William Shakespeare
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Chapter 8: William Shakespeare |
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William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, in western England. He attended the Stratford
grammer school, married in 1582, and had three children. He left his family and moved to London
sometime between 1585 and 1592. During this period he became a professional actor and began writing
plays and poems. Because the London theaters were closed during the plague years of 1592 to 1594,
he apparently worked at other jobs, about which we know nothing. By 1595, however, he was recognized
as a major writer of comedies and tragedies. He soon became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
the leading theatrical company, and as we have seen, he became a shareholder in the new Globe Theater
in 1599. Because he realized good returns from the business venture and also from his plays, he
became moderately wealthy. He stopped writing for the stage in 1611, having written a total of
thirty -seven plays, of which eleven are tragedies. He spent his retirement years in Stratford.
He died in 1616 and is buried next to the alter of Stratford's Trinity Church, beneath a bust and
an inscribed gravestone.
When the Lord Chamberlain's Men first staged Hamlet in 1600 or 1601 at the Globe,
it was not the first time the story had been dramatized on the London stage. There is evidence
that a play based on the Hamlet story, now lost, had been performed before 1589. Therefore, at
least some of the theatergoers might have known the story.
Even if none of them knew it, however, they would have known the tradition of revenge tragedy.
The Elizabethans had been introduced to the drama of vengeance through the English translations
of Seneca's tragedies during the 1570s and early 1580s. Another important precedent was Thomas Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587), which was the first English play in the revenge tradition and which
featured a hero who commits suicide. The genre features a number of conventions. The major ones were
a ghost who calls for vengeance and a revenger who pretends to be insane at least part of the time.
Above all, the tradition required that the revenger would also die, no matter how good the person or
how just the cause.
Author Links
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"Tempest"
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