Contributions
Born at Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glover and wool dealer, Shakespeare came up to London in the late 1580s and made his name as an actor, shareholder and resident playwright of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, renamed the King's Men under James I. Over some twenty years he wrote around forty plays: radiant comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night), the great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), history plays (Richard III, Henry V) and late romances (The Winter's Tale, The Tempest), staged at the Globe theatre he helped finance. He also published two best-selling narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and a sequence of 154 Sonnets (1609). Writing for a popular stage, he blended blank verse and prose, probed the inner life of his characters as no one had before, and forged a language of unmatched invention. Seven years after his death his fellow players Heminges and Condell gathered thirty-six plays in the First Folio (1623), saving half his drama from oblivion.
Significance
Shakespeare has become the centre of gravity of Western literature. His drama established that the stage could sound the human soul — Hamlet's hesitation, Othello's jealousy, Lear's blindness — with a depth once thought reserved for poetry or theology. His language permanently shaped English: hundreds of coinages and turns of phrase are credited to him, and no author is more often performed, translated, quoted or reinvented, from Romantic drama to world cinema. Yet the man remains largely an enigma: almost nothing is known of his formative years, his biography shrinks to legal records, and the contrast between the universality of the work and the scarcity of traces has fed endless theories about the "true" author — notions scholarship dismisses as groundless. It is easily forgotten, too, that this genius was a shrewd man of business, keen on a family coat of arms and on property in Stratford, where he retired prosperous. The playwright who gave voice to every passion left an almost perfect silence about himself.
Influence
The supreme model of modern drama, he nourished German and French Romantic theatre (Goethe; Hugo, who made him a banner), the psychological novel, opera (Verdi's Otello and Falstaff) and then world cinema. Shakespearean blank verse set the music of English tragedy, and his way of staging self-divided characters became the unspoken grammar of Western fiction. He drew in turn on Ovid and Seneca, on Plutarch's Lives in North's translation, on the chroniclers Holinshed and Hall, and on Italian novelle — while the blank verse and tragic ambition of his elder Christopher Marlowe opened the way.
Anecdote
His 1616 will leaves his wife Anne Hathaway only a short interlined afterthought: "my second best bed." The phrase has spilled oceans of ink — marital contempt, or tenderness for the couple's own bed, the best being kept for guests? We shall never know. On his gravestone in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, a carved epitaph threatens anyone who would disturb his remains: "Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, / To dig the dust enclosed heare. / Blest be the man that spares these stones, / And curst be he that moves my bones." The curse held: his grave has never been opened.