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 acclaim quickly followed, and
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England
and a 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 and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s
plays were actually 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 affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
The Tempest probably was written in 1610–1611,
and was first performed at Court by the King’s Men in the fall of
1611. It was performed again in the winter of 1612–1613 during
the festivities in celebration of the marriage of King James’s daughter
Elizabeth. The Tempest is most likely the last
play written entirely by Shakespeare, and it is remarkable for being
one of only two plays by Shakespeare (the other being Love’s
Labor’s Lost) whose plot is entirely original. The play
does, however, draw on travel literature of its time—most notably
the accounts of a tempest off the Bermudas that separated and nearly
wrecked a fleet of colonial ships sailing from Plymouth to Virginia.
The English colonial project seems to be on Shakespeare’s mind throughout The
Tempest, as almost every character, from the lord
Gonzalo to the drunk Stephano, ponders how he would rule the island
on which the play is set if he were its king. Shakespeare seems
also to have drawn on Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals,” which
was translated into English in 1603. The
name of Prospero’s servant-monster, Caliban, seems to be an anagram
or derivative of “Cannibal.”
The extraordinary flexibility of Shakespeare’s stage is
given particular prominence in The Tempest. Stages
of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were for the most part bare
and simple. There was little on-stage scenery, and the possibilities
for artificial lighting were limited. The King’s Men in 1612 were
performing both at the outdoor Globe Theatre and the indoor Blackfriars
Theatre and their plays would have had to work in either venue.
Therefore, much dramatic effect was left up to the minds of the
audience. We see a particularly good example of this in The
Tempest, Act II, scene i when Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio
argue whether the island is beautiful or barren. The bareness of
the stage would have allowed either option to be possible in the
audience’s mind at any given moment.
At the same time, The Tempest includes
stage directions for a number of elaborate special effects. The
many pageants and songs accompanied by ornately costumed figures
or stage-magic—for example, the banquet in Act III, scene iii, or
the wedding celebration for Ferdinand and Miranda in Act IV, scene
i—give the play the feeling of a masque, a highly stylized form
of dramatic, musical entertainment popular among the aristocracy
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is perhaps the tension
between simple stage effects and very elaborate and surprising ones
that gives the play its eerie and dreamlike quality, making it seem
rich and complex even though it is one of Shakespeare’s shortest,
most simply constructed plays.
It is tempting to think of The Tempest as
Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage because of its theme of a great
magician giving up his art. Indeed, we can interpret Prospero’s
reference to the dissolution of “the great globe itself” (IV.i.153)
as an allusion to Shakespeare’s theatre. However, Shakespeare is
known to have collaborated on at least two other plays after The
Tempest: The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry
VIII in 1613, both probably written
with John Fletcher. A performance of the latter was, in
fact, the occasion for the actual dissolution of the Globe. A cannon
fired during the performance accidentally ignited the thatch, and
the theater burned to the ground.
