SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. – Poet, born in Stratford-on-Avon (England) in 1564 (baptized on 26 April), died there on 23 April 1616.
His father, Giovanni, a small country landowner, had engaged in industry and trade, earning the sympathy of the townsfolk, who elected him town bailiff. His mother, Mary Arden, came from an old, wealthy family. A crisis, perhaps not merely economic, overtook the family when Giovanni’s Catholicism coincided with the onset of Elizabeth I’s anti-Catholic absolutism in England. For this reason, the young Shakespeare’s education was irregular, more the work of an autodidact, though he possessed a genius for assimilating the knowledge needed for his poetic discourse. He certainly attended the Grammar School in Stratford and may have completed his education in the household of a feudal lord as a page and singing boy—one of those choristers who also served as actors in theatrical performances.
At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway and left his native town when the burden of family life grew heavier, seeking his fortune in London around 1585 or early 1586. He found it: with affable manners and a gentle disposition, he possessed practical talents; as an actor (he even played the Ghost in his own *Hamlet*), and especially as a co-owner of theatrical companies, he supplemented the meager earnings of playwrights. He worked at the Theatre, the first playhouse in London, and later at the Rose, the Globe, and Blackfriars. He belonged to the company first under the protection of the Earl of Leicester (actors were outlaws in that rigidly regulated British society, and only a noble’s livery could shield them from persecution) and later under that of King James I himself. Among his influential patrons was the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his *Sonnets*.
By 1592, he had already achieved success. Unlike the university wits, who descended to poetry from the dignity of academic culture, Shakespeare rose through the practical craft of the theater. He collaborated with other writers, worked on rough drafts, refining them to a peak of animation, individualization, and style. Hence the suspicions and bitter invective of Robert Greene, who accused him of presumption: *“A crow come up from nowhere, beplumed with our feathers, wrapped in the skin of an actor, dares swell an iambic line as grandly as the best of you; and being a ‘Johannes factotum,’ he fancies himself the only shake-scene of the realm...”* (Shakespeare means “shake-spear”). Yet it was precisely in this refined exercise of mythographic tradition that he produced the documents of his literary excellence: in the poems *Venus and Adonis* (1593) and *Lucrece* (1594), and in the *Sonnets*, whose composition and probable scattered publication extended from the same period to 1600, finally collected and published in 1609.
His fame grew steadily, acclaimed by the public, praised at court, and exalted by Francis Meres in *Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury* (1598) alongside other poets of his time and classical Greek, Latin, and Italian writers. Unscrupulous publishers pirated sixteen of his plays during his lifetime. His success allowed him to restore his family’s fortunes in Stratford, enriching and ennobling them heraldically.
Serious events, though they did not disrupt his steady career, led him into a crisis that remains obscure in the chronicles but is perceptible in his poetry: the Essex conspiracy, which dragged down some of his most admired friends (1601); and a morbid passion, symbolized by the “dark lady” of the *Sonnets*. A dark pessimism is evident in his works from *Julius Caesar* (1601) to the unfinished *Timon of Athens* (c. 1607?). Perhaps in 1608 this crisis culminated in illness, but he emerged into a religious meditation that revealed his path and left him at peace, open to the intimate truths his poetry disclosed. In 1611, he retired to Stratford, though he remained connected to London through business and frequent travel. He died a Catholic, according to reliable testimony.
Between the scant and uncertain records of his outward life and the immense presence of his poetry in the modern world, the gap is so wide that legend has often been invoked to paint an idealized portrait, and his works have been attributed to other figures of his time—such as Francis Bacon—who possessed linguistic or scholarly prestige. Such biographers and mythographers succumbed to the error of reducing poetic creation to a product of historical circumstance and cultural program, rather than recognizing it as a primordial mode of knowledge that transforms reflective systems and the incidents of chronicle into something new. Shakespeare is precisely the poet who seems to hover in absolute openness to a vaster world, teeming with wonders, where human beings seek not self-recognition but the delight of countless forms.
Today, we know enough about his life to place him among the mediocre or significant figures of his age. As for his work, three centuries of ever-widening fortune and increasingly profound exegesis allow us to view it—not diminishing the wonder of a poetry that, with naive trust, embraces the vast world and returns, equally naive, to its Creator—within the context of its time and learning, inseparable from the Christian civilization of the entire West. Finally, if we probe the chronicle and the word to uncover the secret of his soul, and use his poetry as a touchstone for his moral life and the lessons he teaches humanity, we see him move from the naive and proud adventure of genius to an ever more austere, penitentially absorbed meditation, and then open again to renewed trust. His final message is to a humanity that, having strayed, rediscovers itself after the storm; while the winged Ariel, the vocal spirit of poetry, revives among the blossoms, the poet breaks the wand of enchantment and, seeking God’s mercy, calls for the aid of brotherly prayer. Thus he almost summarizes in a parable the meaning of an era in Western civilization and the return, after the triumph of the arts and the dizzying heights of dominion, to the Christian homeland.
The 1623 in-folio edition, prepared by his fellow actors, gathers his works into comedies, histories, and tragedies; and the critical effort to establish the canon and chronology was immense and successful, though not without some uncertainty, drawing on every external clue from chronicles and internal evidence from text, lexicon, and style. His themes are easily recalled in popular memory (for his fame grew in the last two centuries to an immense resonance worldwide: no other playwright is as present on the stage as he, and nearly all his tales have entered the common mythographic heritage). *Romeo and Juliet* (1591) sings of the magic of love’s call that, beyond the city’s strife, leads two young spouses to their death; *Richard III* (1592) elevates to inhuman ferocity the Machiavellian idea of the tyrant who rules by fraud and force, while *Richard II* (1593) ponders, with pity, the idea of regal sanctity that survives even the excesses of power and the misfortune of deposition; *The Merchant of Venice* (1594), set in a distant and gentle Italy, weaves together Marlowe’s echoes, mocking humor, and the wisdom of a loving and shrewd femininity; *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (1595) embroiders upon the veil of a nuptial fable the names of a classicism reimagined in feudal terms and the sprites of the North; in *Henry IV* (1597), tears and blood flow from regal dignity, and warlike rage swells into grotesque guises, while *Henry V* (1599) exalts national victory—a period of his poetics singularly fervent and happy, closing with the comedies *As You Like It* (1599) and *Twelfth Night* (1599), favoring a rediscovered Arcadia, music poured out over the happy errors of love’s desire.
But his meditation on the abysses of power, the snares of the senses, the corruption of the flesh, and the evil that poisons every human dignity and topples every greatness suddenly turns dark and violent: *Julius Caesar* (1601) is a desperate and terrified hymn to the ill-fated magnanimity of political heroes, shattered by the very inertia of the tyrant they suppress, who yet conquers them even in death; and the themes of kingship, lust, and vengeance recur in *Hamlet* (1602). Yet in the tumult of crisis, his commitment grows bolder toward a more arduous meditation, religiously engaged. Hamlet does not heed the otherworldly voice of the murdered king, betrayed, who rises from Purgatory to warn his son and heir, the rightful king, to do justice: with his delay, he drags both guilty and innocent into a whirlpool of crimes. *Othello* (1604) is the generous, loving hero who cannot resist the temptation of evil and lets himself be consumed by the furies of murderous jealousy. *Macbeth* (1605) is likewise overwhelmed by diabolical temptation, even more explicitly declared, which lures him through ambition for the crown. *King Lear* (1606) madly believes he can escape the duties of kingship, divides his realm among ambitious daughters, banishes the devoted one, and, intoxicated by words and gestures, drags himself and his own into an acclaimed and sorrowful madness. With *Antony and Cleopatra* (1608) and *Coriolanus* (1608), the themes of passion and ambition are reconsidered with a clearer eye: the protagonists now know what they want, face the consequences of their will consciously, and judge themselves. *Measure for Measure* (1605), with its heartfelt evangelical appeal, and the carefree festivity of *The Winter’s Tale* (1610) prepare, from opposite directions, the reconciliation of *The Tempest* (1611).
Harder to discern, beyond the allure of form and fortune, is the inner history of his poetics: which unfolds from an initial trust in a native, genuine genius, true even in its most extreme guises—the *vita*, the wit, the spirit, a light that discovers unsuspected relations among things and illuminates them. Though he consents to the modes of the Baroque age, the poet relies more on invention than on reason’s counsel or history’s lessons. A gift of a kindly nature, the *vita* reveals and declares all—the face of the world and the moral law, the idea of freedom and that of human dignity which follows from it—and, according to a lost and then rediscovered norm of good, restores order to human life. His genius explores the human universe in both its adventurous breadth and its religious depth. No one trusts language more than he; he entrusts to it his human fate, indeed the fate of his people and the world; yet no one is quicker to turn poetic availability into vocation, and humbly, fervently, to yield to the truths that language reveals. Renaissance culture had set language to accompany the description of a cosmos already ordered by doctrine—that which Dante traversed; the new poet seems to venture into an unpredictable world, yet language brings him back to rediscover eternal truths that seemed lost and to restore harmony between personal experience and the shared experience of history after him.