Sinead Fitzgibbon - William Shakespeare - History in an Hour

Title Page WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE History in an Hour SINEAD FITZGIBBON

Introduction

Setting the Scene

The Childhood Years

The Family Years

The Jack-of-All-Trades

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men

The King’s Men

The Wooden O

The Works

The Autobiographical Author?

The Affluent Years

Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil

The Contested Will

Quartos, Folios and the Missing Plays

The Authorship Debate

Becoming the Bard

Appendix 1: Key Players

Appendix 2: Timeline of William Shakespeare 1564–1616

Appendix 3: An Approximate Timeline of the Complete Works c. 1590–1613

Got Another Hour?

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About the Publisher

Of all the writers this world has ever produced, William Shakespeare is among the very few who scarcely need an introduction. Widely thought to be the greatest dramatist of all time, he is also considered one of our finest poets.

With a writing career that spanned twenty-five years during the creatively febrile late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, Shakespeare produced an awe-inspiring oeuvre which heavily influenced the development of the English language. Indeed, thanks in large part to the emotional intelligence of his work and his innate understanding of the human condition, the Shakespearean canon has transcended time, literary fashion, even national identity. Although he will always be associated with England, William Shakespeare has become an integral part of world culture. Little wonder then, that his writing has endured for almost 450 years.

But despite the ubiquity of his work, and his continuing influence, very little is known about Shakespeare the man – a fact which inspires fascination and frustration in equal measure.

This, in an hour, is the history of William Shakespeare.

To understand the man, you must know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.

While this maxim, thought to be coined by the French political and military leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, can be applied to the study of almost any historical figure, it is especially true when considering the life and work of England’s revered national poet, William Shakespeare. The world into which Shakespeare was born was one characterized by unprecedented political, religious and cultural upheaval, all of which would have a profound impact on the man and the poetic and dramatic canon he would produce.

Just eighteen months before Shakespeare’s birth, England’s political system had been plunged into turmoil when Elizabeth I, who had been on the throne for just over four years, contracted smallpox. Although she survived, and would go on to reign for a further forty years, England’s political future at this stage seemed far from secure. The queen’s unmarried status and childlessness compounded matters. Although ultimately she would choose to remain unfettered by matrimonial ties, throughout the 1560s and 1570s fears abounded that English sovereignty would be jeopardized should she choose to marry a suitor from the French or Spanish royal families. This bred an atmosphere of strident patriotism mixed with a suspicious fascination about the workings of foreign courts.

Elizabeth’s ascension to the English throne in 1558 also precipitated a return to the Protestant Reformation, which had first been introduced to the country by her father, Henry VIII, and which had been briefly interrupted during the short-lived reign of Elizabeth’s predecessor and half-sister, the staunchly Catholic Mary I. This swinging of the religious pendulum from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again had inevitably caused grievous and injurious hostility between the two faiths. Tensions escalated still further when Elizabeth’s Parliament passed the ‘Act to Retain the Queen’s Majesty’s Subjects in their due Obedience’ in 1581 declaring the practice of Catholicism to be a treasonable, and therefore capital, offence. The central Christian tenet of ‘love thy neighbour’, common to both Catholicism and Protestantism, was all but forgotten as an insidious atmosphere of mutual suspicion and mistrust took hold across the land.

The sixteenth century, the world which greeted Shakespeare, was also notable for being a time of unparalleled discovery and invention which brought about an unprecedented expansion of horizons, both literally and figuratively. The previous century had seen the discovery of the Americas by Spanish explorers and the first circumnavigation of the globe by a Portuguese, Ferdinand Magellan. By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, the English were striving to emulate the successes of their European counterparts, efforts which would culminate in Sir Francis Drake successfully completing the second circumnavigation of the world on his galleon, The Golden Hind , in 1580. These discoveries and explorations had shattered many long-held ‘certainties’, including the belief that we lived in a flat world which was dominated by the European landmass, thus marking a profound shift in mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the world.