WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

• William Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and died in 1616.

• Shakespeare was educated at a local grammar school, and there he became familiar with

• He married Anne Hathaway.

• There are some lost years in Shakespeare’s life (1580s). Although there is no actual evidence of
what Shakespeare did, there are some hypotheses:

-He became a schoolteacher in the Midlands.

-He became a tutor in the house of aristocratic families. That would explain why Shakespeare had
knowledge of upper class life.

-He became a lawyer. That would explain his knowledge of the legal practice.

-He became a travelling actor.

What we do know it is that, in the late 1580s, he went to London, where he worked in the theater as an
actor and wrote plays and poems. The first written evidence we find about that is the pamphlet by Robert
Greene attacking Shakespeare as “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers”.

• Shakespeare’s company was called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

• He retired from the scene in 1613 and went back to Stratford, where he died three years later and
was buried there.

• Shakespeare left two daughters, but the family line extinguished early.

• About Shakespeare’s works, some individual plays were published during his life. The Complete
Works were not published until after his death (1623, First Folio). The First Folio was published by John
Heminge and Henry Condell (two members of Shakespeare’s company: The King’s Men). In this First Folio,
the plays were classified in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The dates of composition of his plays are
approximate, not exactly known.

-Early comedies (1590?-1594): The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of
the Shrew, Love’s Labours Lost.

-Mature comedies (1595-1601) [Shakespeare’s masterpieces in comedy]: A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth
Night.

-Some comedies in the First Folio are considered nowadays Problem plays / Problem comedies.
These are the ones which were composed between 1601 and 1604. They were problematic from the
point of view of genre since they were dark and unpleasant; the topic is not love; and the situation
and characters are not typical of comedies. Some examples of Problem plays are Measure for
Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida.

-History plays: These plays dealt with the history of England, mainly in the 15th century, from the
deposition of Richard II in 1399 to the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 (end of the Wars of the Roses and
beginning ot the Tudor dynasty with Henry VII).
 -First tetralogy (1590-93): It is focused mainly about the Wars of the Roses between the dinasties of
York and Lancaster (1, 2, 3 Henry IV + Richard III). It begins with the Wars of the Roses, and ends
with the Battle of Bosworh (defeat of Richard III).

-Second tetralogy (1595-1599): Richard II, 1, 2 Henry IV, Henry V. It tells the beginning of the story
told in the first tetralogy, beginning with the deposition of Richard II.

-Other history plays:

‣
King John (1596): It’s very peculiar; one of the least popular and known.

‣ Henry VIII (1612): It was written in collaboration with another playwright, John Fletcher.

-Tragedies: Between 1593 and 1595, Shakespeare wrote two great tragedies:

-Titus Andronicus (1593): It deals with the theme of revenge. It was influenced by Kyd and
Marlowe. It is set in Rome.

-Romeo and Juliet (1595): It is a love tragedy which is centered around the feud between two
families.

But Shakespeare’s great tragic period was between 1600 and 1606. In those years he wrote some of his
greatest tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.

Some common features of Shakespeare’s great tragedies are:

-Their context is always based on war or conflict.

-All include a crucial moment in Act III for the later development of the play.

-We find a mixture of the sublime and the grotesque / comic.