10/29/2023 0 Comments First folio othelloTypically, Shakespeare seems to have left the stage with scarcely a backward glance. As well as the nailbiting intensity of Othello or Macbeth, Shakespeare can embody the laid-back nonchalance of the English amateur. The young Shakespeare’s message to his audiences seems to be that there might be other things to do than write plays. Even Twelfth Night is subtitled What You Will. There is something appealingly English, even offhand, about his titles: As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well. His plays seem to tell us that here is a great writer who is happily steeped in low culture and the English countryside as much as court politics and affairs of state. The motto of the Globe, his theatre, was Totus mundus agit histrionem (The whole world is a playhouse).Īt the same time, as a glover’s son and a grammar-school boy from Stratford, Shakespeare projects a uniquely English, and rather modest, sensibility. From the first, he was always pitching his work on the biggest stage imaginable. More than Dante for the Italians, Goethe for the Germans, or Pushkin for Russia, Shakespeare remains an icon for English-speaking peoples throughout the world. The plays, often rooted in ancient myth, in which these theatrical legends appear, have become archetypal stories, too. He has populated our imagination like no other writer: Hamlet, Juliet’s Nurse, Macbeth, Mistress Quickly, Lear, Othello, Shylock, Portia, Prospero and Romeo … the list of classic archetypes stretches out to the crack of doom ( Macbeth), a cast of characters perhaps more real to us than any others in our literature. Elsewhere, words and phrases from his plays have become seeded into the titles of countless novels and films from Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) and The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner) to The Glimpses of the Moon (Edith Wharton) and The Dogs of War (Frederick Forsyth).Īs well as giving the English language a kick-start, Shakespeare can also conjure characters apparently out of nowhere, giving “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”. His unforgettable phrase-making recurs on the lips of millions who do not realise they are quoting Shakespeare: “a fool’s paradise” “the game is up” “dead as a doornail” “more in sorrow than in anger” “cruel, only to be kind” and dozens more. Shakespeare’s plots, which are brilliantly polyvalent, continue to inspire ceaseless adaptations and spin-offs. But he is also the master of the simplest construction, such as Henry’s devastating rebuke to Falstaff (“I know thee not, old man”) or Leontes touching Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale (“O, she’s warm”), three words that any child could understand.Įvery generation continues to be in his debt. He’s “a man of fire-new words” (“equivocal”, “prodigious” and “antipathy”, for instance, get their first citations from him), with a vocabulary of 30,000 words. This dynamic duality runs throughout Shakespeare’s life and work, making him an androgynous and timeless shape-shifter who is impossible to pin down. A few lines later, however, Jonson contradicts himself, declaring that his rival “was not of an age, but for all time”. His friend Ben Jonson, addressing “the Reader”, initially says that “gentle Shakespeare” is the “soul of the age”, placing him firmly in a metropolitan context, as “the wonder of our stage”. Shakespeare’s double life, as both an English and a universal artist (poet and playwright), begins with the First Folio of 1623. Four hundred years on, his unique gift to our culture, language and imagination has been to universalise the experience of living and writing in late 16th-century England and to have become widely recognised, and loved, across the world as the greatest playwright. That heartfelt response is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most astonishing achievement.
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