SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. — Poet, born at Stratford-on-Avon (England) in 1564 (he was baptized on 26 April), died there on 23 April 1616.
His father, Giovanni, a small country landowner, had applied himself to industry and commerce, and won the sympathy of the townspeople, who had elected him bailiff of the municipality; his mother, Maria Arden, came from an old and prosperous family. A crisis ensued, perhaps not merely an economic one, if Giovanni’s Catholicism was implicated in the family’s decline, during the years that coincided with the beginning of Elizabeth of England’s anti-Catholic absolutism. For this reason too, the young man’s course of study was not regular, but rather that of a self-taught person, endowed with a genius for making his own whatever knowledge his poetic discourse required. He certainly attended the Grammar School of Stratford and perhaps completed his education at the court of a feudal lord, as a page and singing boy: one of those choirboys who also acted in theatrical performances. Married at eighteen to Anna Hathaway, he left his native town when the burden of his family increased and sought his fortune in London, in 1585 or at the beginning of 1586. He was able to find it: with affable manners and a gentle disposition, he possessed the qualities of a practical achiever; and as an actor (among other parts, he played the Ghost in his own Hamlet), and above all as a co-owner, he was able to make up for the meager income allotted to authors. He was at the “Theatre,” so called by antonomasia, the first to arise in London, and at the “Rose,” later at the “Globe” and the “Blackfriars”; and he belonged to the company that had placed itself under the protection of the Earl of Leicester (actors were outside the law in that British society full of impulses and prohibitions, and only a livery could save them from persecution), and later under that of King James I himself. Among his influential patrons was the Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of the Sonnets. Success came as early as 1592; he did not descend into poetry, like the university wits, those university men of elegant wit, from the dignity of a professorial culture, elaborated intellectually; he rose to it by mingling with the achievements of an attentive and highly skilled theatrical craftsmanship, collaborating with other authors, and working on roughly elaborated texts, which he brought to an extreme perfection of animation, characterization, and style; hence Robert Greene’s suspicions and sorrowful invective against his supposed intrusion (“a crow newly emerged from nothing, decked out in our feathers, wrapped in an actor’s hide, presumes to be able to inflate a blank verse as well as the best among you; and, being a fully accomplished ‘Johannes factotum,’ imagines himself to be the only stage-shaker in the country ...” (Shake-speare means “spear-shaker”). He then produced the documents of his literary excellence in an extremely refined exercise on themes from the mythographic tradition, in the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594), and in the Sonnets, whose composition, and probable publication in scattered form, extended from those same years to 1600; they were collected and published in 1609. His success steadily increased: acclaimed by the public, praised at court, exalted by Francesco Meres in Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury (1598), in comparison with the other poets of his time and with the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics, and plundered by unscrupulous publishers who, while he was still alive, published sixteen of his plays. His prosperity enabled him to restore the fortunes of his family at Stratford, enriching it and granting it heraldic nobility.
Serious events, though they did not disturb his steady career, led him to a crisis that remains obscure in the chronicle but perceptible in his poetics: the Essex conspiracy, which swept away some of his most admired friends (1601); and a morbid passion, symbolized by the dark lady of the Sonnets. A profound pessimism is documented in the works from Julius Caesar (1601) to the unfinished Timon of Athens (1607?). Perhaps this crisis reached its climax with an illness in 1608; but he immersed himself in religious meditation, which revealed his path to him, and emerged from it pacified, open to more intimate words that his own poetry disclosed to him. In 1611 he retired to Stratford, though he remained connected with London through interests and not infrequent journeys. Died a Papist: so states a reliable testimony.
Between the scant or uncertain documents that remain to us concerning his outward life and the immense presence of his poetry in the modern world, there is such a disparity that recourse has often been made to legend in order to provide an ideal portrait of him, and the work has been taken away from his name and attributed to this or that figure of his time who possessed dignity of language or learning: for example, to Francesco Bacon. Such biographers and mythographers yielded to the error that makes poetic creation the result of a historical situation and a cultural program, rather than a primordial mode of knowledge that penetrates and transfigures the reflective arrangements of culture and the occasions of the chronicle. S. is precisely the poet who seems to soar in an absolute receptivity of image toward a vaster world: a world filled with wonders; and in which the human creature hastens more in search of the delight of innumerable forms than of self-recognition. In reality, we now know enough about him from documented certainties to follow him through life, amid mediocre and important circumstances, from birth to death. And as for his work, three centuries of ever-expanding renown and ever-deepening exegesis make it possible—without removing anything from the prodigy of a poetry that entrusts itself, full of ingenuous confidence, to the vast world and returns ingenuous to its Creator—to observe it within the circumstances of time and doctrine that belong to the poet no less than to the Christian civilization of the whole West. Finally, if, after exploring the chronicle and the word, we attempt to penetrate the secret of his soul; if we make poetry the touchstone for his moral life and for the life he teaches to his followers, we see him withdraw from the ingenuous and proud adventure of the intellect into an increasingly severe, penitent meditation, and then open himself to a recovered confidence: his final message is addressed to a humanity that, having lost its way, finds itself again after the storm; while the winged Ariel, the vocal spirit of poetry, returns to live among the corollas, the poet breaks the wand of enchantment and asks, so that God may have mercy on him, for the aid of fraternal prayer. And he almost sums up in a parable the meaning of an age in the civilization of the West and the return, after the triumph of the arts and the vertigo of dominion, to the Christian homeland.
The in-folio edition of 1623, prepared by his fellow artists, gathers his works, classifying them as comedies, histories, and tragedies; and the work of criticism in establishing the canon and chronology, not without some uncertainty, was immense and successful, making use of every external suggestion provided by chronicles and every internal indication furnished by text, vocabulary, and style. It is easy to find his themes in the common memory (for his fame grew over the last two centuries to immense renown throughout the world: no dramatist is as present as he is on the stage, and almost all his plots have entered the common mythographic heritage). Romeo e Giulietta (1591) sings of the magic of the summons of love which, beyond the city feud, leads the young lovers to a single death; Riccardo III (1592) raises to inhuman brutality the Machiavellian idea of the tyrant who rules by fraud and force, while Riccardo II (1593) compassionately meditates on the idea of royal sacredness, which survives even the excess of dominion and the misfortune of deposition; the Mercante di Venezia (1594), against the background of a remote and gracious Italy, combines reminiscences of Marlow, mocking humor, and the wisdom of a loving and shrewd femininity; the Sogno di una notte di mezza estate (1595) embroiders, within the veil of a nuptial fable, the names of a classicism reimagined in feudal terms and the sprites of the north; in Enrico IV (1597), tears and blood pour from royal dignity, while warlike anger swells into grotesque appearances, and Enrico V (1599)
hails the national victory: this was an exceptionally fervent and fruitful period in his poetics, which closes with the comedies Come vi garba (1599) and Notte dell'Epifania (1599), fables of a rediscovered Arcadia, music poured forth over the happy errors of amorous desire. But his meditation on the abysses of dominion, the snares of the senses, the corruption of the flesh, and the evil that poisons every human dignity and overwhelms every greatness suddenly becomes dark and violent: Giulio Cesare (1601) is a desperate and terrified hymn to the unfortunate magnanimity of political heroes, crushed by the very inertia of the tyrant whom they suppress and who nonetheless conquers them after death; and the themes of kingship, lust, and revenge reverberate through Amleto (1602); yet, amid the tumult of the crisis, his commitment to a bolder, religiously engaged meditation also becomes more daring. Hamlet does not heed the otherworldly voice of the murdered king, treacherously killed, who emerges from Purgatory to admonish his son and heir, the legitimate king, to carry out justice: through his delay he drags both the guilty and the innocent into a whirlpool of crimes. Otello (1604) is the generous and loving hero who cannot resist the temptation of evil and allows himself to be overwhelmed, possessed by the furies of murderous jealousy. Macbeth (1605) too is overcome by diabolical temptation, declared even more explicitly, which besets him in his ambition for the throne. Lear (1606) madly believes that he can evade the duties of kingship, divides the kingdom among his ambitious daughters, drives out his devoted daughter, and, intoxicated by words and gestures, plunges himself and his subjects into an acclaimed and sorrowful madness. With Antonio e Cleopatra (1608) and Coriolano (1608), the themes of passion and ambition are viewed anew with a clearer eye: the protagonists now know what they want, consciously face the consequences of their will, and judge themselves. Misura per misura (1605), with its heartfelt evangelical appeal, and the carefree festivity of Racconto d'inverno (1610) prepare, from opposite directions, the reconciliation of Tempesta (1611).
More difficult to discern, beyond the suggestiveness of form and fortune, is the intimate history of his poetics: it develops from S.’s initial reliance on an innate genial force, genuine even in its most extreme manifestations: wit, ingenuity, spirit, a light that discovers unsuspected relations among things and illuminates them. In keeping with the modes of the Baroque age, the poet relies more on invention than on the counsels of reason and the experiences of history. A gift of a benevolent nature, wit reveals and declares everything—the face of the world and the moral law, the idea of freedom and the consequent idea of human dignity—and, according to a persistent and subsequently rediscovered norm of goodness, recomposes human life. His genius explores the human universe both in its adventurous breadth and in its religious depth. No one trusts the word more than he does, entrusting to it his destiny as a man, indeed the fate of his people and of the world; but no one is more ready to transform poetic receptiveness into a vocation, and to yield, with humble fervor, to the truths that the word reveals. Renaissance culture had arranged the word to accompany the description of a cosmos already ordered by doctrine: the cosmos through which Dante travels; the new poet seems to venture into an unpredictable world, yet the word leads him back to the discovery of eternal truths that had seemed lost and to the harmonious recomposition of his own experience as a man and the shared experience of history after him.