Because he’s such a significant historical
figure and lived in a time when there are fewer reliable
historical records about individuals, compared to other periods,
there have been a number of theories advanced about Shakespeare
over the years. In the eighteenth century especially,
various people suggested that the actor William Shakespeare was
not the author of the works attributed to him, and that those
works were actually written by the Earl of Oxford, King James,
Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe. None of these views
are currently accepted by a significant portion of historians or
Shakespearean scholars, and Simply Charly makes the assumption
that the conventional view of history is correct.
Interested readers can find a wide variety of books on the
subject; for a starter, John Michell’s 1999 book Who Wrote
Shakespeare? provides an overview of the theories without
taking a side.
William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564 -
April 23, 1616) was born and raised in Stratford-on-Avon,
England, and seems to have spent most of his life there and in
London. He married Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and they
had three children, Susanna (with whom Anne was pregnant at the
wedding), Judith, and Hamnet. His actual date of birth is
unknown -- churches kept records of baptisms more frequently than
births, and he was baptized on April 26. April 23 is
traditionally celebrated as his birthday both because it
coincides with the date of his death and because that day is the
feast day of Saint George, the patron saint of England. If
it’s wrong, it’s only off by a few days -- English baptisms were
nearly always performed within a week of a child’s birth.
Beyond his birth, marriage, and death, most of
the details of Shakespeare’s non-professional life are a matter
of speculation. His parents were John and Mary, either or
both of who may have come from Catholic families (England was at
this time Protestant by law, following the creation of the Church
of England), and he was the third of eight children. Though
not prosperous, his family didn’t struggle: his mother came from
an upper-class family and his father served as an alderman in
Avon for a time. William almost certainly attended grammar
school (the local school was open for free to all boys), where he
would have received instruction in Latin and literature,
accounting for the knowledge of the classics and of Romance
language, which he displays in his work.
From 1585 to 1592, no record of Shakespeare
survives. Though this fact fascinates some readers and
historians, it’s about what you’d expect for most residents of
England at the time -- even when records were kept, many of them
wouldn’t have survived to the present day, being vulnerable to
fire, water damage, and simple neglect. Though well-known,
Shakespeare was never as famous in his lifetime as he has become,
and even if he were, history as an academic field just wasn’t
pursued in the same way at the time -- preserving records of
commoners for posterity would have been a strange notion,
especially during a cold winter when papers could have been
burned for fuel.
Various traditions have developed around
Shakespeare’s life -- he is supposed to have worked as a teacher,
to have done odd jobs related to the London theater, and to have
been arrested for poaching deer (just as Robin Hood was) -- but
there is no mention of any of these things until long after his
death, and are probably the equivalent of George Washington and
the cherry tree. We know that by 1592, he was a playwright
-- because well-known writer Robert Greene dismissed him as
"an upstart crow," deriding his play Henry
VI. Interestingly -- given Shakespeare’s lack of
serious education -- what Greene seems most upset by is the
Bard’s attempt to rise above his station by writing serious work,
rather than just entertainments for the masses.
Throughout the 1590s and the first decade of
the seventeenth century, Shakespeare worked as a playwright and
actor on the London stage. He was part owner of Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors later known as the King’s
Men when King James I took over Chamberlain’s sponsorship.
He acted both in his own plays and in those of others, and
retired in 1613, returning to Avon, where he died three years
later of food poisoning.
We know a good deal more about his plays and
poetry than his personal life -- though even then, there are
plays we are not sure Shakespeare wrote, and plays he wrote which
have not survived to the present day.
Perhaps the most prominent aspect of
Shakespeare’s work is one that has been emulated by many writers
to follow him (notably Mark Twain, who supported the
"Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare" theories): he
wrote for the educated man and the "masses"
simultaneously. His plays are full of sexual allusions,
puns and dirty jokes, violence, revenge, ghosts and witches,
romance, betrayal, slapstick, magic, and just plain goofiness --
but they also draw on history, on previous plays, and on Greek
and Roman legendry. Those puns may provide an easy laugh,
but they’re also part of a larger approach to language, a deep
understanding of it. Shakespeare committed to print
thousands of words, which had never been seen before -- more than
all other writers of his generation combined.
Now, "committed to print" needs some
explanation, and demonstrates what makes Shakespeare so
interesting. Some of these words were probably in use at
the time -- in speech. A writer with an excellent ear for
dialogue, Shakespeare wrote down a good many words and phrases
which were used in informal conversation but had never been used
in print before. But on top of that, he also invented a
great many words -- not out of whole cloth, but by deriving
adjectives from nouns, verbs from adjectives, combining parts of
words in ways that simply made sense to him. This was a
fluid time in the history of the English language -- Shakespeare
didn’t even spell his own name the same all the time, nor did
anyone else -- and people were very receptive to these
neologisms, just as new words and slang are introduced every week
in the present day, thanks to television, music, and text
messaging.
In addition to being the first to coin,
record, or popularize such words, many of the phrases he used
have caught on and become a common feature of English even among
people who’ve never read his plays. "A foregone
conclusion" is one such phrase. To vanish into "thin
air" is another, as well as "mum’s the word,"
"in a pickle," and "love is blind."
