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J. JOHN SEKAR
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE
The Age of Shakespeare: Drama (1558-1625)
1 Introduction
Before Shakespeare, there was a temporary conflict between the humanists, who
stood for classical tradition, and sought to impose it upon the people, and the strong national
taste of the English public, who demanded a quite different sort of thing. In the end, the
national taste triumphed, and just before Shakespeare began his career as a playwright the
romantic form of drama was definitely established. The establishment of this romantic drama
was the achievement of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors, a group of university men.
Though they had been trained in the classics, they discarded their special principles of
composition, and instead carried forward the free tradition of the popular stage.
2 Shakespeare’s predecessors
Thus special importance attaches historically to the work of those playwrights who
prepared the way for Shakespeare by ensuring the triumph of that free and flexible form of
drama which he was afterwards to make his own. They are commonly known as ‘university
wits,’ and as it implies, they were all men of academic training, and had thus been brought
into personal touch with the new learning, and been absorbed its spirit at the universities.
They are John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Christopher
Marlowe, and Thomas Nash. Each contributed something to the evolution of the drama into
the forms in which Shakespeare was to take it up. Two of them who exerted influence upon
Shakespeare are Lyly and Marlowe.
Lyly is most widely known as the author of a prose romance, entitled Euphues. He
helped to give comedy an intellectual tone. In his continual use of puns, conceits, and all
sorts of verbal fireworks, he anticipated Shakespeare, whose early comedies, such as Love’s
Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream obviously owe much to his example.
From him, Shakespeare also learnt how to combine a courtly main plot with episodes of
rustic blunders and clownish fooling.
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, the Jew of Malta, and Edward II
give him the place of pre-eminence among the pre-Shakespearian playwrights. In these plays
he really fixed the type of tragedy and chronicle play for his immediate successors, and in
them he introduced blank verse to the romantic drama and the public stage. It was hitherto
confined to classic plays and private representations. Shakespeare’s early blank verse is
fashioned on Marlowe’s. His narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, is in part at least inspired
by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. His Richard III and Richard II are clearly based on the
model of chronicle play Edward II. Even in The Merchant of Venice there are many
details to show that Shakespeare wrote with The Jew of Malta in mind.
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3 William Shakespeare the man (1564-1616)

William Shakespeare was the son of a prosperous tradesman of the town, who a little
later became Mayor. He attended the local Grammar School where he learnt Latin and
arithmetic. Financial misfortunes in the family took him from school when he was fourteen.
On the nature of employment, there is not much to ascertain. In his 19th year he married
Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years senior and a daughter of a well-to-do yeoman. His
marriage was hasty and ill-advised and it appeared to be unhappy. He had three children:
Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet. He fell into bad company and was accused of
deer-stealing. A few years after his marriage (1587), he left his native town Stratford to seek
his fortunes in London.
At this time, the drama was gaining rapidly in popularity through the works of the
University Wits. Shakespeare soon turned to the stage, and became first an actor, and then a
playwright. According to Greene, by 1592, he became a successful author. He wrote two
plays a year on an average, and he became a shareholder in two the leading theatres of the
time: the Globe and the Blackfriars, and purchased property in Stratford and London. But the
years which brought prosperity also brought domestic sorrows. His only son died in 1596;
his father in 1601; his younger brother, an actor, in 1607; his mother in 1608. Between 1610
and 12, he retired to Stratford. His elder daughter had already been married to a celebrated
physician John Hall and in 1616, Judith married Thomas Quiney, whose father was one of the
poet’s closest friends. By this time his health completely broke down and he died on 23 April
1616.
3.1 Shakespeare the artist
Like Chaucer, Shakespeare was no dreamer, but a practical man of affairs. He
reached London poor and friendless; he left it rich and respected; his fortunes were the work
of his own hand. Much light is thrown upon his writings, in which great powers of creative
imagination are combined with a wonderful feeling for reality, sound commonsense, and a
large and varied familiarity with the world. It is not the learning of the trained and accurate
scholar, but rather the wide miscellaneous knowledge of many things, which was naturally
accumulated by an extraordinarily assimilative mind during years of contact with men and
books. Translations gave him easy access to the treasures of ancient literature. The
intellectual atmosphere of the environment in which he lived and worked was charged with
new ideas, and was immensely stimulating. He was pre-eminently endowed with the happy
faculty of turning everything to the best possible account.
3.2 Shakespeare’s works
Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry consists of two narrative poems, Venus and
Adonis, and Lucrece, and a sequence of 154 sonnets, the first 126 addressed to a man, the
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remainder addressed or referring to a woman. They purport to record a passionate history of

disastrous love and broken friendship, but we cannot even be sure whether they deal with real
or with imaginary things. They contain the finest lyrical poetry of their time.
The commonly accepted canon of Shakespeare’s dramatic work comprises 37 plays,
though the authenticity of several of these is doubtful. His activity as a writer for the stage
extended over some 24 years, beginning about 1588 and ending about 1612. In general
terms, 12 years of it belonged to the sixteenth century and 12 to the seventeenth century.
Shakespeare’s critics divide these 24 years into four periods, and it follows the evolution of
his genius and art.
(i) Early period of experimental work 1588-93: his first comedies Love’s Labour’s
Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream, his first effort in chronicle drama Richard III, and
single very youthful tragedy Romeo and Juliet belong to this period.
(ii) Period of great comedies and chronicle plays 1594-1600: works include Richard
II, King John, The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, parts I and II, Henry V,
The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about
Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.
(iii) Period of the great tragedies, and bitter comedies 1601-08: In this period all
Shakespeare’s powers—his dramatic power, his intellectual power and his power
of expression—are at their highest. His attention is pre-occupied with the darker
side of human experience that shakes the foundation of the moral order, and
brings ruin upon innocent and guilty alike. The plays include Julius Caesar,
Hamlet, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and
Cressida, Othello, King John, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus,
and Timon of Athens.
(iv) Period of Dramatic Romances 1608-12: Though tragic passion furnishes
background to these plays, the evil is no longer permitted to have its way, and is
controlled and conquered by the good. A very tender and gracious tone prevails
in them throughout. Cymberline, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale belong
to this period. Pericles and Henry VIII are partly his, while the latter was
completed by his younger contemporary and friend Fletcher.
3.3 Characteristics of his works
Shakespeare’s plays constitute the greatest single body of work which any writer has
contributed to English literature. Their most salient feature is their astonishing variety. No
one has rivalled him in the range and versatility of his powers. He is the most often quoted of
all English writers. He is almost free from dogmatism of any kind, and tolerance is as
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comprehensive as his outlook. In the vitality of his characterisation he is unparalleled; his

characters are accepted as absolutely and completely alive. His unique command over the
resources of the language must also be noted. His plays are remarkable for their general truth
to what is permanent in human nature, but still his interpretation of human nature is very
different from the present time.
4 Shakespeare’s contemporaries
The list of his contemporaries is a very long one. The most important is his friend
Ben Jonson (1573-1637). It is not only because he was the greatest of them in the power and
volume of his genius, but also the aims and principles of his work were fundamentally
different from Shakespeare’s. Actor-turned writer produced the satiric comedy Every man
in his Humour in 1598. For many years he wrote plays for both the court and for the public
stage. With the ascension of Charles I, a decline in his fortunes set in: he suffered from
neglect, poverty, and ever-increasing ill-health. His plays fall into three groups: court
masques, historical tragedies (Sejanus and Catline), and comedies (The Alchemist,
Volpone or the Fox, and Epicoene or the Silent Woman).
Ben Jonson is a realist: the world of his comedy is not the world or romance, but of
contemporary London life, with its manners, types, foibles and affectations. His aim was to
depict to amuse, and he took his art seriously. Holding fast to the moral functions of the
stage he sought to correct and teach. His realism must therefore be further defined as didactic
realism.
His characterization is based on the idea that each man is possessed and governed by
some one particular quality or ‘master passion’ which may be regarded as the backbone and
central feature of his personality. In his comedies, intellect predominates; they are products
rather of learning, skill, and conscientious effort than of creative power. He is the real
founder of what is known as the Comedy of Manners.
John Webster (1580?-1625?) was a dramatist of sombre cast of genius and great
power, though his morbid love of the violent and the horrible led him too often to sheer
sensationalism. His White Devil and Duchess of Malfi contain scenes of tragic passion
unrivalled outside Shakespeare.
The names of Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) are
always associated and did much work in collaboration. Their moral tone is often relaxing,
their sentiment strained, and their characterization poor. However, Philaster and The
Maid’s Tragedy successfully challenge comparison with anything in the romantic drama
outside Shakespeare. Philip Massinger (1583-1666) is in the words of Charles Lamb is ‘the
last of a great race.’
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