Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History. Hugh Williams

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       CHAPTER 7

       The Birth of William Shakespeare

       1564

      Shakespeare is the greatest writer Britain has ever produced. He lifted the English language to new heights and gave us words and phrases we still use today.

      When I was a small boy I was taken by my parents to see a production of Henry IV, Part I, at the school where my father was headmaster. I was greatly impressed by the character of Falstaff who in my childish innocence I thought seemed rather like Father Christmas. When towards the end of the play I thought he had been killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury I was very upset. My relief when he revealed he had been pretending and struggled to his feet again was highly audible. My yelp of delight made the audience laugh almost as much as the actor’s performance. Shakespeare has always been part of my life – as he has for thousands of British men and women. He rose out of one of the most vivid and exciting periods in our history – the Elizabethan Age – and then surpassed it, moving forward with each succeeding period. We still use his words and phrases. His characters still live with us. Perhaps most importantly of all, we feel proud of him because we share his genius with the world. The Prince of Wales, speaking at the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1991, used language that is very familiar when the British talk about him. ‘Shakespeare’s message is the universal, timeless one, yet clad in the garments of his time. He is not just our poet, but the world’s. Yet his roots are ours, his language is ours, his culture is ours.’

      Our knowledge of Shakespeare’s life is incomplete. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a prosperous wool merchant. He went to the local grammar school where, among other things, he studied Latin and at the age of eighteen married a local girl eight years his senior called Anne Hathaway. She was pregnant at the time. Towards the end of the 1580s he seems to have become an actor with the Queen’s Men and began writing plays. By the middle of the 1590s he had teamed up with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of actors who came together after London’s theatres had been closed because of a plague epidemic, and stayed with them for the rest of his career. He died in 1616 and was buried in his home town of Stratford.

      Shakespeare’s life had many modern qualities about it. He was a well-educated, middle-class man from a provincial town who did well and got rich in London’s bustling, fast-moving media world. His was the first generation to enjoy the theatre as a full-blooded form of general entertainment. In the years before his time plays tended to be based on religious themes but by the end of the sixteenth century they were tackling all sorts of subjects – romance, comedy and history – holding, in Shakespeare’s own phrase ‘the mirror up to nature’. Theatre was fashionable. It attracted sponsorship from wealthy courtiers. It was rivalrous, catty and scandalous. A female fan of Richard Burbage, one of the most famous actors of the day, was so enraptured by his performance as Richard III that she asked him to come and visit her dressed as the villainous king. Shakespeare – so the story goes – got wind of this and managed to seduce her before Burbage arrived. As they were lying in bed together the actor appeared, announcing that Richard III had arrived, to which Shakespeare is supposed to have responded that William the Conqueror came before Richard III. The world of the stage was just as heady and exciting in Elizabethan London as it is today.

      Shakespeare was good at his chosen profession – head and shoulders above his contemporaries. In a time that produced a great number of fine writers, he produced the best work. Christopher Marlowe wrote beautiful, heroic verse and Ben Jonson had a clever, satirical wit but neither of these could match Shakespeare in his ability to write about anything to which he turned his hand. He sometimes collaborated with other writers in the town but his greatest plays and poems, the work for which he is remembered and revered, was all his own. He knew what made people tick, he knew what made them laugh and he knew how to make them feel patriotic and proud; he understood politics; and he knew how the world was opening up through voyages of exploration. All of this understanding he brought into his plays. His words and phrases were unlike anything that had been written in the English language before. They gave it dynamism: the power to express everything. The people with whom he worked knew this. When the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623, several writers contributed introductory poems praising his talent and recognising the immortality of his work. Leonard Digges ended his piece with:

      Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die,

      But crowned with laurel, live eternally.

      And Ben Jonson, while joshing that his old rival ‘hadst small Latin and less Greek’, wrote:

       Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

      To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

      He was not of an age, but for all time.

      Digges and Jonson were right. They may just have intended to help the publisher sell their former colleague’s work and so indulged in a little hyperbole, but they must also have realised that Shakespeare had been something special. They sensed even then that his work was ageless.

      Twenty-five years after Shakespeare died Britain was engulfed by the Civil War and the Puritan Revolution. Plays and play-going were frowned upon and the lively brilliance of the Elizabethan stage was forgotten as more sober matters preoccupied the rulers of the nation. After the Restoration in 1660, Shakespeare once more found himself admirers, although he had to take his place among the new writers who were jostling for favour in a London which was coming back to life once more. The theatre had come under the influence of classical convention. Aristotle’s ‘three unities’ of time, place and action were brought back into fashion: a play should have only one plot and should take place over twenty-four hours in the same place. That was hardly Shakespeare. His huge imagination was incapable of being bound by rules. John Dryden, one of the greatest writers in Britain at the end of the seventeenth century, spotted this and acknowledged Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, although he also wrote entirely new versions of some of his plays, constructed along classical lines. All For Love, or The World Well Lost is his take on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Less capable hands than Dryden’s also tinkered with Shakespeare’s work. In 1681 Nahum Tate – the author of, among other things, the words of the carol ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night’ – produced a version of King Lear with a happy ending: Edgar and Cordelia get married and the old king is restored to his throne. In the London of Charles II nothing was allowed to get in the way of a good time.

      Shakespeare’s language

      Shakespeare’s СКАЧАТЬ