A Biography

William Shakespeare was a poet and a playwright active in England during the final years of the reign of Elizabeth I and the first part of the reign of James I, from approximately 1590 until 1610. Fortunately, his plays were collected in what is now known as the First Folio, otherwise little of his work would have come down to us.

Shakespeare's First Folio

Shakespeare the playwright

The first folio edition of the works of Shakespeare was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death. It contained 36 plays in all. In the front matter of this publication Shakespeare's actor associates John Heminges and Henry Condel, who were instrumental in putting the work together, write of Shakespeare:

..he was a happie imitator of Nature, (and) was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. And there we hope, to your divers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you: for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.

This testimony comes from two people who worked with Shakespeare closely for many years, so should be given appropriate weight. Probably the most notable thing about their eulogy is that they clearly liked Shakespeare, thought that others would like him, and appreciated his wit.

Frances Meres (minister and critic, 1566-1647) writes of him 'the sweet wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare'. (Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, 1598), He goes on to commend Shakespeare's plays above those of all other English dramatists.

Arguably the best and certainly the best known of the playwrights contemporary with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson (poet, playwright and bricklayer, 1572-1637) was in an excellent position to assess Shakespeare's character and talent. Eight years younger than Shakespeare, he was engaged in the same business of trying to make a living out of writing for the theatre. A precarious existence indeed!

Further evidence of Shakespeare's character and renown surfaces in the anonymous play Return from Parnassus Part I (c 1600), which portrays Richard Burbage and William Kempe, two of the principal actors from the troupe to which Shakespeare belonged, in conversation about the acting and play writing abilities of University men:

Kempe: Few of the University pen plays well,they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, And Ben Jonson too. Oh that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare has given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.

Kempe is here shown to be ignorant in believing Metamorphosis to be the name of a writer when it is in fact the title of a work, but he clearly makes the point that the style of the University men, for all its correctness, while it was appropriate for production at the Universities, where the audience were all steeped in the classical tradition, was not going to conquer London, where different criteria of excellence reigned. It is with this London audience that Shakespeare, Kempe and Burbage triumphed, and precisely because they were of the people, and lacked the impedimenta of a university education.

Kempe continues by explaining the virtues of the acting craft:

But be merry my lads, you have happened upon the most excellent vocation in the world for money: they come from North and South to bring it to our playhouse, and for honours, who of more report, then Dick Burbage and Will Kempe: he is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.

In brief, in a few short years from his arrival in London around 1586, Shakespeare had risen to the top of his profession at a time when London was awash with players, playwrights and theatres. He was considered the best not only by the London crowd, but also by discerning contemporaries; his plays were popular, they made money, he made money, and he was recognised by his fellow playwrights, allbeit grudgingly. He proved very early that he knew how to write for the people, but, perhaps more importantly, and certainly more surprisingly, he quickly went on to prove that he knew how to write for the aristocracy as well.

Shakespeare the poet

The Sonnets

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18)

Henry Wriothesley (probably pronounced 'Roseley') became the 3rd Earl of Southampton on the death of his father in 1581 when he was eight years old. He also became a ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1521-1598), Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I . This meant that Burghley exercised considerable control over the young aristocrat, though Harry did not readily suffer being guided by this master manipulator, refusing, for example, to marry the bride his guardian proposed for him in 1589, and continued to propose for several years thereafter, only ceding when the Earl paid a huge fine of £5000 to get out of the arrangement. It was probably Burghley who encouraged first John Clapham (1566-1619) and then Shakespeare to write poetry to the young man urging him to get married. So we get Shakespeare's Sonnet I:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's Rose might never die...

Nothing like getting straight to the point! Note the 'Rose' in the second line, printed in italics with a capital initial letter, denoting Rosely (Wriothesley), and so it continues for seventeen sonnets, attempting to persuade the young man of the necessity of producing offspring. At Sonnet X there is something of a shift in emphasis, however, with

Make thee another self, for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

The poet has suddently thrust himself into the picture, and it is clear from what he says that he is confident that his request for the young man to do something 'for love of me' is likely to carry some weight. Evidently, some barriers of social distance have been crossed here, a thing most uncommon in Tudor times. But Southampton was exceptional for his time (preferring to be called 'Harry Southampton', for example, rather than the more usual 'my Lord') and part of a coterie of aristocrats who considered poetry to be one of the highest attainments. In this milieu, the quality of the verse produced by the poet here serenading the young man would not go unnoticed. It would also be evident that Shakespeare is now speaking for himself, expressing his own feelings, and no longer writing on behalf of a third party who is paying him to write.

It should be noted that the context in which the word 'love' is here used moderates its force. Moreover, the use of the word in Tudor times was more common than nowadays to simply indicate strong affection rather than anything more potent or sexual.

That is not to say that the relationship with Harry Southampton was not intense. And it was detailed through the rest of the 154 sonnets, probably covering the period from around 1590 to 1605. Other characters are introduced into the sequence, most significantly a rival poet and a 'dark lady', producing a complex history of love, deception, betrayal, despair and renewed hope which directly details Shakespeare's heart, albeit squeezed into the rigid form of the sonnet. Never has a poet so successfully portrayed the roller coaster ride that is love. Each sonnet represents a moment in time when the poet tries to arrest the flow of emotions and reactions to events, and record them for posterity. The whole is made all the more signifcant and interesting by expressing as it does both the love of a man for another man and of a man for a woman.

Shakespeare addresses some of the contradictions in this situation directly in Sonnet 20:

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a dotinge,

And by addition me of thee defeated

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure

Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

It's a bit like squaring a circle, but, if it works in poetry, it should work in real life. Or not. What is quite evident from this excerpt, however, is that any sexual interest Shakespeare might have felt with regard to his aristocratic friend was based on the fact that he resembled a beautiful woman, and the fact that he was a man put a bar on the physical aspect of the love relationship, at least initially. This is clearly the meaning of the last two lines.

At all events, the idea that Shakespeare was a ghostly, insubstantial figure about whom we know very little is patently absurd. Never was the heart revealed in such graphic detail for the reader. The light shed on Shakespeare's character from these events, and from Shakepeare's own reflections on these events as detailed in the sonnets, illuminates him in a unique way.

Having said all that, it is evident that Shakespeare is applying his extraordinary literary talent to construct a story, but here using as materials his own heart and his own experiences. He is also emulating and then surpassing other writers of sonnets. In so doing, he is taking 'poetic licence' with the facts, exaggerating, poeticising, idealising. Similarly, it is highly unlikely that Romeo spoke to Juliet in the manner of Shakespeare's Romeo. The same process of poetification is in evidence, except that in the one case, an existing story is informed with shakespearean poetry while in the case of the sonnets, it is Shakespeare's own emotions that are poeticised.

Shakespeare had already experienced love and sex with a woman. He had married Anne Hathaway in November 1582, and, by January 1585, his wife had given birth to three children. But his relationship with Southampton allows him to study emotions and sentiments of a different nature. In his enthusiasm for the young aristocrat, he construes the adventure increasingly as ideal love, relating his sonnets to what he has read of love in the poetry of Renaissance and Classical authors, and he is clearly seduced by the aura around Southampton, who is rich, handsome and an aristocrat. But the relationship is fundamentally based on mutual self interest; Shakespeare has need of a patron as much as Southampton has need of a poet in his entourage. The quality of the poetry Shakespeare produces acts as a sort of aphrodisiac for the pair, binding them together in an exploration of noble sentiments. The fact that the poetry is informed by this passionate, sometimes tumultuous stream of emotions is one of the things that separates these sonnets from the courtly poetic posturings of other sonneteers of the period.

But before we go too far in the analysis of Shakespeare's relationship with this young man, we would do well to bear in mind that the poetry Shakespeare was producing was designed to persuade, as were many of the best speeches in his plays (Richard III wooing the lady Anne, Cassius giving his speech to the Roman people after the death of Caesar, Isabelle pleading for her brother's life before Angelo, for example). The sonnets were initially written to persuade the young man to marry, then to secure his patronage, then to secure a gift of £1000, then to persuade him (the young man) that his (the poet's) unfaithfulness was not culpable, then to get rid of him. The sonnets to the ladies were written to obtain their sexual favours. It was, however, a game that was to seriously backfire on Shakespeare.

Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece

It was probably the enforced closure of the theatres during most of 1592 and 1593 that left Shakespeare time to concentrate on two long poems. The first, Venus and Adonis (1194 lines), is an amusing skit on love and sex which became immediately very popular, (running to fifteen reprints before 1640). It is dedicated to the young Wriothesley. The story places Venus in the role of suitor and shows Adonis as more interested in hunting than in what Venus is only too ready to offer. The traditional roles of the sexes are reversed. Venus takes on the male role and Adonis the female. The situation thus produced parallels young Wriothesley's evident disdain for the female sex. But, during the course of the poem, Shakespeare does not seek to persuade the young man to act differently, though the fate of Adonis, who is gored by the boar he is hunting and dies, perhaps indicates that he would have been better advised to stay with Venus.

The dedication of the poem to Southampton is warm, and respectful, but avoids the type of sycophantic excess commonly used at this time in such dedications:

I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some greater labour. (Venus and Adonis, Dedication)

Venus and Adonis showcases all Shakespeare's abilities as a poet in a sustained display of creative inventiveness which goes some way to validating Jonson's criticism mentioned previously. He did not know when to stop. Even the most inventive poetry begins to cloy after a while. This problem was remedied in Shakespeare's plays by the use of scenes taking their inspiration from the common people, scenes which act as an interval and as relief from the high poetry of the main action. But here, there is no such counterpoise, though the poem as a whole is informed by many accurate metaphors and similes taken from nature. Hunting, in particular, is described in elaborate detail, and, in this activity, there is a natural connection between the young aristocrat, one of whose ancient prerogatives is the hunt, and Shakespeare, the poacher. In fact, hunting was as much a qualication of a gentleman as poetry, and Shakespeare is clearly not only addressing a gentleman, he is also aspiring to gentlemanly status himself, (see his later application for a coat of arms granted in 1596, and his comments regretting his having made a spectacle of himself on the stage in Sonnet 110. A gentleman did not do that.)

With the Rape of Lucrece, however, Shakespeare passes on to more serious matter, and the dedication clearly demonstrates an intimacy with his young patron which was not evident in the Venus and Adonis dedication:

The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would shew greater; mean time, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with happiness. (The Rape of Lucrece, Dedication, 9 May 1594)

No doubt the success of Venus and Adonis cemented the relationship between the two men: as has been already mentioned, it was as useful to Southampton to have a significant poet in his entourage as it was to Shakespeare to be in that entourage, where he had access to books, learning, sophisticated conversation, works of art, and, in time, a view of the workings of the political machine in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It should also be mentioned that the tone of the second dedication clearly approaches the tone of the sonnets, some of which were probably written at about the same time.

The poem is more than 1800 lines long, and recounts the story of the rape of Lucrece by the son of King Tarquin of Rome, which was followed by her suicide, the banishment of the tyrannical king, and the creation of the Roman Republic. The story is told by the Roman historian Livy in his History of Rome and also by Ovid in his Fasti. It is a piece which shows the heroism of one woman in standing up to tyranny, and, as such, is surely intended to impress not the fickle Henry Wriothesley, but those close to him whom Shakespeare had got to know.