An Approach to W. Shakespeare’s Plays-Fourteen- King John
By Students’ Academy
Copyright@2012 Students’ Academy
Smashwords Edition
First Edition
Chapter 1: Preface
It is not surprising to see that the academic institutions all over the world are gradually forgetting the past geniuses on whose foundations the pillars of English Literature had been raised. Modern education and the educationalists seem to be finding an escape, running away from hard work, into modern literature which is but a drop in the ocean if compared to the works of the past masters.
It is true that the modern education provides short term courses to students and enables them to win the jobs which help them in better living conditions but they forget that modern education, without solid foundation, is so uncertain and collapsible that any new trend can make the so called short terms scholars useless when it comes to real genius. They are excessively dependent on the internet and hardly ever read the original texts of the past writers. The trend is very dangerous and it could lead to a very precarious situation in recent future. Jacks are being produced on large scale but only one or two scattered masters appear. It is advisable to the students that they can take help from the guide books but they must read the original texts written by Shakespeare and other past writers. English literature without Shakespeare is like the sweet dish which has the name but not the sugar. Who could have thought that the vast and enchanting English literature and the English speaking world would be indebted to a person who had no academic higher education? Yes, William Shakespeare is the person who gave a new direction to the literary world and the academic pursuits all over the world.
Chapter 2: About William Shakespeare
Vast and enchanting English Literature is immensely indebted to a person who did not have any higher academic qualification. Most of the colleges and universities all over the world have his poems and playas in their course of study. It is quite surprising that his diction was so much his own that if a man from this era tries to read his works using the modern meanings, he will definitely be quite confounded. Such was the power of the person that to understand his works properly one must have the dictionary which defines his vocabulary. That person, the most widely read and admired, is William Shakespeare, also called Bard.
He was born on 26 April, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.
Having left Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare moved onto London and he started his career as an actor. In the following seven years, from 1585 to 1592, Shakespeare began a successful career as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men.
It is generally assumed that Shakespeare retired to Stratford around 1613, where he breathed his last three years later. In the absence of enough records of Shakespeare, most of the things about Bard are assumed. There has been a considerable amount of guesswork about his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs. Some critics and historians doubt whether the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by him; they say that some other people wrote the plays and poems which were launched under his name.
Most of Shakespeare’s famous writings were produced between 1589 and 1613. Most of his initial plays were either comedies or histories. He raised these genres to extreme sophistication and aesthetic heights by the conclusion of the sixteenth century. After that he is assumed to have begun writing tragedies in the year 1608. His famous tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, etc. are believed to be some of the best works in the English language. Towards his twilight years, he began to write tragicomedies which were also known as romances. While writing tragicomedies, Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights.
Different versions of his plays were published in different editions during his lifetime. In the year 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognized as Shakespeare's.
Though he was a famous and respected poet and drama writer in his time, he did not get the real fame until the nineteenth century. People began to realize his genius which had been under the cloud of suspicion for more than three centuries. In the nineteenth century, the Romantics acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". With the advent of the twentieth century, more and more academic bodies, and scholars began to explore and analyze Shakespeare’s works. In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, was a very successful glover and alderman; he was originally from Snitterfield. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a very rich landlord. Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564. His actual birth date is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day. This date, which can be traced back to an eighteenth-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
There are no school records to show that Shakespeare was in a particular school but most of the biographers and scholars agree that he may have been educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter of a mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.
After Shakespeare’s wife gave birth to the twins, no solid historical records of his following years are available. Shakespeare is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The years from 1585 to 1592 are referred to a “Lost years” of Shakespeare’s life by the biographers. Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching.
There is one more story that tells us that Shakespeare started his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. If we believe the reports provided by John Aubrey it is said that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some twentieth-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death and the name Shakeshafte was common in the Lancashire area.
There is no evidence that proves when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene:
...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Greene openly criticized Shakespeare and accused that Shakespeare was trying to reach above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers, such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself. The italicized phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene’s target.
This open attack by Green is the first recorded mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Some other biographers say that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene’s remarks. From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
The theatre called The Globe was built by a partnership of company members on the south bank of the Thames in 1599. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.
There is evidence that some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598. Shakespeare had become a name and people began to buy his works. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus, His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. 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 we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of the information.
During his theatre career William Shakespeare shuttled between London and his hometown. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
In the first decade of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays and no plays are attributed to him after the year 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.
Before his death, Shakespeare is said to have made his will. It is said that he left a very large part of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The condition in the will said that she should pass it down intact to "the first son of her body”. The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.
His dead body was kept for the people’s audience for two days and then it was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:
Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.
Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Chapter 3: Shakespeare’s Plays
It was quite common at that time for the playwrights to collaborate with other playwrights and there is no disagreement that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights too. He took help of other drama writers in his early and late career.
There is some controversy about his plays “Titus Andronicus” and the early history plays. His other plays “The Two Noble Kinsmen” and “The Lost Cardenio” have well-attested contemporary documentation. There is written evidence that many of his plays were revised and rewritten by some other writers when they had already been originally composed.
There is evidence that Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI were the first recorded works of William Shakespeare. They were believed to have been written in the early 1590s when historical drama was in vogue and audiences flocked to the theatres.
It is quite difficult to give exact date to Shakespeare’s plays but the studies of the texts 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 earliest period.
It is believed that his first histories were highly dependent and inspired by Raphael Holinshed’s “Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.” They dramatically present the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for the The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.
His early classical and Italianate Comedies contained tight double plots and very precise comic sequences. These plays give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado about Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".
Shakespeare began to write ‘Problem Plays’ in the early 1600s. Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies are said to have been written during that period.
Most of the critics are on agreement that Shakespeare was at his best in his tragedies. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question”. Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgment. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.
During the twilight of his writing career, Shakespeare began to write romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.