William Shakespeare

The last quarter of the 16ft century saw an outburst of English drama whose true gem was indeed William Shakespeare (1564—1616). To the  reader, the coming of Shakespeare seems miraculous, if not mysterious.

Given the fact that very little is known about his personality, some people doubt that he had ever written anything at all — there must have been some other author, they argue.

In fact, Shakespeare's emergence was powerful, but in no way surprising. By the time he was born, England had a steady cultural basis for a new era in literature. In the early 16th century John Colett, an Oxford professor, introduced a new standard for school education, under which children of common people were taught Latin classical literature like Virgil and Cicero.

The recently invented printing press allowed even poor people to have text-books. It was also throughout the 16th century that many pieces of ancient and contemporary foreign literature were translated into English and published in hundreds, even thousands of copies. So things had changed a lot since the

Middle Ages, and literature was mirroring the change. There were at least three major playwrights starting a bit earlier than Shakespeare — Robert Greene, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, all of them very popular in Shakespeare's lifetime (unluckily, they all died young, and Shakespeare had the advantage of outliving them).

If we look mto the background of Shakespeare 's works, he seems almost shockingly unoriginal. There is not a single genre or device he created on his own. The blank-verse tragedy first appeared on the English stage three years before his birth; blank verse itself was invented by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1540s; the sonnet in English dates back to 1530s, and its 'Shakespearean' form was also established by Surrey. And of 36 plays written by Shakespeare, 32 are based on stories found in earlier literature. Where, then, is there any room for genius?

There are two things left which are basic for literature: style and characters. What makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is how he gives us insight the human mind through his use of language. His characters are not just speaking on stage — they are always thinking, and their speech presents the very flow of their thought: embarrassed, frightened, playful etc. Unlike most playwrights before the 20th century, Shakespeare is not interested in creating 'types', or sets of fixed features — his task is rather to explore the changing states of mind in different personalities. That is why Shakespeare's characters look so lively and modern today.

If one needs to see how Shakespeare 's method works, Macbeth is an obvious choice. The shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies and one of his greatest works, it would have never been known if Shakespeare's friends had not published it in a posthumous collection of 1623. (Hamlet, for instance, was published twice in Shakespeare's lifetime). It is a story of a legendary Scottish person who murdered many people in order to ascend to the throne. However, the original story did not have Macbeth punished immediately—he reigned for many years. Shakespeare rendered the legend so that his distaste for amoral policy became apparent. Shakespeare's Macbeth is a naturally good man who is, through his own choice, transformed into a monster — and ruined.