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William Shakespeare Biography
Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker, 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); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare's company the greatest possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king's players. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theatre.
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 paucity of surviving 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 in reality were written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 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.
Backgound on Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus represents Shakespeare’s first recorded attempt at writing a tragedy. This fact, along with the perceived impoverishment of the play’s language, has led many critics in the centuries following Shakespeare’s death not just to denounce the play, but to deny that Shakespeare wrote it at all. The seventeenth-century English dramatist Edward Ravenscroft offers a typical example of this view in the introduction to his 1687 adaptation of the play: “I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage, that it was not originally his [Shakespeare’s], but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some Master-touches to one or two of the principal parts of characters; this I am apt to believe, because ‘tis the most incorrect and indigested piece in all his works; it seems rather a heap of Rubbish than a structure.” Yet despite the attempts of Ravenscroft and others to uncouple Shakespeare’s name from the play, there is little doubt of its authorship. Francis Meres names Shakespeare as the play’s author in his landmark book Palladis Tamia (1598), which provides the first-ever critical account of the Bard’s work. And if that weren’t evidence enough, Titus Andronicus is included in First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
Perhaps one of the reasons Titus Andronicus has sparked such contention rests on its resistance to easy categorization. Portraying events supposedly derived from the history of the late Roman Empire, but which are entirely fictitious, the play flirts with the genre of the history play without satisfying that genre’s minimum requirement of being based on historical figures. Likewise, the play bears some elements of a tragedy, but the revenge plots that drive it render its conclusion less cathartic than in any of Shakespeare’s later tragedies. That said, the so-called “revenge tragedy” was itself a well-known and much-produced genre. Plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were landmark revenge tragedies that lit up the Elizabethan stage. On many counts, Titus Andronicus follows the conventions established by these and other revenge tragedies. However, in its deliberate excesses, the play may well be less an imitation of the Elizabethan revenge drama than a deliberate parody of that form.
In recent decades, many critics have taken a more positive view of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy. The scholar Marjorie Garber, for instance, finds in this play not a hackneyed display of an amateur dramatist, but rather the foundations of many characters, themes, and plot devices that will define his later, greater tragedies. Also characteristic is the way Shakespeare seems to have pieced together the key elements of the play from a variety of sources, adapting them as he saw fit to create a unique and original work. Perhaps the most obvious source material for Titus Andronicus is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a copy of which text appears in the play’s third act, when Lavinia opens it to the story of Philomela. Philomela is a figure from mythology who was raped by her sister’s husband, King Tereus. To ensure that she could reveal his crime to her sister, Procne, Tereus cut out Philomela’s tongue. But Philomela still finds a way to communicate with Procne, and the two women conspire to kill Tereus’s son, bake him into a pie, and serve it to his father. It is this story that informs Lavinia’s tragic arc and Titus’s revenge against Tamora. References to many other figures from history and myth help fill out the details.
Regardless of what later critics have thought about the play, it’s evident that the public of Shakespeare’s own time relished it. Scholarship on the Elizabethan era testifies that contemporary theatergoers had especially bloody tastes, and that Titus Andronicus was received with great applause, remaining a favorite for over a decade. Though certainly not one of Shakespeare’s most accomplished plays, it nevertheless displays uniquely Shakespearean traits that needed only to mature before forming the foundation of his many masterpieces.
