Life and Writing Style of William Shakespeare
Name: Divya Parmar
paper: 101 Literature of The Elizabethan and Restoration Period
Roll no: 05
Enrollment no : 4069206420210024
Email id: divyaparmar07012@gmail.com
Batch : 2021-2023(M.A sem 1)
submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Life of William Shakespeare :
William Shakespeare is considered by many as the Father of English Literature. It is not just his popularity and influence on modern writers that allows for this title to be attributed to him but because of the massive contributions he made to the development of the English language. There are a multitude of words and phrases that Shakespeare invented that we still use today.
Life of William Shakespeare : The life of William Shakespeare divided in following parts:
Birth and childhood:
William Shakespeare was probably born on about April 23, 1564, the date that is traditionally given for his birth. He was John and Mary Shakespeare's oldest surviving child; their first two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy. Growing up as the big brother of the family, William had three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger sisters: Anne, who died at seven, and Joan.
Their father, John Shakespeare, was a leatherworker who specialised in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar items. A prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden, of the prominent Arden family. John rose through local offices in Stratford, becoming an alderman and eventually, when William was five, the town bailiff—much like a mayor. Not long after that, however, John Shakespeare stepped back from public life; we don't know why.
Shakespeare, as the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost certainly attended Stratford's grammar school. Like all such schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on the Latin classics, including memorization, writing, and acting in classic Latin plays. Shakespeare most likely attended until about age 15.
Marriage and children:
A few years after he left school, in late 1582, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly common situation at the time. When they married, Anne was 26 and William was 18. Anne grew up just outside Stratford in the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of her life in Stratford.
In early 1585, the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet, completing the family. In the years ahead, Anne and the children lived in Stratford while Shakespeare worked in London, although we don't know when he moved there. Some later observers have suggested that this separation, and the couple's relatively few children, were signs of a strained marriage, but we do not know that, either. Someone pursuing a theatre career had no choice but to work in London, and many branches of the Shakespeares had small families.
Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of 11. His older daughter Susanna later married a well-to-do Stratford doctor, John Hall. Their daughter Elizabeth, Shakespeare's first grandchild, was born in 1608. In 1616, just months before his death, Shakespeare's daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, a Stratford vintner. The family subsequently died out, leaving no direct descendants of Shakespeare.
London theatre:
For several years after Judith and Hamnet's arrival in 1585, nothing is known for certain of Shakespeare's activities: how he earned a living, when he moved from Stratford, or how he got his start in the theatre.
Following this gap in the record, the first definite mention of Shakespeare is in 1592 as an established London actor and playwright, mocked by a contemporary as a "Shake-scene." The same writer alludes to one of Shakespeare's earliest history plays, Henry VI, Part 3, which must already have been performed. The next year, in 1593, Shakespeare published a long poem, Venus and Adonis. The first quarto editions of his early plays appeared in 1594. For more than two decades, Shakespeare had multiple roles in the London theatre as an actor, playwright, and, in time, a business partner in a major acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (renamed the King's Men in 1603). Over the years, he became steadily more famous in the London theatre world; his name, which was not even listed on the first quartos of his plays, became a regular feature—clearly a selling point—on later title pages.
Final years:
Shakespeare prospered financially from his partnership in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), as well as from his writing and acting. He invested much of his wealth in real-estate purchases in Stratford and bought the second-largest house in town, New Place, in 1597.
Among the last plays that Shakespeare worked on was The Two Noble Kinsmen, which he wrote with a frequent collaborator, John Fletcher, most likely in 1613. He died on April 23, 1616—the traditional date of his birthday, though his precise birthdate is unknown. We also do not know the cause of his death. His brother-in-law had died a week earlier, which could imply infectious disease, but Shakespeare's health may have had a longer decline.
Writing style:
Shakespeare used the conventional style of his age to write his early plays. The plays were written in the stylized language, though it was not always the demand of the drama/play or character. The verses of his play have extended and elaborated conceits and metaphors.
The language he used is, most of the time, rhetorical as it was written to be acted by an actor rather than to speak. However, in the play Titus Andronicus, the critics say that the grand speeches delay the action. Similarly, in the play Two Gentlemen of Verona, the verses have been described as artificial.
Depth of Character:
Shakespeare wrote about people who seemed real instead of using stock characters as was common in the theatre during his days and in the generations that came before it. This literary device allowed him to make characters like MacBeth or Hamlet sympathetic even though they did some terrible things throughout the course of the play. It is because the Bard made them seem real and human, but flawed that he was able to do this. This influence can be seen in works from the 20th and 21st centuries in both movies and plays by writers like Sam Shepard or Arthur Miller.
Additionally, Shakespeare’s work deviated from that of his contemporaries in that he wrote for every type of person who came to the theatre or read poems, not just for the upper class as was common. His plays like “Henry the 4th, part 1” featured not only a king and prince, but also one of the Bard’s most famous comedic characters, Falstaff, which brought a comedic and common touch to the play and appealed to the members of the lower class who attended the plays—often sitting in the same theatre as the nobles of the day and during the same performance.
Romeo and Juliet shows Shakespeare’s witty writing style and his creative mastery. At this point in his life (around 1595), he favoured a more theatrical structure, such as changing between comedy and tragedy to increase suspense. He expanded minor characters and developed sub-plots to amplify the story. Shakespeare also associated various poetic styles to different characters, occasionally evolving the style as the character developed.
The Soliloquy
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
These famous lines from Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” are the opening lines to his most famous—although not the only—soliloquy. The soliloquy or monologue was a common device that the famous playwright used to tell his stories. This monologue served to reveal the character’s thoughts—as in the “Hamlet” example—as well as to create the play’s setting or advance the plot. It serves to bring the audience into the story and let it in on secrets that the rest of the characters in the play may not know.
The narrator character in the play “Our
Town” by Thornton Wilder uses monologues extensively to let the audience in on the secrets of the town and to set the stage since typically this play features a mostly empty stage with the actors creating the settings with their words. This shows Shakespeare’s strong influence as his plays relied on the same devices and often through the soliloquy of a single character, although not always.
After completing Hamlet, Shakespeare adopted a more centred, swift, distinct, and non-repetitive writing style. He began to use more run-on lines, uneven pauses and stops, and excessive alterations in sentence length and structure. Macbeth, his darkest and most dynamic plays, shows this refined writing style in which Shakespeare used wording that sprinted from one unconnected analogy or metaphor to a different one, forcing the reader to complete the “sense” and subliminal meaning.
Iambic Pentameter:
Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. The results were plays and sonnets that had ten syllables per line and with his plays, these lines were unrhymed. The simplest way to describe the rhythm of iambic pentameter is to liken it to a heartbeat, which means a series of stressed words, then unstressed words. In the case of the heartbeat, it would sound like bump BUMP, bump BUMP. Using an example from Shakespeare’s sonnets, this would be:
When I do count the clock that
tells the time
This style of writing lent itself to the theatricality of a play, which was as much about using the language beautifully as it was about telling a good story or furthering the plot.
A Midsummer night's dream Latin edition
While writing such classics as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II in the late 16th century, Shakespeare gradually developed and changed his writing style from the traditional form to a more self-expressive style. He progressively used his metaphors and tropes to the desires of the melodrama itself.
conclusion :
Shakespeare was a great figure of the Elizabethan age and he was a great Dramatist, playwright, poet and actor also. Elizabethan age known as the golden age for literary development and artists development. Shakespeare also known as the 'Dramatist of the all time' means still in modern time dramas of Shakespeare are famous.
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." by William Shakespeare.
Word count: 1720
Resources :
https://www.folger.edu/shakespeares-life
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/writingstyle.html
History of English Literature by W. J. Long
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10609/pg10609-images.html
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