Interesting Facts on Shakespeare and his Plays UGC NET ENGLISH PAPER II, UNIT 1. MODULE 12

1. Shakespeare was born on the same date on which he died after 52 years. (DOB as generally celebrated on:23rd April 1564, DOD: 23rd April 1616). He was baptised in the same Holy Trinity Church where he was buried at the end. 
2. He married Anne Hathaway who was senior to him by eight years. (Shakespeare's marriage took place at his eighteenth age in 1582)
3. What happened in Shakespeare's life till the age of 28? It is a mystery: His writings suggest,  he should have studied in a local grammar school but the records to prove this are lost. Secondly, based on John Aubrey's words -"he had been in his younger years a school master in the country " scholars take him a school master but the biographer John Aubrey who was born 10 years after Shakespeare's death is not a contemporary of Shakespeare. Thirdly it is believed that at the age of 23, Shakespeare became an actor by filling a vacancy in Queen's Men since one of the actors in the troupe was killed just before they reached his village but there is no authentic printed record is available to prove this.  
4. Shakespeare must have an affair with Anne Hathaway even before marriage because his marriage is permitted through a bond in November, 1582 but his eldest daughter Susanna is babtised in May,  1583(within 7 months?!).  In February 1585, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith of whom the former died at the age of 13.
5. The first authentic printed record (a pamphlet) about Shakespeare is "Greene's Groat's Worth of Wit" published in 1592 in which Greene, one of the University wits who could not endure the sudden popularity of Shakespeare calls him "an upstart crow"
6.  Shakespeare's popularity can be explored in connection with the theatres where he performed his plays. Actually in 1572, The Mayor and Corporation of London banned performance of plays due to plague and he formally expelled all playwrights from London in 1575. So outside London,  in 1576 the Theatre was constructed and Lord Chamberlaine's Men, for whom Shakespeare was an actor and playwright, performed their plays in the Theatre till the disputes of the landlords of the theatre peaked in 1597. In 1598 at night,  the Theatre was dismantled and its timbers were used for construction of a new theatre The Globe that was built by Lord Chamberlaine's Men, Shakespeare's playing company in 1599. Shakespeare actively  worked for Lord Chamberlain's Men who later became the popular London company but the Globe got destroyed by fire in 1614 just two years before Shakespeare's death. Meanwhile Lord Chamberlaine's Men got promoted as King's Men soon after James I became the King of England in 1603. King's Men took over the Blackfriars Theater in 1608 and it became their Winter Playhouse till all theatres were closed in1642. 
7. The Oxford Companion to English Literature says,  Shakespeare started to write for the stage  in late 1580s (at the age of 16?!). Shakespeare wrote 37 plays in total and many of his plays remained unpublished till the First Folio( entitled "Mr Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, Published According to True Original Copies") appeared in 1623 that listed for the first time 36 plays of Shakespeare dividing them into three categories as mentioned in the title. The Folio without which we would not have known the great genius, was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John  Heminges and Henry Condell, and was published by Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard, and was dedicated to William Herbert,  3rd Earl of Pembroke and his brother  Philip Herbert. However Troilus and Cressida, which is one of the 36 plays in the Folio was not mentioned in the content page due to conflicts over rights of the play and was later inserted. The other two plays which are now accepted as Shakespeare's but omitted in the Folio are "Pericles, the Prince of Tyre" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen".
8. How did Shakespeare write his plays? The rough working scripts or notes by Shakespeare were called Foul Papers which were later arranged and developed into Fair copies known as manuscripts either by Shakespeare himself or by a scribe. These manuscripts, when heavily annotated with detailed stage directions and data for stage performance, became the Prompt Book  or Transcript to be handled by Prompter known as stage manager.  Prompter is so called because his duty is to prompt the actors when they forget the lines or forget to move to a supposed place on the stage. 
9. Three plays of Shakespeare are known as problem plays: All's Well That Ends Well,  Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida. The critic F.S. Boas who coined the phrase 'problem play '  is the first one to use it to refer to the aforementioned plays though the plays of Henric Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw are now generally called as problem plays.  Problem plays generally deal with contemporary social problem and here in Shakespeare's plays they are concerned with the conflict between established social order and the nature of human tendency. 
10. What happened to Shakespeare's play "Love's Labour's Won"? The contemporary writer of Shakespeare Francis Meres critically talks about this play of Shakespeare in his Commonplace Book published in 1598 and a bookseller's list of that period also mentions this play.  But it is lost.  Similarly another play of Shakespeare written in collaboration with John Fletcher "Cordenio" is found in the Stationers' Register entry of 1653 but it also doesn't survive. Not only these plays but also his death is surrounded by mystery: in 1610, Shakespeare almost retired to his native place Stratford where he had already purchased the largest house known as New Place for €60, with occasional visits to London till 1614 but completely staying at home place during last two years.  One major reason is that theatres were frequently closed (in total 60 months) in between 1603 and 1610 due to bubonic plague and several playwrights including Shakespeare had no work at all. Why should he die at the age of 52, in 1616? Is it his drunkenness as told by the vicar of Holy Tritinity Church in 1661 in his diary : "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted"? Or Did he die being ashamed of the disgrace that fell on his family when his son-in-law Thomas Quiney (married to Judith) was sentenced to public penance in the church for having illegitimate son born to Margaret Wheel? Or Was he forced by his elder daughter  Susana to write a will one month before his death according to which major portion of his estate goes to her and Shakespeare's wife Anne's name is completely left out? During his Age,  it was a general tradition that people used to write their will in deathbed one month before their death but Shakespeare begins his will by saying that he is in "perfect health". Even the inscription on his epitaph sounds strange and mysterious: 

 "Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones."

Complete List of Shakespeare's 37 Plays: (in chronological order) 

1. Two Gentlemen of Verona
2. The Taming of the Shrew 
3. Henry VI Part 1
4. Henry VI Part 3
5. Titus Andronicus
6. Henry VI Part 2
7. Richard III
8. The Comedy of Errors 
9. Love's Labour's Lost 
10. A Midsummer Night's Dream
11. Romeo and Juliet 
12. Richard II
13. King John
14. The Merchant of Venice 
15. Henry IV Part 1
16. The Merry Wives of Windsor 
17. Henry IV Part 2
18. Much Ado About Nothing 
19. Henry V
20. Julius Caesar 
21. As You Like It
22. Hamlet 
23. Twelfth Night 
24. Troilus and Cressida
25. Measure for Measure 
26. Othello
27. All's Well That Ends Well 
28. Timon of Athens 
29. King Lear 
30. Macbeth 
31. Antony and Cleopatra 
32. Pericles,  Prince of Tyre
33. Coriolanus
34. Winter's Tale 
35. Cymbeline 
36. The Tempest 
37. Henry VIII

Critics on Shakespeare :

1. "He was not of an age but for all time." (Ben Jonson in his preface to First Folio)
2. "Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
   What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
   Thou in our wonder and astonishment
   Hast built thy self a live-long Monument."  (Milton in his poem "On Shakespeare" in 1632)
3. "To begin then with Shakespeare; he was the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the Images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look'd inwards, and found her there." (Dryden in his "Essay on Dramatic Poesy", 1668)
4. "That noble extravagance of fancy, which he had in so great perfection, thoroughly qualified him to touch... his reader's imagination, and made him capable of succeeding, where he had nothing to support him besides the strength of his own genius." (Joseph Addison in Spectator no.419)
5. "...every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be Twins will upon comparison be found remarkably distinct...I will conclude by saying of Shakespeare, that with all his faults, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient majestick piece of Gothick architecture, compared with a neat modern building: the latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn . . Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur." (Alexander Pope in his Preface to Pope's Edition of Shakespeare's Works,  1725)
6. "Perhaps it would not be easy to find any author, except Homer, who invented so much as Shakespeare, who so much advanced the studies which he cultivated, or effused so much novelty upon his age or country. The form, the characters, the language, and the shows of the English drama are his." (Samuel Johnson in his "The Plays of William Shakespeare", 1765)
7. "Shakespeare stands out singularly, linking the old and new in a lush. Wish and duty trying to put itself in balance in his plays; both are faced with violence, but always so that the wish is at a disadvantage." and "There is no pleasure greater and purer than, with eyes closed, accompany a Shakespeare's play, not declaimed, but recited by a safe and natural voice"(J.W.Goethe in "Writings on Literature")
8. "One day, when there is no more British Empire or North-American Republic, there will be Shakespeare; when we stop speaking English, we will speak Shakespeare." (by the Brazilian novelist, poet and playwright Machado de Assis)
9. "O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!" (Thomas De Quincey in his "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" 1823)
10. "Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying-signs; indestructible; really more valuable in that point of view than any other means or appliance whatsoever?" ( Thomas Carlyle in his "the Heroes, the Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History", 1841)
11. 'I will translate Shakespeare.' Shekespeare: the ocean." (Victor Hugo, 1859)
12. "...the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits,—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding,—is a great evil, as is every untruth." (LeoTolstoy on Shakespeare, 1906)
13. "When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder/"that such trivial people should muse and thunder /in such lovely language. /How boring, how small Shakespeare's people are!/Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar." (D.H.Lawrence in his poem "When I read Shakespeare", 1928)
14. "There is a continual process of simplification in Shakespeare's plays. What is he up to? He is holding the mirror up to nature... I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There's something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one's life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously." (W.H.Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare, 1947)
15. Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third." (T.S. Eliot, in his critical essay "Dante" published in 1932)