Today marks the 400th anniversary of the death of the leading writer within the English literary canon. William Shakespeare, the poet, playwright and cultural hero, died on the 23rd April 1616 aged fifty-two.
While entrenched within our global literary consciousness, there is little we know about the writer. Though most of us have either read, watched or learned about his work, there is a stretch of time known as Shakespeare’s “lost years” ranging from 1578-1582 and 1585-1592. These periods cover the time between his marriage to Anne Hathaway, the seven-year gap amid the birth of his children and his rise to fame as a London playwright in 1592.
Though there are no exact records for his birthday, we know that he married young, suffered from the death of his child, has no descendent alive today. While most of his family were illiterate, Shakespeare is responsible for incorporating three-thousand words into the English Language. Phrases like “faint-hearted,” “puke” and “love is blind” are a result of Shakespeare’s proficient fluency in the English language.
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Similarly, we don’t actually know what Shakespeare believed. Leaving no diary, his surviving letters are merely requests for patronage, jurisdictional writings regarding business transactions and legal matters.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, however, used poetry and drama to colour the the many dimensions of his love for a mystery persona. Rendering himself immortal through the written word, Shakespeare often mediated upon our impermanence, the power of the metaphor and the incontestability of the complex human personality.
So who really was Shakespeare? A master of the pen, capable of conjuring both laughter and horror from his audience, Shakespeare as a writer exposed the variety of human personality and staged his scepticism regarding the world around him. Interrogating politics, religion and common cultural practice, he was cynical of Puritan intolerance for the theatre, the brutally masculine Roman early modern world. Ultimately, Shakespeare continues to draw our attention to the limits of our knowledge about the world that surrounds us.
Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Othello… Shakespeare continues to live on after four centuries because he reminds us of the unanswerable questions that continue to prevail today. Through his storytelling, Shakespeare perpetually resurfaces the paradoxes of the human condition, making him all the more compelling as time prevails.