SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. - Poet, b. at Stratford-on-Avon (England) in 1564 (he was baptized on April 26), d. there on April 23, 1616.
His father John, a small country landowner, had applied himself to industry and commerce, and having won the sympathy of the townsfolk, who had elected him bailiff of the municipality: his mother, Mary Arden, came from old and wealthy stock. A crisis supervened, perhaps not only an economic one, if John's Catholicism was bound up with the family's decline, in the years that coincided with the beginning of Elizabeth of England's anti-Catholic absolutism. For this reason too the boy's course of studies was not regular, but rather that of a self-taught man, brilliantly disposed to make his own that knowledge which was needed for his discourse as a poet. Certainly he 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 boy singers who also served as actors in theatrical performances. Married at eighteen to Anne Hathaway, he left his native town when the burden of the family grew and sought his fortune in London, in 1585 or at the beginning of 1586. He was able to find it: he had, with affability of manner and gentleness of disposition, the gifts of a practical man of affairs; and as an actor (he played, among other things, the part of the Ghost in his own Hamlet), and above all as a co-owner, he was able to make up for the small income that fell 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 at the "Blackfriars"; and he belonged to the company that had placed itself under the protection of the Earl of Leicester (actors were outlaws in that British society full of impulses and prohibitions, and only a livery could save them from persecution) and then of King James I himself. And among his influential protectors was the Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of the Sonnets. Success came as early as 1592; he does not descend to poetry, like the university wits, the fine university spirits, from the dignity of a professorial culture, intellectually elaborated; he ascends to it by mingling with the achievements of an attentive and highly expert theatrical craft, collaborates with other authors, works on crudely elaborated texts, which he leads to an extreme perfection of animation, of individuation, of style; hence the suspicions and the sorrowful invective of Robert Greene against his presumed intrusiveness ("a crow risen from nothing, beautified with our feathers, wrapped in an actor's skin, presumes to be able to swell an iambic line as well as the best among you; and being a finished 'Jack-of-all-trades,' he thinks he is the only shake-scene of the country..." (Shake-speare means "shake-spear"). Here he is producing the documents of his literary excellence in an extremely refined exercise on themes of the mythographic tradition, in the short poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) and in the Sonnets, whose composition, and probable scattered publication, extends from those same years to 1600, collected and published in 1609. Success grows steadily, acclaimed by the public, praised at court, exalted by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury (1598) in comparison with the other poets of the time and with the Greek, Latin and Italian classics, plundered by unscrupulous publishers who published, while he was alive, 16 of his theatrical works. Fortune allowed him to raise up again the fortunes of his family at Stratford, enriched and ennobled with a coat of arms.
Grave events, if they did not disturb his constant 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 deep pessimism is documented in the work from Julius Caesar (1601) to the unfinished Timon of Athens (1607?). Perhaps with an illness this crisis culminates, in 1608; but he immerses himself in a religious meditation that reveals to him his way and he emerges from it pacified, open to words more trusting than his own poetry reveals to him. In 1611 he retires to Stratford, though remaining connected with London by interests and by not infrequent journeys. Died a Papist, he died a Catholic: so affirms a trustworthy testimony.
Between the scanty or uncertain documents that remain to us of his outward life, and the immense presence of his poetry in the modern world, there is such a gap that recourse has often been had to legend, to give an ideal portrait of him, and the work has been taken away from his name to attribute it to this or that personage of his time, who had dignity of language or of science: e.g., to Francis Bacon: such biographers and mythographers yielding to the error that makes poetic creation the resultant of a historical situation and of a cultural program, rather than a primordial mode of knowledge that invests and transfigures the reflective systematizations of culture and the occasions of the chronicle. S. is precisely the poet who seems to soar in an absolute availability of image toward a vaster world: that world full of marvels; and who seems to have human creatures flock there more to seek the delight of innumerable forms than to recognize themselves. In reality we know today about him as much as is needed of documented certainties to accompany him in life among mediocre or important things from birth to death. And as for his work, three centuries of ever more extensive fortune and ever deeper exegesis allow us, without taking anything away from the prodigy of a poetry that entrusts itself full of ingenuous trust to the vast world and returns ingenuous to its Creator, to observe it in the circumstance of time and of doctrine that belong to the poet no less than to the Christian civilization of all the West. Finally, if after having explored the chronicle and the word we attempt the secret of his soul, if we make poetry the touchstone for his moral life and for that which he teaches to the men who follow him, we see him withdraw from the ingenuous and proud adventure of genius to a meditation ever more severe, penitentially absorbed, and then open himself to a regained trust: his last message is to a humanity that, having lost itself, 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 enchantments and asks, so that God may have mercy on him, the help of fraternal prayer. And he almost sums up in a parable the meaning of an epoch of Western civilization and the return, after the triumph of the arts and the vertigos of dominion, to the Christian homeland.
The in-folio edition of 1623, edited by his fellow actors, gathers his works, cataloguing them into comedies, histories and tragedies; and the work of criticism was enormous and fortunate, not without some uncertainty, in establishing the canon and the chronology, availing itself of every external suggestion from chronicle and internal suggestion from text, lexicon and style. It is easy to find his themes in the common memory (for his fame grew over the last two centuries to an immense resonance in every part of the world: no author of the theatre is present on the stage as he is, and almost all his tales have entered the common mythological patrimony). Romeo and Juliet (1591) sings the magic of love's call which, beyond the city brawl, leads the young spouses to death; Richard III (1592) raises to inhuman savagery the Machiavellian idea of the tyrant who dominates by fraud and force, and Richard II (1593) piously meditates the idea of royal sacredness that survives the very excess of dominion and the misfortune of deposition; the Merchant of Venice (1594), within the setting of a remote and gentle Italy, composes reminiscences of Marlowe, mocking humour and the wisdom of a loving and shrewd femininity; the Dream of a Midsummer Night (1595) embroiders upon the veil of a nuptial tale the names of a classicism rethought in feudal terms and the sprites of the North; in Henry IV (1597) tears and blood drip from royal dignity and warlike wrath swells into grotesque semblances, and Henry V (1599)
hails the national victory: a period of his poetics singularly fervent and happy, this, which closes with the comedies As You Like It (1599) and Twelfth Night (1599), tales of a recovered Arcadia, music poured over the happy errors of love's desire. But his meditation on the precipices of dominion, on the snares of the senses, on the corruption of the flesh, on the evil that poisons every human dignity and sweeps away every greatness suddenly becomes dark and violent: Julius Caesar (1601) is a desperate and terrified hymn to the unfortunate magnanimity of political heroes, shattered by the very inertia of the tyrant whom they suppress and who yet conquers them, after death; and the themes of royalty, lust and revenge run through Hamlet (1602); but his commitment to a bolder, religiously engaged meditation also becomes more audacious, in the tumult of the crisis. Hamlet does not listen to the otherworldly voice of the king, treacherously killed, who comes out of Purgatory to admonish the son and heir, legitimate king, to carry out justice: with his delay he drags into a whirlpool of crimes both the guilty and the innocent. Othello (1604) is the generous and loving hero who does not resist the temptation of evil and lets himself be swept away, obsessed by the furies of murderous jealousy. Macbeth (1605) is likewise swept away by diabolical temptation, even more explicitly declared, which waylays him in his ambition for the kingdom. Lear (1606) madly believes he can withdraw from the duties of royalty, divides the kingdom among his ambitious daughters, drives out his devoted daughter, exalts himself intoxicated with words and gestures, and drags himself and his own into an acclaimed and sorrowful dementia. With Antony and Cleopatra (1608) and with Coriolanus (1608) the themes of passion and ambition are re-examined with a clearer eye: the protagonists now know what they want, they consciously face the consequences of their will, they judge themselves. Measure for Measure (1605), with its heartfelt evangelical appeal, and the carefree festivity of the Winter's Tale (1610) prepare from opposite sides the reconciliation of the Tempest (1611).
It is more difficult to discern, beyond the suggestion of form and fortune, the intimate history of his poetics: which unfolds from an initial entrusting of S. to a native genius, truthful even in its most extended semblances: the wit, the ingenuity, the spirit, a light that discovers unsuspected relations among things and illuminates them. Consonant with the modes of the Baroque age, the poet entrusts himself more to invention than to the counsels of reason and the experiences of history. A gift of a benign nature, the wit discloses and declares everything, the face of the world and the moral law, the idea of freedom and that which follows from it of human dignity; and according to an enduring and then recovered norm of good it recomposes the life of man. His genius explores the human universe both in adventurous extension and in religious depth. No one more than he trusts the word; 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 availability into vocation, and to yield, humbly fervent, to the truths that the word discloses. Renaissance culture had disposed the word to accompany the description of a cosmos already ordered by doctrine: the one that Dante traverses; the new poet seems to venture into an unforeseeable world, and yet the word leads him back to rediscover eternal truths that seemed lost and to recompose in concordant harmony his own experience as a man and the shared experience of history after him.