WEEK 4

1. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1.1 Life
 Born late in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon
 Son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden
 Shakespeare has become the “Bard of Avon”, the ultimate canonical figure
who is taken to represent the genius and values of an entire nation.
 At the age of only 18 he married Anne Hathaway who was 8 years his
senior.
 The Bishop of Worcester issued a licence for the marriage of “Willelmum
Shaxpere et Annam de Temple Grafton”.
 A bond was signed to protect the Bishop as William was a minor and Anne
was pregnant.
 Susanna, their first daughter was born to them on 26 May 1583.
 On 2 February 1585, the register records the birth of twins, Hamnet (being a
variant form of Hamlet) and Judith.
 Shakespeare was well established in London by the early 1590s as an actor
and as a playwright.
 He was often criticized as an “upstart Crow” who “supposes he’s as well
able to bombast out a blank verse”, imagining himself “the only Shake-scene
in a country”.
 His son died at the age of 11, in 1596.
 Shakespeare himself died in late April of 1616, buried in Holy Trinity.
1.2 Literary career/legacy
He wrote a total of 37 plays revolving around several main themes: histories,
tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies.
With the exception of the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet, William
Shakespeare's first plays were mostly histories: Henry VI (Parts I, II and III),
Richard II and Henry V dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt
rulers, and have been interpreted by drama historians as Shakespeare's way of
justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty. Julius Caesar portrays upheaval in

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Roman politics that may have resonated with viewers at a time when England’s
aging monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, had no legitimate heir, thus creating the
potential for future power struggles.
Shakespeare also wrote several comedies during his early period: the witty
romance A Midsummer Night's Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice, the
wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming As You Like It
and Twelfth Night.
Other plays written before 1600 include Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of
Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. After
1600, he wrote the tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. In
William Shakespeare's final period, he wrote several tragicomedies. Among these
are Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.
1.3 Stratford-upon-Avon
Stratford-upon-Avon is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon
District, in the county of Warwickshire, England, on the River Avon. Stratford was
originally inhabited by Anglo-Saxons and remained a village before the lord of the
manor, John of Coutances, set out plans to develop it into a town in 1196. In that
same year, Stratford was granted a charter from King Richard I to hold a weekly
market in the town, giving it its status as a market town. As a result, Stratford
experienced an increase in trade and commerce as well as urban expansion. The
town is a popular tourist destination owing to its status as birthplace of English
playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and receives approximately 2.5 million
visitors a year. The Royal Shakespeare Company resides in Stratford's Royal
Shakespeare Theatre. There are five houses relating to Shakespeare's life which are
owned and cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. These include Hall's
Croft (the one-time home of Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna, and her husband Dr.
John Hall) and Nash's House, which stands alongside the site of New Place which
was owned by Shakespeare himself, wherein he died.
1.4 Bardolatry
Bardolatry is the worship, particularly when considered excessive, of
William Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the
eighteenth century. One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a Bardolator.
The term Bardolatry, derived from Shakespeare's sobriquet "the Bard of Avon"
and the Greek word latria "worship" (as in idolatry, worship of idols), was
coined by George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his collection Three Plays
for Puritans published in 1901. Shaw professed to dislike Shakespeare as a
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 thinker and philosopher because the latter did not engage with social problems,
as did Shaw in his own plays.
The earliest references to the idolising of Shakespeare occur in an
anonymous play The Return from Parnassus, written during the poet's
lifetime. A poetry-loving character says he will obtain a picture of Shakespeare
for his study. This character is being satirised as a foolish lover of sensuous
rather than serious literature.
The serious stance of Bardolatry has its origins in the mid-18th century,
when Samuel Johnson referred to Shakespeare's work as "a map of life". In
1769 the actor David Garrick, unveiling a statue of Shakespeare in Stratford-
upon-Avon during the Shakespeare Jubilee, read out a poem culminating with
the words "'tis he, 'tis he, / The God of our idolatry". Garrick also constructed a
temple to Shakespeare at his home in Hampton. The phenomenon developed
during the Romantic era, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William
Hazlitt, and others all described Shakespeare as a transcendent genius. Shaw's
distaste for this attitude to Shakespeare is anticipated by William Cowper's
attack on Garrick's whole festival as blasphemous in his poem The Task.
2. JANE AUSTEN
2.1 Life
The seventh child and second daughter of Cassandra and George Austen,
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England.
Jane's parents were well-respected community members. Her father served as the
Oxford-educated rector for a nearby Anglican parish. The family was close and the
children grew up in an environment that stressed learning and creative thinking.
When Jane was young, she and her siblings were encouraged to read from their
father's extensive library. The children also authored and put on plays and
charades.
Over the span of her life, Jane would become especially close to her father
and older sister, Cassandra. Indeed, she and Cassandra would one day collaborate
on a published work. In order to acquire a more formal education, Jane and
Cassandra were sent to boarding schools during Jane's pre-adolescence. During this
time, Jane and her sister caught typhus, with Jane nearly succumbing to the illness.
After a short period of formal education cut short by financial constraints, they
returned home and lived with the family from that time forward.

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 2.2 Literary career/legacy
Ever fascinated by the world of stories, Jane began to write in bound
notebooks. In the 1790`s, during her adolescence, she started to craft her own
novels and wrote Love and Friendship, a parody of romantic fiction organized as
a series of love letters. The next year she wrote The History of England..., a parody
of historical writing that included illustrations drawn by Cassandra. These
notebooks, encompassing the novels as well as short stories, poems and plays, are
now referred to as Jane's Juvenilia. She continued to write, developing her style in
more ambitious works such as Lady Susan, another epistolary story. Jane also
started to write some of her future major works, the first called Elinor and
Marianne, another story told as a series of letters, which would eventually be
published as Sense and Sensibility. She began drafts of First Impressions, which
would later be published as Pride and Prejudice, and Susan, later published
as Northanger Abbey by Jane's brother, Henry, following Jane's death. In the
period spanning 1811-1816, she pseudonymously published Sense and
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. At the age of 41,
Jane started to become ill with what some say might have been Addison's disease.
She made impressive efforts, starting a new novel called The Brothers, which
would be published after her death as Sanditon. Another novel, Persuasion,
would also be published posthumously. At some point, Jane's condition
deteriorated to such a degree that she ceased writing. She died on July 18, 1817, in
Winchester, Hampshire, England.
2.2 Chawton House
Chawton House, just outside the village of that name, used to be the home of
the writer's brother, Edward Austen Knight. It remained a private family home into
the late twentieth century. At the turn of the millennium it was purchased by a
charitable trust, extensively restored, and re-opened as a research centre. The
Centre, which runs study programmes in association with the nearby University of
Southampton, incorporates a significant library, a collection of over 9000 books
and related manuscripts. The house is now open to visitors, as well as library
readers, for tours and during public events. It is run as a historic property and also
houses the research library of The Centre for the Study of Early Women's
Writing, 1600–1830, using the building's connection with the English novelist
Jane Austen.