William Shakespeare

English playwright and poet

Date of Birth	:	15 Apr, 1564
Date of Death	:	23 Apr, 1616
Place of Birth	:	Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom
Profession	:	English Playwright And Poet
Nationality	:	British, English

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time"

Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield, Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a wealthy landed family. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died on 26 April 1564. Baptized. His date of birth is unknown, but St. George's Day is traditionally celebrated on April 23. This date from William Oldies and George Stevens has proved interesting to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616. He was the third and eldest surviving son of eight children.

Although there are no attendance records for this period, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553,about a quarter of a mile. (400 m) from his house. Grammar school standards varied during the Elizabethan era, but the grammar school curriculum was essentially the same: the basic Latin text was standardized by royal decree,and the school provided an intensive education in grammar based on Latin classical authors.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The Consistory Court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage license on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway's neighbors posted bonds guaranteeing that no legal claims prevented the marriage. The ceremony may have been somewhat hastily arranged because the Chancellor of Worcester allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times, and Six months after the wedding Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. , baptism. 26 May 1583 Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed about two years later and were baptized on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on 11 August 1596.

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he was mentioned as part of the London theater scene in 1592. The exception is when his name appears on a "bill of charge" in a law suit in the Court of Queen's Bench. Westminster Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589. Scholars refer to the years 1585 to 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers trying to account for this period have reported many irrelevant stories. Nicholas Roe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounts a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the city to London to escape a deer-poaching case on the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also believed to have retaliated against Lucy by writing a nasty ballad about her. In another 18th-century tale, Shakespeare begins his theatrical career by minding the horses of theater patrons in London. John Aubrey reports that Shakespeare was a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare was employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshaft" in his will. Little evidence supports such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshoff was a common name in the Lancashire area.

London and theater career

It is not known with certainty when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary indications and performance records show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. By then, he was well enough known in London that playwright Robert Greene attacked him in print from that year in his Grotes-Worth of Wit:

We have an upstart Crow well-dressed with feathers, Whose tiger's heart is wrapped in a player's hide, Think he is as capable of a blank verse bomb as the best of you: And an absolute Johannes Factotum, The only trembling sight of a country in his own conceit.

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words, but most agree that Greene accused Shakespeare of reaching above his rank to try to match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene. the so-called "University of Wits"). The italicized phrase parodies the line "Oh, a tiger's heart wraps a woman's hide" with the pun "shake-syn" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3 clearly identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. As used here, Johannes factotum ("jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".

Greene's attack is the first surviving reference to Shakespeare's work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks. After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, which soon became London's leading playing company. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was granted a royal patent by the new King James I and renamed the King's Men.

In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theater on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the Company made him a wealthy man,and in 1597, he bought the second largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share. Parish tithes of Stratford.

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and appeared on the title pages. After his success as a playwright, Shakespeare himself and other He continued to act in plays. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's works includes his name in the cast list for Every Man in his Humor (1598) and Cezanne in his Fall (1603). Her absence from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone has been taken by some scholars as a sign of the end of her acting career. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as "one of the principal actors in all these plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although it is not known with certainty which part he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good will" played a "political" role. Later traditions maintain that he played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, although scholars doubt the source of that information.

Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, a year before purchasing New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St Helens, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. By 1599 he had crossed the river to Southwark, the same year his company opened the Globe there. By building a theater. By 1604, he had moved again north of the river, to an area with many fine houses north of St. Paul's Cathedral. There, she rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, who made women's wigs and other headgear.

Later years and death

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death". He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; In reply to the Sharers' Petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of Blackfriars Theater from Henry Evans in 1608, the King's Men kept "male players there", "who were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." However, this is probably relevant. Throughout 1609 the bubonic plague was raging in London. London's public playhouses were closed repeatedly during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of more than 60 months closed between May 1603 and February 1610), which often meant no performances. Retirement from all work was uncommon at the time. Shakespeare continued to tour London from 1611-1614. In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellot v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the settlement of the marriage of Mountjoy's daughter Mary. In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse at the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614, he spent several weeks in London with his son-in-law John Hall. After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none after 1613 are attributed to him. His last three plays were in collaboration, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as house dramatist of the King's Men. He retired in 1613 before the Globe Theater burned down during a performance of Henry VIII on 29 June.

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. No existing contemporary sources explain how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too much, for Shakespeare died there of a fever", an improbable Not the scene as Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. One of the co-authors' tributes noted his relatively sudden death: "We wonder, Shakespeare, that you went so soon / From the world's stage to the weary chamber of the grave.

He is survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna married John Hall, a physician, in 1607, and Judith married Thomas Quinney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; The next day, Thomas Quinney was convicted of fathering an illegitimate son by his new son-in-law, Margaret Wheeler, both of whom died in childbirth. Thomas was ordered to do public penance by the ecclesiastical court, which would cause much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his eldest daughter Susanna on the condition that she leave it intact as "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died unmarried. Hall had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died childless in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line. Shakespeare's will rarely mentions his wife Anne, who probably automatically inherited one-third of his estate. speculation Some scholars see the will as an insult to Anne, while others believe that the second-best bed would have been the marriage bed and therefore significant.

Plays

Most playwrights of this period usually collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree that Shakespeare did both early and late in his career.

Shakespeare's first recorded works are the three parts of Richard III and Henry VI, written during the vogue for historical drama in the early 1590s. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however, and textual studies suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's early period. His first history, which drew heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, dramatized the destructive consequences of weak or corrupt rule and was interpreted as justifying its rise. The Tudor Dynasty.The early plays were influenced by other Elizabethan dramatists, notably Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the medieval dramatic tradition, and by the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on the classical model, but no source has been found for The Taming of the Shrew, although it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folktale. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, where two friends sanction rape, Shrew's story of a man subduing a woman's independent spirit has sometimes offended modern critics, directors, and audiences.

Oberon, Titania and Puck Dancing with the Fairies. By William Blake, c. 1786.

Shakespeare's early classical and Italian comedies, with their tight double plots and precise comic sequences, gave way to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies in the mid-1590s. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a fun mix of romance, fairy magic, and comic book scenes. Shakespeare's later comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, features a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects the dominant Elizabethan view but may seem offensive to modern audiences. Wit and wordplay Much Ado About Nothing, lyric Richard II. After this, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedies in the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he skilfully transitions between the comic and the. Gurugambir achieved narrative diversity in scenes, prose and poetry and his mature works. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love and death; Introduction of new type of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar, "different genres of politics, characters, implications, contemporary events, and even Shakespeare's own reflections in the writing begin to influence each other".

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies. Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both.No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term is often used. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet."Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may, therefore, borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays." The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.

Performances

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest ... and you scarce shall have a room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.

The reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames in London

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees.

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. The others had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the others. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.

poetry

In 1593 and 1594, when the theaters were closed due to the plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wrythesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects Venus's sexual advances; While in The Rape of Lucrece, Stepwife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the poems show guilt and moral confusion resulting from uncontrollable lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a seducer, was printed in the first edition of Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote a lover's complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by the effects of lead. The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the death of the legendary Phoenix and her lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.

Sonnets

Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".

The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.

Style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the time. He wrote them in a stylized language that didn't always come naturally from the character or the drama's needs. The poem relies on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for the actors to announce rather than speak. Titus Andronicus's grand speeches, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse of The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as staggering.

However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt traditional styles for his own purposes. Richard III's opening soliloquy has its roots in the vice's self-proclamation in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature play. No single play marks the transition from traditional to free style. Shakespeare combined these two throughout his career with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of mixing styles. During the mid-1590s Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare began writing more natural poetry. He gradually tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama.

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, written in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables in a line, each accented with stress on the second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from his later plays. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause and end at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. After Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and alter its flow. This technique reveals the new power and flexibility of poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey Hamlet's turmoil of mind:

Sir, I had a kind of fight in my mind

That won't let me sleep. I thought I was sleeping

Worse than Bilbos Rebellion. in a hurry-

And there will be a rush for praise—let us know

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well…

—Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8

After Hamlet, Shakespeare further diversified his poetic style, especially in the more emotional passages of the latter tragedies. Literary critic A.C. Bradley describes this style as "more condensed, rapid, varied, and in construction, less regular, not infrequently curved or elliptical". In the latter part of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These include run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. In Macbeth, for example, the language comes from an unrelated metaphor or simile of another: "Was hope drunk / Where you arrayed yourself?" (1.7.35-38); "... Pity, like a naked new-born child/ Bursts, or the cherubim of heaven, Horse/ On the sightless courier of the wind ..." (1.7.21-25). The listener is challenged to complete the senses. Late Romance, with its changing times and surprising plot twists, inspired a late poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against each other, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, a creates Effect of spontaneity

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with theatrical practicality. Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatized stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed. He reworked each plot to create several centers of interest and show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and extensive interpretation without loss of its original play. As Shakespeare grew in skill, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. In later plays, however, he retained aspects of his earlier style. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returns to a more artificial style, which emphasizes theatrical illusion.

Legacy

Influence

Shakespeare's work has left a significant and lasting impression on later theater and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic possibilities of characterization, plot, language and style. Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance was not seen as a suitable subject for tragedy. Soliloquies were mainly used to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore the characters' minds. His work greatly influenced later poetry. Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner describes all English verse plays from Coleridge to Tennyson as "weak variations on Shakespearean themes". Wonder/ made himself a living-long monument.

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner and Charles Dickens. American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquy owes much to Shakespeare; In Moby-D his Captain Ahab is inspired by a classic tragic hero, King Lear. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music associated with Shakespeare's works, including Felix Mendelssohn's overture and accompaniment to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet. His work has inspired several operas, among them Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical stance compares to the source plays. Shakespeare also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelite, while William Hogarth's 1745 painting of the actor David Garrick as Richard III was decisive in establishing the genre of theatrical portraiture in Britain. The Swiss Romantic artist Henri Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even painted Macbeth. Translated into German. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, the psychology of Hamlet, for his theory of human nature. Shakespeare has been a rich source for filmmakers; Akira Kurosawa adapted Macbeth and King Lear as Throne of Blood and Run respectively. Other examples of Shakespeare in film include Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, and Al Pacino's documentary Looking for Richard. Orson Welles, a lifelong lover of Shakespeare, directed and starred in the films Macbeth and Othello and Chimes at Midnight, in which he played John Falstaff, which Welles himself called his best work.

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardized than they are today, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quotes him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, its first serious work. Such expressions as "with bated breath" (The Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.

Shakespeare's influence extended far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; Shakespeare was widely translated and popularized in Germany in the early 18th century and gradually became a "classic of the German Weimar period". Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce a complete translation of Shakespeare's plays in any language. Actor and theater director Simon Callow wrote, "This master, this titan, this genius, so profoundly British and so effortlessly universal, every different culture - German, Italian, Russian - was bound to respond to Shakespeare's example; for the most part, they embraced it. .

According to Guinness World Records, Shakespeare remains the world's best-selling playwright, believed to have sold more than four billion copies in the nearly 400 years since his death. He is also the third most translated author in history.

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English playwrights as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", although he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art" (lacked skill).

Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". He also famously remarked that Shakespeare "was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.For several decades, Rymer's view held sway. But during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and, like Dryden, to acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet, and described as the "Bard of Avon" In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo.

During the Romantic period, Shakespeare was admired by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th century, critical appreciation for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on admiration. "This King Shakespeare," wrote the essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1840, "does he not shine in crowned sovereignty, above us all, as the greatest, mild, yet mighty sign; indestructible" Victorians saw his plays as spectacles of great size. made Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw derided the worship of Shakespeare as "bardolatry", claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays rendered Shakespeare obsolete.

The modernist revolution in the arts of the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. German Expressionists and Moscow Futurists produced his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht created an epic theater influenced by Shakespeare. Poet and critic T.S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" actually made him truly modern. Eliot, G. Wilson, along with Knight and the School of New Criticism, led a movement toward a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1980s, Shakespeare studies opened up to movements such as structuralism, feminism, new historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies. Comparing Shakespeare's achievements to those of leading figures in philosophy and theology, Harold Bloom wrote, "Shakespeare was greater than Plato and St. Augustine. He surrounds us as we see with his fundamental understanding.

Speculation

Authorship

Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Several "group theories" have also been proposed.All but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory, with only a small minority of academics who believe that there is reason to question the traditional attribution, but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.

Religion

Shakespeare adhered to the official state religion, but his personal views on religion are a matter of debate. Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula and he was a confirmed member of the Church of England, where he was married, had his children baptized and where he is buried. Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when practicing Catholicism was against the law in England. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, must have come from a devout Catholic family. The strongest evidence may be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his father, John Shakespeare, found in the rafters of his former home in Henley Street in 1757. However, the document is now lost and scholars disagree about its authenticity. In 1591, authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church for "fear of debt," a common Catholic excuse. In 1606, the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter Communion in Stratford. Other authors argue that evidence for Shakespeare's religious beliefs is lacking. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of faith in his plays, but proving the truth can be impossible.

Sexuality

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical, and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love. The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.

Portraiture

No written contemporary description of Shakespeare's physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness, and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings, and relabelling of portraits of other people.