William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

By Theodore A. Kachel

Essay

Who was Shakespeare? Did the actor from Stratford-on-the-Avon write all the plays ascribed to him by most scholars today some four hundred years later? Is this William Shakespeare, named on the title page to the First Folio of 1623 some seven years after his death in Stratford in 1616, the author of the thirty-six plays therein attributed to him by his friends, fellow players, and theater partners, John Heminge and Henrie Condell? Is he the one, of whom Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright, poet and rival, wrote in its preface, “He was not of an age, but for all time,”? (First Folio 1623, facsimile ed. 1995).

And if we grant that indeed the Man from Stratford was the poet and the playwright now famous for these plays, still we may ask ‘Who was he?’ Only the barest documentary records exist to sketch his life and his work across the fifty-three years of his journey from birth, April 23, 1564 to his death April 23, 1616? (Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.1977). There is no diary or journal, or even many letters for use to construct his life and relationships. His birth date is a conjecture from a baptismal record on April 26 for John Shakespeare’s son so that only his day of deathis documented directly.

The answers to these questions lie in the works: the thirty-something plays, the two epic poems, and the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. Once we are exposed to their evocation of our ‘selves-in-our-world,’ we are lost to his imaginative seductions, and left to laugh, cry, stare, gasp, and applaud. If as Jacques in As You Like It (II,7) cynically would have it that “All the World’s a Stage and the men and women merely players,” then it is even more the case that ‘All Shakespeare’s Stage’s a World’ in these plays, for he found the ways and the words to crowd us all upon this platform.

How? All it took then to write these works was his boundless natural gifts of language and an unparalleled dramatic imagination. These he learned in the hurley-burley of the birth of professional theatre, in the liveliest city of his day, London, caught up amidst a nation struggling over its political and religious soul. There an unlikely ruler, Elizabeth I, a woman for God’s sake, dominated both struggles in public and private. Certainly ‘those times’ produced enough action, intrigue, violence, and courtly splendors to fill his mind with the stock of images and of persons that would dance from his pen onto the bursting stage of the Theater, the Globe, the Rose, the Curtain, in their youthful prime time.

This mystery Shakespeare shares with us—the mystery of ourselves, as men and women, lovers and fools, heroes and villains, kings and killers. It is not a ‘who-done-it,’ but rather a ‘oh, my, I-never-thought, felt, or saw-that-before’ eye-opener. This was a gift from a ‘man of the theatre’ before all else, and to ask for more about or of him than this, is to seek a curse when we are given a blessing.

Resources for Youth

Williams, Marcia. Tales from Shakespeare. Candlewick Press, 2004.

Ted Kachel

After forty years of university teaching, Professor Kachel, retired as Head of the Theatre Program at Tulsa Community College in 1999 and continues part-time there using his Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia, a B.A. from Baylor, a M.A. from Iowa in drama, and a M. Div. from Union Seminary (NYC). Since 1992 he has performed as William Jennings Bryan, Sir Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare, Joseph Mallord, William Turner, H.G. Wells and the Civil War Generals R. G. Lee and W. T. Sherman. Recently he presented General Lee at the Robert Dole Institute at the University of Kansas with a General U.S. Grant. With Watts Wacker, a futurist, he performed Barnum, Edison, Olmsted, and Frank Lloyd Wright for Genworth Insurance, Hasbro Toys, and R.J. Reynolds American.

Bullet Points

•   “All the World’s a Stage and the men and women merely players,” declares Jacques, the cynical fool in As You Like It. Shakespeare confounded this fool in all his drama showing us the opposite that All the Stage’s a World where men and women merrily or miserably reveal their true selves.” As Alexander Dumas fils put it—“After God Shakespeare created most.”
•   Prospero in The Tempest blurts out, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep,” stating Shakespeare’s continuing fascination with dreams as the source of inspiration for “poets, lunatics, and lovers” that the Duke declares in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This mystery of sleep and dreaming appears also in his tragic plays when it is denied to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth or in Hamlet’s eloquent soliloquy, “To Be or Not to Be.”   Dreams reveal the depths from which great art and thought pour forth.
•   Why and how is Shakespeare still such a power of inspiration today? John Guare, the American playwright, says it well, “They [the sonnets] are bottomless. They are these great emotional Rorschach tests. They tell us where we are now. And they and the plays keep changing, transmogrifying. The paint is always wet on them.” For this reason John Barton used the sonnets as acting exercises with the Royal Shakespeare Company actors. To speak the speech of Shakespeare is to embody the human soul in sound.

Quotes

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.” (As You Like It.)

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: . . . Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth)

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air: . . .We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest)

Then there are also Shakespearean Insults such as:

“Thou lump of foul deformity!” (Richard III)

“I do desire we may be better strangers.” (As You Like It)

And its opposite—found in declarations of love such as:

“Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;” (Sonnet 116)

“What is love? Tis not hereafter,

Present mirth hath present laughter.

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.” (Twelfth Night)

Timeline

1564, April 26
Baptized, born April 23(?)   Stratford-upon-the-Avon

1582
Married at 19 to Anne Hathaway at 26, a farmer’s daughter

1583
First child born, Susanna, seven months later

1585
Twins born, Judith and Hamnet (d. 1596)

1586-1591
No records from his life

1589-91
First plays in London theatre, Henry VI, parts I, II, & III

1592
First mention as playwright in London
Two Gentlemen form Verona
Venus and Adonis (epic poem)

1593
Richard III, Edward III, The Comedy of Errors
The Rape of Lucrece   (epic poem)
The Sonnets (1593-1603)

1594
Joins the Lord Chamberlain’s Men
Titus Andronicus, Taming of the Shrew

1595
Richard II, Love’s Labor’s Lost

1596
Buys New Place, Stratford
King John, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

1597
The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part I

1598
Henry IV, Part II, Merry Wives of Windsor

1599
The Globe Playhouse opens.
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it, Julius Caesar, Henry V

1600
Hamlet, Twelfth Night

1602-04
Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello,
All’s Well That Ends Well

1605-06
Timon of Athens, King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony & Cleopatra

1607-09
Pericles, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale

1610-11
Cymbeline, The Tempest

1612
Living in Stratford

1613
Henry VIII, (The Globe burns down during performance.)

1614
The Two Noble Kinsmen (written with John Fletcher)

1616, April 23
Dies in Stratford, shortly after Judith’s wedding

High Plains Chautauqua