William Shakespeare

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

SHAKESPEARE, William (1564-1616), dramatist, man of the theatre, and poet, baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 Apr. 1564. His birth is traditionally celebrated on 23 Apr., which is also known to have been the date of his death. He was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glover and dealer in other commodities who played a prominent part in local affairs, becoming bailiff and justice of the peace in 1568, but whose fortunes later declined. John had married c. 1557 Mary Arden, who came from a family of higher social standing. Of their eight children, four sons and one daughter survived childhood.

The standard and kind of education indicated by William's writings are such as he might have received at the local grammar school, whose records for the period are lost. On 28 Nov. 1582 a bond was issued permitting him to marry Anne Hathaway of Shottery, a village close to Stratford. She was eight years his senior. A daughter, Susanna, was baptized on 26 May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 Feb. 1585. We do not know how Shakespeare was employed in early manhood; the best authenticated tradition is *Aubrey's: 'he had been in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Country.' This has fed speculation that he is the 'William Shakeshafte' named in the will of the recusant Alexander Houghton, of Lea Hall, Lancashire, in 1581, and in turn that he had Catholic sympathies.

Nothing is known of his beginnings as a writer, nor when or in what capacity he entered the theatre. In 1587 an actor of the Queen's Men died through manslaughter shortly before the company visited Stratford. That Shakespeare may have filled the vacancy is an intriguing speculation. The first printed allusion to him is from 1592, in the pamphlet *Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte, ostensibly by R. *Greene but possibly by *Chettle. Mention of 'an upstart Crow' who 'supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you' and who 'is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country' suggests rivalry, and parody of a line from 3 *Henry VI shows that Shakespeare was established on the London literary scene. He was a leading member of  the Lord Chamberlain's Men soon after their refoundation in 1594. With them he worked and grew prosperous for the rest of his career as they developed into London's leading company, occupying the *Globe Theatre from 1599, becoming the King's Men on James I's accession in 1603, and taking over the Blackfriars as a winter house in 1608. He is the only prominent playwright of his time to have had so stable a relationship with a single company.

Theatrical life centred on London, which necessarily became Shakespeare's professional base, as various records testify. But his family remained in Stratford. In 1596 his father applied, successfully, for a grant of arms, and so became a gentleman; in August William's son Hamnet died, and was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard. In October Shakespeare was lodging in Bishopsgate, London, and in May of the next year he bought a substantial Stratford house, New Place. His father died in 1601, and in the following year William paid £320 for 127 acres of land in Old Stratford. In 1604 he lodged in London with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy. In the next year he paid £440 for an interest in the Stratford tithes, and there in June 1607 his daughter Susanna married a physician, John Hall. His only granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, was christened the following February; in 1608 his mother died and was buried in Holy Trinity.

Evidence of Shakespeare's increasing involvement with Stratford at this time suggests that he was withdrawing to New Place, but his name continues to appear in London records; in Mar. 1613, for instance, he paid £140 for a gatehouse close to the Blackfriars Theatre, probably as an investment. In the same month he and the actor R. *Burbage received 44 shillings each for providing an impresa to be borne by the Earl of Rutland at a court tourney. In Feb. 1616 his second daughter Judith married Thomas Quiney, causing her father to make alterations to the draft of his will, which he signed on 25 Mar. He died, according to the inscription on his monument, on 23 Apr., and was buried in Holy Trinity. His widow died in 1623 and his last surviving descendant, Elizabeth Hall, in 1670.

Shakespeare's only writings for the press (apart from the disputed 'Funeral Elegy' of 1613) are the narrative poems *Venus and Adonis and *The Rape of Lucrece, published 1593 and 1594 respectively, each with the author's dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, and the short poem *'The Phoenix and the Turtle', published 1601 in Robert Chester's Loves Martyr, a collection of poems by various hands. His *Sonnets, dating probably from the mid-1590s, appeared in 1609, apparently not by his agency; they bear a dedication to the mysterious 'Mr W.H.' over the initials of the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. The volume also includes the poem 'A Lover's Complaint'.

Shakespeare's plays were published by being performed. Scripts of only half of them appeared in print in his lifetime, some in short, sometimes manifestly corrupt, texts, often known as 'bad quartos'. Records of performance are scanty and haphazard: as a result dates and order of composition, especially of the earlier plays, are often difficult to establish. The list that follows gives dates of first printing of all the plays other than those that first appeared in the 1623 Folio.

Probably Shakespeare began to write for the stage in the late 1580s. The ambitious trilogy on the reign of Henry VI, now known as *Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and its sequel *Richard III, are among his early works. Parts 2 and 3 were printed in variant texts as The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (1594) and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595). Henry VI Part I may have been written after these. A variant quarto of Richard III appeared in 1597. Shakespeare's first Roman tragedy is *Titus Andronicus, printed 1594, and his earliest comedies are *The Two Gentlemen of Verona, *The Taming of the Shrew (a derivative play, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed 1594), *The Comedy of Errors (acted 1594), and *Love's Labour's Lost (printed 1598). All these plays are thought to have been written by 1595.

Particularly difficult to date is *King John: scholars still dispute whether a two-part play, The Reign of John, King of England, printed 1591, is its source or (as seems more probable) a derivative. *Richard II, printed 1597, is usually dated 1595. For some years after this, Shakespeare concentrated on comedy, in *A Midsummer Night's Dream and* The Merchant of Venice (both printed 1600), *The Merry Wives of Windsor (related to the later history plays, and printed in a variant text 1602), Much Ado about Nothing (printed 1600), *As You Like it (mentioned in 1600), and Twelfth Night, probably wirtten in 1600 or soon afterwards. *Romeo and juliet (ascribed to the mid-1590s) is a tragedy with strongly comic elements, and the tetralogy begun by Richard II is completed by three comical histories: *Henry IV Parts I and 2, each printed a year or two after composition (Part 1 1598, Part 2 1600), and *Henry V, almost certainly written 1599, printed, in a shortened, possibly corrupt, text, 1600.

In 1598 *Meres, a minor writer, published praise of Shakespeare in Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury, mentioning 12 of the plays so far listed (assuming that by Henry the 4 he means both Parts) along with another, Love's Labour's Won, apparently either a lost play or an alternative title for an extant one.

Late in the century Shakespeare turned again to tragedy. A Swiss traveller saw *Julius Caesar in London in September 1599. *Hamlet apparently dates from the following year, but was only entered in the register of the Stationers' Company in July 1602; a short text probably reconstructed from memory by an actor appeared in 1603, and a good text printed from Shakespeare's manuscript in late 1604 (some copies bear the date 1605). A play that defies easy classification is *Troilus and Cressida, probably written 1602 printed 1609. The comedy *All's Well that Ends Well, too, is probably of this period, as is *Measure for Measure, played at court in December 1604. The tragedy *Othello, played at court the previous month, reached print abnormally late in 1622. *King Lear probably dates, in its first version, from 1605; the quarto printed in 1608 is now thought to have been badly printed from Shakespeare's original manuscript. The text printed in the Folio appears to represent a revision dating from a few years later. Much uncertainty surrounds *Timon of Athens, printed in the Folio from uncompleted papers, and probably written in collaboration with T. *Middleton. *Macbeth, probably adapted by Middleton, is generally dated 1606, *Antony and Cleopatra 1606-7, and *Coriolanus 1607-9.

Towards the end of his career, though while still in his early forties, Shakespeare turned to romantic tragicomedy. Pericles, printed in a debased text 1609, certainly existed in the previous year; it is the only play generally believed to be mostly, if not entirely, by Shakespeare that was not included in the 1623 Folio. Forman, the astrologer, records seeing both *Cymbeline and *The Winter's Tale in 1611. *The Tempest was given at court in Nov. 1611.

The last three plays associated with Shakespeare appear to have been written in collaboration with J. *Fletcher. They are *Henry VIII, known in its own time as All Is True, which 'had been acted not passing 2 or three times' before the performance at the Globe during which the theatre burnt down on 29 June 1613; a lost play, *Cardenio, acted by the King's Men in 1613 and attributed to the two dramatists in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653; and *The Two Noble Kinsmen, which appears to incorporate elements from a 1613 masque by F. Beaumont, and was first printed 1634. No Shakespeare play survived in authorial manuscript, though three pages of revisions to a manuscript play, Sir Thomas *More, variously dated about 1593 or 1601, are often thought to be by Shakespeare and in his hand.

It may have been soon after Shakespeare died, in 1616, that his colleagues *Heminges and Condell began to prepare Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, better known as the First Folio, which appeared in 1623. Only once before, in the 1616 *Jonson folio, had and English dramatist's plays appeared in collected form. Heminges and Condell, or their agents, worked with care, assembling manuscripts, providing reliable printed copy when it was available, but also causing quartos to be brought wholly or partially into line with prompt-books. Their volume includes a dedicatory epistle to William and Philip Herbert, earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, an address "To the great Variety of Readers' by themselves, and verse tributes, most notably the substantial poem by Jonson in which he declares that Shakespeare 'was not of an age, but for all time'. Above all, the Folio is important because it includes 16 plays which in all probability would not otherwise have survived. Its title-page engraving, by Droeshout, is, along with the half-length figure bust by Gheerart Janssen erected in Holy Trinity, Stratford, by 1623, the only image of Shakespeare with strong claims to authenticity. The Folio was reprinted three times in the 17th cent.; the second issue (1664) of the third edition adds Pericles and six more plays. Other plays, too, have been ascribed to Shakespeare, but few scholars would add anything to  the accepted canon except part (or even all) of *Edward III, printed anonymously 1596.

Over 200 years after Shakespeare died, doubs were raised about the authenticity of his works (see BACONIAN THEORY). The product largely of snobbery—reluctance to believe that a man of humble origins wrote many of the world's greatest dramatic masterpieces—and of the desire for self-advertisement, they are best answered by the facts that the monument to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon compares him with *Socrates and *Virgil, and that Jonson's verses in the Folio identify the author of that volume as the 'Sweet Swan of Avon'.

The documents committed to print between 1593 and 1623 have generated an enormous amount of varied kinds of human activity. The first editor to try to bring them into order, reconcile their discrepancies, correct their errors, and present them for readers of his time was the dramatist *Rowe, in 1709. His 18th-cent. successors include *Pope (1723-5), *Theobald (1733), Dr *Johnson (1765), *Capell (1767-8), and *Malone (1790; third variorum 1821 by James Boswell the younger, out of Malone's edition). The most important 19th-cent. edition is the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863-6l, rev. 1891-3), on which the Globe text (1864) was based. The American New Variorum edition, still in progress, began to appear in 1871. Early in the 20th cent. advances in textual studies transformed attitudes to the text. Subsequent editions include *Quiller Couch's and J. Dover *Wilson's New Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1921-66), G. L. Kittredge's (1936), Peter Alexander's (1951) and the Riverside (1974). The Arden edition appeared originally 1899-1924; it was revised and largely replaced 1951-81. A new series, Arden 3, started to appear in 1995. The Oxford multi-volume edition (paperbacked as World's Classics) started to appear in 1982, and the New Cambridge in 1983. The Oxford single-volume edition, edited by S. Wells and G. Taylor, was published in 1986.

Great critics who have written on Shakespeare include *Dryden, Samuel Johnson, S. T. *Coleridge, *Hazlitt, A.C. *Bradley, and (lesss reverenly) G. B. *Shaw. The German Shakespeare Jahrbuch has been appearing since 1865; othe major periodicals are Shakespeare Survey (annual from 1948), Shakespeare Quarterly (from 1950), and Shakespeare Studies (annual from 1965). The standard biographical studies are E. K. *Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols., 1940), and S. *Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975). The play scripts have been translated into over 90 languages and have inspired poets, novelists, dramatists, painters, composers, choreographers, film-makers, and other artists at all levels of creative activity. They have formed the basis for the English theatrical tradition, and they continue to find realization in readers' imaginations and in richly varied transmutations, on the world's stages.




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SHAKESPEARE:  NIVEL AVANZADO

1599: Un año en la vida de William Shakespeare

—oOo— 

Interludio: Premio Nobel

Un paréntesis en los Pilares. Es época de anunciar Premios Nobel. Y el Premio Nobel 2021 corresponde a....

Abdulrazak Gurnah

novelista postcolonial anglófono (Zanzibar /Reino Unido).  El de 2020 fue para...

LOUISE GLÜCK

- La poeta estadounidense Louise Glück gana el Premio Nobel de Literatura 2020

 

An interview with Louise Glück:

Dieron en 2019 dos Premios Nobel de literatura, por diversos escándalos y jaleos que hubo en la Academia Nobel en 2017. El de 2018 a una autora feminista polaca poco conocida, que no ha levantado mayor oposición ni crítica, y el de 2019 a Peter Handke, famoso y polémico autor austríaco.

Peter Handke, a troubling choice for the Nobel Prize for literature: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/10/troubling-choice-authors-criticise-peter-handke-controversial-nobel-win

La penúltima Premio Nobel: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/10/olga-tokarczuk-the-dreadlocked-feminist-winner-the-nobel-needed

Recordemos que los dos premios Nobel anteriores, de 2016 y 2017, fueron a autores anglófonos, y es buen momento para recordarlos, ya que no entran en nuestro programa:

- El premio Nobel más reciente de las letras inglesas (2017) sigue siendo KAZUO ISHIGURO, novelista anglo-japonés. Aquí la noticia del premio en The Guardian.

- Van dos autores anglófonos seguidos, pues el anterior premio Nobel (2016) fue el cantautor Bob Dylan. Aquí la noticia en el New York Times.

Y aquí una canción cualquiera de tantas suyas:—"Thunder in the Mountain":





U otra más— SERIES OF DREAMS:

Y una reciente—Murder Most Foul (2020):

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Otros Premios Nobel anglófonos de este siglo:

2001 V. S. Naipaul

2003 J. M. Coetzee

2005 Harold Pinter

2007 Doris Lessing

2013 Alice Munro

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Marlowe and Kyd (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Marlowe and Kyd

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 1972 ed.)

Whether The Spanish Tragedy  is earlier than Tamburlaine, as some suppose, does not greatly matter, for, historically, Kyd and marlowe are not easily separable; they both attained great popularity at the same time and both fell together.

The sentimentalists can no longer make a pathetic story out of Christopher Marlowe's life (1564-93). Additions to our knowledge have left us few illusions. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, passed from the King's School in his native city to Cambridge, where he absorbed the music and the legends of Latin poetry and indulged in some unusual reading and speculation. Though he lived as wildly as Greene and Nashe, he was never one of their fellowship. He was, in fact, a "university wit" who had made himself common, and appears to be pointed at with Nashe's finger of scorn. The facts about his life and works are as obscure as the circumstances of his death. He had become notorious for "atheism", and he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford tavern at the end of a long day spent with three men of very dubious repute. Some time before, Kyd had been arrested for "mutinous sedition", but was released after Marlowe's death, having shown that heretical papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, whom he accused of blasphemy. There is no profit in speculating on what was behind Marlowe's death. He had lived dangerously and was such a man as could have written his plays. (The most reliable biography is The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 1942, by the American scholar John Bakeless). His literary life begins with an undated translation of Ovid's Amores, called Elegies by the publishers. This has more merits than is usually allowed. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe set forth on his way as a poet of classical amorism, but, unlike Shakespeare, he did not immediately find his natural magic and music. Marlowe's first original work was Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, played in 1587 or 1588 and printed anonymously in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the powerful acting of Alleyn and the superiority of the piece to the plays which had so far held the popular stage gave Tamburlaine great popularity. Yet, save in one obscure and hostile allusion by Greene, the author is nowhere named. Even Heywood, who mentions both Marlowe and Tamburlaine in his Apology for Actors, does not clearly associate them. The dramatic excesses of the play were disliked by some, but, of course, the real offence was that Marlowe succeeded. Like Swinburne he carried the young men away by the irresistible force of his style. The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, of which the first known edition is the quarto of 1604, is assumed to be his next play and is dated c. 1588; but there is good reason for refusing it a date earlier than 1592. Faustus, however, is not so complete a thing as Tamburlaine. The comic scenes are almost abjectly bad, and prove either that Marlowe's excesses of humour are worse than his excesses of tragedy, or that his play has suffered from foolish theatrical additions. Nevertheless the greatest parts of Faustus show him at the height of his poetic and dramatic magnificence. The same difficulty is presented in another play, The Jew of Malta. It is mentioned as early as 1592; but as there is no evidence that it was printed before 1633, we have a reasonable excuse for disclaiming the poorer passages as playhouse alterations. In The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (printed 1593-4), Marlowe gave us the first historical play of the type which Shakespeare followed in Richard II. The Massacre at Paris and The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage complete the list of Marlowe's accepted dramas. The first known edition of the former is undated; it was acted in 1593; the earliest text of the latter belongs to the year 1594. The Massacre, badly transmitted, has fitful power. Dido, usually dismissed with undeserved contempt, bears the name of Nashe on its title as co-author; but of Nashe's hand there is little trace.

The supposed association of Marlowe with works attributed to Shakespeare or used by Shakespeare must be barely mentioned in a survey such as this. Assertions about composite authorship are easy to make and hard to establish or refute. Still, composite authorship and revision by several hands are known facts of the time. Readers should trust their own convictions and not accept attributions too readily. In Titus Andronicus and in Henry VI there is some show of argument for Marlowe's hand. The full-bodied verse of Titus and the soaring, defiant character of Aaron might be the work of the author of Tamburlaine, but might equally be the work of a young admirer. Marlowe may have had a share in Henry VI, but the nature and extent of that share (if any) cannog be discussed briefly. At this time of day it is impossible to distinguish between the verse of Marlowe and the verse of a young poet writing with Marlowe's infectious tune in his head. Arden of Feversham is one of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays in which some students have detected Marlowe's hand. The whole question is discussed in F. P. Wilson's Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (1953).

Two other works, non-dramatic, remain for mention: Hero and Leander and Lucan's First Booke Translated Line for Line, both entered for printing in 1593. The first, unfinished, was published in 1598, afterwards with a completion by Chapman; the second appeared in 1600. The famous short poem "Come live with me and be my love" appeared first in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and next, in a fuller form, in Englands Helicon (1600). The nearly simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet's work unprinted. We gather, from various allusions, that Marlowe had friends and admirers in spite of his ill-repute.

The first duty of a historian is to dwell, not upon Marlowe's faults, but upon his achievements; and the fact to be recorded is that Marlowe is a prime creative force in English literature, and a creative force of a new kind. Till Marlowe's time no one had made possible and credible such daemonic figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas, whose tragic doom is compelled by forves within themselves and not by mischances from without. Marlowe's heroes confront the fates; they are not the sport of destiny. Marlowe himself has the self-possession of the strong man, and could use his sources creatively. His violence is native, and the inequalities in his art are the effect of his strength, not the signs of undeveloped power. His work was finished at an age at which few poets have really begun. Edward II stands by itself among his plays. There is a temptation to overpraise it. because it is the first complete historical play of the stricter type without lapses into foolery, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. But it merely seems the best because it never sinks to the worst depths of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Just as certainly it never touches their greatest heights. In passion and word-music the play is inferior to the greater pieces; it lacks, too, the touch of caricature that gives them convincing vitality. Still, it is the first successful attempt we have at the interpretation of history on the stage; for a successful history-play must interpret history, it must not merely label figures with historical names. The earlier historical plays were only another form of the cautionary historical poems in A Mirror for Magistrates. After Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II and its great successors became possible; but Marlowe could never have attained the all-embracing versatility of Shakespeare. Edward II showes his limitations as clearly as his powers. No one remembers its characters and scenes as one remembers the characters and scenes of Richard II.

Marlowe gave his age true tragedy. He also gave it tragedy's true instrument, great verse. Gorboduc had taught blank verse how to speak on the stage; Tamburlaine taught it how to sing. Indeed, it might be said that Marlowe's genius is operatic, and he obviously learned something of his music from Spenser. His famous passages are like great solos, superbly lyrical and appropriate, but not integrally woven into the texture of the drama. His dramatic blank verse unites the formal dignity of Gorboduc with the musical fluency of The Faerie Queene; and so it is rhythmically free and inventive, capable alike of magic and of majesty, always the master and never the slave of its metrical pattern. And though his daemonic figures may seem excessive in deed or aspiration, their poetic speech, however "mighty", is spontaneous, natural, and even simple.

 

Thomas Kyd (1558-94) appears to be the person held up to contempt by Nashe in his preface to Menaphon as an example of those who "could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should have need". Kyd's great offence was that he had made an immense theatrical success with The Spanish Tragedy. The extent of Kyd's Latinity may not have been great; but though he "never ware gowne in the Universitie" he was a fellow pupil with Spenser at Merchant Taylors.' His translations from the Italian and French, which seem to have annoyed Nashe specially, are quite unimportant. The Italian work is a pamphlet, and the French a version of Robert Garnier's Cornélie under the title Pompey the Great, his fair Corneliaes Tragedie (printed 1594—there is no record of its being acted). Other works attributed to him raise too many bibliographical problems to be accepted readily. The First Part of Jeronimo, extant in a quarto of 1605, is possibly a "first part" to The Spanish Tragedie, but not very probably written by Kyd himself. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (published 1592) may perhaps be his, for that is the subject of the play within the play in The Spanish Tragedie; but it is quite definitively inferior to that piece. Even the Tragedie itself is a problem. Its date is unknown. It may have been written just before 1588. By 1592 it was enjoying great popularity. Its first known quarto is dateless; but even that is described as "Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression", so it may not be the first; the second known quarto appeared in 1594, and the third in 1599. None of them gives the least clue as to the author's name; and it is not till 1612 that "M. Kid" is named casually by Heywood, as the author, in his Apology for Actors. The play out-Senecas Seneca in its wild horrors and in the excesses of its style. But there van be observed a faint resemblance to Hamlet, not merely in details of the story, but in the halting, suffering, distracvted, self-communing character of Hieronimo, who was an entirely new kind of tragic hero. The Spanish Tragedy is the first example we possess of the Hamlet type of play.

Kyd can be easily underrated. His contribution to drama is intrinsically as well as historically important. He was the first English dramatist to discover the bearing of episode and of dramatic "movement" upon character, and the first to give the audience a hint of the development that follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. We have parted company with the older declamatory tragedy of the English Senecans, with the "operatic" tragedy of Marlowe, and we are nearer the manner of Shakespeare. That the young Shakespeare knew The Spanish Tragedy is evident. Was there a closer association? What are the "whole Hamlets" of "tragicall speaches" referred to by Nashe in 1589 and apparently associated with Kyd? Did Kyd write a play upon the well-known story of Hamlet? Did Shakespeare make that play the basis of his own? Does the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) carry over some sections of an older, non-Shakespearean play? There is no certain answer to any of these questions. Perhaps in some obscure library there lies unrecognized the lost Hamlet of Kyd, or another, as the lost Fulgens and Lucres lay unrecognized till 1919. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was such a play.

The Spanish Tragedie

La frase que lanzó mil barcos al mar

 

 

—oOo—

Sidney - Astrophil and Stella

Sir Philip Sidney (Video)

Chaucer (In Our Time) - NIVEL AVANZADO

James Joyce

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature

James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and were normal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern languages at University College, Dublin.

 

From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. In his early youth he was very religious, but in his last year at Belvedere he began to reject his Catholic faith in favor of a literary mission that he saw as involving rebellion and exile. He refused to play any part in the nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students, and he created some stir by his outspoken articles, one of which, on the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, appeared in the Fortnightly Review for April 1900. He taught himself Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen and to write to him. When an article by Joyce, significantly titled The Day of the Rabblement, was refused, on instructions of the faculty adviser, by the student magazine that had commissioned it, he had it printed privately. By 1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he was already committed to a career as an exile and writer. For Joyce, as for his character Stephen Dedalus, the latter implied the former. To preserve his integrity, to avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and above all to be able to re-create with both total understanding and total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had to go abroad.

Joyce was sent to Paris after graduation, was recalled to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness, had a short spell there as a schoolteacher, then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Galway girl with no interest in literature; her native vivacity and peasant wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until Joyce's death, although they were not married until 1931. In 1920 Joyce settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks later.

Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits of sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout his thirty-six years on the Continent he was always the center of a literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus, who came out from Dublin to act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His financial position was much improved by the patronage of Mrs. Harold McCormick (Edith Rockefeller), who provided him with a monthly stipend from March 1917 until September 1919, when they quarreled, apparently because Joyce refused to submit to psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, who had been heavily endowed by her. The New York lawyer and art patron John Quinn, steered in Joyce's direction by Ezra Pound, also helped Joyce financially in 1917. A more permanent benefactor was the English feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who not only subsidized Joyce generously from 1917 to the end of his life but occupied herself indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his work.

Joyce's almost lifelong exile from his native Ireland had something paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of his writing from Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, however, so that they became microcosmos, small-scale models, of all human life, of all history, and of all geography. Indeed that was his life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing about all of human experience.

Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching with extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life. But these stories—published as Dubliners in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings are set up, and as a result, Dubliners is a book about human fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin. Furthermore, the stories are presented in a particular order so that new meanings arise from the relation between them.

Tha last story in Dubliners, The Dead, was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later, at a time when Joyce was preoccupied with the nature of artistic objectivity.  A series of jolting events frees the protagonist, Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism; the view he attains at the end is the mood of supreme neutrality that Joyce saw as the beginning of artistic awareness. It is the view of art developed by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners represents Joyce's first phase: he had come directly to terms with the meaning of his own developement as a man dedicated to writing. He did this by weaving his autobiography into a novel so finely chiseled and carefully organized, so stripped of everything superfluous, that each word contributes to the presentation of the theme: the parallel movement toward art and toward exile. A part of Joyce's first draft has been posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero (1944); a comparison between it and the final version that Joyce gave to the world, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), will show how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his material for maximum effect. The Portrait is not literally true as autobiography, although it has many autobiographical elements, but it is representatively true not only of Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in the early twentieth century.

In the Portrait Stephen worked out a theory of art that considers that art moves from the lyrical form—which is the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of emotion—through the narrative form—no longer purely personal—to the dramatic—the highest and most nearly perfect form, where "the artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." This view of art, which invokes the objectivity, even the exile, of the artist (even though the artist uses only the materials provided for him or her by his or her own life), is related to that held by the poets of the 1890s. More widely, it is related to the rejection by the artist of the ordinary world of middle-class values and activities that we see equally, tough in different ways, in Matthew Arnold's war against the Philistines and in the concept (very un-Arnoldian) of the artist as bohemian. Joyce's career belongs to that long chapter in the history of the arts in Western civilization that begins with the artist's declaring independence and ends with his or her feeling inevitable alienation. But if Joyce was alienated, as in certain ways he clearly was, he made his alienation serve his art: the kinds of writing represented by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake represent the most consummate craftsmanship put at the service of a humanely comic vision of all life. Some of Joyce's innovations in organization and style have been imitated by other writers, but these books are, and will probably remain, unique in our literature.

From the beginning, Joyce had trouble with the Philistines. Publication of Dubliners was held up for many years while he fought with both English and Irish publishers about certain words and phrases that they wished to eliminate. (It was one of the former who finally published the book). His masterpiece Ulysses was banned in both Britain and America on its first appearance in 1922; its earlier serialization in an American magazine, The Little Review (March 1918-December 1920) had had to stop abruptly when the U.S. Post Office brought a charge of obscenity against it. Fortunately, Judge Woolsey's history-making decision in favour of Ulysses in a U.S. district court on December 6, 1933, resulted in the lifting of the ban and the free circulation of the work first in America and soon afterward in Britain.


Ulysses

Ulysses is an account of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904; it is thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm of all human experience. The events are not, therefore, told on a single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity of the individual in the World. The most obvious of the devices that Joyce employs to make clear the microcosmic aspect of his story is the parallel with Homer's Odyssey: every episode in Ulysses corresponds in some way to an episode in the Odyssey. Joyce regarded Homer's Ulysses as the most "complete" man in literature, a man who is shown in all his aspects—both coward and hero, cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father and son, dignified and ridiculous; so he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and by so doing helps make him Everyman and make Dublin the world.

The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning of June 16, 1904. Stephen Dedalus (the same character we saw in the Portrait, but this is two years after our last glimpse of him there) had been summoned back to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness and now lives in an old military tower on the shore with Buck Mulligan, a rollicking medical student, and and Englishman called Haines. In the first three episodes of Ulysses, which concentrate on Stephen, he is built up as an aloof, uncompromising artist, rejecting all advances by representatives of the normal world, the incomplete man, to be contrasted later with the complete Leopold Bloom, who is much more "normal" and conciliatory. After tracing Stephen through his early-morning activitites and learning the main currents of his mind, we go, in the fourth episode, to the home of Bloom. We follow closely his every activity: attending a funeral, transacting his business, eating his lunch, walking through the Dublin streets, worrying about his wife's infidelity with Blazes Boylan—and at each point the contents of his mind, including retrospect and anticipation, are presented to the reader, until all his past history is revealed. Finally, Bloom and Stephen, who have been just missing each other all day, get together. By this time it is late, and Stephen, who has been drinking with some medical students, is the worse for liquor. Bloom, moved by a paternal feeling toward Stephen (his own son had died in infancy and in a symbolic way Stephen takes his place), follows him during subsequent adventures in the role of protector. The climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom, worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive Stephen home and gives him a meal. After Stephen's departure Bloom retires to bed—it is now two in the morning on June 17—while his wife, Molly, representing the principles of sex and reproduction on which all human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue in which her experiences as woman are remembered.





On the level of realistic description, Ulysses pulses with life and can be enjoyed for its evocation of early twentieth-century Dublin. On the level of psychological exploration, it gives a profound and moving presentation of the personality and consciousness of Leopold Bloom and (to a lesser extent) Stephen Dedalus. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level, the novel explores the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (for Bloom is both Jew and Dubliner, both exile and citizen, just as all of us are in a sense bothe exiles and citizens), and it explores the problems posed by the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and between the sexes. At the same time, through its use of themes from Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare and from literature, philosophy, and history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads Ulysses, the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one point of view, a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in which he moves, from another, a champion of kindness and justice whose humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and gives the book its positive human foundation.

Readers who come to Ulysses with expectations about the way the story is to be presented derived from their reading of Victorian novels or even of such twentieth-century novelists as Conrad and Lawrence will find much that is at first puzzling. Joyce presents the consciousness of his characters directly, without any explanatory comment that tells the reader whose consciousness is being rendered (this is the stream of consciousness method). He may move, in the same paragraph and without any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a character's action—e.g. Stephen walking along the shore or Bloom entering a restaurant—to an evocation of the character's mental response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives partly from the character's immediate situation and partly fro the whole complex of attitudes that his past history has created in him. To suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the character's consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic nature of human awareness. With a little experience, the reader learns to follow the implications of Joyce's shifts in manner and content—even to follow that at first sight bewildering passage in the "Proteus" episode in which Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but, passing the road that leads to their house, imagines the kind of conversation that would take place in his home if he had gone to visit his uncle and had then returned home and reported that he had done so. Ulysses must not be approached as though it were a novel written in a traditional manner; all preconceptions must be set aside and we must follow wherever the author leads us and let the language tell us what it has to say without our troubling whether language is being used "properly" or not.


Finnegans Wake

Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939; it took more than fourteen years to write, and Joyce considered it his masterpiece. In Ulysses he had made the symbolic aspect of the novel at least as important as the realistic aspect, but in Finnegas Wake he gave up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishman's cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberating puns a continuous expansion of meaning, the elements in the puns deriving from every conceivable source in history, literature, mythology, and Joyce's personal experience. The whole book being (on one level at least) a dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are combined, distorted, created by fitting together bits of other words, used with several different meanings at once, often drawn from several different languages at once, and fused in all sorts of ways to achieve whole clusters of meaning simultaneously. In fact, so many echoing suggestions can be found in every word or phrase that a full annotation of even a few pages would require a large book. It has taken the cooperative work of a number of devoted readers to make clear the complex interactions of the multiple puns and pun clusters, through which the ideas are projected, and every rereading reveals new meanings. It is true that many readers find the efforts of explication demanded by Finnegans Wake too arduous; some, indeed, feel that the law of diminishing returns has now begun to operate, and that the effort of both author and reader is disproportionate. Nevertheless, the book has great beauty and fascination even for the casual reader. Students are advised to read aloud—or to listen to the record of Joyce reading aloud—the extract printed here to appreciate the degree to which the rhythms of the prose assist in conveying the meaning.

To an even greater extent than Ulysses, Finnegans Wake aims at embracing all of human history. The title is from an Irish-American ballad about Tom Finnegan,  a hod carrier who falls off a ladder when drunk and is apparently killed, but who revives when during the wake (the watch by the dead body) someone spills whiskey on him. The theme of death and resurrection, of cycles of change coming round in the course of history, is central to Finnegans Wake, which derives one of its main principles of organization from the cyclical theory of history put forward in 1725 by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico held that history passes through four phases: the divine or theocratic, when people are governed by their awe of the supernatural; the aristocratic (the "heroic age" reflected in Homer and in Beowulf); the democratic and individualistic; and the final stage of chaos, a fall in into confusion startles humanity back into supernatural reverence and starts the process once again. Joyce, like Yeats, saw his own generation as the final stage awaiting the shock that will bring humans back to the first.

A mere account of the narrative line of Finnegans Wake cannot, of course, give any idea of the content of the work. If one explains that it opens with Finnegan's fall, then introduces his successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is Everyman, and whose dream constitutes the novel, that he is presented as having guilt feelings about an indecency he committed (or may have committed) at Phoenix Park, Dublin; that his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP (who is also Eve, Iseult, Ireland, the river Liffey), changes her role just as he does; that he has two sons, Shem and Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin), who represent introvert and extrovert, artist and practical man, creator and popularizer, and symbolize this basic dichotomy in human nature by all kinds of metamorphoses; and if one adds that, in the four books into which Finnegans Wake is divided (after Vico's pattern), actions comic or grotesque or sad or tender or desperate or passionate or terribly ordinary (and very often several of these things at the same time) take place with all the shifting meanings of a dream, so that characters change into others or into inanimate objects and the setting keeps shifting—if we explain all this, we still have said very little about what makes Finnegans Wake what it is. The dreamer, whose initials HCE indicate his universality ("Here Comes Everybody"), is at the same time a particular person, who keeps a pub at Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb on the river Liffey near Phoenix Park. His mysterious misdemeanor in Phoenix Park is in a sense Original Sin: Earwicker is Adam as well as a primeval giant, the Hill of Howth, the Great Parent ("Haveth Childers Everywhere" is another expansion of HCE), and Man in History. Other characters who flit and change through the book, such as the Twelve Customers (who are also twelve jurymen and public opinion) and the Four Old Men (who are also judges, the authors of the four Gospels, and the four elements), help weave the texture of multiple significance so characteristic of the work. But always it is the punning language, extending significance downward—rather than the plot, developing it lengthwise—that bears the main load of meaning.

The Internet Ulysses

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