Shakespeare's Life

Brett Foster

Description

Providing important context for his greatest works, Shakespeare's Life presents a thorough biography of the Bard, featuring the latest findings from scholars about his life and his works. Included is coverage of his upbringing in Stratford, his marriage and family life, the process of writing his greatest works, and his life after the theater.

Coverage includes: 

• His early years in Stratford, including his marriage to Anne Hathaway


• His rise to stardom within the London theater scene


• The death of his nine-year-old son, Hamnet


• The writing of his greatest works, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and others


• His retirement from the theater and move back to Stratford


• And much more.

Sujets

• Shakespeare
• Literary Criticism
• Theater
• Actuación
• Theatre
• Biography
• Writer
• British
• Author
• William Shakespeare
• Actor
• OpenOffice.org Writer
• London

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646930081
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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Shakespeare's Life
Copyright © 2020 by Infobase
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, contact:
Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001
ISBN 978-1-64693-008-1
You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.infobase.com
Contents Chapters Shakespeare s Birth and Adolescence Shakespeare the Young Man Shakespeare s "Lost Years" Shakespeare the Young Actor and Writer Shakespeare s Early Successes Shakespeare s Growing Fame Shakespeare Back in Stratford Shakespeare s Triumphs at the Globe Shakespeare the Literary Lion Jacobean Shakespeare Late Shakespeare: A New Theater, New Plays, New Books Shakespeare s Sonnets and the Late Plays Shakespeare s Last Days in London and Stratford The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Anne Hathaway Shakespeare s 1580s Writings? Shakespeare s Beliefs The Commercial Theaters of London Shakespeare s Stage The Plays: Aids for Reading Shakespeare s Books How to Move a Theater The Globe Theatre Today An Overlooked Shakespeare Poem Shakespeare the King s Man Shakespeare s Collaborations Two Collaborators: George Wilkins and John Fletcher Was Shakespeare Somebody Else? The First Folio s Praising Poets
Chapters
Shakespeare's Birth and Adolescence

William Shakespeare's first great accomplishment in life was not writing Hamlet , which he did around 1600 at roughly the age of thirty-five, or, centuries later, being voted the "Man of the Millennium" by the British Broadcasting Company in 2000. No, his first accomplishment was simple enough—Shakespeare lived. In the English market village of Stratford-upon-Avon (that is, the town situated along the River Avon), merely surviving was no easy task in the year of Shakespeare's birth, 1564. As many as fifteen percent of Stratford's population of approximately two thousand residents perished that year. What made Stratford so deadly?
An entry in the parish register at Stratford's Holy Trinity Church reads: "1564, Apr. 26. C. Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere." This may be a little mystifying at first glance, but the meaning becomes clear when we take into account its Latin words, abbreviations, and loose spellings, which differ from common spellings today. It simply means: "April 26, 1564, christened, William, son of John Shakespeare." It's curious to think that William Shakespeare's first appearance in print, so to speak, features his name in Latin—"Gulielmus." It is one modest sign of how far back in time Shakespeare and his age stands from our own. His was an age still shaped by Latin Christendom, whereas ours is defined by twenty-first-century modernity. We must make committed strides to encounter that earlier era again, as if face to face.
Shakespeare's Hometown: Stratford-Upon-Avon
When we encounter that church register's page and scan down it, we see that many of the following entries suddenly begin to appear with the letter "B," which stands for "burial." Shortly after Shakespeare's birth, then, Stratford's parishioners started dying at an unusually fast pace. Twenty deaths in the first half of 1564 spiked to two hundred in the second half. This death rate equals one in seven people, a number that should make anyone shudder. A note in the margin of the parish register explains everything— hic incepit pestis —that is, "here begins the plague." Shakespeare entered the world at a site of epidemic. Nor was this the only time the bubonic plague would affect Shakespeare's life: it is generally thought that Shakespeare wrote many of his sonnets during a time away from London, when plague there in 1593–94 caused the closing of the city's theaters. The threat may still have been on Shakespeare's mind a year or two later, when Mercutio cries out in Romeo and Juliet , "A plague o'er both your houses." Moreover, the tragic miscommunication occurs between the lovers after Romeo fails to receive a letter from Friar Laurence—a letter that is held up because its messenger, Friar John, is detained by fears of plague infection.
The plague was an acutely dangerous outbreak, but it also grimly symbolizes the perilous times people confronted, and had to endure, during the English Renaissance. During the decade of Shakespeare's birth, only one in three children would live long enough to become an adult citizen of Stratford, and the historian Keith Thomas has concluded that life expectancy during this era was only in the mid-thirties. Various maladies such as tuberculosis and typhus also threatened, and everybody was vulnerable: two years before Shakespeare's birth, even Queen Elizabeth I nearly died of smallpox, and four years before that, influenza had swept through Stratford, killing many. A survey of town history during Shakespeare's life reveals a wide range of dangers and trials. In 1597, rainy conditions fermented another epidemic, and in destroying the crops, also led to a severe food shortage. Sometimes riots erupted in the village's streets as a result, or due to immigrant or vagrant tensions relating to these reeling social pressures. Fires were also a grave concern, especially since many of the houses were timber-framed and could quickly be engulfed in flames. Such conflagrations in Stratford in the mid-1590s ruined a significant portion of the town's homes.
Still, we must refrain from thinking of Stratford as constantly on the verge of apocalypse. On the contrary, it was a robust early-modern English community. Nor should we imagine a rural backwater town from which any bright, lively young man such as Shakespeare was dying to escape as soon as he came of age. Admittedly, compared with the booming capital of London, Stratford was a quiet village. Shakespeare's hometown is far removed from London, about eighty-five miles to the northwest—roughly a four-day walk or a two-day horse ride, with a stopover in the great university town of Oxford a common itinerary. (Even today, Oxford likes to claim its part of Shakespearean history by associating the author with the Crown pub and inn, and with the baptismal font at St. Michael's church, at the site of the former north gate, where Shakespeare may have stood as godfather to an Oxford friend's child.)
Stratford's region is known as Warwickshire or the Midlands, and its site as a river crossing made it a key town. A commercial wool route from Wales to London passed through Stratford, crossing the River Avon at Clopton Bridge. The prosperous citizen Hugh Clopton had rebuilt the sometimes-washed-away wooden bridge as a more lasting stone structure in the 1490s, ensuring that this commercial traffic could move regularly through the town. Stratford was founded centuries earlier, around 1200, and its central axis was along Wood Street/Bridge Street (as they are named today).
"Stratford will help you to understand Shakespeare," wrote the influential scholar F. J. Furnivall in 1875, and with this promise in mind, let us take a brief tour of the town, the circuit of which takes about twenty minutes to walk. At the west end of Wood Street, there was an open space that served as a cattle market, called Rother Market. Today, the railway station is located a little beyond this spot. From Bridge Street, Henley Street ran to the northwest and featured various shops, including John Shakespeare's glover's shop. Another main shopping area was High Street, running due south from the intersection of Wood and Bridge streets, at Market Cross. High Street led into Chapel Street and Church Street as it continued south. This route would pass by the Town Hall, the Guild Chapel, and the grammar school. As the road wound around and became Old Town Street, the lovely Holy Trinity Church would soon appear. This area would have felt slightly separate from the town proper, and around the church only a few large houses, occupied by the well-to-do gentry of the town, marked the area as the original village. The environs outside the main commercial areas were quiet, with barns standing on the side streets. However, as a central market town, Stratford would also be bustling when residents within a five-mile radius traveled there for seasonal fairs and weekly markets, where they would trade produce and products and services. Thus, both of William Shakespeare's grandfathers, Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield and Robert Arden of Wilmcote, would have visited Stratford often and known the town well.
Shakespeare's Family
Shakespeare's family was not immune to Stratford's occasionally lethal conditions described above. As we begin this biographical tale composed largely of Shakespeare's frequent successes—his many literary and theatrical triumphs; the agile, pleasant impression that many had of his personality (at least as it developed in legend); and the enduring power and global recognition of his cultural afterlife—we would do well to keep in mind that Shakespeare, from childhood on, knew death well and suffered tragic family losses. Of the Shakespeares' eight children—four girls and four boys, of whom William was the first son—only one daughter, Joan, lived beyond infancy or early childhood. Both of William's parents died during the first decade of the seventeenth century. One brother, Edmund, a fellow actor, died in 1607 (when William was forty-three) in London, and two other brothers died in Stratford, in successive years, during the last five years of William's own life. Perhaps most devastatingly, Shakespeare lost his only son, named Hamnet, when the boy was eleven years old.
William himself was to die in 1616, on the very day of his birthday, April 23. This "same birthday/death date" notion relies on Shakespeare's baptism record in the Stratford parish register as April 26. As the argument goes, it was natura