| Shakespeare | |||||||
| 莎士比亞 | |||||||
| 出生地： | 英格蘭斯特拉福鎮 | ||||||
閱讀威廉·莎士比亞 William Shakespeare在影视与戏剧的作品!!! 閱讀威廉·莎士比亞 William Shakespeare在诗海的作品!!! | |||||||
威廉·莎士比亚生平
偉大的英國劇作傢、詩人威廉·莎士比亞1564年生於英國中部瓦維剋郡埃文河畔斯特拉特福。其父約翰·莎士比亞是經營羊毛、皮革製造及𠔌物生意的雜貨商，1565年任鎮民政官，3年後被選為鎮長。莎士比亞幼年在當地文法學校讀書。歷史學家喬治·斯蒂文森說，後人從這些文字資料中大概勾勒出莎士比亞的生 活軌跡：１３歲時傢道中落，此後輟學經商，２２歲時前往倫敦，在劇院工作，後來成為演員和劇作傢；１５９７年重返家乡購置房産，度過人生最後時光。他雖受過良好的基本教育，但是未上過大學。1582年，18歲 中，列舉莎士比亞35歲以前的劇作，稱贊他的喜劇、悲劇都“無與倫比”，能和古代第一流戲劇詩人們並稱。但他生前沒出版過自己的劇作。1596年，他以他父親的名義申請到“紳士”稱號和擁有紋章的權利,又先後3次購置了可觀的房地産。1603年，詹姆士一世繼位，他的劇團改稱“國王供奉劇團”，他和團中演員被任命為御前侍從。1612年左右他告別倫敦回到家乡定居。1616年 4月23日病逝，葬於鎮上的聖三一教堂。死前留有遺囑。他的兩個據說比較可靠的肖像是教堂中的半身塑像和德羅肖特畫像，手跡則有 6份簽名和《托馬斯·莫爾爵士》一劇中三頁手稿。1623年，演員J.海明和H.康代爾把他的劇作印成對開本，收進36出戲(其中20出是首次付印)，號稱“第一對開本”。從1772年開始，有人對於莎劇的作者不斷提出過疑問，並且企圖證實作者是培根、C.馬洛、勒特蘭伯爵、牛津伯爵、德比伯爵等等，但都缺乏證據。
莎士比亞在倫敦住了二十多年，而在此期間他的妻子仍一直呆在斯特拉福。他在接近天命之年時隱退回歸故裏斯特拉福（1612年左右）。1616年莎士比亞在其五十二歲生日前後不幸去世，葬於聖三一教堂。死前留有遺囑。他的兩個據說比較可靠的肖像是教堂中的半身塑像和德羅肖特畫像，手跡則有 6份簽名和《托馬斯·莫爾爵士》一劇中三頁手稿。1623年，演員J.海明和H.康代爾把他的劇作印成對開本，收進36出戲(其中20出是首次付印)，號稱“第一對開本”。
作品
莎士比亞在約1590～1612的20餘年內共寫了三十七部戲劇（如加上與弗萊徹合寫的《兩位貴親》則是三十八部），還寫有二首長詩和一百五十四首十四行詩。他的戲劇多取材於歷史記載、小說、民間傳說和老戲等已有的材料，反映了封建社會嚮資本主義社會過渡的歷史現實，宣揚了新興資産階級的人道主義思想和人性論觀點。由於一方面廣泛藉鑒古代戲劇、英國中世紀戲劇以及歐洲新興的文化藝術，一方面深刻觀察人生，瞭解社會，掌握時代的脈搏，故使莎士比亞得以塑造出衆多栩栩如生的人物形象，描繪廣阔的、五光十色的社會生活圖景，並使之以悲喜交融、富於詩意和想象、寓統一於矛盾變化之中以及富有人生哲理和批判精神等特點著稱。
一般來說，莎士比亞的戲劇創作可分以下3個時期：
第一時期（1590～1600年） 以寫作歷史劇、喜劇為主，有9部歷史劇、10部喜劇和2部悲劇。
9部歷史劇中除《約翰王》是寫 13 世紀初英國歷史外 ，其他8部是內容相銜接的兩個4部麯 ：《 亨利六世 》上 、中、下篇與《查理三世》；《查理二世》、《亨利四世》（被稱為最成功的歷史劇）上、下篇與《亨利五世》。這些歷史劇概括了英國歷史上百餘年間的動亂，塑造了一係列正、反面君主形象，反映了莎士比亞反對封建割據，擁護中央集權，譴責暴君暴政，要求開明君主進行自上而下改革，建立和諧社會關係的人文主義政治與道德理想。
10部喜劇《錯誤的喜劇》、《馴悍記》、《維洛那二紳士》、《愛的徒勞》、《仲夏夜之夢》、《威尼斯商人 》、《 溫莎的風流娘兒們 》、《無事生非》、《皆大歡喜》和《第十二夜》大都以愛情、友誼、婚姻為主題，主人公多是一些具有人文主義智慧與美德的青年男女，通過他們爭取自由、幸福的鬥爭，歌頌進步、美好的新人新風，同時也溫和地揭露和嘲諷舊事物的衰朽和醜惡，如禁欲主義的虛矯、清教徒的偽善和高利貸者的貪鄙等。莎士比亞這一時期戲劇創作的基本情調是樂觀、明朗的，充滿着以人文主義理想解决社會矛盾的信心，以致寫在這一時期的悲劇《羅密歐與朱麗葉》中，也洋溢着喜劇氣氛。儘管主人公殉情而死，但愛的理想戰勝死亡，換來了封建世仇的和解。然而，這一時期較後的成熟喜劇《威尼斯商人》中，又帶有憂鬱色彩和悲劇因素，在鼓吹仁愛、友誼和真誠愛情的同時，反映了基督教社會中弱肉強食的階級壓迫、種族歧視問題，說明作者已逐漸意識到理想與現實之間存在着難以解决的矛盾。
第二時期（1601～1607年） 以悲劇為主 ，寫了3部羅馬劇、5部悲劇和3部“陰暗的喜劇”或“問題劇”。
羅馬劇《尤利烏斯·凱撒》、《安東尼和剋莉奧佩特拉》和《科裏奧拉努斯》是取材於普盧塔剋《希臘羅馬英雄傳 》的歷史劇。
四大悲劇《哈姆雷特》、《 奧賽羅 》、《 李爾王 》、《麥剋白》和悲劇《雅典的泰門》標志着作者對時代、人生的深入思考，着力塑造了這樣一些新時代的悲劇主人公：他們從中世紀的禁錮和蒙昧中醒來，在近代黎明照耀下，雄心勃勃地想要發展或完善自己，但又不能剋服時代和自身的局限，終於在同環境和內心敵對勢力的力量懸殊鬥爭中，遭到不可避免的失敗和犧牲。哈姆雷特為報父仇而發現“整個時代脫榫”了，决定擔起“重整乾坤”的責任，結果是空懷大志，無力回天。奧賽羅正直淳樸，相信人而又嫉惡如仇，在姦人擺布下殺妻自戕，為追求至善至美反遭惡報。李爾王在權勢給他帶來的尊榮 、自豪 、 自信中迷失本性 ，喪失理智，幻想以讓權分國來證明自己不當國王而做一個普通人，也能同樣或更加偉大，因而經受了一番痛苦的磨難。麥剋白本是有功的英雄，性格中有善和美的一面，衹因王位的誘惑和野心的驅使，淪為“從血腥到血腥”、懊悔無及的罪人。這些人物的悲劇，深刻地揭示了在資本原始積纍時期已開始出現的種種社會罪惡和資産階級的利己主義，表現了人文主義理想與殘酷現實之間矛盾的不可調和，具有高度的概括意義。
由於這一時期劇作思想深度和現實主義深度的增強，使《特洛伊羅斯與剋瑞西達》、《終成眷屬》和《一報還一報》等“喜劇”也顯露出陰暗的一面，籠罩着背信棄義、爾虞我詐的罪惡陰影，因而被稱為“問題劇”或“陰暗的喜劇”。
第三時期（1608～1613）傾嚮於妥協和幻想的悲喜劇或傳奇劇。
主要作品是4部悲喜劇或傳奇劇《泰爾親王裏剋裏斯》、《辛白林》、《鼕天的故事 》、《暴風雨》。這些作品多寫失散、團聚、誣陷、昭雪。儘管仍然堅持人文主義理想，對黑暗現實有所揭露，但矛盾的解决主要靠魔法、幻想、機緣巧合和偶然事件，並以宣揚寬恕、容忍、妥協、和解告終。
莎士比亞還與弗萊徹合作寫了歷史劇《亨利八世》和傳奇劇《兩位貴親》，後者近年來被有的莎士比亞戲劇集收入。
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威廉·莎士比亞（1564—1616）是文藝復興時期英國以及歐洲最重要的作傢。他出生於英格蘭中部斯特拉福鎮的一個商人家庭。少年時代曾在當地文法學校接受基礎教育，學習拉丁文、哲學和歷史等，接觸過古羅馬劇作傢的作品。後因傢道中落，輟學謀生。莎士比亞幼年時，常有著名劇團來鄉間巡回演出，培養了他對戲劇的愛好。1585年前後，他離開家乡去倫敦，先在劇院打雜，後來當上一名演員，進而改編和編寫劇本。莎士比亞除了參加演出和編劇，還廣泛接觸社會，常常隨劇團出入宮廷或來到鄉間。這些經歷擴大了他的視野，為他的創作打下了基礎。
1590年到1600年是莎士比亞創作的早期，又稱為歷史劇、喜劇時期。這一時期莎士比亞人文主義思想和藝術風格漸漸形成。當時的英國正處於伊麗莎白女王統治的鼎盛時期，王權穩固統一，經濟繁榮。莎士比亞對在現實社會中實現人文主義理想充滿信心，作品洋溢着樂觀明朗的色彩。這一時期，他寫的歷史劇包括《理查三世》（1592）、《亨利四世》（上下集）（1597—1598）和《 亨利五世 》（1599）等9部。劇本的基本主題是擁護中央王權，譴責封建暴君和歌頌開明君主。比如，《亨利四世》展現的是國內局勢動蕩的畫面，貴族們聯合起來反叛國王，但叛亂最終被平息；王太子早先生活放蕩，後來認識錯誤，在平定內亂中立下戰功。劇作中，歷史事實和藝術虛構達到高度統一。人物形象中以福斯塔夫最為生動，此人自私、懶惰、畏縮，卻又機警、靈巧、樂觀，令人忍俊不禁。
這一時期創作的喜劇包括詩意盎然的《仲夏夜之夢》（1596）、揚善懲惡的《威尼斯商人》（1597）、反映市民生活風俗的《溫莎的風流娘兒們》（1598）、宣揚貞潔愛情的《無事生非》（1599）和歌頌愛情又探討人性的《第十二夜》（1600）等10部。這些劇本基本主題是愛情、婚姻和友誼，帶有濃郁的抒情色彩，表現了莎士比亞的人文主義生活理想。與此同時，他還寫了《羅密歐與朱麗葉》（1595）等悲劇3部，作品雖然有哀怨的一面，但是基本精神與喜劇同。莎士比亞還寫有長詩《維納斯和阿多尼斯》（1592—1593）、《魯剋麗絲受辱記》（1593—1594）和154首十四行詩。
17世紀初，伊麗莎白女王一世與詹姆士一世政權交替，英國社會矛盾激化，社會醜惡日益暴露。這一時期，莎士比亞的思想和藝術走嚮成熟，人文主義理想同社會現實發生激烈碰撞。他痛感理想難以實現，創作由早期的贊美人文主義理想轉變為對社會黑暗的揭露和批判。莎士比亞創作的第二時期（1601—1607），又稱悲劇時期。他寫出了《哈姆萊特》（1601）、《奧瑟羅》（1604）、《李爾王》（1606）、《麥剋白》（1606）和《雅典的泰門》（1607）等著名悲劇。《奧瑟羅》中出身貴族的苔絲狄蒙娜不顧父親和社會的反對，與摩爾人奧瑟羅私下結婚，表現了反對種族偏見的主題，而導致他們悲劇的原因不僅是奧瑟羅的嫉妒，而且是以伊阿古為代表的邪惡勢力的強大。奧瑟羅臨死前的清醒，包含着人類理性的勝利。《李爾王》中展現的則是一個分崩離析的社會，李爾王因為自己的剛愎自用付出了生命的代價，也給國傢和人民帶來了巨大的災難。主人公從具有絶對權威的封建君主變成了一無所有、無傢可歸的老人，人物命運和性格發生巨大的變化，這在莎士比亞的作品中最具特色。《麥剋白》中，一位英雄人物由於內在的野心和外部的唆使，成為個人野心傢和暴君。其悲劇意義在於，個人野心和利己主義可以毀滅一個原本並非邪惡的人物。總體而言，這些悲劇對封建貴族的腐朽衰敗、利己主義的駭人聽聞、金錢關係的罪惡和勞動人民的疾苦，作了深入的揭露；風格上，浪漫歡樂的氣氛減少，憂鬱悲憤的情調增加，形象更豐滿，語言更純熟。
1608年以後，莎士比亞進入創作的最後時期。這時的莎士比亞已看到人文主義的理想在現實社會中無法實現，便從寫悲劇轉而為寫傳奇劇，從揭露批判現實社會的黑暗轉嚮寫夢幻世界。因此，這一時期又稱莎士比亞的傳奇劇時期。這時期，他的作品往往通過神話式的幻想，藉助超自然的力量來解决理想與現實之間的矛盾；作品貫串着寬恕、和解的精神，沒有前期的歡樂，也沒有中期的陰鬱，而是充滿美麗的生活幻想，浪漫情調濃郁。《暴風雨》（1611）最能代表這一時期的風格，被稱為“用詩歌寫的遺囑”。此外，他還寫有《辛白林》和《鼕天的故事》等3部傳奇劇和歷史劇《亨利八世》。
莎士比亞的作品從生活真實出發，深刻地反映了時代風貌和社會本質。他認為，戲劇“仿佛要給自然照一面鏡子：給德行看一看自己的面貌，給荒唐看一看自己的姿態，給時代和社會看一看自己的形象和印記”。馬剋思、恩格斯將莎士比亞推崇為現實主義的經典作傢，提出戲劇創作應該更加“莎士比亞化”。這是針對戲劇創作中存在的“把個人變成時代精神的單純的傳聲筒”的缺點而提出的創作原則。所謂“莎士比亞化”，就是要求作傢象莎士比亞那樣，善於從生活真實出發，展示廣阔的社會背景，給作品中的人物和事件提供富有時代特點的典型環境；作品的情節應該生動、豐富，人物應該有鮮明個性，同時具有典型意義；作品中現實主義的刻畫和浪漫主義的氛圍要巧妙結合；語言要豐富，富有表現力；作傢的傾嚮要在情節和人物的描述中隱蔽而自然地流露出來。
莎士比亞的作品包括：
悲劇：羅密歐與朱麗葉，麥剋白，李爾王，哈姆萊特，奧瑟羅，泰特斯·安特洛尼剋斯，裘力斯·凱撒，安東尼與剋莉奧佩屈拉（埃及豔後），科利奧蘭納斯，特洛埃圍城記，雅典的泰門等。
喜劇：錯中錯，終成眷屬，皆大歡喜，仲夏夜之夢，無事生非，一報還一報，暴風雨，馴悍記，第十二夜，威尼斯商人，溫莎的風流娘們，愛的徒勞，維洛那二紳士，泰爾親王佩力剋爾斯，辛白林，鼕天的故事等。
歷史劇：亨利四世，亨利五世，亨利六世，亨利八世，約翰王，裏查二世，裏查三世。
十四行詩：愛人的怨訴，魯剋麗絲失貞記，維納斯和阿多尼斯，熱情的朝聖者，鳳凰和斑鳩等。
成就和影響
莎士比亞的戲劇大都取材於舊有劇本、小說、編年史或民間傳說，但在改寫中註入了自己的思想，給舊題材賦予新穎、豐富、深刻的內容。在藝術表現上，他繼承古代希臘羅馬、中世紀英國和文藝復興時期歐洲戲劇的三大傳統並加以發展，從內容到形式進行了創造性革新。他的戲劇不受三一律束縛，突破悲劇、喜劇界限，努力反映生活的本來面目，深入探索人物內心奧秘，從而能夠塑造出衆多性格復雜多樣、形象真實生動的人物典型，描繪了廣阔的 、五光十色的社會生活圖景，並以其博大、深刻、富於詩意和哲理著稱。
莎士比亞的戲劇是為當時英國的舞臺和觀衆寫作的大衆化的戲劇。因而，它的悲喜交融、雅俗共賞以及時空自由 、極力調動觀衆想象來彌補舞臺的簡陋等特點，曾在18世紀遭到以伏爾泰為代表的古典主義者的指摘，並在演出時被任意刪改。莎劇的真正價值，直到19世紀初，在柯爾律治和哈茲裏特等批評傢的闡發下，纔開始為人們所認識。然而當時的莎劇演出仍常被納入5幕結構劇的模式 。19世紀末 ，W.波埃爾和H.格蘭威爾 - 巴剋強烈反對當時莎劇演出的壯觀傳統 ，提倡按伊麗莎白時代劇場不用布景的方式演出，以恢復其固有特點。
17世紀始，莎士比亞戲劇傳入德、法、意、俄、北歐諸國，然後漸及美國乃至世界各地，對各國戲劇發展産生了巨大、深遠的影響，並已成為世界文化發展、交流的重要紐帶和靈感源泉。中國從本世紀初開始介紹和翻譯莎劇，到1978年出版了在朱生豪譯本基礎上經全面校訂、補譯的11捲《莎士比亞全集》。1902年，上海聖約翰書院學生最早用英語演出《威尼斯商人》。據不完全統計，中國先後有65個職業和業餘演出團體 ，以英 、漢 、藏 、蒙 、粵5種語言 ，文明戲、現代話劇、戲麯、廣播劇、芭蕾舞劇 、木偶劇6種形式 ，共演出莎劇21部，包括了莎劇大部分重要作品。莎劇已成為中國中學、大學特別是戲劇院校的教材。莎劇的重要角色為中國演員的培養和提高開闢了廣阔天地。
莎士比亞給世人留下了三十七部戲劇，其中包括一些他與別人合寫的一般劇作。此外，他還寫有一百五十四首十四行詩和三、四首長詩。
就莎士比亞的天才、成就和聲望而言，他的名字未能在本册中名列前茅看來有點離奇。我把莎士比亞排得這樣低，不是因為我不賞識他的藝術成就，而是我認為文學藝術人物一般說來對人類歷史影響較小。
宗教領袖、科學家、政治傢、探險傢、哲學家或發明傢的活動經常影響到人類奮鬥的許多其他領域的發展。例如，科學的進展對經濟和政治事物已經産生了巨大的影響，也影響了宗教信仰、哲學觀點和藝術的發展。
一位著名的畫傢，雖然可能對後來的畫傢的作品影響很大，但是他對音樂和文學可能帶來的影響卻微乎其微，對探險和其他人類奮鬥的領域實際上則毫無影響可言。類似的說法也適合於詩人、劇作傢和音樂作麯傢。一般說來，文藝人物衹對文藝有影響，實際上衹對他們所從事的那個特殊領域有影響。正是由於這種原因，沒有一名文學、音樂或美術人物被列進前三十名，且衹有少數幾個人物纔被列入本册。
那麽為什麽本册中有文藝人物呢？這是因為欣賞文藝對每個人的生活有一定的直接影響（雖然這種影響並不總是很大），換句話說，一個人可能會花一部分時間聽音樂，一部分時間讀書，一部分時間作畫，等等。即使我們聽音樂的時間對我們的其他活動毫無影響（這肯定是種誇張的說法），這一部分時間仍然代表着我們生活中的無聊時間。
一位藝術傢對我們生活的影響可能比我們聽、讀或看他的作品所花的時間還要多。這是因為他的作品很可能對其他作傢的創作活動産生影響，他們的作品為我們所體驗和賞識。
在有些情況下，文藝作品或多或少地有些明確的哲學內容，這會影響我們對其他問題的看法。當然文學作品比音樂或美術作品更經常是如此這般。例如，在《羅密歐與朱麗葉》（第三幕，第一場）中，莎士比亞讓親王說：“對殺人的兇手不能講慈悲，否則就是鼓勵殺人。”這裏提出的觀點（不管人們接受與否）具有鮮明的哲學內容，可能會對人們的政治態度産生影響，而不是其他如欣賞“蒙娜麗莎”所産生的影響。
莎士比亞在所有的文學人物中首屈一指，這看來是無容置辯的。相對來說，今天很少有人談喬叟、維吉爾、甚至荷馬的作品，但是要上演一部莎士比亞的戲劇，肯定會有很多觀衆。莎士比亞創造詞彙的天才是無與倫比的，他的話常被引用──甚至包括從未看過或讀過他的戲劇的人。況且他的名氣也並非曇花一現。近四百年來他的作品一直給讀者和評論傢帶來了許多歡樂。由於莎士比亞的作品已經接受住了時間的考驗，因此在將來的許許多多世紀裏也將會受到普遍歡迎，這一推測看來不無道理。
在評價莎士比亞的影響時，我們應該這樣考慮，如果沒有他，就根本不會有他的作品（當然類似的論斷適合於每一位文學藝術人物，但是這個因素在評價一般的藝術傢的影響時看來並不特別重要）。
據統計，莎士比亞用此高達兩網格以上。它廣泛采用民間語言（如民謠、俚語、古諺語和滑稽幽默的散文等），註意吸收外來詞彙，還大量運用比喻、隱喻、雙關語，可謂集當時英語之大成。莎劇中許多語句已成為現代英語中的成語、典故和格言。相對而言，他早期的劇作喜歡用華麗鏗鏘的詞句；後來的成熟作品則顯得更得心應手，既能用豐富多樣的語言貼切而生動的表現不同人物的特色，也能用樸素自然的詞句傳達扣人心弦的感情和思想。
雖然莎士比亞用英文寫作，但是他是一位真正聞名世界的人物。雖然英語不完全是一種世界語言，但是它比任何其它語言都更接近世界語言。而且莎士比亞的作品被譯成許多種文學，許多國傢都讀他的著作，上演他的戲劇。
當然有些受歡迎的作傢的作品也會受到文學評論傢的輕視，但是莎士比亞就不同了，文學學者都不遺餘力地贊揚他的作品。世世代代的戲劇傢都研究他的作品，企圖獲得他的文學氣質。正是因為莎士比亞對其他作傢有巨大的影響和不斷受到大衆的賞識，纔使他在本書中獲得相當高的名次。
某版本的莎翁戲劇集中的序言，有一段這樣的話：
他通過具有強大藝術力量的形象，從他的那些典型的、同時又具有鮮明個性的主人公的復雜的關係中，從他們的行動和矛盾中去揭示出他們的性格。戲劇中放射出的強烈的人文主義思想光芒，以及卓越而大膽的藝術技巧，其意義早已超出了他的時代和國傢的範圍。
對文學界造成如此大的影響，難怪他的朋友、著名的戲劇傢本·瓊孫說：“他不衹屬於一個時代而屬於全世紀。”
最後一點不得不提的是-----
莎士比亞與世界圖書與版權日
4月23日，對於世界文學領域是一個具有象徵性的日子，因為塞萬提斯、威廉·莎士比亞和加爾西拉索·德·拉·維加都在1616年的這一天去世。此外，4月23日也是另一些著名作傢出生或去世的日子，如莫裏斯·德律恩、拉剋斯內斯、佛拉吉米爾·納博科夫、約瑟·普拉和曼努埃爾·梅希亞?巴列霍。
很自然地，1995年在巴黎召開的聯合國教科文組織大會選擇這一天，嚮全世界的書籍和作者表示敬意；鼓勵每個人，尤其是年輕人，去發現閱讀的快樂，並再度對那些為促進人類的社會和文化進步做出無以替代的貢獻的人表示尊敬。
1995年11月，聯合國教科文組織第二十八次大會通過决議，宣佈每年4月23日為世界圖書和版權日。
版權即著作權，是指文學、藝術、科學作品的作者對其作品享有的權利（包括財産權、人身權）。版權的取得有兩種方式：自動取得和登記取得。我國的著作權法規定，作品完成就自動有版權。
經典臺詞
1. 脆弱啊，你的名字是女人！
2. To be or not to be，that's a question。（生存還是毀滅，那是個值得思考的問題。）
3. 放棄時間的人，時間也會放棄他。
4. 成功的騙子，不必再以說謊為生，因為被騙的人已經成為他的擁護者，我再說什麽也是枉然。
5. 人們可支配自己的命運，若我們受製於人，那錯不在命運，而在我們自己。
6 美滿的愛情，使鬥士緊綳的心情鬆弛下來。
7 太完美的愛情，傷心又傷身，身為江湖兒女，沒那個閑工夫。
8 嫉妒的手足是謊言！
9 上帝是公平的，掌握命運的人永遠站在天平的兩端，被命運掌握的人僅僅衹明白上帝賜給他命運！
10 一個驕傲的人，結果總是在驕傲裏毀滅了自己。
11 愛是一種甜蜜的痛苦，真誠的愛情永不是一條平坦的道路的。
12 因為她生的美麗，所以被男人追求；因為她是女人，所以被男人俘獲。
13 如果女性因為感情而嫉妒起來那是很可怕的。
14 不要衹因一次挫敗，就放棄你原來决心想達到的目的。
15 女人不具備笑傲情場的條件。
16 我承認天底下再沒有比愛情的責罰更痛苦的，也沒有比服侍它更快樂的事了。
17 新的火焰可以把舊的火焰撲滅，大的苦痛可以使小的苦痛減輕。
18 聰明人變成了癡愚，是一條最容易上鈎的遊魚；因為他憑恃才高學廣，看不見自己的狂妄。
19 愚人的蠢事算不得稀奇，聰明人的蠢事纔叫人笑痛肚皮；因為他用全副的本領，證明他自己愚笨。
20 外觀往往和事物的本身完全不符，世人都容易為表面的裝飾所欺騙。
21 黑暗無論怎樣悠長，白晝總會到來。
22 勤勞一天，可得一日安眠；勤奮一生，可永遠長眠。
24 金子啊，,你是多麽神奇。你可以使老的變成少的，醜的變成美的，黑的變成白的，錯的變成對的……
25 目眩時更要旋轉，自己痛不欲生的悲傷，以別人的悲傷，就能夠治愈！
26 愛情就像是生長在懸崖上的一朵花，想要摘就必需要有勇氣。
27 全世界是一個巨大的舞臺，所有紅塵男女均衹是演員罷了。上場下場各有其時。每個人一生都扮演着許多角色，從出生到死亡有七種階段。
28 在自己還得不到幸福的時候，不要靠櫥窗太近，盯着幸福出神
29 人類是一件多麽了不得的傑作！多麽高貴的理性！多麽偉大的力量！多麽優美的儀表！多麽文雅的舉動！在行動上多麽像一個天使！在智慧上多麽像一個天神！宇宙的精華！萬物的靈長！
名言
Do not , for one repulse , give up the purpose that you resolved to effect .(William Shakespeare , British dramatist)
不要衹因一次失敗，就放棄你原來决心想達到的目的。(英國劇作傢 莎士比亞.W.)
A light heart lives long .( William Shakespeare , British dramatist )
豁達者長壽。 (英國劇作傢 莎士比亞. W.)
In delay there lies no plenty , Then come kiss me , sweet and twenty , Youth's a stuff that will not endure . (William Shakespeare , British dramatist)
遷延蹉跎,來日無多,二十麗株,請來吻我,衰草枯楊,青春易過。(英國劇作傢 莎士比亞. W.)
The time of life is short ; to spend that shortness basely, it would be too long . (William Shakespeare , British dramatist )
人生苦短，若虛度年華，則短暫的人生就太長了。(英國劇作傢 莎士比亞. W.)
Don't gild the lily.
不要給百合花鍍金/畫蛇添足。 (英國劇作傢 莎士比亞 . W .)
The empty vessels make the greatest sound . (William Shakespeare , British dramatist )
滿瓶不響，半瓶咣當。 (英國劇作傢 莎士比亞. W.)
Just be myself.
超越你自己。——莎士比亞
最著名的是莎士比亞的戲劇集，分喜悲兩册，被譯成多國文字。
莎士比亞雋語鈔
新的火焰可以把舊的火焰撲滅；
大的苦痛可以使小的苦痛減輕。
《羅密歐與朱麗葉》
聰明人變成了癡愚，是一條最容易上鈎的遊魚；因為他憑恃才高學廣，看不見自己的狂妄。
愚人的蠢事算不得稀奇，聰明人的蠢事纔叫人笑痛肚皮；因為他用全副的本領，證明他自己愚笨。
《愛的徒勞》
對自己忠實，纔不會對別人欺詐。
習慣簡直有一種改變氣質的神奇力量，它可以使魔鬼主宰人類的靈魂，也可以把他們從人們的心裏驅逐出去。
《哈姆雷特》
我沒有路，所以不需要眼睛；當我能夠看見的時候，我也會失足顛僕，我們往往因為有所自恃而失之於大意，反不如缺陷卻能對我們有益。
《李爾王》
要一個驕傲的人看清他自己的嘴臉，衹有用別人的驕傲給他做鏡子；倘若嚮他卑躬屈膝，不過添長了他的氣焰，徒然自取其辱。
《特洛伊羅斯與剋瑞西達》
外觀往往和事物的本身完全不符，世人都容易為表面的裝飾所欺騙。
沒有比較，就顯不出長處；沒有欣賞的人，烏鴉的歌聲也就和雲雀一樣。要是夜鶯在白天雜在聒噪裏歌唱，人傢絶不以為它比鷦鷯唱得更美。多少事情因為逢到有利的環境，才能達到盡善的境界，博得一聲恰當的贊賞。
《威尼斯商人》
懦夫在未死以前，就已經死了好多次；勇士一生衹死一次，在一切怪事中，人們的貪生怕死就是一件最奇怪的事情。
行為勝於雄辯，愚人的眼睛是比他們的耳朵聰明得多的。
《英雄叛國記》
疑惑足以敗事。一個人往往因為遇事畏縮的原故，失去了成功的機會。
最好的好人，都是犯過錯誤的過來人；一個人往往因為有一點小小的缺點，更顯出他的可愛。
《量罪記》
他賞了你錢，所以他是好人；有了拍馬的人，自然就有愛拍馬的人。
《黃金夢》
世界是一個舞臺，所有的男男女女不過是一些演員，他們都有下場的時候，也都有上場的時候。一個人的一生中扮演着好幾個角色。
《皆大歡喜》
贊美倘從被贊美自己的嘴裏發出，是會減去贊美的價值的；從敵人嘴裏發出的贊美纔是真正的光榮。
《特洛伊羅斯與剋瑞西達》
黑暗無論怎樣悠長，白晝總會到來。
世界上還沒有一個方法，可以從一個人的臉上探察他的居心。
《麥剋佩斯》
要是你做了獅子，狐狸會來欺騙你：
要是你做了羔羊，狐狸會來吃了你；
要是你做了狐狸，萬一騙子嚮你告發，獅子會對你起疑心；
要是你做了騙子，你的愚蠢將使你受苦，而且你也不免做豺狼的一頓早餐……
《黃金夢》
魔鬼為了陷害我們起見，往往故意嚮我們說真話，在小事情上取得我們的信任，然後我們在重要的關頭便會墮入他的圈套。
《麥剋佩斯》
上天生下我們，是要把我們當做火炬，不是照亮自己，而是普照世界。因為我們的德行倘不能推及他人，那就等於沒有一樣。
《一報還一報》
一個驕傲的人，結果總是在驕傲裏毀滅了自己，他一味對鏡自賞，自吹自擂，遇事衹顧浮誇失實，到頭來衹是事事落空而已。
無論一個人的天賦如何優異，外表或內心如何美好，也必須在他們德性的光輝照耀到他人身上發生了熱力，再由感受他的熱力的人把那熱力反射到自己身上的時候，纔會體會到他本身的價值的存在。
作品集
《特洛伊羅斯與剋瑞西達》
·暴風雨 ·哈姆雷特 ·維洛那二紳士
·溫莎的風流娘兒們 ·一報還一報 ·錯誤的喜劇
·無事生非 ·愛的徒勞 ·仲夏夜之夢
·第十二夜 ·鼕天的故事 ·皆大歡喜
·威尼斯商人 ·馴悍記 ·約翰王
·終成眷屬 ·亨利六世上篇 ·亨利六世中篇
·亨利六世下篇 ·亨利四世上篇 ·亨利四世下篇
·亨利五世 ·理查二世 ·亨利八世
·科利奧蘭納斯 ·理查三世 ·羅密歐與朱麗葉
·泰特斯·安德洛尼剋斯 ·特洛伊羅斯與剋瑞西達 ·奧瑟羅
·李爾王 ·麥剋白 ·裘力斯·凱撒
·雅典的泰門 ·安東尼與剋莉奧佩特拉 ·泰爾親王配力剋裏斯
·辛白林 ·莎士比亞詩選
濃縮簡介
【莎士比亞】（1564～1616） 英國著名戲劇傢和詩人。出生於沃裏剋郡斯特拉特福鎮的一個富裕市民家庭，曾在當地文法學校學習。13歲時傢道中落輟學經商，約1586年前往倫敦。先在劇院門前為貴族顧客看馬，後逐漸成為劇院的雜役、演員、劇作傢和股東。1597年在家乡購置了房産，一生的最後幾年在家乡度過。
莎士比亞是16世紀後半葉到17世紀初英國最著名的作傢（本·瓊斯稱他為“時代的靈魂”），也是歐洲文藝復興時期人文主義文學的集大成者。他共寫有37部戲劇，154首14行詩，兩首長詩和其他詩歌。長詩《維納斯與阿多尼斯》（1592～1593）和《魯剋麗絲受辱記》（1593～1594）均取材於羅馬詩人維奧維德吉爾的著作，主題是描寫愛情不可抗拒以及譴責違背“榮譽”觀念的獸行。14行詩（1592～1598）多采用連續性的組詩形式，主題是歌頌友誼和愛情。其主要成就是戲劇，按時代、思想和藝術風格的發展，可分為早、中、晚3個時期。
早期（1590～1600年）：這時期的伊麗莎白中央主權尚屬鞏固，王室跟工商業者及新貴族的暫時聯盟尚在發展，1588年打敗西班牙“無敵艦隊”後國勢大振。這使作者對生活充滿樂觀主義情緒，相信人文主義思想可以實現。這時期所寫的歷史劇和喜劇都表現出明朗、樂觀的風格。歷史劇如《理查三世》（1592）、《亨利三世》（1599）等，譴責封建暴君，歌頌開明君主，表現了人文主義的反封建暴政和封建割據的開明政治理想。喜劇如《仲夏夜之夢》（1596），《第十二夜》（1600）、《皆大歡喜》（16O0）等，描寫溫柔美麗、堅毅勇敢的婦女，衝破重重封建阻攔，終於獲得愛情勝利，表現了人文主義的歌頌自由愛情和反封建禁欲束縛的社會人生主張。就連這時期寫成的悲劇《羅密歐與朱麗葉》（1595）也同樣具有不少明朗樂觀的因素。
中期（1601～1607年）：這時英國農村的“圈地運動”正在加速進行，王權和資産階級及新貴族的暫時聯盟正在瓦解，社會矛盾深化重結，政治經濟形勢日益惡化，詹姆士一世繼位後的揮霍無度和倒行逆施，更使人民痛苦加劇，反抗迭起。在這種情況下，莎士比亞深感人文主義理想與現實的矛盾越來越加劇，創作風格也從明快樂觀變為陰鬱悲憤，其所寫的悲劇也不是重在歌頌人文主義理想，而是重在揭露批判社會的種種罪惡和黑暗。代表作《哈姆雷特》（16O1）展現了一場進步勢力與專治黑暗勢力寡不敵衆的驚心動魄鬥爭。《奧賽羅》（1604）描寫了一幕衝破封建束縛又陷入資本主義利己主義陰謀的青年男女的感人愛情悲劇。《李爾王》（1606）描寫剛愎自用的封建君王在真誠和偽善的事實教育下變為一個現實而具同情心的“人”的過程。《麥剋白》（1606）則揭露權勢野心對人的毀滅性腐蝕毒害作用。這時期所寫的喜劇《終成眷屬》、《一報還一報》等也同樣具有悲劇色彩。
晚期（1608～1612年）：這時詹姆士一世王朝更加腐敗，社會矛盾更加尖銳。莎士比亞深感人文主義理想的破滅，乃退居故鄉寫浪漫主義傳奇劇。其創作風格也隨之表現為浪漫空幻。《辛白林》（1609）和《鼕天的故事》（1610）寫失散後的團聚或遭誣陷後的昭雪、和解。《暴風雨》（1611）寫米蘭公爵用魔法把謀權篡位的弟弟安東尼奧等所乘的船攝到荒島，並寬恕了他，其弟也交還了王位。一場類似《哈姆雷特》的政治風暴，在寬恕感化中變得風平浪靜。
馬剋思稱莎士比亞為“人類最偉大的天才之一”。恩格斯盛贊其作品的現實主義精神與情節的生動性、豐富性。莎氏的作品幾乎被翻譯成世界各種文字。1919年後被介紹到中國，現已有中文的《莎士比亞全集》。
伊麗莎白一世（伊麗莎白女王）對他的態度
在莎翁的歷史劇當中，君主往往是反面角色。伊麗莎白女王呢，當然知道這一點，她並沒有下令禁止演出莎士比亞的戲劇。因為小莎從來就沒有對女王有任何不敬，相反，他寫了很多歌頌女王和她媽媽的劇本，贏得了大傢的喜愛，如果他敢把女王寫成反面角色，他早就人頭落地了。
儘管在哈姆雷特這樣的劇中，就有“脆弱啊，你的名字是女人！”這樣的臺詞。但是呢，這並沒有影響伊麗莎白女王一世界、就坐在舞臺對面的包廂裏看戲。 因為稱女人脆弱是一種贊美，反之，如果一女的被說成剛強，則一般被認為是一種污衊。
女王的寬容，成就了莎士比亞的藝術高度，也成就了英國整個島國上的人民的面貌和氣質。
莎士比亞的作品包括：
悲劇：羅密歐與朱麗葉，麥剋白，李爾王，哈姆雷特，奧瑟羅，泰特斯·安德洛尼剋斯 ，裘力斯·凱撒，安東尼與剋莉奧佩屈拉（埃及豔後），科利奧蘭納斯，特洛埃圍城記，雅典的泰門等。
喜劇：錯中錯，終成眷屬，皆大歡喜，仲夏夜之夢，無事生非，一報還一報，暴風雨，馴悍記，第十二夜，威尼斯商人，溫莎的風流娘們，愛的徒勞，維洛那二紳士，泰爾親王佩力剋爾斯，辛白林，鼕天的故事等。
歷史劇：亨利四世，亨利五世，亨利六世，亨利八世，約翰王，裏查二世，裏查三世。
十四行詩：愛人的怨訴，魯剋麗絲失貞記，維納斯和阿多尼斯，熱情的朝聖者，鳳凰和斑鳩等。
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.
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". 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.
Early life
John Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare's Coat of ArmsWilliam Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on 26 April 1564. His unknown birthday is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day. This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter of a mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. Two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds the next day as surety that there were no impediments to the marriage. The couple may have arranged the ceremony in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times. Anne's pregnancy could have been the reason for this. Six months after the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, who was baptised on 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August 1596.
After the birth of the twins, there are few historical traces of Shakespeare until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. Because of this gap, scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching. Another eighteenth-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some twentieth-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death.
London and theatrical career
It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene:
...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself. The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene’s target.
"All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–42.
Greene’s attack is the first recorded mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks. From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain what roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the information.
Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Later years and death
Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-AvonAfter 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612, he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
Inscription on Shakespeare’s grave
In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. Sometime before 1623, a monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. A stone slab covering his grave is inscribed with a curse against moving his bones.
Plays
Main article: Shakespeare's plays
Scholars have often noted four periods in Shakespeare's writing career. Until the mid-1590s, he wrote mainly comedies influenced by Roman and Italian models and history plays in the popular chronicle tradition. His second period began in about 1595 with the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and ended with the tragedy of Julius Caesar in 1599. During this time, he wrote what are considered his greatest comedies and histories. From about 1600 to about 1608, his "tragic period", Shakespeare wrote mostly tragedies, and from about 1608 to 1613, mainly tragicomedies called romances.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. Their composition was influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe[c], by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models; but no source for the The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain.Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic low-life scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock which reflected Elizabethan views but may appear racist to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts I and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–5. Kunsthaus Zürich.Shakespeare's so-called "tragic period" lasted from about 1600 to 1608, though he also wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well during this time and had written tragedies before. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The hero of the first, Hamlet, has probably been more discussed than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question." Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.
In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.
Performances
Main article: Shakespeare in performance
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599; with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello and King Lear.
Reconstructed Globe Theatre, London.After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."
The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the sixteenth century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.
Textual sources
Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". Alfred Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers. In some cases, for example Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised texts between the quarto and folio editions. The folio version of King Lear is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, since they cannot be conflated without confusion.
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.
Sonnets
Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."
Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.
Style
Main article: Shakespeare's style
Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.
Soon, however, 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. 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. 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.
Pity by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd / Upon the sightless couriers of the air".Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...
After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense. The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.
Shakespeare's poetic genius was allied with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all playwrights of the time, Shakespeare dramatised stories from sources such as Petrarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In his late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.
Influence
Main article: Shakespeare's influence
Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. By Henry Fuseli, 1793–94. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."
Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. Dickens often quoted Shakespeare, drawing 25 of his titles from Shakespeare's works. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.
In Shakespeare's day, English grammar and spelling were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.
Critical reputation
Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism
"He was not of an age, but for all time."
Ben Jonson
Shakespeare was never revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".
Ophelia (detail). By John Everett Millais, 1851–2. Tate Britain.Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the seventeenth century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the eighteenth century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.
During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the nineteenth century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible". The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.
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. 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. By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, African American studies, and queer studies.
Speculation about Shakespeare
Authorship
Main article: Shakespeare authorship question
Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to emerge about the authorship of Shakespeare's works. Alternative candidates proposed include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Although all alternative candidates are almost universally rejected in academic circles, popular interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory, has continued into the 21st century.
Religion
Main article: Shakespeare's religion
Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was against the law, Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ on its authenticity. In 1591, the authorities reported that John had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse. In 1606, William's daughter Susanna was listed among those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove either way.
Sexuality
Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare
Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. However, over the centuries readers have pointed to Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than sexual love. At the same time, the twenty-six so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.
List of works
Further information: List of Shakespeare's works and Chronology of Shakespeare plays
Classification of the plays
The Plays of William Shakespeare. By Sir John Gilbert, 1849.Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and tragedies. Shakespeare did not write every word of the plays attributed to him; and several show signs of collaboration, a common practice at the time. Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with scholars agreed that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their composition. No poems were included in the First Folio.
In the late nineteenth century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, his term is often used. These plays and the associated Two Noble Kinsmen are marked with an asterisk (*) below. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet. "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays." The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy. The other problem plays are marked below with a double dagger (‡).
Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a dagger (†) below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as lost plays or apocrypha.
Works
Comedies
Main article: Shakespearean comedy
All's Well That Ends Well‡
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love's Labour's Lost
Measure for Measure‡
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles, Prince of Tyre*†[d]
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest*
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Noble Kinsmen*†[e]
The Winter's Tale*
Histories
Main article: Shakespearean histories
King John
Richard II
Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, part 1† [f]
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII†[g]
Tragedies
Main article: Shakespearean tragedy
Romeo and Juliet
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus†[h]
Timon of Athens†[i]
Julius Caesar
Macbeth† [j]
Hamlet
Troilus and Cressida‡
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline*
Poems
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim[k]
The Phoenix and the Turtle
A Lover's Complaint
Lost plays
Love's Labour's Won
Cardenio†[l]
Apocrypha
Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha
Arden of Faversham
The Birth of Merlin
Locrine
The London Prodigal
The Puritan
The Second Maiden's Tragedy
Sir John Oldcastle
Thomas Lord Cromwell
A Yorkshire Tragedy
Edward III
Sir Thomas More
[show]v • d • eEarly editions of William Shakespeare's works
Folios and Quartos Foul papers • Bad quarto • First quarto • Second quarto • First Folio • Second Folio • False Folio
Early editors John Heminges • Henry Condell • Edward Knight • John Leason • John Shakespeare • Thomas Bowdler
Publishers Robert Allot • William Aspley • John Benson • Edward Blount • Cuthbert Burby • Nathaniel Butter • Philip Chetwinde • Richard Hawkins • Henry Herringman • William Leake • Richard Meighen • Thomas Millington • Thomas Pavier • John Smethwick • Thomas Thorpe • Thomas Walkley • John Waterson • Andrew Wise
Printers Edward Allde • Thomas Cotes • Thomas Creede • George Eld • Richard Field • William Jaggard • Nicholas Okes • Peter Short • Valentine Simmes • William Stansby
Notes
a. ^ Dates use the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan. Under the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on May 3.
b. ^ The exact figures are unknown. See Shakespeare's collaborations and Shakespeare Apocrypha for further details.
c. ^ An essay by Harold Brooks suggests Marlowe's Edward II influenced Shakespeare's Richard III. Other scholars discount this, pointing out that the parallels are commonplace.
d. ^ Many scholars believe that Pericles was co-written with George Wilkins.
e. ^ The Two Noble Kinsmen was co-written with John Fletcher.
f. ^ Henry VI, Part 1 is often thought to be the work of a group of collaborators; but some scholars, for example Michael Hattaway, believe the play was wholly written by Shakespeare.
g. ^ Henry VIII was co-written with John Fletcher.
h. ^ Brian Vickers suggests that Titus Andronicus was co-written with George Peele, though Jonathan Bate, the play's most recent editor for the Arden Shakespeare, believes it to be wholly the work of Shakespeare.
i. ^ Brian Vickers and others believe that Timon of Athens was co-written with Thomas Middleton, though some commentators disagree.
j. ^ The text of Macbeth which survives has plainly been altered by later hands. Most notable is the inclusion of two songs from Thomas Middleton's play The Witch (1615).
k. ^ The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name in 1599 without his permission, includes early versions of two of his sonnets, three extracts from Love's Labour's Lost, several poems known to be by other poets, and eleven poems of unknown authorship for which the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved.
l. ^ Cardenio was apparently co-written with John Fletcher.
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^ Frye, 288.
^ Rowe J., The Poems, 3, 21.
^ Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
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^ Rowe J., The Poems, 1.
• Honan, 289.
• Schoenbaum, Compact, 327.
^ Shakespeare, William; ed. W. J. Craig (1914). Sonnet 18. The Oxford Shakespeare: the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved on 2007-06-22.
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^ Honan, 180.
^ Schoenbaum, Compact, 268.
^ Honan, 180.
• Schoenbaum, Compact, 180.
^ Schoenbaum, Compact, 268–269.
^ Wood, 177.
^ Clemen, Wolfgang (2005). Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: Collected Essays, 150. London; New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415352789.
^ Frye, 105, 177.
• Clemen, Wolfgang (2005). Shakespeare's Imagery. London; New York: Routledge, 29. ISBN 0415352800.
^ Brooke, Nicholas, "Language and Speaker in Macbeth", 69; and Bradbrook, M.C., "Shakespeare's Recollection of Marlowe", 195: both in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir. Edwards, Philip; Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G.K. Hunter (eds.) (2004 edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521616948.
^ Clemen, Shakespeare's Imagery, 63.
^ Frye, 185.
^ Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8. Wright, George T (2004). "The Play of Phrase and Line". In Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000. Russ McDonald (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, 868. ISBN 0631234888.
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^ a b McDonald, 42–6.
^ McDonald, 36, 39, 75.
^ Gibbons, 4.
^ Gibbons, 1–4.
^ Gibbons, 1–7, 15.
^ McDonald, 13.
• Meagher, John C. (2003). Pursuing Shakespeare's Dramaturgy: Some Contexts, Resources, and Strategies in his Playmaking. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 358. ISBN 0838639933.
^ Chambers, E. K. (1944). Shakespearean Gleanings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 35. OCLC 2364570.
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• Crystal, 63.
^ Quoted in Bartlett, John, Familiar Quotations, 10th edition, 1919. Retrieved 14 June 2007.
^ Dominik, Mark (1988). Shakespeare–Middleton Collaborations. Beaverton, Or.: Alioth Press, 9. ISBN 0945088019.
• Grady, Hugh (2001). "Shakespeare Criticism 1600–1900". In deGrazia, Margreta, and Wells, Stanley (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 267. ISBN 0521650941.
^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 265.
• Greer, Germaine (1986). William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 9. ISBN 0192875388.
^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 266
^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 266–7
^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 269.
^ Dryden, John (1668). "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy". Cited by Grady in Shakespeare Criticism, 269; For the full quotation, see Levin, Harry (1986). "Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660 to 1904". In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Wells, Stanley (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 215. ISBN 0521318416.
^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 270–271.
• Levin, 217.
^ Dobson, Michael (1992). The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198183232. Cited by Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 270.
^ Grady cites Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1733); Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795); Stendhal's two-part pamphlet Racine et Shakespeare (1823–5); and Victor Hugo's prefaces to Cromwell (1827) and William Shakespeare (1864). Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 272–274.
^ Levin, 223.
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^ Grady, Shakespeare Criticism, 276.
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^ Grady, Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism, 24.
^ Grady, Modernity, Modernism and Postmodernism, 29.
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• Schoenbaum, Lives, 430–40.
• Holderness, Graham (1988). The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 137, 173.
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^ Wood, 75–8.
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• Ackroyd, 416.
•Schoenbaum, Compact, 41–2, 286.
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• Shapiro, 167.
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^ Fort, J. A. "The Story Contained in the Second Series of Shakespeare's Sonnets." The Review of English Studies. (Oct 1927) 3.12, 406–414.
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^ Kathman, 629.
• Boyce, 91.
^ Edwards, Phillip (1958). "Shakespeare's Romances, 1900–1957." Shakespeare Survey 11: 1–10.
• Snyder, Susan, and Curren-Aquino, Deborah, T (eds.) (2007). The Winter's Tale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Introduction. ISBN 0521221587.
^ Schanzer, Ernest (1963). The Problem Plays of Shakespeare. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1–10. ISBN 041535305X.
^ Boas, F.S (1896), Shakspere and his Predecessors, 345. Quoted by Schanzer, 1.
^ Schanzer, 1.
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^ Taylor, Gary (1988). William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 116. ISBN 0198129149
^ Bloom, 30.
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^ Potter, Lois (ed.) (1997). The Two Noble Kinsmen. William Shakespeare. London: Arden Shakespeare, Thomson. Introduction, 1–6. ISBN 1904271189.
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^ Gordon McMullan (ed.) (2000). King Henry VIII. William Shakespeare. London: Arden Shakespeare, Thomson. Introduction, 198. ISBN 1903436257.
^ Vickers, Brian (2002). Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 8. ISBN 0199256535.
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^ Vickers, 8.
• Dominik, 16.
• Farley-Hills, David (1990). Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights, 1600–06. London; New York: Routledge, 171–172. ISBN 0415040507.
^ Brooke, Nicholas (ed.) (1998). The Tragedy of Macbeth. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 57. ISBN 0192834177.
^ Wells, Oxford Shakespeare, 805.
^ Bradford, Gamaliel Jr. "The History of Cardenio by Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare." Modern Language Notes (February 1910) 25.2, 51–56.
• Freehafer, John. "'Cardenio', by Shakespeare and Fletcher." PMLA. (May 1969) 84.3, 501–513.
Further reading
Schoenbaum, S. (1991). Shakespeare's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greenblatt, Stephen (2005). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico. ISBN 0712600981.
Honan, Park (1998). Shakespeare: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198117922.
Wells, Stanley, et al (2005). The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199267170.
Vendler, Helen (1997). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674637127.