WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

. . . Shakespeare commands the language with which to express the deep suffering of men and the nature of the conflict in which they find themselves.

David Galloway, Shakespeare: Seven Talks for CBC Radio

English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) matured greatly as a writer over his career. Some might argue that he reached a height of technique and wisdom, and that afterwards his writing somewhat declined. If this is true, we should examine the most superb works of his maturity.

These appear to be the great plays, mostly tragedies, he wrote beginning about 1599. Let me name the usual suspects: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and -- perhaps -- Coriolanus. We do not know the exact order in which he wrote these plays, presumably between 1599 and 1607-8. But scholars have established a few facts about them so that the above order is approximately correct. Of course, we cannot know whether Shakespeare worked on several at the same time, or began one, to leave it and write another; then returned to the first. Writers work in this irregular way all the time.

Hamlet seems to me the earliest of these works. It is both a little too long and a little less expert than Othello, which is just about a perfectly structured play. Shakespeare reached a peak of pure dramaturgy in Othello.

But Macbeth and Lear seem to share a few words and ideas, so perhaps both were written at nearly the same time. And the one contrasts nicely in length with the other. So I tend to believe one followed the other, probably Lear after Macbeth.

Antony and Cleopatra seems the lushest, richest, most romantically lush play of Shakespeare's; in this it contrasts nicely with Coriolanus. I can believe that Shakespeare would follow a play of lush life with one about severity.

Coriolanus seems to me something like Timon of Athens, which seems to be an expansion of the idea of Coriolanus's contempt for the mob.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

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