Good morning everyone, welcome again to this
course on History of English Language and
Literature.
And in today's session we begin talking about
this perhaps this greatest figure not in Elizabethan
literature itself but in world literature
itself - William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is perhaps the best known literary
writer of not just his period but also of
the entire world literature.
And in fact, many of you might know that even
the ones who have got little inclination towards
theatre, poetry or any kind of literary writing
might have heard about Shakespeare.
That's the kind of impact which he has had
on not just on literature but also in world
culture for the last few centuries.
And in fact when we begin talking about William
Shakespeare, one of the first things that
comes to our mind is who is William Shakespeare.
Let's begin with some very trivial details
about this scholarship on Shakespeare.
In fact there is lot of mystery about who
really Shakespeare was and
what kind of an author he was in the sense
that the absence of historical records has
made his personality, his corpus of writing
quite mysterious in terms of actual authorship.
In fact a particular branch of study itself
exists in English Literary studies known as
authorship
studies which debates and deliberates upon
the actuality
of Shakespeare’s writing whether Shakespeare
actually wrote those plays or not.
In fact some of those concerns about the various
disputes about authorship we also looked at
in the previous session when we engaged with
the university wits in general.
So, that's about the debates about Shakespeare's
authorship but in this lecture we move on
with the assumption, which most of the recent
historians also share, that Shakespeare himself
actually wrote most of the, most of his plays.
May be there were collaborations, maybe there
were lost plays but nevertheless the man did
exist and his dramatic genius is beyond question.
So we move ahead with this assumption.
And another interesting trivia about his personality,
some of you might have noticed this opening
scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love where
he tries to put his signature in many different
ways.
Let's quickly take the look at the clip
This detail in the movie is actually based,
based on facts and that's very interesting,
given the fact that the man who penned almost
37 plays and a number of sonnets and a few
other un-credited and lost plays, maybe he
had a problem in spelling his name correctly.
So this is
an instance of about six examples of Shakespeare's
own handwriting which historians have recovered
from signatures from legal documents.
These were mostly contracts that he signed
with that particular acting companies and
the one is from his will and very interestingly
there is
no standard spelling that the linguistic experts
and handwriting experts could discover from
these varied kinds of signatures that Shakespeare
is said to have used.
So these are the different spellings that
he himself perhaps had been using.
And even the veracity of these signatures
and whether Shakespeare himself actually signed
them or whether he had another clerk doing
all these jobs for him is not yet not clear
but it is very interesting to note that during
his own life, during his own lifetime,
the standard spelling that we use, William
Shakespeare was never used.
He himself never had used it and we do not
find any other records using his name with
this spelling either.
So in that sense,
it was a very interesting and a very multi-faceted
kind of life that he led so beyond these many
trivialities about his life and many disputes
about his life, in fact there are . . . but
apart from these, many trivialities about
his life and these many disputes about historical
veracity, one needs to move on
with the assumption that as we said earlier,
Shakespeare did exist and also his drama is
of supreme genius, not just during the Elizabethan
times but in the world class literature itself
These are some of the instances of the earlier
manuscripts available
which were published posthumously after his
death and we do not find them using the spelling
that we contemporarily use.
So moving on
from there, we need to take a brief; we need
to take a brief look at his early life and
in fact
Shakespeare is said to have been born on twenty
third April 1564 and I use the phrase, said
to have, quite advisedly because there are
no actual records of his birth available.
And there are church records of baptism so
in that sense it is assumed that may be he
was born in and around twenty third April
in Stratford-upon-Avon.
He was born as a son of an alderman so his
childhood may not have been that difficult.
He was one of the eight children of his father
and he is said to have hailed from a fairly
well-to-do family in that sense so maybe he
also, this is
the birthplace which is now a center of tourist
attraction in London and he is also said to
have
enjoyed a fairly sound education In terms
of schooling he perhaps went to this grammar
school
which was quite popular and quite decent in
Stratford during these days, during those
days and he may have been taught Latin and
Arithmetic but there are no actual school
records to prove whether he went or not but
there is this assumption that like all other
children of his class he may have enjoyed
the sound education.
But he was certainly not very learned in that
sense he never went to a university and he,
when he came to London as we noted even in
the discussion of University wits he was perhaps
the only one who arrived in London
with the hope of making it big in theatre,
making it big in writing without having had
the university education.
So Ben Johnson, one of his contemporaries
later wrote about him, “He knew
small Latin and less Greek”.
So this is how he was looked down upon by
some of his more learned contemporaries but
the ironical fact remains that he became more
famous and more achieved in terms of his literary
merit and his dramatic craft at a later point
of time.
And we get to know financial misfortunes had
overtaken his family.
This was around 1577 but one does not know
the real nature of the misfortunes and the
circumstances in which his childhood was faced
but following that perhaps
it was not an easy time for him.
There are also some records which prove that
he got married to Anne Hathaway in 1585.
There are no actual marriage records but one
knows about this marriage due to some available
records from the church.
And there is a, there is a record of baptism
of a daughter and set of twins and one of
them who also dies a little later.
And strangely enough, by the time Shakespeare
was of 21 years, he had already fathered three
children.
So it was not an easy life to begin with.
He had a lot of financial misfortunes and
he was not really making it big in that small
town of Stratford and we find him
leaving for London in 1587.
And reason for taking off to London is not
really known and some of the historians feel
that he was going to be arrested for poaching
in somebody else's property.
So one is not too sure whether he fled Stratford
for
London in order to escape an impending arrest
or whether he decided to deliberately move
to London to pursue more fortunes over there.
So if we try and record
Shakespeare's journey to London from Stratford-upon-Avon,
this is the kind of journey that he had undertaken
so
for a very long time we
realize that when Shakespeare began to make
it big in London he used to almost shift between
Stratford and London and some historians even
feel that he led a double kind of a life.
Because he was a very successful professional
in London and but his home front always continues
to be based in Stratford.
And if we talk about this journey
in terms of distance it is only 133 kilometers
which might sound quite simple
today but during those days, as Pat Rogers,
the historian puts it, ‘it was the journey
of several days unless
you were rich and extravagant enough to hire
post horses’.
So we do not have any historical records to
show that Shakespeare's family had moved to
London but perhaps he used to commute up and
down, one is not too sure about the domestic
details.
So in that sense he was a contemporary of
the university wits as well about whose families
also we have, we do not know much about.
Another thing is that
one is not too sure about the exact year in
which Shakespeare arrived in London, the exact
year in which he started participating in
theatrical activities, so on and so forth.
Pat Rogers says ‘in what year exactly Shakespeare
was drawn into the orbit of metropolitan theatre
we are not sure’.
So we begin discussing his dramatic
his dramatic career with this uncertainty
but there is enough evidence that by 1592,
he was writing and acting in London.
And he was fairly established and fairly well-known
in London circles by the time he was at the
age of 28.
And we also recalled in the discussion of
University Wits that there was this Robert
Greene who had written quite unkindly about
the arrival of a new fellow in the London
dramatic circles.
So this is perhaps, there is a conjecture
that that this is perhaps Shakespeare.
So in 1592 at the age of 28, he was important
enough to merit abuse from a famous playwright
of the period, Robert Greene.
And by 1594, he was one of the leading actors
in London and there is enough evidence to
show that he was, he had appeared
with William Kempe and Richard Burbage who
were two of the major actors of those period.
In fact it is really said, generally said
that during the Elizabethan times, many of
them used to flock these theatres to watch
their favorite actors in stage and in such
a, within such a setting, for some person
like Shakespeare to make it really big in
terms of acting abilities, in terms of his
writing skills, in terms of his dramatic technique
- that was quite an achievement.
And by 1595 we know that
he was in the payroll of Lord Chamberlain’s
Company of actors and this was in fact the
most respectable and most coveted company
in Elizabethan times and they had the rare
distinction of performing within the court.
There is even evidence that Shakespeare himself
had performed in front of the Queen herself
a couple of times.
So Lord Chamberlain's Company was the most
well-known and Shakespeare, once he had been
part of Chamberlain's Company, we note that
he had not performed or he had not written
for any other company after that.
And the same company was renamed as King's
Men after James the First takes over as the
King of England.
So we also get to know about which we shall
be
seeing in detail a little as well, we get
to know that the theatre companies, their
performances and everything continued to be
at the mercy of the government, the monarch,
the town council, so on and so forth.
Many of these details we shall be coming back
to when we look at Elizabethan theatre in
detail.
By 1597 there is evidence to show that
he had already authored 15 of the 37 plays
and that is quite a tremendous achievement
for someone who had arrived in London with
very little fortune
or very little prospects.
If we survey his career in more detail, if
we try to describe Shakespeare, he was not
just a dramatist.
He was not just a playwright.
He was not just an actor.
He was many things put together.
In fact, he was a theatre owner, he was an
entrepreneur, he is considered as a very successful
businessman who knew the market sense and
who could cater to what the market wanted.
So in that sense he is perhaps one of the
first playwrights who realized the kind of
success that one could reap out of theatre
and literature in the more financial and revenue
based
Terms.
So we can even call him as one of the, one
of the dramatists who could come up with box-office
hits one after the other and so in that sense,
Hudson in fact refers to him as a practical
man of affairs and he compares
Shakespeare with that of, he compares Shakespeare's
genius with that of Chaucer and he says he
was no dreamer like Chaucer.
And this is proved by the fact
that Shakespeare reached London poor and friendless
but by the time he left London he was rich
and he was respected and now we know England
in fact owes much of its popularity, much
of its cultural heritage to this singular
figure, William Shakespeare.
And his output was prolific.
In fact he was; he was the object
of envy of most of his contemporaries because
he was producing almost a couple of plays
a year and all of them were quite successful
as well.
So in contemporary terms we think of a movie
director who is coming up with at least two
successful nationwide hits and that also,
if he repeats
this success, he or she repeats this success
one after the other for many consecutive years
that is quite an achievement.
So this is what Shakespeare had.
He achieved literary merits through this.
He achieved the court's favor.
He was popular and he was making a lot of
money.
So by the time he begins to be quite an established
figure in London, we know that he had amassed
a lot of wealth and he had become extremely
famous in London circles.
And we find him coming up as a very smart
entrepreneur and a shrewd businessman as well.
As soon
as he realized the kind of revenues that these
theatres were turning out, we find him becoming
the shareholder of two very important theatre
companies, playhouses of the period, the Globe
and Blackfriars.
So this is how the structure
of the Globe looked like when we, we can already
see that this is quite a massive structure.
It is very elaborate.
In fact it is quite elaborate than the playhouses
of today.
So we will be looking at all of these technical
features in detail when we talk about Elizabethan
drama.
So there is also evidence to show that he
purchased property in Stratford and London
and in that sense, he is also one of the earliest
figures in, London to realize the potential
of real estate dealing.
So we find him investing heavily in property
and also you know he could
identify and also, he had an eye for this
market, eye for business so we find him becoming
extremely successful and extremely famous
even during his lifetime.
But this, his life was not just a bed of roses.
We find a lot of domestic tragedies hitting
him one after the other.
He is, in fact his dramatic career is also
marred by continuous deaths in his family.
His son dies initially followed by his father,
his younger brother Edmond who was also an
actor in London and his mother also dies in
1607.
And this had a major impact on his career
and his personal life in general.
By 1610, we find him quietly retiring back
to Stratford-upon-Avon and when he goes back
to
Stratford if you remember earlier when he
had left for London he had to almost flee
London because he, there was an impending
arrest perhaps or maybe he was running away
from the misfortunes that had fallen him and
his family.
But when he goes back as a, goes back to London
to retire and spend some quiet time over there,
he is the richest man over there.
We find him purchasing the largest house in
Stratford
and settling over there.
And just like
his entire life was clouded in mystery in
certain ways; his death is also a quite mysterious.
He is said to have again died on twenty third
April 1616 which happens to be the documented
birthday of William Shakespeare as well.
This is again a conjecture because there are
burial records which show that he was buried
on twenty fifth April so given the conventions
of the day, the burial is to happen two days
after death.
So there is
conjecture that he was born on twenty third
April and he died on twenty third April as
well.
And talking about Shakespeare's genius, it
was, there was no way in which one could compare
him to his contemporaries because he had no
university education and he was not, he did
not have the kind of background that many
of the others, other literary writers of those
period had.
And his learning
and his craft, it was not the reflection of
the trained and accurate scholar.
In fact we find him gathering knowledge, gathering
life material from different sources and it
is a very miscellaneous assortment of different
kind of experiences we find at a later point.
And at the same time he was not free from
the influences of his times.
His plays reflect a very strong influence
of the classicism of the Renaissance period.
And also we get to know that he had access
to lot of ancient, Greek and Roman literature
through translations and some of the plays
are, they also seem to be have been borrowed
from certain other languages so
he was trying to keep himself abreast with
the latest happenings and the knowledgeable
things of the times.
And last but not the least, one cannot ignore
the influence that Elizabethan England had
on him because we have noted multiple times
that this was a
, it was charged and stimulated atmosphere
in London during those times; so he was influenced
by all of these things collectively and it
is very difficult to pinpoint what exactly
turned this man into a quite an exemplary
figure of those times.
And interestingly, though he had performed
many plays in London, though he was quite
famous, he had taken a name as an actor, as
a playwright, as a poet so on and so forth,
he himself did not take any kind of effort
to get anything published.
This, some of them feel perhaps, being a successful
playwright himself, being a successful person
who was putting plays on stage, maybe he was
weary of
publishing his plays.
There was this risk of piracy because , because
drama was getting increasingly competitive
in England so everyone had to make sure that
their plays remain their own and they were
not pirated by someone else.
So may be for this reason Shakespeare did
not actively try to bring out any kind of
publication in his name.
But there is also this other assumption that
he was too busy staging plays one after the
other, preparing the actors and putting the
plays on stage that he did not really have
the time to sit down and have a proper script.
There are lots of anecdotes about how casually
he used to name his plays, how casually he
used to frame his script.
So this man had his eye only on the stage
and not on the literary thing that would go
into the pages.
So in that sense, he had never published anything
and there are no surviving manuscripts in
his own name which is quite ironical and quite
strange given the kind of success, popularity
and fame that he achieved at a later point.
So how do we access his plays?
So some of his friends, two of them in particular,
they had come out with a collection much after
his death.
This was known as the First Folio.
This is in fact, for all Shakespeare scholars
and all Shakespeare lovers, this is a very
important document because we do not have
any other kind of access to the
plays of Shakespeare apart from the fact that
they were staged at some point in London.
So John Hemminge and Henry Condell, they were
good friends of Shakespeare, they were also
actors and they were part of King's Men for
a very long time.
So they knew Shakespeare very well and had
been a part of most of his dramatic ventures.
So they brought together in 1623 a collection
known as the First Folio and one does not
know about how original all of these plays
were, whether they had to, they had amended
the plays, they had brought about some changes
because they had, it was all based on the,
partly from memory, partly from the plays
which were still being staged.
So let's not go into those details which is,
which is clearly beyond the scope of our discussion
and it is said that in the contemporary only
233 copies of the 750 original First Folios
are now available.
Rest of them were perhaps lost or some even
feel that they could be available in someone's
private collections.
So this is how
the First Folio, the first
page of the Folio looked like.
If you look at the title
it’s Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories,
Tragedies Interestingly this is how this scholarly
discussion on Shakespeare's works have been
framed as well.
It talks about these three major different
genres and this folio in that sense has been
a major scholarly framework as well in all
the other kinds of discussions on Shakespeare
to follow.
And this
portrait of Shakespeare that we find over
here, that is known as the Droeshout portrait
because it was made by Martin Droeshout.
And this is one of the two portraits which,
this in fact is one of the two accurate portraits
of Shakespeare which is available till date
and the other one being the, his bust which
is erected in, near his graveyard.
And this one is said to be accurate because
of the assumption that his friends had brought
it out and perhaps they could, may be they
had found it closer to real life than many
other portraits of that time.
So this is the most accurate and the most
trustworthy portrait of Shakespeare as we
have it today.
And but at the same time, if you just google
Shakespeare's name you will find that there
are different versions and different kinds
of portraits which are available.
So if we talk about this vast corpus of Shakespeare's
works; in, in span of twenty four years, this
is what he had come out with.
He has two narrative poems to his credit,
154 sonnets, 37 plays - so this is quite a
big achievement and some of them feel that
there are also a few lost plays.
There are a couple of incomplete ones, there
are certain plays with Shakespeare collaborated
with certain others and were not documented.
So this is really a vast corpus of work and
many historians feel that this is the greatest
single body of work available in literature.
To embark upon a discussion on Shakespeare's
work we need to devote an entire lecture for
that and which is precisely what we are going
to do in the next lecture.
So with this we come to the end of this session.
Thank you for listening and see you in the
next class.
