A perfect holiday
A MAN FOR ALL AGES
• Facts about Shakespeare’s life and career:
William Shakespeare was born on the 26th of April 1564 in a half-timbered house in Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was the son of John, a glovemaker who had married Mary Arden, the youngest of eight daughters of a farmer. She was 24 when she bore William. Young Shakespeare was well-educated at the local grammar school, learning rhetoric and Erasmian philosophy. The adolescent Master Shakespeare “was trained in civility” as tutor to an aristocratic Catholic family. When he was 18, he married Anne Hathaway.
She was three months pregnant and eight years senior. They had three children, Susanne and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Then he left them behind to find his fortune in Elizabethan London. First he was an actor, then a playwright. In 1596 his son died and he never seems to have recovered from it. Shakespeare became a metropolitan celebrity when in 1598 a book appeared that listed 12 plays by him.
When plague closed the theatres he turned to poetry. He died in 1616 and it took another half century for the “genius” Shakespeare to be discovered.
• What is it that makes up Shakespeare’s genius? What is he admired for?
He did not make monkey around with the forces of nature, he wrote astonishing plays about characters who did.
One gets acquainted with him without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution.
He was a timeless genius, whose work informs a universal imagination.
He had a great imaginary gift, he was able to think up what for example Ancient Egypt was like. He could imagine and picture what people felt. He is still alive in his language.
Yet his words are sill in our mouths and understanding. His plays belong to everybody. Precisely because so many of them seem beyond criticism, each generation can do whatever it likes with them.
On various modern Shakespeare productions today’s artists have left their particular imprint.
• There is little about the bard’s life we know for sure. Throughout the centuries scholars have
tried to fill the gap. Some speculations...
secret agent of the counter-Reformation
astronomer
ham actor who hogged opening scene of his own productions
dark lady of sonnets was a man, homosexual, bisexual
didn’t write plays at all. Could one man be responsible for 37 plays and 154 sonnets? It had to be Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe (who was apparently killed in a fight but who really faked his own death), or Edward the Vere (17th Earl of Oxford, who paid S. to act as a front man because it was beneath his dignity to admit that he was a playwright.)
• What did S. look like?
Had a little beard, intelligent eyes, high domed forehead.
MAN OF THE MILLENIUM
• S’s poetry and plays have been translated into more than 100 languages and his coinages
and metaphors salt the tongues of the English-speaking world.
• Common phrases like green-eyed jealousy and cold comfort derive from him. he is the one
compulsory author in the National Curriculum. (introduced new phrases)• He provided a model for a national poet, a writer creating a sense of a national identity and
national history.
• S’s willingness to present conflicts without giving answers in one of the reasons why his
work continues to fascinate each generation, and why his plays have the capacity to keep on
evolving.
• S. is a deeply humane writer.
He is a religious writer, one who is concerned with a world
elsewhere; the ghost, the supernatural, the fairy world.
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