Lecture 02

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:21]Welcome learners to this four weeks online course on William Shakespeare titled understanding Shakespearean drama tragedy and comedy. I am Dr. Shika Singh assistant professor from department of English faculty of arts banaras hindu university. I'm here today to discuss the life and works of William Shakespeare. Let us begin with lecture two Shakespeare's life and works. Let us also have a look at the session objectives. So today in this course we will be looking at the life and early career of William Shakespeare. We will also be looking at some of the major works that he wrote uh in his time. We will be looking at the publication of his first compiled uh uh we will also be looking at the publication of his first compiled uh work which is the first folio which was interestingly not done by him and uh later in the session we will be looking at some of the critical comments made by readers and critics uh over the years. So let us begin today's lecture. We know very little of William Shakespeare. There are facts and figures. There are some data which are available to us and most of the biographies that have been written about the bard is mostly conjectural. That means most writers have guessed and imaginatively created the life of the author from these different facts and data that they have collected over the years. There are few dates and years that we are sure of and uh here I present to you some of them. So he was born uh in April 23rd 1564.

[00:01:58]uh in a place called Stratford upon Aan in England. We also know that he was from a wellto-do family. Uh initially prosperous but later on fallen into some dire situations. Uh as a result he could complete his early education quite well and we also know that he studied Bible, Latin, rhetoric, classical literature and history. But sadly he could not complete his education and had to work as an apprentice for his father in order to support his father's income. Uh he was married at the age of 18 in 1582.

[00:02:34]Uh there is a gap in his life history between 1585 to 1592. We do not know much about his whereabouts but it is believed that by 1592 he had established himself in London as a promising actor and a playwright. So again critics believe uh critics and historians believe that in 1587 uh he had reached London and he had joined Richard Burbage's company uh which was a playing uh company or a theater company and by 1592 he was a well-known figure in the field of drama and theater. How do we know about this?

[00:03:14]We know about this through a pamphlet that was published in 1592 by Robert Green, another playwright and critic, where Green accuses this upstart crow of pretending to be a high flown playwright and dramatist, not delivering up to his um merits. And uh Green is supposedly warning the other university ws or the other professional playwrights and dramatists to be wary of this uh new kid on the block. We also uh find his name being mentioned as an actor in Ben Johnson's play every man in his humor and seness.

[00:03:51]He might have worked for more than one theater company in the early years of his career but 1594 onwards his name was only associated with a playing company called the playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's men. uh this particular theater company is important because this company would later on become the king's men under James the first rule. Now owing to the nature of theater and performances in the 16th century every playwright actor or a theater company needed a patron and Shakespeare too was patronized by some of the very wealthy and prominent men of Europe of uh the Elizabeth and Jacobian society. So among his patrons are Henry Wrightley uh also known as Earl of Southampton and the famous fair youth of Shakespeare's sonets. Uh we also know that King James patronized and funded many of the productions of the plays in the later years. Uh this was important because during the lean years especially when uh there was an outbreak of plague in England uh the writers the playwrights had to fall back on the patrons for funding and expenses and this was also the time when Shakespeare wrote some of his most remarkable poetical works like Venus and Adonis Rape of Lucree which we will be discussing again in the later part of the session. In 1595 uh we find Shakespeare reaching another milestone of his career. He becomes a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's men the leading company uh that was producing plays at that time.

[00:05:37]So we find a natural trajectory in the life and career of Shakespeare. Earlier he trained as an actor. He then uh he then majored into a playwright rewriting old plays and adapting uh the plays of other playwrights and then finally at the later stage of his career we find him writing plays experimenting new styles and being creative and inventive and becoming the Shakespeare that we now know of. Another thing we need to remember is that Shakespeare did not always write his plays. um none of his plays can be considered original in that sense of that term. Uh what I mean to say is most of his plays are either collaborations with other playrs, some of them are reworkings of historical uh uh historical incidents. Um they there are also adaptations and uh a majority of them were just reworking of what was already uh known and existed in uh the Elizabeth and Jacobian period. So this idea of originality and original authorship is something which is very tricky when we discuss William Shakespeare.

[00:06:48]But one thing we do know of is that Shakespeare was a master in uh understanding the general traits and preferences of his audience. So he reveled in giving the audience members what they wanted and that is also one of the reasons why he was so popular during his time and it's still quite a popular figure in today's times. Shakespeare's like I said borrowed from a number of sources and here I've mentioned some of the sources uh that went into influencing his works. So these resources included classical texts like ovitz metamorphosis plutarch's lives, English chronicles or uh records of histories like Hollandshed's chronicles Italian novellas and romances works of fiction like Mandelo and Cynthio as well as uh plays and dramas that were being produced by other playwrights. For example, uh kids, the Spanish tragedy was major influence uh behind the publication behind sorry uh the performance of uh his most famous play Hamlet.

[00:07:53]Uh a little also needs to be said about uh the playing company where he worked.

[00:07:59]uh his company Lord Chamberlain's men uh was heavily favored by Elizabeth and later on it was also patronized by James I where they took the name the king's pen. Uh remember at that time it was a rare honor to be uh afforded such a title and it was only Shakespeare's company who had the license to perform anywhere in the country without prior permission. the Globe, the famous theater house which existed uh which was interestingly built using the remains of the first English playhouse which was established in 1576 in London. The theater uh was commonly associated with the name of William Shakespeare. He uh put on most of his plays over there and later on he also became a shareholder and the Lord Chamberlain's men uh exclusively uh began performing in the globe. By 1610 it is noted that he had amassed significant amount of wealth. By 1613 he had almost retired back uh at Stratford upon Aan. Given this brief career or uh rather I should say the brief information that we have uh regarding his career uh his contribution towards theater and poetry uh seems to be immense.

[00:09:18]uh some of the critics and scholars have divided uh his works uh on the basis of uh chronology that is when the works were published. Other writers have uh decided to uh classify his works on the basis of genres whereas certain other scholars have decided to um classify his works on the basis of style or themes.

[00:09:40]So there is no uh unitary uh decision on how the works uh on how the works should be read or on how uh we need to classify these works. But if you go by the chronological output uh there are few divisions that can be seen here. So majorly his works uh majorly his career as a writer as a poet and as a dramat as a dramatist can be divided into four brief uh periods. the early experimental period uh where he was mostly borrowing from other sources, reworking on prior existing works uh adapting classics for the English stage and so on and so forth. These were works which were not original but uh were already there and Shakespeare had a major role in readapting, experimenting and presenting it in front of the audience.

[00:10:35]uh these works consist of some of his historical plays like Henry V 6 and uh comedies like loves labels lost and so on. The second period uh of his career belongs to the period when he was amassing all the skills he was refining his style of writing. He was narrowing down on the themes and the ideas to present in his works and he was expanding upon the conventions that he had received from uh from the theater conventions and from the other writers.

[00:11:09]This period of growth and development includes some of his famous comedies uh Midsummer's Nightdream Merchant of Venice which we will be looking at in the future as well as some of his early tragedies like Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet.

[00:11:24]The most important period of his career is when he wrote his most famous tragedies namely the namely Oll Hamlet uh McBth and King Leia. This is considered to be by most of the critics as one of the epidome of uh as epidome of English playwriting and uh and an epidome uh or the zenith to which uh uh any playwright could reach. Uh the later years consist of works like the tempest and the winter's tale. These works are not uh something these works are where the writer is not so interested in delineating the character or the style or the plot of the play but he is more interested in developing the germ of an idea. For example, in the play The Tempest, he works on the theme of forgiveness and retribution without uh giving much thought about uh the plot of the play or the manner in which the characters are uh presented or other technicalities of the play. Uh even though uh he does not uh even though he does not spend so much time uh explaining the nuances of the play, we find him here to be more confident and more sure of his craft than he could ever be. Let us also spend some time uh on some of these works uh and note down the trajectory uh which led to development and growth of the playright.

[00:12:53]So uh even though our course does not deal with poetry, let us uh briefly take an account of the kind of works uh he did when it comes to poetry. uh there are five uh publications which are associated with him even though most of these uh manuscripts were published in private and some of these were published later uh after his death.

[00:13:16]Chronologically speaking the first uh poetry work was Venus and Adonis. Uh it was followed by the rape of Lucrice in 1594. Then comes the most famous uh work of Shakespeare in poetry the sonnetss.

[00:13:31]uh it is followed by the phoenix and the turtle and the last a lover's complaint.

[00:13:36]What you can see here if you look at the slide that most of these works excluding the sonnetss are basically recreations of classical myths and stories. And this tells us something about the early years of Shakespeare where he was reading uh these classical works trying to grasp uh the notions and conventions of classical drama and then adapting and recreating those same ideas and uh effects for uh the English stage. when it when we come to drama. Uh again uh the first folio like I said the first folio which is one of the most uh important compilations of works of uh Shakespeare and we will be discussing this again. The first folio divides uh his works into three categories on the basis of the genres.

[00:14:28]Now again I need to remind you that uh even in the case of Shakespeare a play which is ideally classified as a comedy might also be read as a tragedy if you just shift your point of perspective and a very good example of course is the merchant of Venice. I mean if the play seen from the perspective of Porsche it is a romantic comedy but if seen from the perspective of the character of Shillock it appears to be somewhat of a tragedy. So while it is beneficial to go by these genres, we should always keep in mind that this is not what Shakespeare had authorized or even recommended, it is just something that we have done for our own benefit uh so that we can better understand or place and study um his works. So going by the genres uh the first set of plays that we come across are the historical plays and again uh chronologically speaking historical plays can be divided into early histories, middle histories and later histories. So among early histories you can see on the slide are Henry V 6th, Henry V 6 part 2, Henry V 6 part 3, Richard III. Middle histories include Richard the 2, Henry IV part one, King John, Henry IV, part two, Henry 5th, and later history includes Henry VII. I've purposefully not included uh the Roman historical plays here because they are more aptly uh understood as tragedies. Again, the problem of viewing Shakespeare uh Shakespeare's plays uh within airtight uh genres. Most scholars believe that some of the most significant work uh that was done by Shakespeare was in the field of tragedies and again chronologically speaking tragedies can be divided into early tragedies and later tragedies. Again this is not a comment upon uh the style or excellence of these plays. It is just that that the early plays reflect more of uh a kind of uncertaintity and a sense of in immaturity in the writing style and uh treatment of the subjects. The later tragedies are more mature. The writer appears to be more confident and the themes and the values touched upon are more comprehensive and profound. So the early tragedies consist of Titus and Ronicus, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. Later tragedies include Hamlet, Oello, King Leia, McBth, Anthony and Cleopatra, uh, Corolanis and Timon of Aens which was also possibly co-written with uh, Thomas Middleton. Next we come to comedies. Comedies uh, can be divided into four different categories. Now this is an interesting division because we are not only looking at these plays in terms of chronology but also in terms of the plot and structure of the play. uh Shakespeare was adept in writing comedies and most of his plays can be classified as a comedy. It was also one of the genres in which he experimented the most in which uh he created uh his own versions of comedies and in which he quite deviated from the classical models and the traditional models uh which for scholars and readers like us present a unique problem. How do we understand structure? How do we understand uh or interpret the plays and how do we classify them? Uh most scholars tend to believe that the early comedies were imitations of either classical drama or they were reworkings of already existing plays. So the early comedies like the two gentlemen of Verona, the comedy of errors, the taming of the shrew, love's labels lost, Midsummer's Nightdream, The Merchant of Venice can all be traced back to certain existing uh manuscripts, works of fictions, classical plays uh and other such materials that were there. Uh what Shakespeare did was reuse these materials and present it in the form of a drama. Obviously he also experimented and tried on uh different tropes, different techniques, different ways of presentation of the character so on and so forth. So these are not just mere imitations of uh early existing plays but also the stage of experimentation and trying out of different uh elements and components to create his own style of writing. Um if we proceed ahead we come across the middle comedies or also known as the mature comedies of Shakespeare. These are considered to be one of the most uh accomplished works of Shakespeare when it comes to comedies and these works include much to do about nothing as you like it and the 12th night. Uh what is different about these comedies uh is that Shakespeare has now developed his own style, his own vision and uh we specifically uh see this in the way the female protagonists are presented to us in the way he contrasts between uh the countryside or the forest and the city and also evokes values of um freedom and restraint, vitality and life and death and uh discipline so on and so forth.

[00:19:50]The conflict between the younger generation and the older generation uh the theme of self-nowledge and introspection.

[00:19:57]Such uh profound ideas are reflected in his mature comedies. But again a word of advice, it is not that the earlier comedies were devoid of profine profound ideas and thoughts. It is just that that Shakespeare finds a more truer version uh and he is more able better able to express his vision in the metal comedies. We next come across a particular type of plays which he wrote between 16003 and 165 known as the problem plays or the dark comedies.

[00:20:29]This particular term has been uh adopted from the late 19th century plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henry Gibson.

[00:20:37]Yes, it's quite a bit of a uh contradiction. But the reason why we use problem place, the term problem plays for these plays is that these particular plays tend to interrogate a specific social or political issue. And it is almost as if the playwright is trying to uh think about uh the issue so as to find a resolution to these social problems. Uh therefore the name problem plays such plays are generally speaking more philosophical in nature. Uh they're more serious even though at the end it tends to hark back to the traditional structure of a comedy and end in marriage and laughter but you cannot ignore the air of uh seriousness and the air of gloom in these plays. The later plays also known as tragy comedies are sometimes classified as a separate genre altogether. But uh for the sake of convenience I've added it here as a part of comedy. Why have I done this? Because uh when we discuss later these type of plays uh you would know that tragic comedies again uh a specific type of play which became very uh very common in uh the Elizabethan period usually would begin as a tragedy uh with some uh forboarding uh event some uh attempt at murder a kidnapping scene some serious crime or grave injustice being done to the character. It would be moving towards it would appear that it is moving towards a tragedy towards uh uh towards a very catastrophic incident.

[00:22:15]However, the playwright would use providence or fate or some other reason so as to provide a resolution to the conflict and finally end the play in marriage or a happy ending. So, uh such plays sometimes have been uh classified as an entire genre altogether. But uh it would be fair to say that they can also be studied as uh a kind or a type of comic plays of Shakespeare.

[00:22:44]We also have uh the two noble kinsmen a play which uh he wrote quite later in his years uh with John Fletcher which can again be classified as a tragic comedy.

[00:22:58]Uh I next come to one of the most important uh uh one of the most important topic when uh reading Shakespeare and that is the first folio.

[00:23:10]Now Shakespeare did not write his plays to get them published. Uh he was not a writer. He was a performer. He was an actor. He was a a theater manager. He was a dramatist. He had no intention uh of publishing his plays. uh throughout his years his plays were published not by him but by the theater company by other people and they claimed to uh be the authorized version of the play. Most of these plays uh or most of these versions varied uh and and differed from each other. It was only in 1623 some uh 7 years after the death of the dramatist that a compiled version of all the works of Shakespeare. Again uh by all the works I mean uh 36 plays were published together in a compiled version called the first folio. Now this uh compilation excluded some of the plays but it presented the plays in a manner in which it had not been presented before. This compilation was done by two actors who claimed that they had the authorized version of the plays of Shakespeare. Uh their names were John Heming and Henry Condell and they included 36 plays in uh their uh publication. This was the first folio.

[00:24:32]Another interesting contribution that the first folio made towards the study of Shakespearean works is that first folio classified uh the entire uh the entire works of Shakespeare into three categories namely histories or chronicle plays, tragedies and comedies. The same structure that we followed earlier in our lecture. At the same time, it also provided us with a certain I would not say the exact date of performance and writing of the plays, but with a certain indication on when the plays were performed and uh when uh when was the first version of the play published. Uh there are of course lot of inaccuracies.

[00:25:11]There are a lot of mistakes in the first folio. The printing technique and the printing conventions uh were very different in the Jacobian times than they are today. uh often the type uh often the type setter would run out of uh the type sets or uh those printing blocks and then he would use some different uh print blocks to print the play which would result in inaccuracies and u uh misprintings. So a lot of these problems uh occurred but for uh the for the future generations it was a huge opportunity in terms of the availability of the works of uh the bard at one place in a compiled format which was never done before. It was not even conceived by Shakespeare during his times. So in spite of all the shortcomings and flaws and faults in the first folio, it still remains remarkable uh in terms of what it presents to us and the information and insight it gives us into uh the works of Shakespeare. Uh we come to the last section of the lecture where we will look briefly into the critical reception of William Shakespeare over the years. Now there is something we need to remember. These commentaries and readings and interpretations of Shakespeare tell us less about who Shakespeare was and uh what were his ideals and uh what influenced him and more about the age uh the preferences of that age and what they thought unique and interesting about Shakespeare. So uh Shakespearean studies and Shakespearean reception is an entirely uh different field of scholarship altogether and most uh scholarship begin uh with his contemporaries like Thomas Nash and Ben Johnson. Now if you remember I told you at the beginning of the lecture Thomas Nash uh was initially very skeptical of him and published uh his uh published his very satirical pamphlet on him denouncing him as a playwright but later on he was made to uh uh accept the genius of the playwright. Similarly, Ben Johnson who in his own plays uh quite uh was known to follow the classical traditions and who very famously uh came up with his own idea of comedy of humors considered uh Shakespeare to one of the most important playwrights of uh not just England but u uh of of the entire literary fraternity. He famously said he was not of an age but for all time. Uh meaning that even though he was a product of his time. He wrote in late 16th and early 17th century his legacy would continue and people would often find something uh to read and come back to uh even in the future years and which has uh basically stood the test of time.

[00:28:12]Coming to uh Johnson's views on Shakespeare, even though Johnson accepted uh Shakespeare's skills in characterization, poetic imagination and ability to capture human nature, he also uh criticized Shakespeare for not following the classical formalist tradition and uh for specially deviating from the unities uh famously given by Aristotle in his poetics. A similar line of critique uh is found in 17th century and early 18th century especially the neocclassical writers. So we have writers like uh writers like John Ryden who in essay of dramatic poy wrote he was naturally learned. He needed not the spectacles of books to read nature. He looked inwards and found her there. That means he did not need to follow the classical tradition because what was taught through books he gleaned instinctually naturally through his own um uh imagination and uh vitality. Um again this did not stop Dryen from uh critiquing him on the looseness of the plot and again on uh uh on the manner in which he shunned the classical traditions. uh Samuel Johnson, the late uh the late neocclassical uh writer again uh reiterated the words of Dryen and Johnson and said that Shakespeare will be known for the truthfulness uh for his truthfulness to human nature uh the moral instructions that he provides um and uh the mastery in use of language and diction. Uh he also famously said that he's above all rules. He's the fountain of nature and the model of humanity. Uh again harking back to the same idea that there are certain traditions and conventions that exist which any mediocre writer or playwright would do well to follow. But since Shakespeare was so gifted, he probably did not need it. uh it's a very balanced uh kind of criticism which is labeled at Shakespeare in the sense these critics are pointing out that while he needed to follow these conventions that it would have been better had he followed these conventions um the genius of his or or or the creativity of his more than compensated for all the deviations and uh uh lack of learning that he showed in his works.

[00:30:46]The romantics were of course much more sympathetic and uh admired Shakespeare much more than the neocclassical writers. Uh critics like Ceridge Hazlit Lamb have published essays and writings on works of Shakespeare. Craridge famously uh praised Shakespeare for his use of imagination combining it with ethical values and learnings in his works. uh Hazelit said that Shakespeare provides us with a mirror to life and lamb admired him for his compassion and universality. Next we come to the modern period and this is where we notice diversions in how Shakespeare is read and interpreted. Um one thing to be noted here is that the early 20th century criticism mostly focused on historical and textual scholarship which means uh most of the works either focused on the social background on the social political conditions or on the autobiography of the writer in order to interpret the place or uh they tended to be on uh the textual uh uh variations uh the different versions comparison of the different versions uh in trying to find about the author uh the authoral version of the text so on and so forth. Um one name stands out in 20th century uh Shakespearean criticism and that is AC Bradley uh whose famous work on Shakespeare's tragedies uh is considered to be a landmark and one of the fundamental texts uh in reading uh the ethos and structure of uh Shakespearean tragedies.

[00:32:27]uh Bradley famously analyzed uh the psychological development of the lead characters, the tragic flaw in the characters. Um he also commented on the structure and the poetic style of Shakespeare's writings and uh often when we read tragedies, it is AC Bradley that we uh fall back upon. Moving on, we come across TS Elliott, a very famous modernist, critic and poet and dramatist. Um, interestingly, Elliot uh had a problem with some uh structural and stylistic aspects of Shakespeare's plays. Um, so his uh basis of critique of Shakespeare of his basis of critique of Shakespeare's plays was the inconsistency in the structure and form of the plays. Uh interestingly he wrote uh interestingly he wrote an essay in 1919 Hamlet and his problem where he called Hamlet an artistic failure. The later half of the 20th century consists of different approaches to William Shakespeare. Uh some of which uh focuses on uh aspects of style and structure and others on thematics and uh uh social and political values that the play seems to uh that the play seemed to express. So uh foremost among them is Northroof Fry uh the famous Canadian critic uh who used archetypes and myths to study uh the plays of Shakespeare. Not just uh the themes and motives in Shakespeare's plays but also the origin and structure of his plays. We also have new historicism led by Stephen Greenblat. uh again a major critic when it comes to uh when we come to Shakespearean studies uh who uh provided a a different reading of Shakespearean plays based on the social political conditions uh partly inspired by Marxist readings uh partly inspired by cultural studies and worked out how the playwright uh created uh the social uh how the playwright was influenced by the social political conditions.

[00:34:41]and how uh the playwright also intervened in uh the social political ideas of the uh of the Elizabeth and Jacobian times. We also have feminist critics like Janet Adelman uh Copilia Khan Lisa Jardine uh who explored gender power and patriarchal themes in the place. Uh we also have critics like Bruce R. Smith and Stephven Oril who uh use uh the who uh study sexual performances and uh gendered roles and queer desire in the works of Shakespeare. Most importantly for us uh postcolonial criticism has uh led the way in examining uh the manners in which power plays and power relations came to be represented in the plays of Shakespeare. And uh this especially applies to his plays like The Tempest where um the relationship between Prospero and Caliban uh reeks more of colonial ties and imperial uh subjugation than of uh of of of a friendly uh and sympathetic master and uh and uh indebted uh servant. uh postcolonial criticism uh has been led by uh scholars and critics of the global south as well as uh scholars from Europe who have pointed out uh how race relations uh how uh uh how the uh how race relations how outsiders and how uh certain communities and classes of people were represented in the plays and how sometimes Shakespeare deviates from popular ideas and uh conventions and give agency and gives agency to these characters. Uh remember this particular idea of power play and uh of power politics and giving agency to outsiders and the study of exoticism and alienation and uh ideas of imperialism and colonialism would appear again in the play that we are about to study in this course merchant of Venice.

[00:37:03]uh with that we uh conclude today's lecture. So in today's uh lectures we briefly dealt on the life and early career of William Shakespeare. We looked at some of the major plays uh that he wrote. Uh we also looked at the different classifications of his plays.

[00:37:22]We also discussed the publication of the first folio, the benefits it afford us and uh the problems uh in the first folio. We also uh in a very brief manner touched upon the critical reception of Shakespeare over the years, noting down uh the various ideals and conventions that were prized in those uh ages or periods. And uh we finally noted down the different approaches that have um uh the different approaches that have uh uh made Shakespearean study such a fertile ground for study and uh interpretation.

[00:38:01]Uh with that I hope uh you would reflect on some of these questions that today's lecture presents us uh such as uh how did the origin and early career of Shakespeare uh shape his works and uh uh how some of the major works of William Shakespeare have been classified. uh you should also think and reflect on um how the first folio has uh made an impact on Shakespearean studies and how the future readings and interpretations of William Shakespeare has affected our own understanding of uh the B of Avon. And lastly, we need to reflect upon how the different ages read Shakespeare, how they responded to Shakespeare, um what qualities or what ideas they found worth uh complimenting and what uh parts and constituents of his plays were critiqued uh to give us uh a brief insight into the complexity as well as the ficandity of uh reading and interpretation of William Shakespeare's plays. So with that I would take you leave. Uh with that we come to the end of the lecture.

[00:39:16]I hope you had a fruitful time uh listening to the lecture and I hope to see you again in the next lecture where where we would discuss uh some of the other important aspects of Shakespeare's plays and we would delve deeper into two of his most important uh plays uh visually uh McBth and the merchant of Venice. Thank you.