It should come as no surprise to see William Shakespeare placed at the head of a ranking of the most influential literary artists of all time. At literature’s most basic and elemental level of language, form, and vision, Shakespeare’s power is unequaled. If the mark of a writer’s greatness is the creation of the largest imaginary universe populated by believable characters and the reflection of the widest human experience, surely Shakespeare is alone in the magnitude of his achievement. Acknowledged as the greatest English writer, unrivaled in popular and critical acclaim, Shakespeare is also the recognized international master whose universality communicates across cultural divides. Shortly after Shakespeare’s death, BEN JONSON [66] wrote in tribute to Shakespeare’s greatness: Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe , An art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give . . .Triumph, my Britaine, thou has one to showe, To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!Jonson’s sentiment has held sway as each generation since Shakespeare’s has discovered new relevance and significance in his plays and poems. No other writer has so completely established literature’s boundaries and excellence in the creation of fully realized characters, in the genius of his dramatic storytelling, and, most magnificently, in his supreme mastery of language as an expressive, poetic medium.
The little we know about Shakespeare’s life and artistic development has contributed both to the myth of the playwright as a natural, instinctual artist rather than a conscious craftsman, and also to the search for alternative sources of his creations in other authors, such as Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, whose education and experiences seem a better fit to explain the genius of the playwright. The essence of the man who produced such a glittering array of masterpieces has eluded and confounded his critics. “Shakespeare is in the singularly fortunate position,” W. H. AUDEN [103] once remarked, “of being to all intents and purposes, anonymous.” Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly argued that “Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare.” What continually perplexes us is Shakespeare’s defiance of customary artistic limitations, his unmatched objectivity, and his freedom from the personal bias that confines most artists.
Shakespeare’s art is one of remarkable inclusiveness that captures the full range of human experience, in which most traces of inspiration and the personality of its creator have been fully absorbed in the works themselves.What we know for sure of Shakespeare’s life comes from a few scanty records that fix his birth, marriage, the baptism of his three children, and his later theatrical successes as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare was born in Stratford upon Avon in the geographical center of England, a rural community of fewer than 2,000. His father was a prosperous and prominent trades-man, bailiff, and alderman, who suffered a decline in fortune and prestige.
It is likely that Shakespeare was educated at the local grammar school, where he was exposed to the Latin classics, of which OVID [26] was a particular favorite. At the age of 18 he married a farmer’s daughter, Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna in 1583 and the twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585. What Shakespeare did or experienced in the next seven years, before records locate him in London as a successful playwright and actor, remains a mystery. By 1594 records show that he was a shareholder in London’s most celebrated stage company under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain. Besides his early plays—the comedies, Comedy of Errors (1592), Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595); historical chronicles, Henry VI (1590), Richard III (1592), and Richard II (1595); and the early tragedies, Titus Andronicus (1593) and Romeo and Juliet (1594)—Shake-speare achieved literary distinction as a poet with Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).
He would continue his nondramatic writing with a masterful sonnet cycle that circulated among his friends and was published in 1609. The achievement evident in the sonnets alone would have secured Shakespeare a significant place in English literary history.By the late 1590s, Shakespeare’s prominence and success allowed him to purchase a large home, New Place, in Stratford, and to secure the rank of a gentleman with the recognition of his family’s coat of arms in 1596. He shared in the expenses for the construction of the Globe in 1598, a large playhouse on the south bank of the Thames, where his masterpieces were performed. They include the great comedies, As You Like It (1599) and Twelfth Night (1599); the historical cycle of Henry IV (1597) and Henry V (1598); the great tragedies, Hamlet (1600), Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605); and the Roman plays, Julius Caesar (1599) and Antony and Cleopatra (1606). Around 1610 Shakespeare retired to Stratford, although he continued to write a series of romances or tragicomedies that include Cymbeline (1609), The Winter’s Tale (1610), and The Tempest (1611) before his death in 1616 at the age of 52.
It is impossible to write briefly of Shakespeare’s achievement in a literary canon that includes more than 30 plays, the majority of which are crucial to an understanding of literary history and resist reduction even to the conventional categories of comedies, tragedies, and histories. It is possible here only to point to some of the central qualities that define Shakespeare’s genius. One place to start is with the dramatic tradition that Shakespeare inherited and revolutionized. As with all of literature’s greatest figures, Shakespeare’s work is derived from a complex blend of time, place, and particular genius.Shakespeare is fundamentally a great assimilator of the popular dramatic tradition, joined with the humanist energies released by the Renaissance and the expansive freedom of expression and form that the Elizabethan stage allowed.
Prior to the Elizabethan dramatists, the English theater offered mainly religious and allegorical themes. Shakespeare, preeminently, instead used drama to explore secular human experience and reflect the actual life of English and world history, shaped by a remarkable grasp of the commonplace and the subtlety of behavior and psychology. He established the link with AESCHYLUS [27], SOPHOCLES [13], and EURIPIDES [22] in reviving drama as a medium for the most profound exploration of human existence. Extending the rules of classical drama, he created an expressive dramatic form that would serve as a romantic alternative to the classical norm of order and balance, and helped establish the tension between classicism and romanticism that defines modernism.
Shakespeare divided his efforts fairly equally among the four major categories available to him in drama—tragedies, comedies, histories, and romances—and turned the potential limitations of the Elizabethan theater, with its bare, open stage, into a great strength, as his expressive language compensated for limited stage effects. From king to clown, Shakespeare is able to capture the high heroism of a character like Hotspur in Henry IV and his opposite in Falstaff; the tortured melancholy of youth in Hamlet and the anguish of age in King Lear; and the delightful follies of love in his comedies, as well as love’s corruption in Othello and Macbeth. Expressed in his remarkable expressive language, as Thomas Carlyle observed, “woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams,” Shakespeare exploited the widest vocabulary of any English creative writer and fashioned an unsurpassed pattern of dazzling and functional imagery. Yet Shakespeare’s greatness rests not principally on either his daunting range or virtuosity, but instead in his power to communicate, to reveal our selves in the mirror of his art.
0 comments:
Post a Comment