We are taking advantage of the
anniversary of the William Shakespeare’s death
back home in Stratford-upon-Avon on
April 23 1616 at the age of almost exactly 52.
I say almost exactly because his birthday is lost, but we know he was Baptized on April 26, 1584. Since baptisms in such rural villages usually
occurred within days of birth, lots of folk think he may have been born on the
23rd as well which would make for a tidy story indeed. That would make this also his 450th birthday. To make matters even more interesting this is
also the Feast of St. George—a Greek dragon slayer who morphed into a
shining knight on horseback and became the Patron
Saint of England. If Will had
written a play about that, it would have been perfect.
Amazingly little is known about
Shakespeare’s life. Which means you will
be spared another tedious blow-by-blow of his career. We do know he was born into a prosperous
provincial family. His father was a
successful glover, a career which in
the days when both men and women of the better classes wore gauntlets or
dancing gloves year around was evidently was quite profitable. His mother’s family was landowning
farmers. They had a handsome, half-timbered
home in the village and his father was an alderman.
Will was the third of eight children
and the oldest son. Although no records
confirm it, he was almost surely given an education at Kings New School in the village.
Such Grammar Schools offered
a rigorous course in Latin grammar
and studied from classic Latin texts.
While well short of what the son of a nobleman or prosperous London merchant might receive or the
instruction at Oxford or Cambridge, this still would have been a
better education than 80 % of the boys in England.
Any chances for further education
were squashed when he was 18 and had to enter a rushed marriage with 26 year
old Anne Hathaway, who we can assume
looked nothing like her modern movie star namesake. We know it was rushed because the local Vicar
read only the first of the three required bans
and because six months later daughter Susana
was born. A couple of years later there
were twins, Hammet and Judith.
The children were born in February 1585 and their baptism is the last
record of Shakespeare’s life in the Village until he returned there in
retirement.
No one is clear on what he did, or
how he made a living. Some surmised that
he clerked for his father or tutored the children of the local gentry yet no
trace is left behind.
We do know he had a roving eye. The evidence lies in his Sonnets which include ardent praises of “his coy mistress” and
raptures on the beauty of a black haired girl.
Likely this made home life less than idyllic for all concerned.
For whatever reason—an apocryphal but
oft told tale has it that we was escaping a Sheriff’s warrant for poaching a deer on a local gentleman’s
estate—sometime between 1685 and 1592 Shakespeare decamped for London.
The latter years finds reference to
him as an already established writer dabbling in play writing. It seems an astonishing career choice with no
hint of it is his background. He was a
member and minority owner of a troop of actors known as The Lord Chamberlin’s Men.
Based largely on the success of Shakespeare’s early plays, mostly those
known as the Histories, the troop
prospered enough that they were able to erect the Globe Theater on the banks of the Thames in 1699. With three
tiers of box seats in circle under a thatched roof and an open, uncovered pit
surrounding a thrust stage for the rabble, up to 3000 customers could view a
production. In the winter months the
company performed more intimately at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, converted from a part of a priory, in
1608.
After Elizabeth
I died in 1603 theater loving James I gave the company a Royal
Patent and afterwards they were known at The King’s Men.
With
Shakespeare as their primary playwright the company thrived even bettering
companies featuring the work of established, university educated writers like Christopher
Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nash. Some of them, Greene in particular did not
take well to completion from a cloddish upstart.
Like
Shakespeare, these men began as actors themselves. But as they met with success they retired
from the boards. Not Shakespeare. He evidently never stopped acting until he
retired from London altogether. In fact,
evidence suggests that he may always have considered himself to be, first and
foremost, an actor. What roles he played
is not clear except for surviving cast lists of a couple of plays by the
company not written by him. He is
thought to have played the ghost of Hamlet’s father. There is passing reference to him playing
“kingly roles.”
In all,
Shakespeare is thought to have written about 38 plays, the last few probably in
collaboration. They included the
Histories, comedies, tragedies, and the latter romances. A few of his plays were published in his life
time, but probably without his consent.
These were probably loosely transcribed from the audience as there are
considerable differences with the canonical versions. An early form of video piracy, you might say.
From time
to time plays, or fragments of plays, pop up that are suggested to be the
unknown work of the master. Just as
frequently his claim to this or that play is challenged. But by far the biggest game in the world of
Shakespeare scholarship is denying that he wrote the plays at all. Several candidates have been suggested and
new ones seem to pop up every few years.
Among the suspects have been Francis Bacon, Marlowe who would
have had to be so prolific that he could keep two theater companies provided
with fodder, and assorted noblemen up to and including members of the Royal
family.
I for one
don’t buy any of it. It is all rooted in
the deep class bias of the English upper classes, who could never admit that a
commoner with a rude education could have the widest vocabulary of any Englishman
ever; an encyclopedic knowledge of classic literature, myth, and folklore; a
firm grasp on English history and the political sense to write about it in ways
that kept his head attached to his torso; plus an unparalleled fluidity of
style. They discount native genius as
impossible. But such great genius,
exploding from unexpected sources erupts from time to time in history in all of
the arts and sciences. I, for one, prefer
to think that the son of a glover could lay quill to parchment and create say Macbeth.
The
success of his plays and the troop made Shakespeare a moderately wealthy
man. He purchased property in London and
sent money back home to buy the second grandest house in Stratford, New
House. He ostentatiously generously
subscribed to the tithes of the local parish where wagging tongues had probably
once gossiped about his sexual offenses.
The
original Globe burned down when cannon fired in a production of Henry VII in 1613 ignited the
thatched roof. Although the company
rebuilt the theater on the old foundations, the fire may have hastened
Shakespeare’s retirement. So might ill
health.
At any
rate, he returned to Stratford and the perhaps not so loving arms of his wife
not long after. He died of unknown
causes in 1616 leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. His wife, Anne, was automatically under
English law, entitled to a third of the estate, so it might not have been quite
as mean as it looked when the bard left her only “his second best bed” in his
will.
After his
death two of his comrades in the King’s Men arranged for the publication of the
famous First Folio of
Shakespeare’s plays in 1623. It
contained all but two of the plays now commonly attributed to him. It also featured a cover woodcut of a balding
man with a moustache and soul patch which, in the absence of any verifiable
contemporary image, is how we picture him today.
Of course
Shakespeare is best remembered for his plays, which are perpetually in
production in theaters large and small around the world. But this is National Poetry Month so
today we salute his verse. Of course
there is plenty of memorable and highly quotable poetry in the plays
themselves. But most folks think of the Sonnets, 154 poems written over most
of his adult life. But he had earlier
published, with some success two long erotic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece while London theaters
were closed down during the plague years of 1593 and’94. Another long
poem, The Lover’s Complaint
was added as a kind of bonus to the first edition of the Sonnets.
A Fairy Song
Over hill, over
dale,
Thorough bush,
thorough brier,
Over park, over
pale,
Thorough flood,
thorough fire!
I do wander
everywhere,
Swifter than the
moon’s sphere;
And I serve the
Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs
upon the green;
The cowslips
tall her pensioners be;
In their gold
coats spots you see;
Those be rubies,
fairy favours;
In those
freckles live their savours;
I must go seek
some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl
in every cowslip’s ear.
—William
Shakespeare
Carpe Diem
O mistress mine,
where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journey's end in lovers' meeting—
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;—
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journey's end in lovers' meeting—
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;—
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
—William
Shakespeare
From you have I
been absent in the spring...
From you have I
been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied
April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a
spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy
Saturn laughed and leaped with him,
Yet nor the lays
of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different
flowers in odor and in hue,
Could make me
any summer's story tell,
Or from their
proud lap pluck them where they grew.
Nor did I wonder
at the lily's white,
Nor praise the
deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but
sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you,
you pattern of all those.
Yet seemed it
winter still, and, you away,
As with your
shadow I with these did play.
—William
Shakespeare
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