WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE SWEET SWAN OF AVON

(1564 – 1616)

1.1. Биография Шекспира. Периодизация творчества.

A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare’s life is lacking, and thus much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. It is commonly accepted that he was born in 1564, and it is known that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father’s shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of declines in his father’s financial situation. According to another account, he became a schoolmaster. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had a daughter in 1583 and twins—a boy and a girl—in 1585. The boy did not survive.

Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The publication of Shakespeare’s two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and of his Sonnets established his reputation as a gifted and popular poet of the Renaissance.

Shakespeare’s modern reputation, however, is based primarily on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although generally popular in his time, these plays were frequently little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.

Shakespeare’s professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlain’s Men, later called the King’s Men, and its two theaters, the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatist. It is known that he risked losing royal favor only once, in 1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II” at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. In the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeare’s company was absolved of complicity in the conspiracy.

After about 1608, Shakespeare’s dramatic production lessened and it seems that he spent more time in Stratford, where he had established his family in an imposing house called New Place and had become a leading local citizen. He died in 1616, and was buried in the Stratford church.

Although the precise date of many of Shakespeare’s plays is in doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four periods:

(1) the period up to 1594,

(2) the years from 1594 to 1600,

(3) the years from 1600 to 1608, and

(4) the period after 1608.

Because of the difficulty of dating Shakespeare’s plays and the lack of conclusive facts about his writings, these dates are approximate and can be used only as a convenient framework in which to discuss his development. In all periods, the plots of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories, or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary dramatists.

1.2. Исторические хроники. Реконструкция средневековой истории Англии в пьесах Шекспира.

Shakespeare’s first period was one of experimentation. His early plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a degree by formal and rather obvious construction and by stylized verse. Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time, and four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th century are possibly Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic works. These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1590-1592) and Richard III (1592-1593), deal with evil resulting from weak leadership and from national disunity fostered for selfish ends.

Richard III continues the story of England’s dynastic civil Wars of the Roses. The protagonist, Richard of Gloucester, is a Machiavellian villain: a hero who wins the crown by treachery and murder. Yet unlike playwright Christopher Marlowe's supermen, Richard is refined and developed into a more subtle character. Characteristically Shakespearean features are the presence of a nemesis that pursues and destroys Richard, and the subtle implication that Henry Tudor's victory over Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which initiated the Tudor dynasty, laid the foundation of the greatness and unity of England.

The four-play cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially in the bloodiness of many of their scenes and in their highly colored, bombastic language.

1.3. Игра судьбы и случая как основа коллизий в комедиях Шекспира. Разрешение трагического конфликта в пьесе «Ромео и Джульетта». Победа гармонии над хаосом в ранних произведениях Шекспира.

Shakespeare’s second period includes his most important plays concerned with English history, his so-called joyous comedies, and two of his major tragedies. In this period, his style and approach became highly individualized.

Outstanding among the comedies of the second period is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), which interweaves several plots involving two pairs of noble lovers, a group of bumbling and unconsciously comic townspeople, and members of the fairy realm, notably Puck, King Oberon, and Queen Titania.

Two major tragedies, differing considerably in nature, mark the beginning and the end of the second period. Romeo and Juliet (1595) is famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love. It dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by the feuds of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments.

1.4. Тематика и проблематика трагедий «Гамлет», «Отелло», «Король Лир», «Макбет».

Shakespeare’s third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark or bitter comedies. The tragedies of this period are considered the most profound of his works. In them he used his poetic idiom as an extremely supple dramatic instrument, capable of recording human thought and the many dimensions of given dramatic situations.

Hamlet (1601), perhaps his most famous play, exceeds by far most other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. It is atragedy of revenge and probably written in 1601. Hamlet is generally considered the foremost tragedy in English drama. Numerous commentaries have been written analyzing every aspect of the play, and interpretation of Hamlet’s character and motivation continue to be subjects of considerable interest.

The story of Hamlet originated in Norse legend. The earliest written version is Books III and IV of Historia Danica (History of the Danes), written in Latin around 1200 by Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. Shakespeare's source for Hamlet was either an adaptation of Saxo's tale, which appeared in Histoires Tragiques (1576) by Franзois Belleforest, or a play, now lost, which was probably written by English dramatist Thomas Kyd. The lost play is referred to by scholars as Ur-Hamlet, meaning “original Hamlet.”

Othello (1604) portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello’s evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him.

King Lea r (1605), conceived on a more epic scale, deals with the consequences of the irresponsibility and misjudgment of Lear, a ruler of early Britain, and of his councillor, the Duke of Gloucester. In the original English legend that King Lear is based upon, Lear, king of Britain, decides in his old age to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. He asks how much they each love him. The two elder daughters overwhelm him with expressions of their love, but the youngest daughter simply says that she loves him as a child should. Enraged at his youngest daughter's reply, Lear drives her into exile and divides the kingdom between the other two. After receiving their share of the kingdom, the ungrateful daughters treat King Lear so cruelly that he flees to the youngest, who in the meantime has married the king of France. This daughter returns to Britain with an army, defeats the wicked sisters, and places Lear again on the throne.

Shakespeare converted the legend of Lear into a great and terrible tragedy. The play’s intensity is heightened by Shakespeare’s portrayals of the madness of Lear, brought on by the cruelty of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan; the murder of his youngest daughter, Cordelia; and the death of Lear with Cordelia's body in his arms. These aspects of the story are original to Shakespeare’s play, as is the character of the Fool, whose bitter jests bring home to Lear the folly of his action. Both Lear's madness and the Fool's wit raise the explicit theme of the play—inhumanity in the form of filial ingratitude—to a higher level of philosophical meaning and resolution.

In Macbeth ( 1606), Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a man who, led on by others and because of a defect in his own nature, succumbs to ambition. In securing the Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where he becomes capable of any amoral act.

1.5. Столкновение сил добра и зла в трагикомедиях и его разрешение; близость поздних пьес Шекспира к моралите («Буря»). Место Шекспира в мировой драматургии и судьба его наследия в культуре Нового времени

The fourth period of Shakespeare’s work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies. Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare created several plays that, through the intervention of magic, art, compassion, or grace, often suggest redemptive hope for the human condition. These plays are written with a grave quality differing considerably from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, but they end happily with reunions or final reconciliation. The tragicomedies depend for part of their appeal upon the lure of a distant time or place, and all seem more obviously symbolic than most of Shakespeare’s earlier works. To many critics, the tragicomedies signify a final ripeness in Shakespeare’s own outlook, but other authorities believe that the change reflects only a change in fashion in the drama of the period.

Perhaps the most successful product of this particular vein of creativity, however, is what may be Shakespeare’s last complete play, The Tempest (1611), in which the resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of wisdom and power. The story of The Tempest —a storm, a shipwreck, and the adventures of the shipwrecked party on an enchanted island—was suggested to Shakespeare by reports received in London late in 1610 of the wreck of an English ship off the Bermuda Islands. The survival of the crew during a winter's sojourn in the islands provided a timely topic for a play, but little plot. Somewhere, however, in old stories and in Italian comedies Shakespeare picked up accounts of a banished prince who was also a wise magician. This prince had a fair daughter whom he contrived to marry to the son of a hostile king in order to end an old feud. Shakespeare set these characters and their story in an enchanted island after a shipwreck and the result was The Tempest.

The plot of The Tempest is alone among Shakespeare's plays in observing the unity of time. The play contains something for all tastes: exciting action; lovely songs; a stately masque with music and dancing; the farcical comedy of the monster Caliban, the drunken butler Stephano, and the clown Trinculo; the love story between Ferdinand and Miranda; and, controlling and directing all, the figure of the wise and benevolent magician Prospero. Such theatrical spectacles must have taxed the resources of the Blackfriars stage, the London theater where The Tempest was performed. Yet The Tempest is also a multi-layered, lyrical play, containing beautiful verse, wisdom of thought, and themes of repentance and reconciliation. Above all, there is the sense of finality. The famous lines given to Prospero, beginning with the words, “Our revels now are ended," are interpreted by many to announce Shakespeare's retirement from the theater.