Shakespeare's plays

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William Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery), in the famous Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed.
William Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery), in the famous Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed.

William Shakespeare's plays have the reputation of being among the greatest in the English language and in Western literature. His plays are traditionally divided into the genres of tragedy, history, and comedy. His plays have been translated into every major living language, in addition to being continually performed all around the world.

Among the most famous and critically acclaimed of Shakespeare's plays are Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III and Macbeth.

Some plays first appeared in print as a series of quartos, but most remained unpublished until 1623 when the posthumous First Folio was published. The traditional division of his plays into tragedies, comedies, and histories follows the logic of the First Folio. However, modern criticism has labelled some of these plays "problem plays" as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions, and has introduced the term 'romances' for the later comedies.

Contents

[edit] Source material of the plays

As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. This stricture did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. For example, Hamlet (c.1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet),[1] and King Lear is likely an adaptation of an older play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North,[1]) and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles.

[edit] Stylistic groupings of the plays

While there is much dispute about the exact Chronology of Shakespeare plays, as well as the Shakespeare Authorship Question, the plays tend to fall into three main stylistic groupings.

The first major grouping of his plays begins with his histories and comedies of the 1590s. Shakespeare's earliest plays tended to be adaptations of other playwright's works and employed blank verse and little variation in rhythm. However, after the plague forced Shakespeare and his company of actors to leave London for periods between 1592 and 1594, Shakespeare began to use rhymed couplets in his plays, along with more dramatic dialogue. These elements showed up in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Almost all of the plays written after the plague hit London are comedies, perhaps reflecting the public's desire at the time for light-hearted fare. Other comedies from this period include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It.

The middle grouping of Shakespeare's plays begins in 1599 with Julius Caesar. For the next few years, Shakespeare would produce his most famous dramas, including Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear. The plays during this period are in many ways the darkest of Shakespeare's career and address issues such as betrayal, murder, lust, power and egoism.

The final grouping of plays, called Shakespeare's late romances, include Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The romances are so called because they bear similarities to medieval romance literature. Among the features of these plays are a redemptive plotline with a happy ending, and magic and other fantastic elements.

[edit] Canonical Plays

The plays are here according to the order in which they are given in the First Folio of 1623. Plays marked with an asterisk (*) are now commonly referred to as 'Romances'. Plays marked with two asterisks (**) are sometimes referred to as the 'problem plays'.

[edit] Comedies

Main article: Shakespearean comedies

[edit] Histories

Main article: Shakespearean history

[edit] Tragedies

Main article: Shakespearean tragedy

[edit] Shakespeare Authorship Question

Main article: Shakespearean authorship

Around one hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, doubts began to be expressed by some researchers about the authorship of the plays and poetry attributed to him. The terms Shakespearean authorship, and Shakespeare Authorship Question normally refer to the debates inspired by these researchers, who consider the works to have been written by another playwright, or group of playwrights, using either William Shakespeare, or the hyphenated "Shake-speare", as a pen-name.

Reasons cited for these doubts include the large gaps in the historical record of his life; there are no surviving letters written by him, to him or about him; his detailed will mentions no books, plays, poems, writings of any kind, nor does it list the valuable shares he reportedly owned in the Globe Theatre; unlike other popular writers of the time, he was not publicly eulogized after his death; at the height of his supposed fame, he apparently stopped writing and retired to Stratford; and, that many of the so-called "later plays" were revised or perhaps completed by other authors while Shakespeare of Stratford was still alive.

While many figures have been proposed as the actual author, including Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, the leading candidate (aside from Shakespeare of Stratford) is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Proponents of the Oxfordian theory are called Oxfordians.

Most conventional scholars see no reason to believe anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays. They agree that the lack of information about Shakespeare is disappointing, but find it unsurprising given the passage of time, and given that the lives of middle-class people were not recorded as fully as those of politicians and the aristocracy. They also note that information about Elizabethan theatre practitioners is fragmentary, and that a similar scarcity of information is the case with other period playwrights.

[edit] Dramatic collaborations

Main article: Shakespeare's collaborations

Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone, and a number of his plays were collaborative, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial and are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.

[edit] Lost plays

  • Love's Labour's Won A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare's recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All's Well That Ends Well.
  • Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It re-worked a tale in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood [sic] does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all we have of the lost play.

[edit] Plays possibly by Shakespeare

Note: For a comprehensive account of plays possibly by Shakespeare, see the separate entry on the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

  • Edward III Some scholars have recently chosen to attribute this play to Shakespeare, based on the style of its verse. Others refuse to accept it, citing, among other reasons, the mediocre quality of the characters. If Shakespeare had involvement, he probably worked as a collaborator.
  • Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work by several playwrights, possibly including Shakespeare. That Shakespeare had any part in this play remains uncertain.

[edit] Shakespeare and the textual problem

Unlike his contemporary Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not have direct involvement in publishing his plays and produced no overall authoritative version of his plays before he died. As a result, the problem of identifying what Shakespeare actually wrote is a major concern for most modern editions.

One of the reasons there are textual problems is that there was no copyright of writings at the time. As a result, Shakespeare and the playing companies he worked with did not distribute scripts of his plays, for fear that the plays would be stolen. This led to bootleg copies of his plays, which were often based on people trying to remember what Shakespeare had actually written.

Textual corruptions also stemming from printers' errors, misreadings by compositors or simply wrongly scanned lines from the source material litter the Quartos and the First Folio. Additionally, in an age before standardised spelling, Shakespeare often wrote a word several times in a different spelling, and this may have contributed to some of the transcribers' confusion. Modern editors have the task of reconstructing Shakespeare's original words and expurgating errors as far as possible.

In some cases the textual solution presents few difficulties. In the case of Macbeth for example, scholars believe that someone (probably Thomas Middleton) adapted and shortened the original to produce the extant text published in the First Folio, but that remains our only authorised text. In others the text may have become manifestly corrupt or unreliable (Pericles or Timon of Athens) but no competing version exists. The modern editor can only regularise and correct erroneous readings that have survived into the printed versions.

The textual problem can, however, become rather complicated. Modern scholarship now believes Shakespeare to have modified his plays through the years, sometimes leading to two existing versions of one play. To provide a modern text in such cases, editors must face the choice between the original first version and the later, revised, usually more theatrical version. In the past editors have resolved this problem by conflating the texts to provide what they believe to be a superior Ur-text, but critics now argue that to provide a conflated text would run contrary to Shakespeare's intentions. In King Lear for example, two independent versions, each with their own textual integrity, exist in the Quarto and the Folio versions. Shakespeare's changes here extend from the merely local to the structural. Hence the Oxford Shakespeare, published in 1986 (second edition 2005), provides two different versions of the play, each with respectable authority. The problem exists with at least four other Shakespearean plays (Henry IV, part 1, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello).

[edit] Performance history

The twentieth century saw a multiplicity of visual interpretations of Shakespeare's plays. For centuries there had been an accepted style of how Shakespeare was to be performed which was erroneously labeled "Elizabethan" but actually reflected a trend of design from a period shortly after Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare's performances were originally performed in contemporary dress. Actors were costumed in clothes that they might wear off the stage. This continued into the 18th Century, the Georgian period, where costumes were the current fashionable dress. It wasn't until centuries after his death, primarily the 19th Century, that productions started looking back and tried to be "authentic" to a Shakespearean style. The Victorian era had a fascination with historical accuracy, this was adopted to the stage in order to appeal to the educated middle class. Charles Kean was particularly interested in historical context and spent many hours researching historical dress and setting for his productions. This faux-Shakespearean style was fixed until the twentieth century.

Gordon Craig's design for Hamlet in 1911 was groundbreaking in its Cubist influence. Craig abandoned the Constructivist approach to scenography and instead defined space with simple flats: monochrome canvases stretched on wooden frames, which were hinged together to be self-supporting. Though the construction of these flats was not original, its application to Shakespeare was completely new. The flats could be aligned in many configurations and provided a technique of simulating architectural or abstract lithic structures out of supplies and methods common to any theater in Europe or the Americas. Craig's iconoclastic design was the first of many paradigm shifts in the design of Shakespeare's plays of the twentieth century.

The second major shift of twentieth-century scenography of Shakespeare was in the 1923 production of Cymbeline at the Birmingham Rep. This production was groundbreaking because it reintroduced the idea of modern dress back into Shakespeare. It was not the first modern-dress production since there were a few minor examples before World War II, but Cymbeline was the first to call attention to the device in a blatant way. Iachimo was costumed in evening dress for the wager, the court was in military uniforms, and the disguised Imogen in knickerbockers and cap. It was for this production that critics invented the catch phrase "Shakespeare in plus-fours".[2] The experiment was moderately successful, and the director, H.K. Ayliff, two years later staged Hamlet in modern dress. These productions paved the way for the modern-dress Shakespearean productions that we are familiar with today.

In 1936, Orson Welles brought Macbeth to Harlem in the groundbreaking production casting only African American actors. The production was controversial since it was organized and planned by whites, and Welles' retelling of the story was hardly complimentary to African American culture. Called Voodoo Macbeth, it was set in a Haiti run by an evil king and thoroughly under the mastery of evil African magic. Despite its unique nature, this Macbeth exhibited some of the patronizing attitudes that black leaders had been denouncing. Perhaps the most controversial moment came when the lead actor fell ill, and Welles went on in the title role wearing black-face. The black community took to the production thoroughly, ensuring full houses for ten weeks at the Lafayette Theatre and prompting a small Broadway success and a national tour.

Other notable productions of the twentieth century that follow this trend of relocating Shakespeare's plays are H.K. Ayliff's Macbeth of 1928 set on the battlefields of World War I, Welles' Julius Caesar of 1937 based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg, and Thacker's Coriolanus of 1994 set in the French revolution.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^  Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Accessed 10/23/05.
  2. ^  Trewin, J. C. Shakespeare on the English Stage, 1900-1064. London, 1964.

[edit] External links

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