Life and Times of William Shakespeare

Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the
most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was
born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son
of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar school, but
his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne
Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and
travelled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success
quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in
England and part owner of the Globe Theatre. His career bridged the reigns of
Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favourite of
both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare's company the greatest possible
compliment by endowing them with the status of king's players. Wealthy and
renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two.
At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the
apogee of Renaissance theatre.
Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the
century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the
greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented
admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; but
the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of
Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact that Shakespeare's plays in reality were written by someone else--
Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the
evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken
seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed
as the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this
body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended
even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
The Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are very different from Shakespeare's plays, but they do
contain dramatic elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with
a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems
around it. The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we don't know
whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows enough about
Shakespeare's life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we
tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as "the speaker"--as though he were a
dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.
There are certainly a number of intriguing continuities throughout the poems.
The first 126 of the sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman,
whom the speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two,
which seem generally unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed
to a mysterious woman, whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously.
The two addressees of the sonnets are usually referred to as the "young man" and the
"dark lady"; in summaries of individual poems, I have also called the young man the
"beloved" and the dark lady the "lover," especially in cases where their identity can
only be surmised. Within the two mini-sequences, there are a number of other
discernible elements of "plot": the speaker urges the young man to have children; he
is forced to endure a separation from him; he competes with a rival poet for the young
man's patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems that the young
man and the dark lady are actually lovers themselves--a state of affairs with which the
speaker is none too happy. But while these continuities give the poems a narrative
flow and a helpful frame of reference, they have been frustratingly hard for scholars
and biographers to pin down. In Shakespeare's life, who were the young man and the
dark lady?
Historical Mysteries
Of all the questions surrounding Shakespeare's life, the sonnets are perhaps the
most intriguing. At the time of their publication in 1609 (after having been written
most likely in the 1590s and shown only to a small circle of literary admirers), they
were dedicated to a "Mr. W.H," who is described as the "on lie begetter" of the
poems. Like those of the young man and the dark lady, the identity of this Mr. W.H.
remains an alluring mystery. Because he is described as "begetting" the sonnets, and
because the young man seems to be the speaker's financial patron, some people have
speculated that the young man is Mr. W.H. If his initials were reversed, he might even
be Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who has often been linked to
Shakespeare in theories of his history. But all of this is simply speculation: ultimately,
the circumstances surrounding the sonnets, their cast of characters and their relations
to Shakespeare himself, are destined to remain a mystery.

The Sonnet Form

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic

pentameter--that is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second
syllable, as in: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" The sonnet form first
became popular during the Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a
sequence of love sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm
hold among Italian poets, the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where,
after its initial Renaissance, "Petrarchan" incarnation faded, the form enjoyed a
number of revivals and periods of renewed interest. In Elizabethan England--the era
during which Shakespeare's sonnets were written--the sonnet was the form of choice
for lyric poets, particularly lyric poets seeking to engage with traditional themes of
love and romance. (In addition to Shakespeare's monumental sequence, the Astrophel
and Stella sequence by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of the most important sonnet
sequences of this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of classical
English verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others, and written again during the
heyday of English Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and particularly John
Keats created wonderful sonnets. Today, the sonnet remains the most influential and
important verse form in the history of English poetry.
Two kinds of sonnets have been most common in English poetry, and they
take their names from the greatest poets to utilize them: the Petrarchan sonnet and the
Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two main parts, called
the octave and the sestet. The octave is eight lines long, and typically follows a rhyme
scheme of ABBAABBA, or ABBACDDC. The sestet occupies the remaining six
lines of the poem, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD, or CDECDE.
The octave and the sestet are usually contrasted in some key way: for example, the
octave may ask a question to which the sestet offers an answer. In the following
Petrarchan sonnet, John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," the
octave describes past events--the speaker's previous, unsatisfying examinations of the
"realms of gold," Homer's poems--while the sestet describes the present--the speaker's
sense of discovery upon finding Chapman's translations:
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse have I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet utilized throughout
Shakespeare's sequence, is divided into four parts. The first three parts are each four
lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is called the
couplet, and is rhymed CC. The Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a
sequence of metaphors or ideas, one in each quatrain, while the couplet offers either a
summary or a new take on the preceding images or ideas. In Shakespeare's Sonnet
147, for instance, the speaker's love is compared to a disease. In the first quatrain, the
speaker characterizes the disease; in the second, he describes the relationship of his
love-disease to its "physician," his reason; in the third, he describes the consequences
of his abandonment of reason; and in the couplet, he explains the source of his mad,
diseased love--his lover's betrayal of his faith:
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desp'rate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
In many ways, Shakespeare's use of the sonnet form is richer and more
complex than this relatively simple division into parts might imply. Not only is his
sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets--the
traditional love poems in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a
man, while the love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet
147--he also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his
sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan
sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still
three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question,
which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. As you read through
Shakespeare's sequence, think about the ways Shakespeare's themes are affected by
and tailored to the sonnet form. Be especially alert to complexities such as the
juxtaposition of Petrarchan and Shakespearean patterns. How might such a
juxtaposition combination deepen and enrich Shakespeare's use of a traditional form?