William Shakespeare Biography
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William Shakespeare (baptized April 26,
1564 – April 23, 1616) was an English poet and playwright who has a
reputation as one of the greatest of all writers in the English language
and in Western literature, as well as one of the world's pre-eminent
dramatists.
Shakespeare's literary achievement is not
confined to his mastery of the poetic and dramatic form; his ability to
capture and convey the most profound aspects of human nature is
considered by many scholars to be unequalled, due to his understanding
of the range and depth of human emotions. A colossal figure in world
literature, Shakespeare's legacy and influence continues to be felt in
all parts of the globe. He has been translated into every major living
language, and his plays are continually performed all around the world.
Shakespeare is among the very few playwrights who have excelled in both
tragedy and comedy.
Shakespeare wrote his works between 1588
and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays
attributed to him are often uncertain. His prolific output is especially
impressive in light of the fact that he lived only 52 years.
Shakespeare's influence on the
English-speaking world shows in the widespread use of quotations from
Shakespearean plays, the titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases,
and the many adaptations of his works.
****
Biography
Many scholars believe that enough
historical evidence exists to map out Shakespeare's life in some detail.
Early life
William Shakespeare was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in April 1564, the son of
John Shakespeare, a successful tradesman, and of Mary Arden, a daughter
of the gentry. They lived on Henley Street. His baptismal record dates
to April 26 of that year. Because baptisms were performed within a few
days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 as his birthday. It
provides a convenient symmetry: he died on that day in 1616, and perhaps
appropriately for a playwright commonly considered to be England's
greatest, it is also the Feast Day of Saint George, the patron saint of
England.
Shakespeare's father, prosperous at the
time of William's birth, was prosecuted for participating in the black
market in wool, and later lost his position as an alderman. Some
evidence pointed to possible Roman Catholic sympathies on both sides of
the family.
As the son of a prominent town official,
William Shakespeare probably attended King Edward VI Grammar school in
central Stratford, which may have provided an intensive education in
Latin grammar and literature. The quality of Elizabethian-era grammar
schools was uneven. It is presumed that the young Shakespeare attended
this school, since he was entitled to, although this cannot be confirmed
because the school's records have not survived. There is no evidence
that his formal education extended beyond grammar school.
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight
years his senior, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near
Stratford. Two neighbours of Anne, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson,
posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There
appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony: Anne was
three months pregnant. After his marriage, William Shakespeare left few
traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London literary
scene.
The late 1580s are known as Shakespeare's
'Lost Years' because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he
was or why he left Stratford for London. One legend, long since
thoroughly discredited, is that he was caught poaching deer on the park
of Sir Thomas Lucy, the local Justice of the Peace, and had to flee.
Another theory is that Shakespeare could have joined the Lord
Chamberlain's Men when they travelled through Stratford while on tour.
The seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey recorded the testimony of
the son of one of Shakespeare's fellow players that Shakespeare had
spent some time as "a schoolmaster in the country".
On May 26, 1583 Shakespeare's first child,
Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. A son, Hamnet, and a daughter,
Judith, were baptised soon after on February 2, 1585.
London and theatrical career
By 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in
London and had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him
as "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 beeing an absolute Johannes
factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."
(The italicised line parodies the phrase, "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in
a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)
In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on
August 11, 1596. Some suspect that his death was part of the inspiration
behind The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c.1601), a
reworking of an older, lost play (possibly Danish play Amleth or Thomas
Kyd).
By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish
of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and appeared at the top of a list of actors
in Every man in his Humour written by Ben Jonson.
Shakespeare became an actor, writer and
finally part-owner of a playing company, known as The Lord Chamberlain's
Men — the company took its name, like others of the period, from its
aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular
enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I
(1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the
King's Men.
In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker
for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case
was brought to trial, show that in 1604, Shakespeare was a tenant of
Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker (a maker of ornamental
headdresses) in the northwest of London. Mountjoy's apprentice Stephen
Belott wanted to marry Mountjoy's daughter. Shakespeare was enlisted as
a go-between, to help negotiate the details of the dowry. On
Shakespeare's assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Belott
sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry.
Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the
circumstances.
Various documents recording legal affairs
and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough
during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London
and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.
Later years
Shakespeare retired in about 1611. His
retirement was not entirely without controversy. He was drawn into a
legal quarrel regarding the enclosure of common lands. (Enclosure
enabled land to be converted to pasture for sheep, but removed it as a
resource for the poor.) Shakespeare had a financial interest in the
land, and to the chagrin of some, he took a neutral position, making
sure only that his own income from the land was protected.
In the last few weeks of Shakespeare's
life, the man who was to marry his younger daughter Judith — a
tavern-keeper named Thomas Quiney — was charged in the local church
court with "fornication." A woman named Margaret Wheeler had given birth
to a child and claimed it was Quiney's; she and the child both died soon
after. Quiney was thereafter disgraced, and Shakespeare revised his will
to ensure that Judith's interest in his estate was protected from
possible malfeasance on Quiney's part.
Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616 at the
age of 52. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived
by his two daughters, Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John
Hall. Neither Susannah's nor Judith's children had any offspring and as
such there are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive
today.
Shakespeare is 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 fame as a playwright, but
for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440 (a
considerable sum of money at the time). A bust of him placed by his
family on the wall nearest his grave shows him posed as writing. Each
year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing
hand of the bust.
It was common in his time for graves in the
chancel of the church to later be emptied with the contents removed to a
nearby charnel house as more room was needed. Possibly fearing that his
body would be removed, he was considered to have written an epitaph on
his tombstone:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
But cursed be he that moves my bones.
Popular legend claims that unpublished
works by Shakespeare may lie inside his tomb, but no one has ever
verified these claims, perhaps for fear of the curse included in the
quoted epitaph.
Works
Canonical works
The plays and their categories
Shakespeare's plays first appeared in print
as a series of folios and quartos, and scholars, actors and directors
continue to study and perform them extensively. They form an established
part of the Western canon of literature.
The plays are traditionally divided into
tragedies, comedies and histories, following the logic of the original
publications; however, modern criticism has labelled some of them
"problem plays" as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps
purposefully break generic conventions. In addition, Shakespeare's later
comedies are commonly known as "romances".
The following list gives the plays in the
order and categorization of the 1623 First Folio (the first collected
edition of the plays). A single asterisk indicates a play commonly
classified as a 'romance' today; two asterisks indicates those generally
accepted as 'problem plays' - though other comedies still occasion
critical dispute. To see the plays in the order in which they were
written, see Chronology of Shakespeare plays.
Comedies
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 * (not included in
the First Folio)
The Two Noble Kinsmen * (not included in
the First Folio)
Histories
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
Troilus and Cressida **
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline * (normally classed as a comedy
today)
Dramatic collaborations
Like most playwrights of his period,
Shakespeare did not always write alone and a number of his plays were
collaborative, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the
following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have
well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus
Andronicus, remain more controversial, and are dependant on linguistic
analysis by modern scholars.
Cardenio, a lost play; contemporary reports
say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
Henry VI, part 1, possibly the work of a
team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some
scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
Henry VIII, generally considered a
collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.
Macbeth: Thomas Middleton may have revised
this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
Measure for Measure may have undergone a
light revision by Thomas Middleton at some point after its original
composition.
Pericles Prince of Tyre may include the
work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
Timon of Athens may result from
collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might
explain its incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.
Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration
with, or revision of, George Peele.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto
in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each
playwright appears to have written about half of the text.
Lost plays
Love's Labour's Won A late
sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper
(apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare's
recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become
lost, or it may represent an alternate title of one of the plays listed
above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and
Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It
re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald
produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have
adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did
not name. Double Falshood[sic] does re-work the Cardenio story, and
modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all
we have of the lost play.
Poems
Shakespeare's other literary works
include:
Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Longer poems:
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Lover's Complaint
Apocrypha
Plays possibly by Shakespeare
Note: For a comprehensive account of plays
possibly by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare
Apocrypha.
Edward III Some scholars have recently
chosen to attribute this play to Shakespeare, based on the style of its
verse. Others refuse to accept it, citing, among other reasons, the
mediocre quality of the characters. If Shakespeare had involvement, he
probably worked as a collaborator.
Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work by
several playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare. That Shakespeare
had any part in this play remains uncertain.
Other works possibly by Shakespeare
A Funeral Elegy by W.S. (?). For a period
many believed, on the basis of stylistic evidence researched by Donald
Foster, that Shakespeare wrote a Funeral Elegy for William Peter.
However most scholars, including Foster, now conclude that this evidence
was flawed and that Shakespeare did not write the Elegy, which is more
likely from the pen of John Ford.
The King James Version of the Bible Some
people claim that Shakespeare assisted in the translation of the King
James Bible, rewording or rewriting certain sections to make them more
poetic; they argue that the poetic sensibility of certain sections of
the King James Bible is very similar to the style of Shakespeare, and
cite Psalm 46, where the word "shake" appears 46 words from the
beginning, and "spear" 46 words from the end. This is a controversial
notion and is not accepted by mainstream scholarship, though Neil Gaiman
managed to work it into his Sandman graphic novel The Wake.
Shakespeare and the textual problem
Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson,
Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays. The
problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote became a major
concern for most modern editions. Textual corruptions stemming from
printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned
lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio.
Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often
wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have
contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have
the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating
errors as far as possible.
In some cases the textual solution presents
few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth for example, scholars believe
that someone (probably Thomas Middleton) adapted and shortened the
original to produce the extant text published in the First Folio, but
that remains our only authorised text. In others the text may have
become manifestly corrupt or unreliable (Pericles or Timon of Athens)
but no competing version exists. The modern editor can only regularise
and correct erroneous readings that have survived into the printed
versions.
The textual problem can, however, become
rather complicated. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have
modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing
versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such cases, editors
must face the choice between the original first version and the later,
revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have
resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they
believe to be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide
a conflated text would run contrary to Shakespeare's intentions. In King
Lear for example, two independent versions, each with their own textual
integrity, exist in the Quarto and the Folio versions. Shakespeare's
changes here extend from the merely local to the structural. Hence the
Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986, provides two different versions
of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at
least four other Shakespearean plays (Henry IV, part 1, Hamlet, Troilus
and Cressida, and Othello).
Reputation
Shakespeare's reputation has grown
considerably since his own time, as illustrated in a timeline of
Shakespeare criticism from the 17th to 20th century.
During his lifetime and shortly after his
death, Shakespeare was well-regarded, but not considered the supreme
poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading
poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. It
is more difficult to assess his contemporary reputation as a playwright:
Plays were considered ephemeral and somewhat disreputable entertainments
rather than serious literature. The fact that his plays were collected
in an expensively produced folio in 1623 (the only precedent being Ben
Jonson's Workes of 1616) and the fact that that folio went into another
edition within nine years, indicate that he was held in unusually high
regard for a playwright.
After the Interregnum stage ban of
1642—1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous
generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of
all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben
Jonson and Shakespeare. Old plays were often adapted for the Restoration
stage, and where Shakespeare is concerned, this undertaking has seemed
shockingly respectless to posterity. A notorious example is Nahum Tate's
bowdlerized happy ending of King Lear of 1681, which held the stage
until 1838. From the early 18th century, Shakespeare took over the lead
on the English stage from Beaumont and Fletcher, never to relinquish it
again.
In literary criticism, by contrast,
Shakespeare held a unique position from the start. The unbending French
neo-classical "rules" and the three unities of time, place, and action
were never strictly followed in England, and practically all critics
gave the more "correct" Ben Jonson second place to "the incomparable
Shakespeare" (John Dryden, 1668), the follower of nature, the untaught
genius, the great realist of human character. The long-lived myth that
the Romantics were the first generation to truly appreciate Shakespeare
and to prefer him to Ben Jonson is contradicted by accolades from
Restoration and 18th-century writers such as John Dryden, Joseph
Addison, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. The 18th century is also
largely responsible for setting the text of Shakespeare's plays.
Nicholas Rowe created the first truly scholarly text for the plays in
1709, and Edmund Malone's Variorum Edition (published posthumously in
1821) is still the basis of modern editions of the plays.
At the beginning of the 19th century,
Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised admiration for
Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry, in line with the Romantic
reverence for the poet as prophet and genius.
In the twenty-first century, Shakespeare is
often simultaneously considered both the greatest and one of the more
difficult authors by the general public. Most inhabitants of the
English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age,
and there is a common association of his work with boredom and
incomprehension. At the same time, Shakespeare's plays remain more
frequently staged than the works of any other playwright. The negative
reputation held by many makes him the target of frequent parody and
satire, for example by the comic strip Foxtrot and The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare (Abridged).
Identity and authorship
As noted above, there is considerable
historical evidence of the existence of a William Shakespeare who lived
in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London. The vast majority of academics
identify this Shakespeare as the Shakespeare. Over the years however,
such figures as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain ("Is Shakespeare Dead?"), Henry
James, and Sigmund Freud have expressed disbelief that the man from
Stratford-upon-Avon, christened William Shaksper or Shakspere, actually
produced the works attributed to him. This scepticism is variously
grounded: such as the lack of a single book to be found in his otherwise
detailed will, the circumscribed social, education and travel
opportunities available to the young author that could have served to
prepare him, the differences in spellings of his name, the language of
the works itself. Mainstream scholars consider all these supposed
mysteries to be explicable. It is notable that doubts about
Shakespeare's authorship of the plays emerged only in the nineteenth
century, and were based in part on exaggerated beliefs in his lack of
education then current. Prior to this, from the poet's time onward,
opinion was unanimous that the author of "Shakespeare" was Shakespeare.
Many attribute this debate to the scarcity
and ambiguity of many of the historical records of this period. Various
fringe scholars have suggested writers such as Sir Francis Bacon,
Christopher Marlowe and even Queen Elizabeth I as alternative authors or
co-authors for some or all of "Shakespeare's" work. These claims
necessarily rely on conspiracy theories to explain the lack of direct
historical evidence for them, although advocates of alternative authors
point to evidentiary gaps in the orthodox history.
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an
English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, became the most
prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon,
after having been identified in the 1920s. Oxford partisans note the
similarities between the Earl's life, and events and sentiments depicted
in the plays and sonnets. Oxford had the documented education, travel
and life experience that one might associate with works as broad and
detailed as Shakespeare's. He was also contemporaneously identified as a
poet and writer of some talent by Francis Meres (although Meres also
separately lauds Shakespeare, whom he specifically credits as author of
the Shakespeare plays). The principal hurdle for Oxfordian theory is the
evidence that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after their
candidate's death, but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare.
The gifted playwright and poet Christopher
Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to write
the works of Shakespeare, even though he was apparently dead. According
to history, Marlowe was killed in 1593 by a group of men including
Ingram Frizer, a servant of Lord Walsingham, Marlowe's patron. However,
a theory has developed that Marlowe, who was facing an impending death
penalty for heresy, was saved by the faking of his death only 10 days
later, and that he subsequently wrote the works of Shakespeare.
A related question in mainstream academia
addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his
commonly-accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists
routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work
continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of
the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others. See academic
Shakespearean authorship debates.
Shakespeare's sexuality
The content of Shakespeare's sonnets has
raised the question of whether he may have been bisexual. This question
has caused controversy given Shakespeare's iconic status.
Early controversy
Shakespeare's Sonnets are the principal
reason for suggesting that he may have been bisexual. The poems were
initially published, perhaps without his approval in 1609. One hundred
twenty-six of them are love poems addressed to a young man (known as the
"Fair Lord"), and twenty-six to a married woman (known as the "Dark
Lady"). This edition does not seem to have sold well, and may have been
suppressed or perhaps simply disliked by its readership.
The apparently homosexual content seems to
have disturbed at least one seventeenth century reader. In 1640, John
Benson published another edition in which he changed most of the
pronouns from masculine to feminine so that readers would believe nearly
all of the sonnets were addressed to the Dark Lady. Benson’s modified
version was mass-produced and soon became the best-known text. It was
not until 1780 that Edmund Malone re-published the sonnets in their
original forms in his widely-distributed edition.
Debate over the Sonnets
There are numerous passages in the Sonnets
that can be read as homosexual or bisexual. During Sonnet 13 Shakespeare
calls the young man "dear my love" and in 15 announces that he is at
"war with Time for love of you". In Sonnet 18 he says "shall I compare
thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate",
followed by Sonnet 20 in which he says that the man is his
"master-mistress". The questions raised by scholars for the past two
hundred years are: are these passages really intended this way? And if
so, are the Sonnets autobiographical or mere fiction? By 1944, the
Variorum edition of his Sonnets contained an appendix with the
conflicting views of nearly forty commentators.
The controversy was first articulated in
1780 when George Steevens, upon reading Sonnet 20 where Shakespeare
describes his young male friend as his "master-mistress" remarked, "it
is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male
object, without an equal mixture of disgust and indignation". Other
English scholars, who were dismayed at the possibility that one of their
national heroes may have been a "sodomite", concurred with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's comment, around 1800, that Shakespeare’s love was "pure" and
in his sonnets there is "not even an allusion to that very worst of all
possible vices".
Critics in Continental Europe added more to
the debate. In 1834, a French reviewer in 1834 saying "He instead of
she?... Can I be mistaken? Can these sonnets be addressed to a man?
Shakespeare! Great Shakespeare? Did you feel yourself authorized by
Virgil’s example?"
Those who reject the notion of
Shakespeare's bisexuality usually explain these passages as referring to
intense friendship, not sexual love. Douglas Bush in the preface to his
1961 Pelican edition writes,
"Since modern readers are unused to such
ardor in masculine friendship and are likely to leap at the notion of
homosexuality... we may remember that such an ideal, often exalted above
the love of women could exist in real life, from Montaigne to Sir Thomas
Browne and was conspicuous in Renaissance literature".
Bush cites Montaigne as evidence of a
platonic interpretation, but he said his male friendships were distinct
from "that other, licentious Greek love".
However, not all scholars are convinced by
this argument. C.S. Lewis writes that the sonnets are "too lover-like
for ordinary male friendship" and that he has "found no real parallel to
such language between friends in the sixteenth-century literature".
Shakespeare says that his love for the youth gives him sleepless nights
and causes sharp anguish and fearful jealousy. There is considerable
ephasis on the young man's beauty. In Sonnet 20, Shakespeare theorizes
that the youth was originally a woman whom Mother Nature had fallen in
love with and — to resolve the dilemma of lesbianism — added a penis
("pricked thee out for women's pleasure") to, which Shakespeare
describes as "to my purpose nothing". Later in the same sonnet he tells
the adolescent to sleep with women but only to love him — "mine be thy
love and thy love's use their treasure." Some have interpreted this line
to infer that he ruled out sexual relations while openly saying that he
was sexually aroused by the youth.
The plays
Similar evidence — or at least fuel for
controversy — exists within the plays. In The Merchant of Venice, for
example, the characters Bassanio and Antonio have a close friendship
which some have interpreted as paederastic, that is, as a
sexual/mentoring relationship between an adult male and a young man, in
which the adult helps his lover transistion to adulthood, including
finding a wife; Bassanio enlists Antonio's help in courting the female
Portia. Likewise, several plays such as Twelfth Night contain comedic
situations in which a woman poses as a man, a device exploiting the fact
that in Shakespeare's day men or boys of the theatrical troupe played
women's parts. As Isaac Asimov notes in his Guide to Shakespeare, this
permits situations in which men playing women posing as men allow other
men playing men to practice the art of wooing upon them.
Shakespeare was able to joke about
homosexuality. In Hamlet, the title character indulges in a gloomy
discourse on human shortcomings before his friends, Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. This speech, in Act II, scene II, begins with Hamlet
saying, "I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth".
After several lines of melancholy exposition, Hamlet says, "Man delights
not me — no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say
so."
Conclusion
It must be kept in mind that if Shakespeare
had openly engaged in sexual relations with other males, he risked
prosecution under sodomy laws of the time that could have resulted in
the death penalty. However, in Elizabethan times, as today, an interest
in one gender did not preclude an interest in the other, and the
question of whether an Elizabethan was "gay" in a modern sense is
anachronistic, as the concept of homosexuality did not emerge until the
nineteenth century. While sodomy was a crime in the period there was no
word for an exclusively homosexual identity (see History of
homosexuality). One of Shakespeare’s greatest role-models, Christopher
Marlowe, has also been claimed to have been homosexual.
Word coinage
Shakespeare provided the first print
citations for many of the words (ode, addiction, alligator) and phrases
("my mind's eye," "one fell swoop") that have become and remained
household words in our time.
****
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