Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564--1616) occupies a unique position in English literature: his works are simultaneously the most frequently studied and the most frequently performed texts in the English language. A-Level English Literature requires detailed, rigorous engagement with at least one Shakespeare play, and strong answers demonstrate knowledge of Shakespeare's language, dramatic structure, thematic preoccupations, and the critical traditions that have shaped his reception. This section provides comprehensive coverage of Shakespeare's context, language, major plays, and critical heritage.

Shakespeare's Context

Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre

Shakespeare's career spanned the reigns of Elizabeth I (1558--1603) and James I (1603--1625), a period of extraordinary political, religious, and cultural change. The theatre of this period was a commercial, popular entertainment, not the elite art form it later became. Key features of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical context include:

• Playing companies: Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), one of two principal playing companies in London. Companies were organised cooperatively, with sharers (investor-actors), hired men, and apprentices. The company system meant that plays were written for a specific ensemble of actors, and roles were tailored to their strengths.
• The Globe Theatre: Built in 1599, the Globe was an open-air, polygonal playhouse with a thrust stage that projected into the audience. The absence of artificial lighting meant performances took place in daylight; the minimal scenery meant that setting was conveyed through language and a few portable properties. The Globe's architecture -- the trapdoors, the gallery, the canopy (the "heavens") -- shaped the staging possibilities available to Shakespeare.
• Audience: The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre attracted a socially mixed audience: aristocrats in the gallery, "groundlings" standing in the yard, and citizens of the middling sort. This heterogeneous audience shaped Shakespeare's practice: his plays combine elevated poetry with colloquial prose, complex philosophical argument with physical comedy, and courtly intrigue with popular entertainment.
• Censorship: All plays had to be licensed by the Master of the Revels, who could demand cuts or prohibit performance. Political and religious sensitivity shaped what could be represented on stage. Shakespeare's history plays, for example, navigate the politics of Tudor legitimisation with considerable tact.
• Boy actors: Female roles were played by boy actors, a convention that has significant implications for the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's plays. The device of cross-dressing -- women disguised as men, played by boy actors -- creates layers of gender performativity that are central to plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It.

The Renaissance Context

Shakespeare wrote during the English Renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural ferment influenced by:

• Humanism: The revival of classical learning and the emphasis on human potential and individual agency. Humanist education -- grounded in Latin and Greek literature, rhetoric, and moral philosophy -- shaped Shakespeare's literary culture.
• The Reformation: Henry VIII's break with Rome (1534) and the subsequent religious upheavals created a culture of theological debate and uncertainty. Shakespeare's plays engage with questions of conscience, authority, and the relationship between earthly and divine justice.
• Political instability: The Elizabethan succession crisis (the queen's failure to produce an heir), the threat of Catholic assassination plots, and the transition from Elizabeth to James created a climate of political anxiety. Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies are deeply engaged with questions of political legitimacy, succession, and the ethics of power.
• The New World: Exploration, colonisation, and the encounter with non-European cultures are reflected in plays like The Tempest and Othello.

Shakespeare's Language

Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse

Shakespeare's dominant verse form is iambic pentameter -- ten syllables per line, organised in five iambs (unstressed-stressed). This metre provides a rhythmic foundation that is flexible enough to accommodate a vast range of speech, from formal declaration to intimate reflection. Shakespeare's pentameter is not mechanically regular: he frequently uses metrical substitutions (replacing an iamb with a trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic) to create emphasis, disruption, or emotional intensity.

Blank verse -- unrhymed iambic pentameter -- is the standard medium for Shakespeare's serious drama. It is the language of nobility, authority, and high emotion. When characters shift from verse to prose (or vice versa), the shift is almost always significant:

• Prose is typically used for comic, informal, or low-status speech. It is the language of the common people, of madness, and of characters who are drunk, distraught, or deliberately lowering their register.
• Verse signals elevated status, seriousness, or rhetorical ambition. Characters who speak in verse assert their social and intellectual authority.

In King Lear, Lear's descent from verse to prose tracks his descent from regal authority to madness. In Hamlet, Hamlet's prose to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern -- "a dream itself is but a shadow" -- marks his deliberate lowering of register to signal contempt.

Prose in Shakespeare

Shakespeare's use of prose is sophisticated and deliberate. Key functions include:

• Comic scenes: The prose scenes involving Falstaff in the Henry IV plays use prose to create a world of tavern licence, bodily appetite, and linguistic exuberance that contrasts with the verse of the court.
• Madness: Lear's prose in the storm scenes, Ophelia's fragmented speech in Hamlet, and Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene all use prose (or broken verse) to dramatise the disintegration of rational consciousness.
• Intimacy: The prose exchanges between Hamlet and Horatio, or between Antony and Cleopatra in their private moments, create a register of emotional candour that verse might over-formalise.

Early Modern English Features

Shakespeare's English is Early Modern English (not Old English or Middle English), and while it is broadly comprehensible to modern readers, it contains features that require attention:

• Thou / you distinction: "Thou" was the informal singular pronoun; "you" was the formal singular or the plural. Shakespeare exploits the social implications of this distinction: characters who shift from "you" to "thou" signal intimacy, aggression, or a change in the power dynamic.
• Verb endings: "-est" (second person singular: "thou art," "thou dost") and "-eth" (third person singular: "he goeth").
• Pronunciation: Some words that look familiar had different pronunciations or meanings in Shakespeare's English (e.g., "wherefore" means "why," not "where"; "let" can mean "hinder").
• Wordplay: Shakespeare exploits the richness of Early Modern English vocabulary through puns, double entendres, and extended wordplay. The opening of Richard III -- "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York" -- is a double pun on "son" and "sun" and on "discontent" (the state of being discontented and the content of our discontent).

Major Tragedies

Hamlet (c. 1600--01)

Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest and most philosophically complex tragedy. Its central enigma -- Hamlet's delay in avenging his father's murder -- has generated more critical commentary than any other question in Shakespeare studies.

Key themes:

• Action vs. inaction: Hamlet's inability to act decisively is the play's driving tension. Is his delay a flaw (the failure to translate thought into action), a virtue (the moral scruple that distinguishes him from Claudius and Laertes), or an inevitable consequence of the play's epistemological uncertainty?
• Appearance vs. reality: The play is saturated with deception, surveillance, and performance. Hamlet's "antic disposition" (I.v), the play-within-a-play ("The Mousetrap"), Claudius's concealed guilt, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's false friendship all dramatise the difficulty of distinguishing truth from appearance.
• Mortality: The graveyard scene (V.i), with its meditation on Yorick's skull and the equalising power of death, is the play's philosophical centre. "The readiness is all" (V.ii) encapsulates Hamlet's hard-won stoic acceptance of mortality.
• Revenge: The play interrogates the ethics of revenge, positioning Hamlet's moral sensitivity against the revenge-tragedy convention (derived from Seneca and Kyd) that demands bloody retribution.
• Madness: Is Hamlet truly mad, or is his madness a strategic performance? The play refuses to resolve this question, and the ambiguity is central to its effect. Ophelia's genuine madness contrasts with Hamlet's performed derangement, raising questions about gender and the expression of psychological distress.

Key scenes:

• Act I, scene v: The Ghost's revelation and Hamlet's oath of vengeance.
• Act II, scene ii: Hamlet's "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy and the arrival of the players.
• Act III, scene i: "To be, or not to be" -- the play's most famous meditation on existence, action, and the fear of the unknown.
• Act III, scene ii: "The Mousetrap" -- the play-within-a-play that confirms Claudius's guilt.
• Act III, scene iv: The closet scene -- Hamlet confronts Gertrude and kills Polonius.
• Act V, scene ii: The final duel and the play's catastrophic resolution.

Othello (c. 1603--04)

Othello is a tragedy of jealousy, manipulation, and the destructive power of suggestion. Its exploration of race, identity, and the vulnerability of love in a prejudiced society makes it one of Shakespeare's most urgently relevant plays.

Key themes:

• Jealousy: Iago's manipulation of Othello transforms the noble general into a murderous husband. Shakespeare explores jealousy not as a character flaw but as a psychological state -- "the green-eyed monster" (III.iii) -- that feeds on insecurity and destroys from within.
• Race and otherness: Othello's status as a Black man in white Venetian society is central to the play. His marriage to Desdemona transgresses racial boundaries, and Iago exploits the racial anxieties of Brabantio, Roderigo, and (ultimately) Othello himself. The play's treatment of race has been extensively debated: is Othello a victim of racism, or does the play itself reproduce racist assumptions?
• Appearance vs. reality: Iago -- "Honest Iago" -- is the play's master of deception. His ability to present himself as loyal while plotting destruction makes him one of Shakespeare's most compelling villains.
• Gender and sexuality: Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca represent different positions within the play's patriarchal structure. Desdemona's virtue and Emilia's pragmatism provide contrasting responses to male authority and violence.

Key scenes:

• Act I, scene iii: Othello's defence of his marriage before the Senate -- "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them."
• Act III, scene iii: The temptation scene -- Iago's insinuations and Othello's descent into jealousy. This is the play's dramatic centre, a masterclass in psychological manipulation.
• Act IV, scene i: Othello's epileptic fit and the handkerchief's fabricated significance.
• Act V, scene ii: The murder of Desdemona and Othello's anagnorisis -- "O fool, fool, fool!"

King Lear (c. 1605--06)

King Lear is Shakespeare's most devastating tragedy: a play about the stripping away of status, identity, and sanity that strips the audience of any comforting illusions about justice, order, or redemption.

Key themes:

• Power and its loss: Lear's abdication and its catastrophic consequences dramatise the fragility of political authority and the gap between the title of king and the man who bears it. "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (I.iv) -- Lear's question, after his abdication, exposes the dissolution of identity that accompanies the loss of power.
• Nature vs. civilisation: The play contrasts the ordered world of the court with the chaotic wilderness of the heath. Lear's exposure to the storm -- "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" (III.ii) -- strips away the trappings of civilisation and forces a confrontation with the "unaccommodated man" (III.iv).
• Blindness and insight: Lear is morally blind to the true natures of his daughters; Gloucester is literally blinded. Both characters gain insight only through suffering: "I stumbled when I saw" (IV.i).
• Filial ingratitude and the bonds of obligation: The central moral question of the play -- what do children owe their parents, and what do parents owe their children? -- is explored through Lear's relationship with Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, and Gloucester's relationship with Edgar and Edmund.
• Nothingness: The word "nothing" recurs obsessively throughout the play, signifying loss, absence, and the void that underlies human pretensions to significance.

Key scenes:

• Act I, scene i: The love test and Cordelia's "Nothing, my lord."
• Act I, scene iv: Lear's growing awareness of Goneril's ingratitude.
• Act III, scenes ii--iv: The storm scenes -- Lear on the heath, exposed to the elements and to his own nakedness.
• Act IV, scene vi: Lear's encounter with Gloucester on Dover Beach -- "I am a man more sinned against than sinning."
• Act IV, scene vii: The reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia.
• Act V, scene iii: Cordelia's death and Lear's final "Howl, howl, howl, howl!"

Macbeth (c. 1606)

Macbeth is Shakespeare's most concentrated tragedy: a taut, fast-moving drama of ambition, guilt, and the corruption of the natural order. Its brevity (the shortest of Shakespeare's tragedies) and its relative simplicity of plot make it a frequent introduction to Shakespearean tragedy, but its psychological and thematic complexity rewards the closest study.

Key themes:

• Ambition: "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself" (I.vii) -- Macbeth's ambition, catalysed by the witches' prophecy and Lady Macbeth's incitement, drives the play's action. Shakespeare explores ambition not as an abstract quality but as a psychological force that corrupts judgment, perverts nature, and destroys the self.
• Guilt and conscience: Macbeth's soliloquies after Duncan's murder -- "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?" (II.ii) -- dramatise the psychological torment of guilt. The blood imagery that pervades the play is both literal and metaphorical, signifying the irreversible stain of moral corruption.
• The supernatural: The witches, the dagger, Banquo's ghost, and the apparitions create a world in which the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural are dissolved. The witches' equivocal prophecies -- "none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth" (IV.i) -- exploit the gap between literal truth and intended meaning.
• Kingship and natural order: The murder of Duncan -- a divinely ordained king -- disrupts the natural order: horses eat each other, the day is swallowed by night, and the weather itself is disordered. The play's insistence on the restoration of legitimate rule (Malcolm's accession) reflects the Jacobean political doctrine of the divine right of kings.
• Masculinity: Lady Macbeth's invocation of the spirits to "unsex" her (I.v) and her taunting of Macbeth's masculinity -- "When you durst do it, then you were a man" (I.vii) -- connect the play's violence to its exploration of gender roles.

Key scenes:

• Act I, scenes i--iii: The witches' prophecies and Macbeth's first soliloquy.
• Act I, scene v: Lady Macbeth's soliloquy and her incitement of Macbeth.
• Act I, scene vii: Macbeth's "If it were done when 'tis done" soliloquy -- the play's central meditation on the morality of action.
• Act II, scene ii: The murder of Duncan and Macbeth's guilt.
• Act III, scene iv: Banquo's ghost and Macbeth's public breakdown.
• Act V, scene i: Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene -- "Out, damned spot!"
• Act V, scene v: Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy -- the play's meditation on the futility of ambition and the emptiness of life.

Major Comedies

A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595--96)

See the discussion in Drama. For A-Level study, key analytical points include:

• The play's tripartite structure (court, lovers, fairies, mechanicals) and the ways in which the four worlds interact, parody, and illuminate each other.
• The theme of imagination and its relationship to reality: "The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact" (V.i).
• The play-within-a-play ("Pyramus and Thisbe") as a metatheatrical commentary on the conventions of romantic tragedy.
• The play's treatment of love as irrational, transformative, and potentially tyrannical: "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind" (I.i).
• Bottom's transformation as a moment of contact between the human and the non-human, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Twelfth Night (c. 1601--02)

See the discussion in Drama. For A-Level study, key analytical points include:

• The play's exploration of gender performativity: Viola/Cesario's disguise creates a fluid network of desires (Orsino loves Olivia, Olivia loves Cesario, Viola loves Orsino) that destabilises fixed categories of gender and sexuality.
• The role of Feste as the play's wisest character: his songs ("What is love? 'Tis not hereafter," "When that I was and a little tiny boy") frame the play's action with melancholy and philosophical reflection.
• Malvolio's fate as a dark undercurrent: his humiliation raises questions about the limits of comic festivity and the cruelty of social exclusion.
• The play's title (the Feast of the Epiphany, a time of revelry and inversion) as a key to its preoccupation with disguise, inversion, and the temporary dissolution of social order.

The Tempest (c. 1610--11)

See the discussion in Drama. For A-Level study, key analytical points include:

• Prospero as a figure for the author-artist: his magic as a metaphor for theatrical creation, his renunciation of magic as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage.
• The play's engagement with colonialism: Caliban's claim -- "This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother" (I.ii) -- and Prospero's displacement of him raise urgent questions about conquest, enslavement, and cultural imperialism.
• The theme of forgiveness and reconciliation: Prospero's decision to forgive his enemies -- "The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance" (V.i) -- is the play's moral centre, though its sincerity has been questioned by critics.
• The masque in Act IV as a reflection of Jacobean court culture and its ideologies of order, harmony, and hierarchical authority.

Historical Plays

Richard II (c. 1595)

Richard II dramatises the deposition of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV). It is a meditation on the nature of kingship, the divine right of kings, and the consequences of political illegitimacy. Richard's poetic self-dramatisation -- "For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings" (III.ii) -- contrasts with Bolingbroke's pragmatic political authority, creating a tension between the poetry of power and the reality of power that the play refuses to resolve. The play's depiction of a reigning monarch's deposition was politically sensitive in Elizabethan England and may have contributed to the Essex rebellion of 1601.

Henry V (c. 1599)

Henry V dramatises Henry's military campaign in France, culminating in the Battle of Agincourt (1415). The play raises complex questions about the ethics of war, the nature of leadership, and the relationship between political rhetoric and moral reality. Henry's St. Crispin's Day speech (IV.iii) -- "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" -- is one of Shakespeare's most rousing set-pieces, but the Chorus's appeals to the audience's imagination, the bleakness of the opening scenes (Canterbury's justification of war, the traitors' conspiracy), and the play's closing suggestion that Henry's conquests will be squandered by his son all complicate any simple patriotic reading.

Shakespearean Criticism

The Critical Tradition

Shakespeare criticism has evolved through several major phases:

Period	Approach	Key Critics
17th--18th century	Moralising and neoclassical	John Dryden, Samuel Johnson
Romantic period	Character criticism, emphasis on imagination	Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt
Late 19th--early 20th century	Character criticism, psychological analysis	A.C. Bradley, Edward Dowden
Mid-20th century	Historical scholarship, close reading	E.K. Chambers, G. Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon
1960s--80s	Political criticism, New Historicism, feminism	Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, Juliet Dusinberre
1980s--present	Postcolonial, queer, performance studies	Edward Said, Jonathan Goldberg, W.B. Worthen

Key Critics

Samuel Johnson (1709--1784): Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare (1765) is the first major work of English Shakespeare criticism. Johnson praised Shakespeare's universality -- "Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life" -- while criticising his looseness of plot and mixture of comedy and tragedy.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772--1834): Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare (delivered 1808--19) pioneered the psychological approach to Shakespearean character. His analysis of Iago's "motiveless malignity" and Hamlet's "balance of contrary impulses" remains influential. Coleridge emphasised Shakespeare's philosophical depth and his capacity to dramatise the workings of consciousness.

A.C. Bradley (1851--1935): Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) is the most influential work of character criticism. Bradley's detailed analyses of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth treated the characters as if they were real people, exploring their motivations, conflicts, and psychological development. Bradley's approach has been criticised for neglecting the plays as dramatic structures and for anachronistically imposing modern psychological concepts on early modern characters, but his readings remain the starting point for many classroom discussions.

William Empson (1906--1984): Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) applied close reading to Shakespeare, demonstrating the multiple, often contradictory meanings generated by Shakespeare's language. His analysis of the word "honest" in Othello is a classic demonstration of how a single word can carry the weight of an entire theme.

Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943): Greenblatt, the leading figure of New Historicism, reads Shakespeare's plays in relation to the cultural and political practices of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) demonstrate how Shakespeare's texts engage with the ideologies, anxieties, and power structures of their historical moment. For Greenblatt, Shakespeare's plays are not timeless works of universal genius but historically situated texts that participate in the cultural negotiations of their time.

Critical Approaches to Shakespeare

Feminist Criticism

Feminist criticism examines the representation of women in Shakespeare's plays and the gender dynamics that structure the dramatic world. Key questions include:

• How are women characters constructed, and what possibilities for agency do they have?
• How does Shakespeare engage with early modern ideologies of femininity, patriarchy, and domestic authority?
• What is the significance of cross-dressing, disguise, and gender performativity?

Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1975) argued that Shakespeare's plays contain a radical, proto-feminist critique of patriarchal structures. More recently, critics such as Philippa Berry (Shakespeare's Feminine Endings, 1991) and Ann Thompson have explored the complexity and ambiguity of Shakespeare's gender politics.

Marxist Criticism

Marxist criticism reads Shakespeare's plays in relation to class structures, economic systems, and the dynamics of political power. Key questions include:

• How do the plays represent social hierarchy and class relations?
• What is the relationship between political authority and economic power?
• How do the plays engage with the material conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean society?

Postcolonial Criticism

Postcolonial criticism reads Shakespeare's plays in relation to the history of colonialism, imperialism, and cultural encounter. The Tempest has been the central text for postcolonial Shakespeare criticism: Caliban has been read as a figure for the colonised subject, Prospero as the coloniser, and the island as a microcosm of colonial encounter. Edward Said's concept of Orientalism and Ania Loomba's Colonialism and the Cultural Construction of Race (1998) have been influential in this field.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism applies the theories of Freud, Lacan, and Jung to Shakespeare's characters and plots. Key questions include:

• How do the plays dramatise unconscious desire, repression, and the Oedipus complex?
• What is the psychological significance of dreams, madness, and the supernatural?
• How do family dynamics -- particularly father-daughter and mother-son relationships -- shape the plays?

Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers (1992) is a landmark psychoanalytic study of Shakespeare, exploring the relationship between maternal figures and the construction of masculinity in the tragedies.

New Historicism

New Historicism reads Shakespeare's plays as participants in the cultural and political negotiations of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Key principles include:

• Texts are embedded in their historical moment and must be read in relation to the institutions, practices, and ideologies that produced them.
• The boundary between "literature" and "history" is permeable: plays are historical documents, and historical documents are textual constructs.
• Power operates not only through overt coercion but through cultural practices, rituals, and representations.

Greenblatt's reading of The Tempest -- as a play that simultaneously enacts and interrogates colonial ideology -- is a paradigmatic example of New Historicist criticism.

Common Pitfalls in Shakespeare Analysis

1. Character worship: Treating Shakespeare's characters as real people rather than as dramatic constructs. Analyse how characters are created through language, structure, and staging.
2. Quotation without analysis: Embedding quotations without analysing their language, context, and significance. Every quotation should be followed by close analysis.
3. Anachronism: Applying modern psychological or political concepts without acknowledging the historical distance between Shakespeare's world and our own.
4. Neglecting dramatic structure: Focusing exclusively on characters and themes without attending to how the play is structured as drama -- scene arrangement, entrances and exits, the timing of revelations.
5. Over-reliance on plot summary: Retelling the story instead of analysing how it is dramatised.
6. Ignoring verse/prose distinctions: Failing to attend to the significance of Shakespeare's shifts between verse and prose.
7. Neglecting the theatrical dimension: Treating the play as a book rather than as a script for performance. Consider staging, movement, and the audience's experience.