WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
from Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life
by Stanley Wells, former Director of the Shakespeare Institute
Shakespeare is all
around us as both a source of pleasure and an instrument of education. His plays
are central to the theatrical repertoire, not only in English speaking countries,
but in many others too. They form the basis of innumerable films, operas, ballets
and musical scores. Poets, novelists, and dramatists play variations on their
narratives, characters and ideas. Some of their characters have acquired the status
of mythic figures: we can speak of a Shylock, a Romeo, or a Hamlet, as of an Adonis,
a Don Juan or a Scrooge without implying reference to the works in which they
occur. Shakespeare has had an ineradicable influence on the English language,
so that we often quote him without knowing that we are doing so.
Shakespeare was not the only great dramatist of his time. He learned from many
others, especially, early in his career from John Lyly, Robert Greene and Christopher
Marlowe. Some of his contemporaries succeeded in ways he did not attempt. Ben
Jonson is the greater satirist. Thomas Middleton is the more acute observer of
contemporary life. Shakespeare is predominantly romantic in tone. Still, he is
unique among his fellows for the range of his achievement . . . He so often grapples
with fundamental issues that never cease to concern us: with love and hate, with
wit and folly, with the waywardness of the sexual instinct, with relations between
generations, with violence and tenderness, with problems of self-government and
national government, with our need to come to grips with the inevitability of
death and our yearning to find meaning in existence. He is finally, the most humane
of writers, the one who most poignantly convinces us of his compassion for his
fellow human beings, and it's for this that we value him most.
