Regardless of whether you actually enjoyed studying Shakespeare at school or have avoided his works in adulthood because of a really bad English teacher, there isn’t anyone who will be able to deny the influence of his works on the English language. Indeed his influence is so great that each of his 38 plays will be performed in a different language at the Olympics in 2012. He was renowned for creating new words and is reported to have had a more extensive vocabulary than Milton, but even this does not explain the fascination we still have with Shakespeare, a fascination which is felt around the globe, so what is it that makes Shakespeare have such universal appeal? After all, the French dramatist Jean Racine has a formidable reputation, but is he so well known?
The plays in themselves are enough to explain why we continue to revisit his writing, but our fascination is not lessened by the mystery surrounding who Shakespeare really was. We will all be familiar with the bare facts: He was born in Stratford upon Avon on the 23rd April, 1564, is thought to have attended the local grammar school at 11, married Anne Hathaway at the age of eighteen, and then went to London to seek his fortune- or did he? A number of famous writers such as Henry James and Dickens have questioned the official biography, and there are a group of scholars called the Oxfordians who argue that the ‘real’ Shakespeare was in fact Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. These critics argue that the Stratford Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays for a number of reasons: Shakespeare was not widely travelled and was writing in an age where guide books did not exist, yet his plays show extensive knowledge of European customs and literature; while he was not a member of the court, his plays show a keen understanding of courtly life and practices- as well as the undercurrents of political intrigue. Furthermore while he is thought to have attended the local grammar school, there are no records that prove this, and it is generally accepted by both schools of thought that illiteracy ran in his family. The question the Oxfordians ask is whether a man from such humble origins was capable of writing the plays? The mystery is complicated by the fact that the only writing that survives from the Stratford Shakespeare are six signatures- three of which remain incomplete. The other three appear on his will and were written laboriously. Indeed, the final signature appears to have been written with help, and the “by me William” accompanying it is written in a different hand with more proficiency. The Earl on the other hand was in a better position to have been the author. He not only travelled extensively, but was from a literary background, and some of his early writing survives which seems to anticipate ‘Shakespeare’s’ more sophisticated style. Additionally, when he was 12, he became the ward of Lord Burghley, (Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State,) following the death of his father. Owing to this he would have been familiar with life at court from an early age.
One thing that is certain is regardless of whether he was an aristocrat or the son of a small-town businessman, his plays will still continue to be read and rewritten. Shakespeare’s plays not only offer an insight into the past, giving us a glimpse of the Elizabethan/Jacobean way of thinking they also speak to modern times. In Othello the issues surrounding war and racial conflict are still applicable today, and no one tires of Romeo and Juliet because we all like to hear a good love story every now and again, but there’s more to his appeal than that. Perhaps the most important reason for why we never tire of Shakespeare lies in his characters and the way he depicts their motives and conflicts. Their triumphs and downfalls give us a profound insight into the complexities of human nature and often provoke audiences into questioning their own motives and behaviour. This is a characteristic of all great literature and why we continually revisit it.
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