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    Useful William Shakespeare
    Useful William Shakespeare
    Useful William Shakespeare
    Ebook98 pages52 minutes

    Useful William Shakespeare

    By Martin Manser

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This book will help you:
    • plan your essays
    • revise better
    • prepare for exams

    This book provides:

    • Introduction to Shakespeare
    • Background on Shakespeare’s life
    • Shakespeare and the English language
    • Shakespeare’s Works in Summary
    • Glossary of Shakespeare’s words
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 28, 2015
    ISBN9781483559094
    Useful William Shakespeare
    Author

    Martin Manser

    Martin Manser is a professional writer and researcher. He is responsible for ‘The Penguin Wordmaster’ and ‘The Guinness Book of Words’.

    Read more from Martin Manser

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      Book preview

      Useful William Shakespeare - Martin Manser

      Terms

      Introduction

      William Shakespeare’s standing as one of the great writers in the English language is universally recognized and unlikely to be seriously challenged now or in the foreseeable future. Although relatively little is known for certain about his life and personal beliefs, and only little more about the circumstances in which he wrote his celebrated plays and poetry, his influence upon literature, language and the wider culture remains profound and far-reaching.

      The emotional power of Shakespeare’s language combined with the originality of his plots and the strength of his characterization has ensured the continuing popularity of his plays with succeeding generations of readers and theatre-goers. The work of a practical man of the theatre, the thirty-six or so tragedies, comedies, tragic-comedies, romances and histories credited to Shakespeare’s name continue to be widely performed four hundred years after their creator’s death. Even today theatre directors around the world continue to contrive new interpretations of his dramas, finding new ways to keep the stories exciting and relevant to contemporary audiences. As his fellow-playwright and friend Ben Jonson observed in his famous epitaph for Shakespeare, ‘He was not of an age but for all time.’

      All this is despite the sometimes archaic Elizabethan phraseology and imagery that pepper the texts, alongside references to customs and traditions long since fallen into disuse. The meaning of many of the words in Shakespeare’s lexicon is no longer immediately familiar and texts are often accompanied by glossaries explaining more obscure terms. Other words that were actually coined by the author have long since been absorbed into the language, testament to the unique literary legacy the man himself left.

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

      Shakespeare’s Life

      Despite Shakespeare’s status as the greatest author in the English language and one of the greatest figures in world literature, comparatively little is known about his life. It is possible to look into the biographies of many authors and see how what they experienced influenced what they wrote. It is not possible to do this with Shakespeare. Scholars are forced to do the opposite: they look into his works to try and find clues to his life, particularly his emotional and intellectual life. But since Shakespeare was a dramatist and expressed his thoughts and ideas through a multitude of different characters, none of whom can be confidently identified as a spokesperson for their creator, the task is very difficult. We have to accept the fact that there are huge gaps in our knowledge of him that will probably never be filled. As a result, any account of Shakespeare’s life is likely to be annoyingly full of ifs and maybes and probablys – not because biographers are unwilling to commit themselves, but because there is so little of which they can be absolutely sure.

      The reason for this lack of certainty is not simply that Shakespeare lived a long time ago and records have been lost. There were no media in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to record the day-to-day doings of the great and the good. In any case, although he was an extremely successful and popular playwright and became quite a wealthy man – the sort of person who might well attract media attention in the twenty-first century – Shakespeare’s social origins were comparatively humble, and artists and performers enjoyed nothing like the status they do today. Officially, the members of theatre companies were classed as the ‘servants’ of a great lord who acted as their patron. The company for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, because its patron was Lord Hunsdon, the official in charge of Queen Elizabeth I’s royal household. Later, after succeeding to the English throne, King James I became the company’s patron, and it changed its name to the King’s Men. Actors who did not enjoy aristocratic protection were classed as ‘rogues and vagabonds’, the lowest of the low. However talented, Shakespeare was perhaps simply not a sufficiently notable personage according to the standards of the times for anyone to think his life worth recording. By the time it became obvious that he was truly a supreme artist whose works would continue to interest and delight people for hundreds of years, it was too late. The first serious attempt to collect the facts of his life was not made until 1709, nearly a hundred years after his death.

      The Swan of Avon

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