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With plots that entertained both the highest and the lowest minds, Shakespeare
taught the play-going public about human nature. His tool was an unrivaled mastery
of the English language. Using borrowed plots, outrageous puns, and poetic lan-
guage, Shakespeare wrote comedies (c. 1590— Taming of the Shrew, As You Like
It ), tragedies (c. 1600— Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear ), and fanciful com-
binations (c. 1610— The Tempest ), exploring the full range of human emotions and
reinventing the English language.
Perhaps as important was his insight into humanity. His father was a glove
maker and wool merchant, and his mother was the daughter of a landowner from
a Catholic family. Some scholars speculate that Shakespeare's parents were closet
Catholics, practicing their faith during the rise of Protestantism. It is this tug-of-war
between two worlds, some think, that helped enlighten Shakespeare's humanism.
Think of his stock of great characters and great lines: Hamlet (“To be or not to be,
that is the question”), Othello and his jealousy (“It is the green-eyed monster”), am-
bitious Mark Antony (“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”), rowdy
Falstaff (“The better part of valor is discretion”), and the star-crossed lovers Romeo
and Juliet (“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks”). Shakespeare
probed the psychology of human beings 300 years before Freud. Even today, his
characters strike a familiar chord.
The scope of his brilliant work, his humble beginnings, and the fact that no ori-
ginal Shakespeare manuscripts survive raise a few scholarly eyebrows. Some have
wondered if maybe Shakespeare had help on several of his plays. After all, they
reasoned, how could a journeyman actor with little education have written so many
masterpieces? And he was surrounded by other great writers, such as his friend and
fellow poet, Ben Jonson. Most modern scholars, though, agree that Shakespeare did
indeed write the plays and sonnets attributed to him.
His contemporaries had no doubts about Shakespeare—or his legacy. As Jon-
son wrote in the preface to the First Folio, “He was not of an age, but for all time!”
The Canterbury Tales
Six hundred years later, England was Christian, but it was hardly the pious, predictable,
Sunday-school world we might imagine. Geoffrey Chaucer's bawdy collection of stories
(c. 1410), told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, gives us the full range of life's ex-
periences—happy, sad, silly, sexy, and devout. (Late in life, Chaucer wrote an apology for
those works of his “that tend toward sin.”)
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