уильям шекспир - King Lear

The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little more than a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.

About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies . It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:

And art alive still while thy book doth live

And we have wits to read and praise to give …

He was not of an age, but for all time!

SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS:

A CHRONOLOGY

1589–91

? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship)

1589–92

The Taming of the Shrew

1589–92

? Edward the Third (possible part authorship)

1591

The Second Part of Henry the Sixth , originally called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible)

1591

The Third Part of Henry the Sixth , originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable)

1591–92

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

1591–92; perhaps revised 1594

The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably co-written with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)

1592

The First Part of Henry the Sixth , probably with Thomas Nashe and others

1592/94

King Richard the Third

1593

Venus and Adonis (poem)

1593–94

The Rape of Lucrece (poem)

1593–1608

Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover’s Complaint , a poem of disputed authorship)

1592–94/1600–03

Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)

1594

The Comedy of Errors

1595

Love’s Labour’s Lost

1595–97

Love’s Labour’s Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)

1595–96

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

1595–96

The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

1595–96

King Richard the Second

1595–97

The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier)

1596–97

The Merchant of Venice

1596–97

The First Part of Henry the Fourth

1597–98

The Second Part of Henry the Fourth

1598

Much Ado About Nothing

1598–99

The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)

1599

The Life of Henry the Fifth

1599

“To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)

1599

As You Like It

1599

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

1600–01

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version)

1600–01

The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99)

1601

“Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])

1601

Twelfth Night, or What You Will

1601–02

The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida

1604

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

1604

Measure for Measure

1605

All’s Well That Ends Well

1605

The Life of Timon of Athens , with Thomas Middleton

1605–06

The Tragedy of King Lear

1605–08

? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy , mostly by Thomas Middleton)

1606

The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)

1606–07

The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

1608

The Tragedy of Coriolanus

1608

Pericles, Prince of Tyre , with George Wilkins

1610

The Tragedy of Cymbeline

1611

The Winter’s Tale

1611

The Tempest

1612–13

Cardenio , with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)

1613

Henry VIII (All Is True) , with John Fletcher

1613–14

The Two Noble Kinsmen , with John Fletcher

THE HISTORY BEHIND THE

TRAGEDIES: A CHRONOLOGY

FURTHER READING

AND VIEWING

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Booth, Stephen, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (1983). Not for beginners, but very penetrating.

Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Still worth reading a century after publication.

Cavell, Stanley, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (1987). A skeptical philosopher’s reading; still less for beginners, but so full of deep insight that it has claims to be among the best pieces ever written on the play.

Colie, Rosalie L., and F. T. Flahiff, Some Facets of “King Lear”: Essays in Prismatic Criticism (1974). An unusually strong collection of critical essays.

Danby, J. F., Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1949). Contexts for Edmund.

Dollimore, Jonathan, “King Lear and Essentialist Humanism,” in Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (1984). Inflected by neo-Marxist cultural politics.

Elton, William R., King Lear and the Gods (1966). Useful contextualization in the intellectual history of Shakespeare’s time.

Empson, William, “Fool in Lear,” in The Structure of Complex Words (1951). Superb essay on a key word.

Goldberg, S. L., An Essay on King Lear (1974). Consistently thoughtful.

Greenblatt, Stephen, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988). Inventive account of why Shakespeare used an anti-Popish treatise for the mad language of Poor Tom.

Heilman, R. B., This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (1963). Good account of image patterns.