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Plays |
Main article: Shakespeare's plays
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Scholars have often noted four periods in Shakespeare's writing career. [65] 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, [66] 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. [67] His first histories , which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland , [68] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty . [69] 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 . [70] 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. [71] Like Two Gentlemen of Verona , in which two friends appear to approve of rape, [72] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors. [73]
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. [74] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic low-life scenes. [75] 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. [76] |
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The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing , [77] the charming rural setting of As You Like It , and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. [78] 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. [79] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet , the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; [80] and Julius Caesar —based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives —which introduced a new kind of drama. [81] 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". [82]
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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. [83] 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 ." [84] 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. [85] |
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. [86] In Othello , the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. [87] In King Lear , the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, triggering scenes which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Duke of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". [88] In Macbeth , the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, [89] 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. [90] 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 . [91]
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. [92] 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. [93] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen , probably with John Fletcher . [94]
Performances
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. [95] 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. [96] 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". [97] 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 . [98] 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 . [99]
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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 . [100] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. [101] 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." [102 |
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 . [103] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing , among other characters. [104] 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 . [105] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". [106] 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. [106]
Textual sources
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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. [107] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. [108] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". [109] 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. [110] 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 . [111] 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. [112] |
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