quiney but all of their children died very young, and Susanna's daughter Elizabeth Hall died in 1670, marking the end of Shakespeare's lineage.

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel, not on account of his literary fame but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440. Shakespeare's funeral monument, on the church wall nearest his grave, has a bust of him posed in the act of writing. Shakespeare may have written his own epitaph:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosèd here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Works

Plays

Image of Shakespeare from the First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays

Main article: Shakespeare's plays

Many of Shakespeare's plays are reputed to be among the greatest—not only in the English language but in all of Western literature. They have been translated into every major living language and are continually performed all over the world.

Chronology and publication

Shakespeare did not write every word of the plays commonly attributed to him. Several show signs of collaboration, revision, or both. This was not uncommon at the time: collaboration frequently occurred between dramatists.

The chronology of Shakespeare's plays cannot be established accurately. Many of his plays were printed in quarto versions of varying quality during his lifetime; but there is no evidence that Shakespeare was involved in their publication. Some of these have been labelled "bad quartos"; that is, mangled versions of the plays usually believed to have been reconstructed from the faulty memories of some of the players. These bad quartos were described as "stol'n and surreptitious copies" in the First Folio. The First Folio was published by John Heminges and Henry Condell—two of Shakespeare's former colleagues from the King's Men—in 1623, around seven years after Shakespeare's death. It comprised 36 of Shakespeare's plays, and remains the only extant source for seventeen of them. The First Folio divided the plays into their traditional categories: tragedies, histories and comedies.

Each play that survives in several texts has signficant textual variants—differences between those texts—both large and small. These corruptions may stem from compositors' misreadings or faulty source material: which may have been Shakespeare's own foul papers, a theatrical prompt-book, or a scribe's fair copy. Other textual variations are harder to discount: for instance, the widely different quarto and folio versions of King Lear. Traditionally, editors have used a conflated Lear which includes every scene from both versions. However, some modern editors see the two as meaningfully distinct works.

Sources

Like many of his contemporaries, Shakespeare based his plays on the works of other playwrights or reworked earlier stories and historical material. Hamlet (c. 1601) is believed to be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet), and King Lear of an earlier play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare heavily relied on two principal texts: Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North) and the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He used the former for his Roman plays and the latter for his history plays, as well as for Macbeth and King Lear. Shakespeare may have borrowed stylistic elements from contemporary playwrights like Christopher Marlowe.^[VII]

Performances

Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, together with a team of carpenters, built the Globe Theatre from the dismantled timbers of their previous venue. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. Most of Shakespeare's post-1599 plays were first staged at the Globe, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Hamlet. The Prologue to Henry V refers to its debut venue as "this wooden O". From 1603 the Lord Chamberlain's Men became known as the King's Men after King James, who adopted the company. After 1608 they used the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.

Among the actors in Shakespeare's playing company were Richard Burbage, Richard Cowley , William Kempe, and both Henry Condell and John Heminges, known today for collecting and editing the plays of Shakespeare's First Folio (1623). Richard Burbage played the title role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and King Lear. Richard Cowley played Verges in Much Ado About Nothing. William Kemp played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and possibly Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

For a history of the performance of Shakespeare's plays, see Performance history.

Sonnets

Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."

— Famous lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

Shakespeare's sonnets form a collection of 154 poems that deal with themes such as love, beauty, and mortality. The style used has since been called the Shakespearean sonnet, and is still in use today. Poems are divided into 14 lines, with 3 quatrains, followed by a closing couplet; the rhyme scheme being abab cdcd efef gg (each letter corresponding to a rhyming line).

All but two of the 154 poems first appeared in the 1609 publication entitled SHAKE-SPEARE'S Sonnets; while numbers 138 ("When my love swears that she is made of truth") and 144 ("Two loves have I, of comfort and despair") were previously published in a 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim. The circumstances of the sonnets' publication are unclear. The 1609 text is dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", described as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare or the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the bottom of the dedication page. Nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was—though there are many theories, including one that he was the "fair youth" featured in the sonnets—or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.

Other poems

Besides his sonnets, Shakespeare wrote three known longer narrative poems: "Venus and Adonis", "The Rape of Lucrece" and "A Lover's Complaint." "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" are based on classical works by the Roman poet Ovid, while "A Lover's Complaint" tells the original story of a scorned love—a few scholars question if Shakespeare was the poem's actual author. These poems were all written in the rhyme royal, using the rhyme scheme ababbcc. They appear to have been written either in an attempt to win the patronage of a rich benefactor—a common practice of the time—or as the result of such patronage. The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were both dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Each was written between 1593 and 1594, while theatres were closed because of the plague. Shakespeare also wrote the short poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle", an allegorical look at the death of ideal love. An anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim, was attributed to him upon its first publication in 1599, but only five of its poems would be definitively accredited to Shakespeare, and the attribution was withdrawn in the second edition.

Style

Main article: Shakespeare's style

Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square, London.

Although Shakespeare wrote some passages in prose, he wrote a large proportion of his plays and poems in iambic pentameter. In some of his early works, he added punctuation at the end of the iambic pentameter lines to strengthen the rhythm. He and other dramatists at the time used this form of blank verse for much of the dialogue between characters. He used a rhyming couplet to end many scenes in his plays with suspense. A typical example occurs in Macbeth: as Macbeth leaves the stage to murder Duncan (to the sound of a chiming clock), he says,

Hear it not Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

His plays make effective use of the soliloquy, in which a character makes a solitary speech, giving the audience insight to the character's motivations and inner conflict. Among his most famous soliloquies are To be or not to be, All the world's a stage, and What a piece of work is a man. The character either speaks to the audience directly (in the case of choruses, or characters that become epilogues), or more commonly, speaks to himself or herself in the fictional realm. Shakespeare's writing features extensive wordplay of double entendres and clever rhetorical flourishes. Humour is a key element in all of Shakespeare's plays. His works have been considered controversial through the centuries for his use of bawdy punning, to the extent that "virtually every play is shot through with sexual puns"; and in the nineteenth century, popular censored versions of the plays were produced as The Family Shakespeare by Henrietta Bowdler (writing anonymously) and later by her brother Thomas Bowdler. Comic scenes are not confined to Shakespeare's comedies, and are a core element of many of the tragedy and history plays. In Henry IV, Part 1 comic scenes dominate the historical material.

Shakespeare's works express the complete range of human experience. His characters were human beings who commanded the sympathy of audiences when many other playwrights' characters were flat or archetypes. Macbeth commits six murders by the end of the fourth act, and is responsible for many deaths offstage, yet still commands an audience's sympathy until the very end because he is seen as a flawed human being, not a monster. Hamlet knows that he must avenge the death of his father, but he is too indecisive, too self-doubting, to carry this out until he has no choice. His failings cause his downfall, and he exhibits some of the most basic human reactions and emotions. Shakespeare's characters were complex and human in nature. By making the protagonist's character development central to the plot, Shakespeare changed what could be accomplished with drama.

Influence

See also: Shakespeare's influence, Shakespeare's influence on the English language, and List of English words invented by Shakespeare

Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre and literature. Not only did he create some of the most admired plays in Western literature—Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear being ranked among the world's greatest plays—he expanded the dramatic possibilities of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare mixed tragedy and comedy to create a new genre: romantic tragedy. At the time, romance was not considered a worthy topic for tragedy, but Shakespeare's new form made it respectable. He adapted the soliloquy: using it not only to "convey information" of a character or event in the play, but also to explore a character's inner motivations and conflict.

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. Dickens quoted Shakespeare liberally; even his titles, 25 of which were drawn from Shakespeare, reflect his admiration for him. In Moby Dick, Melville frequently used Shakespearean devices such as the extended soliloquy. The novel's protagonist, Captain Ahab, is a classic tragic hero, inspired by Shakespearean characters like King Lear. Shakespeare heavily influenced later poetry; the Romantic poets, in particular, were drawn to themes such as self-consciousness. Critic George Steiner described all English poetic dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."

Composers, also, have been influenced by Shakespeare: scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music associated with his works. Among these, two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, have attained a critical standing equal to the plays which influenced them.

Shakespeare wrote at a time when English grammar and spelling were not yet fixed, and his use of language helped shape modern English, particularly during his rise to fame in the eighteenth century, when writers of dictionaries illustrated word use by quoting the best authors. Samuel Johnson quoted Shakespeare more than any other author in his Dictionary of the English Language, the first authoritative work of its type; and other standardization projects helped ensure the absorption of Shakespearean language into English. Many of Shakespeare's coinages and idiomatic expressions, such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello), have found their way into everyday English speech.

Shakespeare's characters have influenced modern ideas of human consciousness. His Prince Hamlet, title character of the play Hamlet, for example, heavily influenced Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan's theories on human nature and the subconscious. Several of their ideas about sexual repression, the Oedipus complex, and death were tested in embryo against Shakespeare's characters. Each of these psychologists' theories, while today outdated, provided the basis for the definition of modern thought. Thus, perhaps the most extreme view of Shakespeare's influence held by scholars is that his writing has defined the modern human. This position is held by Harold Bloom, who tells us that "all of us were, to a shocking degree, pragmatically reinvented by Shakespeare".

Reputation

Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

"He was not of an age, but for all time."

—Ben Jonson, in an epitaph to Shakespeare written in the early 1600s.

The assessment of Shakespeare by his contemporaries was generous, but not overwhelming. In 1598, Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English poets which he compared with the greatest of Greece and Rome, and described him as "the most excellent" among English playwrights of both comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare was alluded to alongside Chaucer, Gower and Spenser by the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. In the years following Shakespeare's death, his rival Ben Jonson would give him both praise and criticism. He described Shakespeare as "soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage" in his prefatory poem to the First Folio, yet elsewhere asserted that "Shakespeare wanted art".

In Restoration society, the vogue for neoclassicism, and tastes at the Royal courts, led to a consensus which ranked Shakespeare below Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. The influential critic John Dryden acknowledged this consensus, and sought to modify it in 1668, saying of Jonson: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". At this time the collaborative works of Beaumont and Fletcher were twice as popular as those of Shakespeare in the theatres. From the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered as the supreme English-language playwright and poet. His classic status was established by a series of critically annotated versions of his works, including those by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, Alexander Pope in 1725, and most influentially, Samuel Johnson in 1765. Johnson's strongest criticism of Shakespeare was in the over-use of puns: "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeare's reputation spread across Europe, largely as a result of the treatment of his works by Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

"There is no eminent writer ... whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

—George Bernard Shaw, on Shakespeare's mind.

Shakespeare's lack of conformity to the forms of Neoclassicism ceased to be regarded as a weakness in the Romantic era, as his genius came to be acknowledged by other, more individual standards: particularly as a result of the works of the translator and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel in Germany, and the poet and lecturer Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England. This reverence for Shakespeare became parodied in the term bardolatry, which would be attacked by George Bernard Shaw who argued that, after Ibsen, Shakespeare had become antiquated and would need to be set aside. Throughout the nineteenth century, performances of Shakespeare became increasingly pictorial, using highly elaborate scenery, detailed costumes and props, spectacular effects and the frequent use of tableaux.

Twentieth century criticism developed as a reaction to the views of scholars such as A. C. Bradley, who in Shakespearean Tragedy stated that we study poetry "in order to reproduce in ourselves more faintly that which went on in the poet's mind when he wrote." Such views were challenged by structuralist thinkers, who stressed the inabilty of language to communicate the true feeling of a speaker or writer - concentrating instead on the artificial nature of language, and the importance of the relationships between words. Poststructuralists carried this thinking further, arguing that a text such as a play cannot have a single comprehensible meaning: that its meaning is in a constant free play with other meanings and uses of language. Shakespeare's works have been analysed from feminist and Marxist perspectives, and among feminists they have been reviled for upholding the male "phallocentric" world view yet occasionally admired for their portrayals of female characters: including, famously, by Germaine Greer.

Today, Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. Shakespeare's plays are more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright. They have been adapted into a large number of films—including Hollywood movies marketed to teenage audiences,^[VIII]—though many simply use his plots rather than his dialogue.^[IX] Shakespeare is often referred to as the most filmed author ever: there are more than 420 feature-length film versions of his plays.

Speculations about Shakespeare

Authorship

Main article: Shakespearean authorship question

Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of Shakespeare's works. Alternative candidates proposed include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Although all alternative candidates are rejected in academic circles, popular interest in the subject continues.

Religion

Main article: Shakespeare's religion

Some scholars claim that there is evidence that members of Shakespeare's family were recusant Catholics, at a time when many Catholic practices, most notably Mass, were illegal. The strongest evidence is a tract professing secret Catholicism signed by John Shakespeare, father of the poet. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was a member of a conspicuous and determinedly Catholic family in Warwickshire, and in 1606, William's daughter Susannah was listed as one of the residents of Stratford refusing to take Holy Communion, which may suggest Catholic sympathies. While none of this evidence proves Shakespeare's own Catholic sympathies, Clare Asquith has claimed that those sympathies are detectable in his writing.^[X] Other scholars agree with the suggestion that Shakespeare was Catholic; but this is by no means universally accepted.

Sexuality

Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare

There is little direct evidence of Shakespeare's sexuality. At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was then 26 and pregnant. Their first of their three children, Susanna, was born on 26 May 1583; six months after the marriage. It is possible that Shakespeare felt trapped by this marriage, since he left his family and moved to London after only three years of marriage. While in London, Shakespeare may have had affairs with different women; one anecdote of uncertain validity asserts that he had an affair during the performance of one of his plays. Possible evidence of other affairs is found in his twenty-six love poems addressed to a married woman (the so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets).

In recent decades, some scholars have taken a different view of Shakespeare's sexuality, asserting that possible homoerotic allusions in his works suggest Shakespeare was bisexual. Others, however, interpret them as expressions of intense friendship rather than sexual love.

Bibliography

Classification

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays which appear in the First Folio, which are listed here according to their Folio classification as tragedies, histories and comedies. In addition, two comedies, Pericles, Prince of Tyre and The Two Noble Kinsmen do not appear in the First Folio, but subsequently became accepted into the canon of Shakepeare's works since scholars generally accept the evidence that Shakespeare had a substantial hand in writing them. Shakespeare's poems were also not included in the folio. Other works attributed to him are classified, below, as Lost Plays or Apocrypha.

Today, five of the comedies are usually considered as a separate subgenre, the late romances, and these plays are highlighted with an asterisk (*) below.

In 1896, the critic F. S. Boas coined the expression "problem plays" for four of Shakespeare's plays—All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet. In the first three, he identified moral ambiguities: Cressida's betrayal of Troilus's love (against the dominating plot theme of an history play), and the external interventions (the enforced marriages) at the end of All's Well and Measure for Measure. Boas found a psychological problem in Hamlet: the protagonist's motives remain inscrutable even by the end of the play. Common to all four is the depiction of a corrupted society. Today, scholars classify Hamlet among the great tragedies, leaving the three plays marked with a ‡ symbol below in the category of problem plays.

Many of the plays have been alternatively classified as tragicomedies, because of their combination of comic and tragic motifs. However, this classification has not become universal so no plays are marked as tragicomedies, below. Some scholars use the term as roughly synonymous with the romances.

Plays that are thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a † symbol, below.

Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedy

• The Tempest*
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure‡
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• As You Like It
• Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well‡
• Twelfth Night, or What You Will
• The Winter's Tale*
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre*†^[XI]
• The Two Noble Kinsmen*†^[XII]
• Cymbeline*

Histories

Main article: Shakespearean histories

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, part 1
• Henry IV, part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, part 1†^[XIII]
• Henry VI, part 2
• Henry VI, part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII†^[XIV]

Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

• Romeo and Juliet
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus†^[XV]
• Timon of Athens†^[XVI]
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth†^[XVII]
• Hamlet
• Troilus and Cressida‡
• King Lear
• Othello
• Antony and Cleopatra

Poems

• Shakespeare's Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece
• The Passionate Pilgrim
• The Phoenix and the Turtle
• A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays

• Love's Labour's Won
• Cardenio†^[XVIII]

Apocrypha

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

• The Birth of Merlin
• Locrine
• The London Prodigal
• The Puritan
• The Second Maiden's Tragedy
• Sir John Oldcastle
• Thomas Lord Cromwell
• A Yorkshire Tragedy
• Edward III

Notes and references

Notes

1. ^ Dates use the Julian Calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar, Shakespeare was baptised on May 6 and died on May 3.
2. ^ The exact figures are unknowable. See Shakespearean authorship, Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
3. ^ The point is illustrated by reference to the Stratford Parish Register of 1579: it records the arrangements for the burial of Shakespeare's sister, Anne: "Mr Shaxpers dawter".
4. ^ Spelling was not fixed in Elizabethan times, hence the variation.
5. ^ Shakespeare would refer to the saint in the battle cry of Henry V: "Upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!"
6. ^ These dates use the Julian calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar, Shakespeare died on May 3.
7. ^ An essay by Harold Brooks suggests Marlowe's Edward II influenced Shakespeare's Richard III, Others scholars, though, discount this, stating that the parallels are simply commonplace.
8. ^ See particularly William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
9. ^ See particularly 10 Things I Hate About You, O (film) and She's the Man.
10. ^ "In spite of the difficulties of working under the eyes of the Cecil faction, Shakespeare appeared to have found a new métier—that of highly placed apologist for the Catholic opposition."
11. ^ Pericles was co-written with George Wilkins.
12. ^ The Two Noble Kinsmen was co-written with John Fletcher.
13. ^ Henry VI, Part 1 is usually thought to be the work of a group of collaborators.
14. ^ Henry VIII was co-written with John Fletcher.
15. ^ Titus Andronicus was co-written with Thomas Middleton.
16. ^ Timon of Athens was co-written with George Peele.
17. ^ The text of Macbeth which survives has plainly been altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615)
18. ^ Cardenio was apparently co-written with John Fletcher.

Further reading

• Burgess, Anthony (1970). Shakespeare. London: Cape. ISBN 0-7867-0972-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Biography
• Greenblatt, Stephen (2004). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-224-06276-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Biography
• Fields, Bertram (2006). Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare. New York: Regan Books. ISBN 0-060-83417-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Bloom, Harold (1999). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. ISBN 1-573-22751-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Literary Criticism
• Wood, Michael (2003). In Search of Shakespeare. BBC Books. ISBN 0-563-53477-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Companion to the television series of the same title.
• Ackroyd, Peter (2005). Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Chatto and Windus. ISBN 1-856-19726-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Biography.
• Rowse, A. L. (1988). Shakespeare the Man. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0-312-03425-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Biography.
• Schoenbaum, Samuel (1977). William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life. Oxford U. Press. ISBN 0-195-02433-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Biography
• Cruttwell, Patrick (1954). The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17th century. London: Chatto and Windus. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• Open Source Shakespeare includes the complete works, an advanced search function, a complete concordance, and some statistics about the works.
• The Internet Shakespeare Editions at the University of Victoria has old spelling versions of all the texts, with newly edited modern texts for some works; facsimiles, an extensive section on the life and times, a growing database of Shakespeare in performance, and a detailed section of links.
• Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet
• The Shakespeare Wiki
• William Shakespeare Search Engine
• National Geographic article about Shakespeare's coinages
• Designing Shakespeare - 40 years of Shakespearian performance in London and Stratford, featuring thousands of high-quality photographs, cast lists, reviews and interviews
• The Royal Shakespeare Company - probably the most famous classical theatre company in the world. This site has all the latest information on current and future productions, ticket sales, merchandising as well as press and educational resources.