Context
The most influential writer in
all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born
in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker
in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school,
but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he
married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her.
Around 1590 he left his family behind and
traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and
critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became
the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe
Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and
James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite
of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the
greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title
of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford
and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two.
At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as
Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by someone
else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular
candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial,
and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must
be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets
that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A
number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category
of brilliance, becoming so influential as to profoundly affect the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Shakespeare did not invent the story of Romeo
and Juliet. He did not, in fact, even introduce the story
into the English language. A poet named Arthur Brooks first brought
the story of Romeus and Juliet to an English-speaking
audience in a long and plodding poem that was itself not original,
but rather an adaptation of adaptations that stretched across nearly
a hundred years and two languages. Many of the details of Shakespeare’s
plot are lifted directly from Brooks’s poem, including the meeting
of Romeo and Juliet at the ball, their secret marriage, Romeo’s
fight with Tybalt, the sleeping potion, and the timing of the lover’s
eventual suicides. Such appropriation of other stories is characteristic
of Shakespeare, who often wrote plays based on earlier works.
Shakespeare’s use of existing material as fodder for his
plays should not, however, be taken as a lack of originality. Instead,
readers should note how Shakespeare crafts his sources in new ways while
displaying a remarkable understanding of the literary tradition
in which he is working. Shakespeare’s version of Romeo and Juliet is
no exception. The play distinguishes itself from its predecessors
in several important aspects: the subtlety and originality of its characterization
(Shakespeare almost wholly created Mercutio); the intense pace of
its action, which is compressed from nine months into four frenetic
days; a powerful enrichment of the story’s thematic aspects; and,
above all, an extraordinary use of language.
Shakespeare’s play not only bears a resemblance to the
works on which it is based, it is also quite similar in plot, theme,
and dramatic ending to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, told by
the great Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses.
Shakespeare was well aware of this similarity; he includes a reference
to Thisbe in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare also
includes scenes from the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in the comically
awful play-within-a-play put on by Bottom and his friends in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream—a play Shakespeare wrote around
the same time he was composing Romeo and Juliet.
Indeed, one can look at the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream as parodying the very story that Shakespeare
seeks to tell in Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare
wrote Romeo and Juliet in full knowledge that the
story he was telling was old, clichéd, and an easy target for parody.
In writing Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare,
then, implicitly set himself the task of telling a love story despite
the considerable forces he knew were stacked against its success.
Through the incomparable intensity of his language Shakespeare succeeded
in this effort, writing a play that is universally accepted
in Western culture as the preeminent, archetypal love story.
