Shakespeare's Life Research Articles

Review: Play: Review Article: Electronic Gardens of Elizabethan Lore: Shakespeare's Life and Times, the Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, the Electronic Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, Conc

Review: Play: Review Article: Electronic Gardens of Elizabethan Lore: Shakespeare's Life and Times, the Complete Poetical Works of John Milton, the Electronic Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, Conc

Shakespeare's lives

Materials for a life Shakespeare of the legends - the first biographers Edmond Malone the earlier 19th century Victorians deviations the 20th century.

"Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished": Medieval Dramatic Eschatology in Shakespeare

An Elizabethan dramatist whose early memories of theater centered on annual productions of a mystery cycle would unconsciously think of serious drama as driving teleologically toward an eschatological resolution. This is an artistic cause and effect which apparently operated in William Shakespeare's life;l it seems very likely that he learned how to think about plays from seeing what was shown with defiant civic commitment and special emphasis in the streets of Coventry in the last years of the Corpus Christi cycle there. And a substantial number of plays in his canon include eschatological scenes, usually in Act V.2 To understand how Shakespeare, as an impressionable boy, might have felt about the annual event, one should recall that though it may have been somewhat subdued in its last years because of official opposition and economic depression, the Coventry cycle was once so proud a spectacle that it lent its name to the very genre.3 People, including royalty, came from all over England to see the famous plays; there is a pleasing historical irony in the modern analogy whereby visitors flock annually from all over England (and the world) to Stratford, drawn by the RSC productions of Shakespeare's plays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where there is a box set aside for the Royal Family. The Coventry cycle was finally suppressed in 1580, when Shakespeare was sixteen years old.4 He may

Shakespeare's Other Lives

to separate facts of Shakespeare's life and career from myths that have entangled them, fictions about Shakespeare create a curious dilemma. On one hand, such fictions often invoke-and even embrace-the very legends that scholarship has sought to discredit. On other, scholars share with authors of such work a kinship of interest. Like theologians fascinated by sin, many Shakespeareans develop an affection for even most arcane or misleading piece of Shakespeareana. The ambivalence towards conscious fictions of those who have devoted their lives to identifying and correcting biographical fictions may explain why large collection of novels, stories, and plays about Shakespeare is so rarely discussed.1 Although questions of intentional fallacies occasionally arise, few readers have trouble distinguishing between conscious and unconscious fictions. The large body of conscious fictions involving Shakespeare offers a rich variety, ranging from anachronistic fantasy to scrupulous fidelity, from bardolatrous flights to Marxian dialectics, and from Catholic apologetics to an attempt to establish Ulysses S. Grant as head of a state-governed Church of America. Most authors have larger ambitions than mere art. They offer solutions to identities of W.H. and Dark Lady, suggest Shakespeare's role in shaping King James Bible, and trace his relationships with Sir Thomas Lucy, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, Kit Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. They celebrate, mourn, and demean Anne. And they speculate endlessly about Shakespeare's pets and poaching, his sources and inspirations, his melancholy and death. For most part, these other lives reinforce patterns that have emerged in studies of biographies. In a few cases, they also offer interesting experiments in fiction or drama, works worth reading for their own sake. I have divided material into seven broad categories, discussing under each some representative examples. The first five categories involve differing approaches to Shakespeare himself. Cygnets and Daytrippers, first two categories, provide younger or less experienced readers an entrance to his world. Approaching more sophisticated audiences, Domestics and Players, third and fourth categories, attempt to identify the essential man, former at home and latter in theatre. The last of categories includes those for whom relevance is a 1 As my title suggests, any discussion of Shakespearean biography-whether fictional or factual-owes a major debt to S. Schoenbaum's groundbreaking work in Shakespeare's Lives (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). I am also indebted to Dr. Levi Fox and librarians of Shakespeare Centre at Stratford.

John Donne and Biographical Criticism

Since Augustus Jessopp's biography of Donne in 1897 and, more particularly, since Edmund Gosse's in 1899, the life of John Donne has proven irresistibly fascinating to biographers. Following Gosse's Life, thirteen full-length biographies (including two fictional adaptations of Donne's life) and numerous essays, articles, and letters elucidating one facet or other of his life have been written. Donne's life attracts writers, R. C. Bald argues, partly because Donne is the first English poet about whom enough is known to write a modern biography. Accounts of Shakespeare's life, Bald continues, dwell on his times or on autobiographical readings of the Sonnets; there are gaps in our knowledge of Dryden's and Spenser's lives; and few of Milton's intimate communications to friends have survived. For Donne, however, letters and verse letters to friends, relatives, and patrons; certain undeniably autobiographical poems; and Izaak Walton's seventeenth-century biography of Donne all exist to help, or sometimes to hinder, the modern biographer in piecing together Donne's life.' Nonetheless, much of the twentieth century's fascination with John Donne's biography arises from the seemingly contradictory nature of his life. Jack Donne the Rake and Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, is certainly the best-known antithesis. But such antinomies as Donne the Catholic great-nephew of Sir Thomas More and Donne the Anglican preacher, Donne the poet who extolled full nakedness and Donne the sermon writer who condemned lust, Donne the worldly courtier and Donne the other-worldly divine, also exist and continue to generate attempts to reconcile the apparent contradictions. These attempts have sometimes taken the form of interpreting Donne's poetry biographically, of emphasizing one side or aspect of his life more than another, or of speculating about his motives for seemingly contradictory actions. Naturally, the life of any author, especially if he lived before the eighteenth century, is subject to some biographical guesswork: some of the activities of Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, may never be fully known, much less accurately dated, and will continue to provide opportunities for scholarly research and dis-

I Actually Know Not Too Much on Shakespeare

IN HIS INTRODUCTORY LECTURE on Shakespeare at New York University in September 1949, Professor Karl J. Holzknecht wistfully stated that he had always aspired to have a class that was innocent of any knowledge of Shakespeare's life and works. Holding up a sheaf of less than a dozen mimeographed pages on Shakespeare, he said: Ladies and gentlemen, these are the only facts we have on William Shakespeare. All else is hypothesis and conjecture. I still have these valuable documented notes authored by my inspired teacher who died in the prime of his teaching career, and I use them religiously to divest my credulous freshmen of the fanciful notions about Shakespeare which they accumulate in high school English classes. But before distributing these unadorned notes, I investigate the range of their intimacy with Shakespeare by asking them to write impromptu responses to these three questions:

W. Nicholas Knight, Shakespeare's Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595

W. Nicholas Knight, <i>Shakespeare's Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595</i>

Re-presenting Shakespeare

N inevitable and healthy plurality of critical systems appears as soon as we talk about even so small a lyric as Nothing Gold Can Stay. It stuns us almost into silence as soon as we consider one of the larger literary forms-a play or a novel, for instance-or, worse yet, as soon as we read what other people think about them. Try reading for several weeks running what thousands of critics and literary historians have said about a large work like King Lear. It is enough to turn your wits. Yet it does not drive you mad exactly because so many different systems, so many diverse and even contradictory insights finally make or can make for sanity. Lear was driven mad by one obsessive idea and came back to his senses when he could accept the possibility that others could be right too. An object lesson for his critics. But stunned as we may be by the size of the larger literary forms and the variety of responses to them, we had better ask ourselves how to teach-well, Shakespeare. It is much easier to say how not to teach Shakespeare: i. should not deal with Shakespeare's life any more than we absolutely have to, and we should especially steer our students away from fruitless research into the silly question of who, besides Shakespeare, wrote the plays. can't ignore his life entirely because he led an interesting one, but we'll find ourselves speculating wildly, and uselessly. 2. should never forget that a play is a play. I shall return to this point later. 3. should not locate the play somewhere back around i6oo and leave it there. Our students are less interested in historical research than we are, though they should learn as much about the past as they need to. This may be a great deal. 4. Nor should we locate the play simply in 1974 and restrict our responses to what we can now naturally feel. The currently fashionable attempts of Jan Kott, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski to find in Shakespeake's plays problems that are relevant to our times, though often valuable as ways to keep the theater alive, can end by impoverishing the plays themselves. Patrick Cruttwell is right when he criticizes Kott for going to Shakespeare for answers to problems: If you ask Shakespeare the answers to problems, you ask him the problems you yourself are obsessed with and you find the answers you yourself have already found.' I suppose that books like Shakespeare our Contemporary touch on that sensitive nerve that screams, We must be relevant! But to go to the past only for what may be relevant to the present may be to search for

W. Nicholas Knight. Shakespeare's Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595. New York: Mason &amp; Lipscomb, 1973. 325 pp. $12.50.

W. Nicholas Knight. Shakespeare's Hidden Life: Shakespeare at the Law 1585-1595. New York: Mason &amp; Lipscomb, 1973. 325 pp. $12.50.

Shakespeare's Lives

Other| December 01 1971 Shakespeare's Lives S. Schoenbaum. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. xxiv + 838 pp. $12.50. Paul A. Jorgensen Paul A. Jorgensen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (1971) 32 (4): 429–431. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-32-4-429 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Paul A. Jorgensen; Shakespeare's Lives. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 1971; 32 (4): 429–431. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-32-4-429 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1971 by Duke University Press1971 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Shakespeare's Lives. By S. SCHOENBAUM. Pp. xxiv+838. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. £6.00 net. DOUGLAS HAMER DOUGLAS HAMER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXII, Issue 88, November 1971, Pages 482–485, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXII.88.482 Published: 01 November 1971

Roland Mushat Frye,Shakespeare's Life and Times

Roland Mushat Frye,<i>Shakespeare's Life and Times</i>

Shakespeare's Life and Times

Shakespeare's Life and Times

VIII. Shakespeare's Life and Times

Journal Article VIII. Shakespeare's Life and Times Get access Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3, Summer 1965, Pages 64–76, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/16.3.64 Published: 01 July 1965

Shakespeare's Life and Art.

Peter Alexander: Shakespeare’s Life and Art Get access Shakespeare’s Life and Art. By Peter Alexander. New York University Press, 1961. Pp. vi + 247. $3.00. Aïla De Oliveira Gomes Aïla De Oliveira Gomes University of Brazil Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 1, Winter 1965, Page 129, https://doi.org/10.2307/2867758 Published: 01 January 1965

Three Notelets on Shakespeare

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, William John Thoms (1803–85) pursued literary and bibliographical interests and conversed with the likes of Thomas Macaulay and Charles Dickens. Most notably, he coined the term 'folklore' in 1846 and founded the scholarly periodical Notes and Queries in 1849. Having been published separately, these three essays on Shakespeare were brought together in this 1865 work. 'Shakespeare in Germany' (1840) spells out how German drama was influenced by English playwrights and by English actors performing plays in Germany from the late sixteenth century onwards. 'The Folk-Lore of Shakespeare' (1847) considers fairy lore and names, with particular attention paid to the characters of Puck and Queen Mab. In 'Was Shakespeare Ever a Soldier?' (1859), Thoms acknowledges that little is known for sure about Shakespeare's life, but careful scrutiny of the evidence has made him 'morally certain' that the dramatist had seen military service.

Teaching Shakespeare: Is There a Method?

Teachers College of Columbia University. We may as well face it. English professors who have not graduated from teachers colleges are irrevocably opposed to as such, and each one is probably convinced that what he does is best-or else why would he be doing it. Let me say at the outset that if by one means the kind of indoctrination that student teachers might get by observing a class through a plate glass window transparent from only one side, I heartily agree that there is no that is universally applicable. But there is method and frequently some madness in it. I taught my first Shakespeare course in 1947. By that time I was already a bardolater and had a nice collection of Shakespeareana. I was determined that my classes would be taught and would learn everything, for indeed all Elizabethan knowledge might throw some light on our interpretation of the plays. I gave a background of Elizabethan drama, gave a capsule view of some of the great writers active in contemporary literature and drama, and then lectured on Shakespeare's life by giving every date and event, and the significance of all that was known. As I left the class I heard a student who did

Shakespeare. A Biographical Handbook.

Bentley presents the life and working methods of William Shakespeare with the strictest fidelity to the surviving documentation. By presenting the hundred or more surviving Shakespearean documents in the context of similar records, against the background of Elizabethan customs and prejudices, and in relation to one another, he sets up an essential outline of Shakespeare's life.

Imagery and Symbolism in Richard II

HE fall of Richard and the rise of Bolingbroke provide the central theme of Shakespeare's tragedy, Life and Death of King Richard the Second.' As William Hazlitt observes: The steps by which Bolingbroke mounts the throne are those by which Richard sinks into the grave. Spiritually, one might add, as Richard rises, so Bolingbroke declines. This dual theme of rise and fall provides in turn the dominant imagery and symbolism of the play, indeed, it may justly be described as its leitmotif. Perhaps in no other of Shakespeare's plays do imagery and action so closely correspond. recurrent imagery of rise and fall goes far beyond a purpose of mere description. Throughout, it has a significance beyond its immediate context and bears a striking relationship to the central dramatic theme. imagery, in the language of Wolfgang Clemen (The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery) is functional and organic and plays a decisive part both in expressing the dramatic theme and in characterization. This close relationship in Richard between the action of the play and its iterative imagery appears somehow to have escaped attention in the numerous writings on Shakespearian imagery. Even Richard D. Altick, in his detailed study, Symphonic Imagery in Richard 11 (PMLA, LXII) makes no specific

"Food for Powder"--"Food for Worms"

N an age accustomed to and thunder on and off stage, Shakespeare's instinctive revulsion from senseless shedding of is striking and novel. The agonizing cry of Marlowe's Faustus at moment of his damnation, See, see where Christ's streams in firmament! impresses finally with its theatricality rather than with its sensitivity to blood-letting. But Shakespeare's Portia, in a similar vein of melodrama, sets countercurrent to age's insensibility in her warning against shedding of one drop of Christian blood (IV. i. 3I0). From very beginning of Shakespeare's career, this phrase, the effusion of Christian blood, runs like a thread through English history plays, in which, over a long period of time, he turned again and again to tragical cost of war. In Henry VI, his earliest history, good Duke of Gloucester proposes a peace between England and France as only means to stop effusion of our Christian blood (i Henry VI V. i. 8-9), and in Henry V, with which he completed series, French King echoes same sentiment (III. vi. I39-I40). Indeed, business of does not come to a climax until almost unendurable pageant of Macbeth's futile and bloody murders. In none of Shakespeare's historical plays is this humane temper more in evidence than in i Henry IV, where it is thrown into high light through deft use of a potent image. In last decade study of Shakespeare's imagery has been occasion for a good deal of speculation on Shakespeare's life, character, and environment, extending from his observation of direction of flow of water under Clopton bridge to his disgust of fawning spaniels at rich men's tables. As to dubiousness of these speculations, nothing more need be said here than has already been said in Rosemund Tuve's recently published Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. It is rather to be remarked that, with all this new interest in subject, so little attention should have been paid to what on its face would seem to be a more pertinent field of inquiry, Shakespeare's use of imagery in conformity to special capacities of artistic medium in which he was writing. The prefaces of Granville-Barker have shown how sensitive Shakespeare was to dramatic effects possible on stage on which his plays were produced. It is inconceivable that poet should not have perceived possibilities of poetic imagery so projected. That Shakespeare did think of imagery functionally is a wholly reasonable hypothesis against which evidence in i Henry IV may be tested with profit. But first critics must be dealt with, who, while they will begrudgingly