William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Shakespeare is unusual among [his contemporaries] not only because of his posthumous reputation. Whereas most playwrights circulated in the market for scripts, Shakespeare was exclusively committed to a single company for almost the whole of his career. Whereas most playwrights lived from hand to mouth, Shakespeare acquired substantial wealth. And whereas most playwrights were or became Londoners, Shakespeare, who of course lodged and worked in London, effectively remained a citizen of Stratford-upon-Avon, the provincial town where he grew up, married, had children and died. These peculiarities are connected to each other, but are worth looking at separately.
He probably began working as an actor and playwright around 1590. In 1592 a serious outbreak of plague led to the closure of the playhouses, and he wrote two immediately famous narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. When the theatres reopened in 1594 a new company was formed, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare was one of the original sharers: he helped to manage the company, acted for it, and wrote about two plays a year for it. Through a mixture of luck and judgement, it did extremely well by the time he retired around 1612, it was the most successful of the London companies, the corporate owner of two playhouses and, as the King’s Men, the favorite of James I. As a leading member of this organization, Shakespeare had no occasion to offer his work to the King’s Men’s competitors: they were his competitors too.
This identification is one reason for his financial success. Usually, a playwright lived by selling his script to a company, and the company secured a place to perform it by paying rent to a landlord. Thanks to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s sharing system, Shakespeare was playwright and company and landlord; the whole theatrical process was in his hands, which may explain how he could buy landed property for cash in 1597, 1602, 1605, and 1613, as well as suggesting a grounding for his serene acceptance, as a writer, or theatricality itself.
Most of the property was in Stratford. Shakespeare’s father was a prominent tradesman, alderman and Justice of the Peace who was in commercial decline from the late 1570s on; his son restored the family fortunes and lived in the grandest house in town. His involvement in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, then, was complemented by a degree of detachment from London affairs in general. He had status, even preeminence, elsewhere; he was, quite unambiguously, a Warwickshire gentleman.
The firm edges of his social and professional position are arguably reproduced in his output. He did very little collaborative writing, at least after 1594; on the whole, the 37 plays of the standard ‘Shakespeare canon’ are probably his own. But some of them, including highly distinctive ones – The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV, Hamlet, [King] Lear – are drastic adaptations of existing scripts, while others – As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, the Roman lives out of Plutarch – are dramatizations of stories that were already well known. And several early references emphasize his fluency: people remembered how readily and quickly he wrote. All this suggests a theatre professional, prepared to make something out of whatever materials looked promising. The anomaly, then, which has exercised generations of critics in one way or another, is the passionate density of the resulting verbal and dramatic textures. Shakespeare’s career can look almost chillingly efficient, but his writing was the reverse, magnificently giving the actors more than they could ever need.
Taken from: Womack, Peter. English Renaissance DramaMalden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 119-20.
(1564-1616)
Shakespeare is unusual among [his contemporaries] not only because of his posthumous reputation. Whereas most playwrights circulated in the market for scripts, Shakespeare was exclusively committed to a single company for almost the whole of his career. Whereas most playwrights lived from hand to mouth, Shakespeare acquired substantial wealth. And whereas most playwrights were or became Londoners, Shakespeare, who of course lodged and worked in London, effectively remained a citizen of Stratford-upon-Avon, the provincial town where he grew up, married, had children and died. These peculiarities are connected to each other, but are worth looking at separately.
He probably began working as an actor and playwright around 1590. In 1592 a serious outbreak of plague led to the closure of the playhouses, and he wrote two immediately famous narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. When the theatres reopened in 1594 a new company was formed, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare was one of the original sharers: he helped to manage the company, acted for it, and wrote about two plays a year for it. Through a mixture of luck and judgement, it did extremely well by the time he retired around 1612, it was the most successful of the London companies, the corporate owner of two playhouses and, as the King’s Men, the favorite of James I. As a leading member of this organization, Shakespeare had no occasion to offer his work to the King’s Men’s competitors: they were his competitors too.
This identification is one reason for his financial success. Usually, a playwright lived by selling his script to a company, and the company secured a place to perform it by paying rent to a landlord. Thanks to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s sharing system, Shakespeare was playwright and company and landlord; the whole theatrical process was in his hands, which may explain how he could buy landed property for cash in 1597, 1602, 1605, and 1613, as well as suggesting a grounding for his serene acceptance, as a writer, or theatricality itself.
Most of the property was in Stratford. Shakespeare’s father was a prominent tradesman, alderman and Justice of the Peace who was in commercial decline from the late 1570s on; his son restored the family fortunes and lived in the grandest house in town. His involvement in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, then, was complemented by a degree of detachment from London affairs in general. He had status, even preeminence, elsewhere; he was, quite unambiguously, a Warwickshire gentleman.
The firm edges of his social and professional position are arguably reproduced in his output. He did very little collaborative writing, at least after 1594; on the whole, the 37 plays of the standard ‘Shakespeare canon’ are probably his own. But some of them, including highly distinctive ones – The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV, Hamlet, [King] Lear – are drastic adaptations of existing scripts, while others – As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, the Roman lives out of Plutarch – are dramatizations of stories that were already well known. And several early references emphasize his fluency: people remembered how readily and quickly he wrote. All this suggests a theatre professional, prepared to make something out of whatever materials looked promising. The anomaly, then, which has exercised generations of critics in one way or another, is the passionate density of the resulting verbal and dramatic textures. Shakespeare’s career can look almost chillingly efficient, but his writing was the reverse, magnificently giving the actors more than they could ever need.
Taken from: Womack, Peter. English Renaissance DramaMalden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 119-20.