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alt title(s): Shakespeare
THE Spoony Bard!
Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564 - died 23 April 1616),
the only playwright most people can name, has been a major influence on English language fiction for 400 years. While most only know his plays through
Popcultural Osmosis, the tropes he invented or popularised are still with us today.
Many of his plays and plots are
traceable back to older sources, but
he made them his own. Trace back most of
The Oldest Ones In The Book and
you will find Shakespeare, and before him no one anyone much has heard of.
Many series have parodied Shakespeare's plays, or
staged them, and there have been innumerable film adaptations. Indeed, one contestant on the first series of
Big Brother in Germany was lampooned for believing Shakespeare to be a film director like Tarantino, based on the sheer number of films around with his name in the title...
The "Big Five Tragedies"—
Hamlet,
Macbeth,
Romeo And Juliet,
Othello, and
King Lear — are widely considered the five greatest works of literature in the English language. Shakespeare holds the record of having four of his plays running on Broadway simultaneously. No other playwright has come close.
Incidentally, he left his wife his "second-best bed" in his will, which has had historians scratching their heads for centuries. The most normal sounding explanation was that the second-best bed was the one he and his wife slept in, the best bed was reserved for guests. Unfortunately, muddying up the water is the fact that Shakespeare was quite cool to his wife, spending most of his life away from home. He only married her in the first place because he got her pregnant. Maybe. We don't
know much about the man's personal history, and the gaps have been filled with a lot of patchwork speculation over the decades. (See Authorship Question below.)
Due to Shakespeare's wide-ranging influence and extremely high renown, any time you want to establish a character as smart and classy, just have him
quote a couple of apropos lines from a Shakespeare play. It works every time, hero or villain.
He's also become
a popular fictional character in his own right.
The Authorship Question
Epileptic Trees are hardly new or limited to genre fandoms. Since the early 18th century, some have
speculated that "William Shakespeare" was just a pen name for one or more other individuals. People who believe this hypothesis are generally called
anti-stratfordians; those who hold to the generally accepted view of Shakespearian authorship (i.e. that William Shakespeare did in fact write the works attributed to him) are dubbed
stratfordians. With entire books and websites dedicated to arguing one way or the other, this is clearly
Serious Business to some.
A brief and amusingly snarky (
stratfordian) analysis of some of the different author theories can be found
here
.
Perhaps you want to
emulate this esteemed fellow?
Widespread Shakespearean tropes include:
- Affably Evil
- Anachronism Stew: Shakespeare rarely bothered to do the research. But no one watches his plays for the historical content, even the ones that are supposedly about historical events.
- Anyone Can Die
- Beta Couple: including, appropriately, Benedick and Beatrice, although in popularity they've far eclipsed Much Ado About Nothing's Official Couple, Hero and Whatshisface.
- Card Carrying Villain
- Complete Monster
- Double Entendre: Lots and lots and lots. Your high school teachers did not mention half of them, probably on purpose.
- Duel To The Death
- Get Thee To A Nunnery (many of his plays are absolutely bawdy, but language has changed so much that modern audiences will not understand this; can seriously impact the comedies, in particular, which lose a lot of their humour)
- Grokking The Horrorshow: invented many words and terms, including 'doorknob'.
- It might be more accurate to say that he used words in ways that were new and creative - he took the word 'assassin' (a member of an Islamic cult who carried out murders) and created the word 'assassination'.
- Hilarity Ensues
- Home Sweet Home
- Hurricane Of Puns
- Kill Em All
- Love Hurts
- Love Triangle
- Magnificent Bastard
- Missing Episode (Records indicate that Shakespeare wrote plays entitled Cardenio and Love Labour's Won. Unfortunately, no copies of them are known to exist)
- Oracular Urchin / Waif Prophet - Child, jester, and/or crazy person? Count on them to speak God's own truth.
- Poor Communication Kills
- Prophecy Twist / No Man Of Woman Born
- Recursive Crossdressing
- Royal Blood
- Slap Slap Kiss / Shut Up Kiss
- The Smurfette Principle - But when women aren't allowed to perform on-stage, what're ya' gonna do?
- Sweet Polly Oliver - Likewise.
- They Do
- True Art Is Angsty (Shakespeare's tragedies are better known than his comedies)
- Two Lines No Waiting
- Unaccustomed As I Am To Public Speaking
- Vindicated By History / Deader Than Disco: The reputation of both Shakespeare himself and his individual works has varied widely over the years. For instance the now largely forgotten King John was one of the most popular plays in the Victorian era while Troilus and Cressida was not performed at all between between 1734 and 1898.
- Wild Mass Guessing - According to Bill Bryson, any claim about Shakespeare's personal life beyond what's on official records is this given how staggeringly little is actually known about Shakespeare's home life.
- What Do You Mean Its Not For Kids? - Junior High teachers do not seem to understand that either: their students are not going to understand a word, or they shouldn't.
- You Fail History Forever / You Fail Geography Forever: Not really Shakespeare's fault, though, given his lack of formal education and the small number of history and geography books available in his time.
- Shakespeare may not have been educated or well-traveled, but he had plenty of opportunities to talk to people who were. He probably just didn't care about period, cultural, or historical accuracy, and wrote plays that were intended For Entertainment Purposes Only.
- Most of Shakespeare's sources on history, such as Holinshed's Chronicles, are essentially propaganda pieces and are therefore rather liberal with the truth, so in large part it's not Shakespeare that failed history, it is the historians.
- Also, Shakespeare himself was writing propaganda promoting the current English royalty, understandable considering he lived and died (financially at the very least) on their good opinion.
The plays, their individual tropes, and well-known adaptations include:
In addition to his plays, Shakespeare also wrote a series of sonnets and several longer poems. Tropes found in these include:
