Life & Background
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a glover and alderman, and was probably educated at the local grammar school, where he would have absorbed Latin rhetoric and Ovid. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and had three children, including twins Hamnet and Judith; Hamnet died at eleven. By the early 1590s he was working in London as an actor and playwright, and became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men under James I — a stake in the company that made him wealthy. He wrote for the Globe and later the indoor Blackfriars, retired to Stratford around 1613, and died in 1616. Half his plays were unpublished until the First Folio of 1623, assembled by two fellow actors.
Hamlet
Prince Hamlet returns to Elsinore to find his father dead, his uncle Claudius on the throne, and his mother Gertrude married to Claudius. His father's ghost tells him Claudius committed the murder and demands revenge. Hamlet feigns madness while he tests the ghost's claim, staging a play that mirrors the murder to watch Claudius react. He kills Polonius by mistake behind an arras, is sent to England to be executed and escapes, returns to find Ophelia dead and her brother Laertes bent on revenge. In the final duel, poisoned sword and poisoned cup kill Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, and Hamlet himself; Fortinbras arrives to claim the kingdom.
Hamlet turns the revenge tragedy inside out: the genre requires action, and the play is built almost entirely from delay. The soliloquies — seven of them — invent a kind of dramatic interiority that had not existed on the English stage, letting an audience watch a mind arguing with itself rather than declaring its intentions. The play is obsessively concerned with the unreliability of appearance: acting, playing, seeming, the antic disposition, the play-within-the-play. Critics have read the delay as psychological (Coleridge's over-thinking intellectual), Oedipal (Ernest Jones after Freud), and political, while T.S. Eliot famously judged the play an artistic failure because Hamlet's emotion exceeds any 'objective correlative' in the plot.
Why Shakespeare Matters
Shakespeare's influence on English is structural rather than merely stylistic — vocabulary, phrase, and the assumption that dramatic character has an inner life all bear his mark. He wrote across comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, and his plays have proved endlessly portable: reinterpreted through psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial criticism, staged in every major theatrical tradition, and rewritten from Kurosawa to Vishal Bhardwaj. For examinations he is unavoidable across papers — the tragedies, the problem plays, the sonnet sequence, the First Folio and textual transmission, and the long history of Shakespeare criticism from Johnson and Coleridge to Greenblatt's new historicism.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Titus Andronicusc. 1592
- A Midsummer Night's Dreamc. 1595
- The Merchant of Venicec. 1597
- Hamletc. 1600
- Twelfth Nightc. 1601
- Othelloc. 1604
- King Learc. 1605
- Macbethc. 1606
- The Winter's Talec. 1610
- The Tempestc. 1611