William Shakespeare (1564~1616) is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever known. With plays, 154 sonnets and 2 long poems, he has established his giant position in world literature.  He has also been given the highest praises by various scholars and critics the world over. In the past four hundred years or so, books and essays on Shakespeare and his works have kept coming out in large quantities.

William Shakespeare was born probably on April 23, 1564, into a merchant's family in Stratford-on-Avon. His father, John Shakespeare, who was variously described as a glover, wool-dealer, farmer, and butcher, was a man of some importance in the town, repeatedly serving as a member of the town council. Shakespeare spent his childhood in that beautiful market town and attended the Stratford Grammar School. His real teachers were nature and its people that surrounded him. In 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman several years his senior.  She gave birth to three children: Susanna and the twins, Judith and Hamnet. It was probably because he had to support his growing family that Shakespeare left Stratford for London in 1586 or 1587.

Shakespeare went to a London which afforded a wonderful environment for the development of drama. Shakespeare worked both as actor and playwright.  He acted with and wrote for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which was later renamed the King's Men. Shakespeare established himself so well as a playwright that Robert Greene, one of the "University Wits," resentfully declared him to be "an upstart crow."

From about 1591 to about 1611, Shakespeare was in the prime of his dramatic career and his plays came out one after another. In 1593 and 1594, he published two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. He also wrote sonnets, which were published in 1609. By 1597, Shakespeare was so prosperous that he bought the largest house' in Stratford, known as New Place. About 1610 Shakespeare left London and retired to Stratford, though he continued to write for some time. He died on April 23, 1616.

As the cise dates of many of Shakespeare's plays are still in doubt, critics hold different views to the spanision of his dramatic career. But generally his dramatic career is spanided into four periods.

The first period of Shakespeare's dramatic career was one of apnticeship. He wrote five history plays: Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus; and four comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Love's Labour's Lost.

In the second period, Shakespeare's style and approach became highly inspanidualized. By constructing a complex pattern between different characters and between appearance and reality, Shakespeare made subtle comments on a variety of human foibles. In this period he wrote five histories: Richard H, King John, Henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V; six comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; and two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare's third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark comedies. The tragedies of this period are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus. The two comedies are All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.

The last period of Shakespeare's work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest; and his two final plays: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Shakespeare's authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and his sequence of 154 sonnets. Shakespeare's sonnets are the only direct exssion of the poet's own feelings. Among them, numbers 1-126 are addressed to a young man, beloved of the poet, of superior beauty and rank but of somewhat questionable morals and constancy. The sonnets numbered 127-152 form a less coherent group. They involve a mistress of the poet, a mysterious "Dark Lady,” who is sensual, promiscuous, and irresistible. The final two sonnets do not apparently belong to either the friend or the Dark Lady sequence, they are translations or adaptations of some version of a Greek epigram, and they evidently refer to the hot springs at Bath. With three exceptions (99, 126 and 154) Shakespeare writes his sonnets in the popular English form, first fully developed by Surrey, of three quatrains and a couplet. The rhetorical organization also follows this structure, though Shakespeare varies it occasionally. The couplet usually ties the sonnet to one of the general themes of the series, leaving the quatrains free to develop the poetic intensity which makes the separate sonnets memorable.

Shakespeare's history plays are mainly written under the principle that national unity under a mighty and just sovereign is a necessity. The three history plays on the reign of Henry VI are the beginning of Shakespeare's epic treatment of English history. The first and second parts of Henry IV are undoubtedly the most widely read among his history plays. It reveals a troubled reign in the 15th century. Shakespeare sents the patriotic spirit when mourning over the loss of English territories in France. He also dramatizes the class struggle between the opssors and the opssed during Jack Cade's rising of 1450. Furthermore, he condemns the War of the Roses waged by the feudal in which innocent people were killed. Here Shakespeare has liberated himself from any imitations of the contemporary example. Besides, there is a wonderful balance of characters between Hotspur and Prince Hal, and between Prince Hal and his father Henry IV.

In his romantic comedies, Shakespeare takes an optimistic attitude toward love and youth, and the romantic elements are brought into full play. The most important play among the comedies is The Merchant of Venice, in which Shakespeare has created tension, ambiguity, a self-conscious and self-delighting artifice that is at once intellectually exciting and emotionally engaging. The sophistication derives in part from the play between high, outgoing romance and dark forces of negativity and hate. The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew. But after centuries‘ abusing of the Jews, especially the holocaust committed by the Nazi Germany during the Second World War, it is very difficult to see Shylock as a conventional evil figure. And many people today tend to regard the play as a satire of the Christians' hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning judice against Jews. Compared with the idealism of other plays, The Merchant of Venice takes a step forward in its realistic sentation of human nature and human conflict. Though there is a ridiculous touch on the part of the characters restrained by their limitations, Shakespeare's youthful Renaissance spirit of jollity can be fully seen in contrast to the medieval emphasis on future life in the  world.

The successful romantic tragedy is Romeo and Juliet, which eulogizes the faithfulness of love and the spirit of pursuing happiness. The play, though a tragedy, is permeated with optimistic spirit.

Shakespeare's greatest tragedies are: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They have some characteristics in common. Each portrays some noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation. Each hero has his weakness of nature: Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind; Othello's inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old king Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer from treachery and infidelity; and Macbeth's lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crimes. With the concentration on the tragic hero, Shakespeare dramatizes the whole world around the hero. Along with the portrayal of the weakness or bias of the, hero, we see the sharp conflicts between the inspanidual and the evil force in the society, which shows that Shakespeare is a great realist in the true sense.

Hamlet, the first of the great tragedies, is generally regarded as Shakespeare's most popular play on the stage, for it has the qualities of a "blood-and-thunder" thriller and a philosophical exploration of life and death. The play was probably written around 1601, based on a widesad legend in northern Europe. Shakespeare takes the bare outlines of Revenge Tragedy (such as had been used by Kyd among others), but what he adds is infinitely more interesting than what he adopts. And the timeless appeal of this mighty drama lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict and searching philosophic melancholy. The play opens with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, appearing in a mood of world-weariness occasioned by his father's recent death and by his mother's hasty remarriage with Claudius, his father's brother. While encountering his father's ghost, Hamlet is informed that Claudius has murdered his father and then taken over both his father's throne and widow. Thus, Hamlet is urged by the ghost to seek revenge for his father's "foul and most unnatural murder." But Hamlet has none of the single-minded blood lust of the earlier revengers. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because the cast of his mind is so speculative, so questioning, and so contemplative that action, when it finally comes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father's death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. For such a figure, soliloquy is a natural medium, a necessary release of his anguish; and some of his questioning monologues possess surpassing power and insight, which have survived centuries of being torn from their context. But our interest is not only in Hamlet the tragic hero, for this play is also Shakespeare's most detailed expose of a corrupted court- "an unweeded garden" in which there is nothing but "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." By revealing the power-seeking, the jostling for place, the hidden motives, the courteous superficialities that veil lust and guilt, Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and general corruption at the royal court.

In the plays of Shakespeare's last period, there is a valent Christian teaching of atonement. Shakespeare seems to have entered an imagined pastoral world. Thus, he could achieve what he failed to in the real world, i.e. to right the wrongs and to realize his ideals. The Tempest, an elaborate and fantastic story, is known as the best of his final romances. The characters are rather allegorical and the subject full of suggestion. The humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywhere in the play. The wild storm becomes magic, answering Prospero's every signal. The playwright resorts to the supernatural atmosphere and to the dreams to solve the conflict. To Shakespeare, the whole life is no more than a dream. Thus, The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.

Shakespeare, as a humanist of the time, was shocked by the feudal tyranny and disunity and internal struggle for power at the court which led to civil wars. In his plays, he does not hesitate to describe the cruelty and anti-natural character of the civil wars, but he did not go all the way against the feudal rule. In his dramatic creation, especially in his histories or tragedies, he affirms the importance of the feudal system in order to uphold social order. "The King's government must be carried on" -- but carried on for the good of the nation, not for the pleasure of the King.

Shakespeare is against religious persecution and racial discrimination, against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. In King Lear, Shakespeare has not only made a profound analysis of the social crisis in which the evils can be seen everywhere, but also criticized the bourgeois egoism. He has shown to us the two-fold effects, exerted by the feudalist corruption and the bourgeois egoism, which have gradually corroded the ordered society. On the other hand, there is also a limit to his sympathy for the downtrodden. He fears anarchy, hates rebellion and despises democracy. Thus, he finds no way to solve the social problems. In the end, the only thing he can do as a humanist is to escape from the reality to seek comfort in his dream.

Shakespeare has accepted the Renaissance views on literature. He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. Based on this consideration, he has claimed through the mouth of Hamlet that the "end" of dramatic creation is to give faithful reflection of the social realities of the time. Shakespeare also states that literary works which have truly reflected nature and reality can reach immortality. From his sonnets, we can find quite a few examples in which Shakespeare sings the immortality of poetry.

Shakespeare's major characters are neither merely inspanidual ones nor type ones; they are inspaniduals resenting certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, Shakespeare succeeds in exploring the characters' inner mind. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the inner conflict of his characters. Shakespeare also portrays his characters in pairs. Contrasts are frequently used to bring vividness to his characters.

Shakespeare's plays are well-known for their adroit plot construction. Shakespeare seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources. In order to make the play more lively and compact, he would shorten the time and intensify the story. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and aphension.

Irony is a good means of dramatic sentation. It makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth do certain ridiculous things. There is so much fun that the audience are immediately amused. Disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man.

Lastly, to understand Shakespeare, it is necessary to study the subtlest of his instruments -- the language. Shakespeare can write skillfully in different poetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. His blank verse is especially beautiful and mighty. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. He is known to have used 16,000 different words. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader. Shakespeare is above all writers in the past and in the sent time. His influence on later writers is immeasurable. Almost all English writers after him have been influenced by him either in artistic point of view, in literary form or in language.

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