William Shakespeare, the Talented British
By Okky Budhiarto (61413020)
William Shakespeare was born on 26 April 1564. He is an English poet,
playwright and actor. He was also 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”. His works consist of
about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long
narrative poems, and a few other verses, the authorship of some of which is
uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major and are performed more
often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was
born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married to Anne Hathaway. They had three children: Susanna,
and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful
career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company
called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to
have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years
later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been
considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance,
sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were
written by others.
Shakespeare
produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were comedies
and histories and these works remain regarded as some the best work produced
even today. Then he wrote tragedies until 1608, including Hamlet, King
Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest
works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known
as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays
were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime.
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow
actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his
dramatic works that included all but two of the plays recognized as
Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare
is hailed, presciently, as “not of an age, but for all time.”
Shakespeare was a
respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise until
the 19th century. The Romantics acclaimed Shakespeare's genius and the Victorians
worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called “bardolatry”.
In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and
rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays are popular
today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse
cultural and political contexts.
Early
life
William
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful
glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an
affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptized
there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but is
traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. This date, which can be
traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to
biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616. He was the third child of
eight and the eldest surviving son.
Although no
attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that
Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553,
about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools
varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were
largely similar, the basic Latin text was
standardized by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive
education in grammar based upon Latin classical
authors.
At the age of 18,
Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court
of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage license on 27 November 1582. The
ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor
allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three
times, and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna
who was baptized on 26 May 1583. The twins, their son, Hamnet and their
daughter Judith were baptized on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes
at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.
After the birth
of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as
part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of
his name in the 'complaints bill' of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at
Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589. Scholars refer to
the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
Biographers who tried 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 in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also
supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about
him. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career
minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that
Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-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.
London
and theatrical career
"All
the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts..."
It is not known
exactly 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 known in London to be attacked by the playwright Robert Greene in
his Groats-Worth of Wit:
...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's attack
is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's career in the theatre.
Biographers suggest 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
by only the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company which is owned by a group of
players, including Shakespeare, that 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.
In 1599, a
partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the
River Thames, which they called the Globe. 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.
Some of
Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had
become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.
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 near with its end. The First Folio
of 1623 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.
Shakespeare
divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. 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 that 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 whose name is Christopher Mountjoy, a maker
of ladies' wigs and other headgear.
Later
years and death
Rowe was the first biographer to record the
tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford 'some years before his death'. He
was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers'
petition in 1635 Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the
Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men 'placed men
players' there, 'which were Heminges, Condell,
Shakespeare, etc.'. In a document dated 7 June 1609 in a lawsuit he brought in
Stratford against John Addenbrooke, Shakespeare is described as 'generous nuper
in curia domini Jacobi'. However it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague
raged in London throughout 1609. The London public playhouses were repeatedly
closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months
closure between May 1603 and February 1610), which meant there was often no
acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time. Shakespeare
continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614. In 1612, he was called as
a witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, 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.
After 1610,
Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 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 to a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married
to Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare
signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616. It was the following day
his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate
son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by
the church court to do public penance which would have caused much shame and
embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.
In his will,
Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The
terms instructed that she 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. 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.
Shakespeare was
buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his
death. 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.
Thanks for reading my article =) please fill our questionnaire too : https://docs.google.com/forms/
♥THANK YOU VERY MUCH♥
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar