Who was Shakespeare?
Everyone thinks they know who Shakespeare was. But sometimes, when someone
is as influential and world-famous as William Shakespeare, it’s worth repeating
the basics.
William Shakespeare was a professional actor and playwright from Stratford-Upon-Avon.
He worked in London, writing on average three plays a year for the acting
company the Lord Chamberlain’s - later King’s - Men, whilst sustaining his
family in Stratford. Whatever we think about him as a writer, he was
principally a man of the theatre: he worked collaboratively and knew his
playhouses intimately. He acted in plays by other playwrights and, as a
shareholder in the Globe he profited from every aspect of the playmaking
business. This made him rich, and he is recorded as being a careful and
conservative investor.
Shakespeare was born in 1564. His father was a glover and later an
alderman. He was educated at the local grammar school, gaining a strong
grounding in Latin and rhetoric, ideal skills for accessing classical source material
for plays and writing dramatic dialogue. He married young, becoming a father at
the age of eighteen; as such there were many things binding him to Stratford –
this makes it all the more remarkable that he chose a career far away in the
unpredictable and disreputable London theatres. However, Shakespeare remained
rooted in Stratford, buying property and investing locally. His plays contain
many allusions to Warwickshire dialogue, people and places. He died in
Stratford in 1616.
We don’t know when Shakespeare arrived in London and there are many
theories and myths regarding how his life in theatre began. The theatres were
new, controversial and hugely popular but were attacked by churchmen as immoral
and dangerous. Banned from the City of London, they were built outside the city
in areas called liberties. However, the theatres’ financial success combined
with Elizabeth I’s enjoyment of plays enabled the leading companies to achieve
wealth and respectability. The Chamberlain’s Men gained royal patronage under
King James I. By that time, indoor theatres were also fashionable – the King’s
Men performed at the Blackfriars Theatre from 1609 – these theatres targeted a
more affluent audience, mirroring the social rise of the playing companies from
vagabond status to (relatively) respectable businessmen.
Shakespeare quickly staked a claim as a leading writer with plays such as Henry
VI and the gory Titus Andronicus. Early playwrights were almost
exclusively university-educated - the first published reference to Shakespeare
attacks him as an actor arrogant enough to presume himself a playwright.
Shakespeare’s singular talent was unprecedented, but it is important to note
that he worked in competition and collaboration with other playwrights, as well
as keeping a careful eye on theatrical fashions. His genius for wordplay,
dramatic dialogue and characterisation was born from adapting and rewriting
material from novels, histories, classical myth and older plays. Shakespeare
wrote for the same company for most of his professional life, meaning that
roles such as Hamlet and King Lear would have been written for Richard Burbage,
clown roles for Will Kemp and, later, Robert Armin. The influence of the
personalities and talents of the King’s Men on Shakespeare’s dramatic art
cannot be overestimated.
Acting styles changed over the course of Shakespeare’s career, and it’s
likely that Shakespeare’s innovation and experimentation in drama were central
to these changes, as he developed methods of writing that showed characters’
inner lives. Pivotal to Shakespeare’s breakthrough was that, unlike other early
playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene, he was also an
actor. However we read Hamlet’s famous ‘advice to the players’, on the surface
it advises against an overly mannered style of performance and Shakespeare’s
plays contain many jokes and allusions to old-fashioned and bombastic playing
styles, suggesting that – however the King’s Men’s style of acting would appear
to us now – he and his colleagues pursued what was, for them, a more
naturalistic mode of performance.
Shakespeare worked hard to feed a local, loyal popular audience, as well as
his royal and aristocratic patrons. Unfortunately, only a small number of the plays
performed between 1576, when the first London theatre was opened, and 1642,
when the theatres were closed by Parliament, were published. Had Shakespeare’s
colleagues not collected his plays into the ‘First Folio’ of 1623, around half
of his plays, including – amazingly - Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The
Tempest would have been lost. Theatre’s artistic status in literature had
improved by the time of Shakespeare’s death, and he was mourned as a brilliant
writer by his peers. But no one could have known that this popular artist,
writing for a local audience in a single city, would grow in reach and
influence over four hundred years to become arguably the most celebrated writer
of all time.
