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Shakespeare: Plays
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Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry".[4] In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
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In all likelihood, Shakespeare wrote the 154 verse pieces that constitute his Sonnets at an early juncture in his career, and after 1598 or so, he abandoned both the sonnet form and the composition of non-dramatic poetry. Shakespeare's motives in engaging in this genre at a time when he had already written several plays was undoubtedly related to a short-lived fad in the court of Queen Elizabeth. In 1591, a year or two before Shakespeare began to write sonnets, Sir Philip Sydney Astrophel and Stella sonnet cycle was first published, and its immediate popularity among Elizabethan aristocrats inaugurated a vogue that many other poets tried to exploit. In short order, Samuel Daniel (Delia, 1592), Michael Drayton (Ideas Mirrour, 1594) and Edmund Spenser (Amoretti, 1595) authored sonnet cycles.
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In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus.
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Soon... Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.[127] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.[128] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.
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Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon. He spent most of his career in London as an actor, playwright, and manager of the Globe Theater. His success enabled him to retire to Stratford, where he died.
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The modernist revolution in the arts during the early twentieth century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.[168] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.[169] By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, African American studies, and queer studies.[170]
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