Who are the men behind these 4 names? What’s with their works
in literature?
Speaking of the first name in this entry’s
title, Shakespeare is mostly known other than the other three.
William Shakespeare was
born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon. He is the son of John Shakespeare
and Mary Arden and was probably educated at the King Edward IV Grammar School
in Stratford, where he learned Latin and a little Greek and read the Roman
dramatists. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years
his senior. Together they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in 1583,
and Judith (whose twin brother died in boyhood), born in 1585.
Little is known about Shakespeare’s activities
between 1585 and 1592. Robert Greene’s A
Groatsworth of Wit alludes to him as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare
may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that
shortly after 1585 he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor.
Due to the plague, the London theaters were
often closed between June 1592 and April 1594. During that period, Shakespeare
probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton,
to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape
of Lucrece (1594). The former was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection
of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from
the world. Despite conservative objections to the poem’s glorification of
sensuality, it was enormously popular and was reprinted six times during the
nine years following its publication.
In 1594, Shakespeare joined the Lord
Chamberlain’s company of actors, the most popular of the companies acting at
Court. In 1599 Shakespeare joined a group of Chamberlain’s Men that would form
a syndicate to build and operate a new playhouse: the Globe, which became the
most famous theater of its time. With his share of the income from the
Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford.
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| The Globe Theatre |
While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost
dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his contemporaries
looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. Shakespeare’s sonnets
were composed between 1593 and 1601, though not published until 1609. That
edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare, consists of 154 sonnets, all written in
the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean.
The sonnets fall into two groups: sonnets 1-126, addressed to a beloved friend,
a handsome and noble young man, and sonnets 127-152, to a malignant but
fascinating “Dark Lady," who the poet loves in spite of himself. Nearly
all of Shakespeare’s sonnets examine the inevitable decay of time, and the
immortalization of beauty and love in poetry.
In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented
thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French, and native
roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, includes such words as: arch-villain,
birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore,
hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn,
watchdog, and zany.
Shakespeare wrote more than 30 plays. These are
usually divided into four categories: histories,
comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily
comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, but in 1596,
Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, his second tragedy, and over
the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which
he is now best known: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
and Antony and Cleopatra. In his final years, Shakespeare turned to the
romantic with Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
Only eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays were
published separately in quarto editions during his lifetime; a complete
collection of his works did not appear until the publication of the First Folio
in 1623, several years after his death. Nonetheless, his contemporaries
recognized Shakespeare’s achievements. Francis Meres cited “honey-tongued”
Shakespeare for his plays and poems in 1598, and the Chamberlain’s Men rose to
become the leading dramatic company in London, installed as members of the
royal household in 1603.
Sometime after 1612, Shakespeare retired from
the stage and returned to his home in Stratford. He drew up his will in January
of 1616, which included his famous bequest to his wife of his “second best
bed.” He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried two days later at Stratford
Church.
Below are among Shakespeare's works:
Poetry
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1609)
Venus and Adonis (1593)
Drama
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
All’s Well that Ends Well (1602)
Antony and Cleopatra (1607)
As You Like It (1599)
Coriolanus (1608)
Cymbeline (1609)
Hamlet (1600)
Henry IV (1597)
Henry V (1598)
Henry VI (Parts I, II, and III) (1590)
Henry VIII (1612)
Julius Caesar (1599)
King John (1596)
King Lear (1605)
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1593)
Macbeth (1606)
Measure for Measure (1604)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
Othello (1604)
Pericles (1608)
Richard II (1595)
Richard III (1594)
Romeo and Juliet (1596)
The Comedy of Errors (1590)
The Merchant of Venice (1596)
The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)
The Taming of the Shrew (1593)
The Tempest (1611)
The Winter’s Tale (1610)
Timon of Athens (1607)
Titus Andronicus (1590)
Troilus and Cressida (1600)
Twelfth Night (1599)
Two Gentlemen of Verona (1592)
Citation: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-shakespeare
The next name is Becket, the man behind Waiting For Godot.
Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906 – December 22,
1989) was an Irish avant-garde playwright, poet and novelist best known for his
play Waiting for Godot. Strongly
influenced by fellow Irish writer, James Joyce, Beckett is sometimes considered
the last of the Modernists, however, as his body of work
influenced many subsequent writers, he is also considered one of the fathers of the
Postmodernist movement. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1969, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and
drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on Good
Friday, 1906, Samuel Barclay Beckett was the younger of two sons born to
William Frank Beckett and May Barclay. The area surrounding his family home
featured in his prose and poetry later in life. Irish poet and Beckett
biographer Anthony Cronin said of Samuel Beckett’s childhood, “if anything, an
outdoor type rather than an indoor one. He enjoyed games and was good at them.
He roamed by himself as well as with his cousin and brother; and though he
often retreated to his tower with a book and was already noticeable in the
family circle for a certain moodiness and taciturnity, he could on the whole
have passed for an athletic, extrovert little Protestant middle-class boy with
excellent manners when forced to be sociable.”
He attended Trinity College from 1923 to 1927,
earning a Bachelor’s degree in French and Italian and developing a love for
Romance languages and poetry from such esteemed tutors as Thomas Rudmose-Brown,
A.A. Luce and Bianca Esposito.
He took a teaching position at Campbell College
in Belfast before moving to Paris to become a lecteur d’anglais at the École
Normale Supérieure. In Paris, Beckett was introduced to Irish novelist James
Joyce that had a profound effect on Beckett’s life. Samuel Beckett biographer
James Knowlson writes, of the relationship between James Joyce and Samuel
Beckett, “They both had degrees in French and Italian, although from different
universities in Dublin. Joyce's exceptional linguistic abilities and the wide
range of his reading in Italian, German, French, and English impressed the
linguist and scholar in Beckett, whose earlier studies allowed him to share
with Joyce his passionate love of Dante. They both adored words -- their
sounds, rhythms, shapes, etymologies, and histories -- and Joyce had a
formidable vocabulary derived from many languages and a keen interest in the
contemporary slang of several languages that Samuel Beckett admired and tried
to emulate.”
Around this time Samuel Beckett aided Joyce in his research for
what would one day become Finnegan’s Wake, he also wrote a critical essay
entitled, “Dante…Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,” in which Samuel Beckett defended James
Joyce’s work and method.
Samuel Beckett’s first published work, a short
story entitled, “Assumption,” appeared in transition, a highly influential
avant-garde serial edited by Franco-American writer Eugene Jolas. He won his
first literary prize the following year with the poem, “Whoroscope,” which
imagined Réné Déscartes meditating on the nature of time while waiting to be
served an egg at a restaurant. Following his first two published works, Beckett
returned to Dublin from Paris to accept a lecturing position at Trinity
College. He became disillusioned with academia shortly thereafter and resigned
from his position by playing a practical joke on the college. Samuel Beckett
invented a French author named Jean du Chas who had founded a literary movement
called “concentrism” and presented a lecture on Chas and Concentrism to mock
pedantry in the academic world.
Resigning from his position at Trinity College,
he traveled through Europe and Britain, stopping in London to publish Proust, a
critical study of Marcel Proust’s work and Beckett’s only published, long-form
work of criticism. During his travels, Beckett met many drifters and wanderers,
which he would use as the bases for several of his most memorable characters.
Throughout his European wanderings, Samuel Beckett also became interested in
the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and decided to devote himself entirely to
writing, beginning to work on his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which he subsequently abandoned
after little interest from publishers.
William Beckett, Samuel Beckett’s father, to
whom he was very close, died in 1933. Samuel was devastated by the loss of his
father and sought treatment at Tavistock Clinic in London where he was treated
by and studied under influential British psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Brion. While
at the Tavistock Clinic, Beckett witnessed a lecture given by Dr. Carl Jung on
the “never properly born” which affected much of his subsequent work including
Watt, Waiting for Godot and All that Fall which ends with an almost word for
word recitation of the end of Jung’s lecture.
Beginning what would become his first published
novel, Murphy, in 1935, Samuel Beckett traveled once again to Europe, this time
to Germany where he documented with distaste the rise of the Nazi party. Returning
to Ireland in 1937 to oversee the publication of Murphy, he had a major
falling-out with his mother, which contributed to his desire to leave Ireland
and settle permanently in Paris. At the outset of 1938, Beckett had installed
himself on the Left Bank of Paris where he renewed his friendship with James
Joyce and became friends with artists like Alberto Giacometti and Marcel
Duchamp. January of that year brought tragedy, he was accosted and stabbed in
the chest by a pimp who went by the name “Prudent.” When asked by Samuel
Beckett why he did this, Prudent replied, “I don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.”
The dawn of World War II found Samuel Beckett
aiding the French Resistance as a courier. In August 1942 his unit was found
out and he was forced to move with his lifelong companion, Suzanne
Dechevaux-Dumesnil, to the town of Rousillon. There he continued to aid the
Resistance while working on his novel Watt.
As the war drew to a close, Samuel Beckett
returned to Ireland where he had a critical epiphany. Fearing he would forever
toil in the shadow of James Joyce, a new path showed itself to him. “I realized
that James Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more,
[being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have
to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in
impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather
than in adding,” he wrote. He also began writing in French instead of his
native English because he found it easier to write, “without style.” His first
novel in French was entitled Mercier et Camier which was written in 1946 but
not published until 1970. Immediately after Mercier et Camier, he wrote what
many believe to be his best prose in the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The
Unnamable.
Following this new path to full fruition,
Samuel Beckett released his most famous work in 1953, the minimalist play,
Waiting for Godot. Godot was very successful albeit controversial in the
theaters of Paris but was not as well received in London and in the US. As time
progressed, however, Godot garnered critical acclaim, which ultimately saw
Samuel Beckett awarded the International Publisher’ Formentor Prize in 1961.
During this period Samuel Beckett also wrote the plays Endgame, Krapp’s Last
Tape, Endgame and Play.
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| Waiting For Godot play |
This period also saw changes in Samuel
Beckett’s personal life. His mother, with whom he had many difficulties, died
in 1950 and his brother, Frank, died in 1954, both of these deaths affected
Beckett’s later meditations on life and death in his work. He also married
Suzanne in a private ceremony in England in 1961. The success of his plays not
only offered him the ability to experiment with his writing but also enabled
him to begin a career as a theater director as well as to branch out into other
mediums. In 1956 he was commissioned by the BBC to write the radio play All
that Fall and continued to expand his scope into television and cinema.
Suzanne, Samuel Beckett’s wife, received the
news while they were on holiday in Tunis in 1969, that Samuel Beckett had been
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an event she described as a
“catastrophe” for her intensely private husband. Despite the accolades and
fame, however, Samuel Beckett remained a private man whose literary works
continued to explore the outer reaches of minimalism and experimentalism.
His later work, which focused on themes of
entrapment and frequently featured characters who were literally trapped from
the neck down, went through many phases, culminating in three “closed space
stories” in which he interrogates the nature of memory and its effect on the
confined and observed self. His final work, written in 1988, was a poem
entitled “Comment Dire (What is the Word),” which dealt with the inability to
find the words to express oneself.
Samuel Beckett died on the 22nd of December,
1989, just five months after his wife, Suzanne. They are interred together at
the Cimitiére de Montparnasse in Paris in a tomb of simple granite, following
Samuel Beckett’s instruction that it should be, “any
colour, so long as it’s gray.”
citation: http://www.egs.edu/library/samuel-beckett/biography/
Arthur Miller
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| Arthur Miller and his one time wife, the famous Marilyn Monroe |
Arthur Miller was born to a Jewish family in
New York in 1915. His grandparents had come to America from Poland. When the
family business failed, they moved to Brooklyn, where A View from the Bridge is
set. There, Arthur worked in a warehouse to earn money for his university fees.
He began to write plays while he was a student
at the University of Michigan and continued to do so after he graduated in 1938
and became a journalist. He received much acclaim from All My Sons in 1947;
Death of a Salesman (1949) - which won the Pulitzer Prize - and The Crucible (1952)
confirmed him as a great playwright.
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| Death of the Salesman |
Between his years as a journalist and making
his name as a writer, Miller worked in the Brooklyn shipyards for two years,
where he befriended the Italians he worked alongside. He heard a story of some
men coming over to work illegally and being betrayed. The story inspired A View
from the Bridge, which was written in 1955. It was originally a one-act play,
but Miller re-worked it into a two-act play the following year.
Miller's first marriage ended in divorce in
1956. He then married the actress Marilyn Monroe, but they divorced in 1961.
His third marriage was to a photographer, Inge Morath.
Most of his work is set in the America of the
day and portrays realistic characters and events. He deals with political and
moral issues and weaves in ideas from Greek tragedy. He is interested in how personal
relationships dictate the way one leads one's life and about people's struggles
to do what is right.
Miller died in 2005 at the age of 89. Today, he
is regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century.
Major Works of Arthur Miller:
All My Sons (1947)
Death of a Salesman (1949)
The Crucible (1953)
A View from the Bridge (1955)
After the Fall (1964)
Broken Glass (1994)
Resurrection Blues (2002)
Finishing the Picture (2004)
Norwegian’s Henrik Ibsen
A Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen is
considered as the father of Modern Theatre. He is also referred as the father
of realism. After Shakespeare, he is
considered as the second most influential and insightful dramatist and poet of
the 19th century. Ibsen was born on 20th March 1828 in the city Skien, Norway.
Henrik Ibsen was the eldest of his five siblings. He belonged to an affluent
merchant family settled in the port town of Skien, which was well known for
shipping timber.
Henrik father, Knud Ibsen (1797-1877) was a
well-off merchant. His mother, Marichen Altenburg (1799-1869) was a daughter of
one of the richest merchants of the Skien. When Henrik Ibsen turned eight his
father went bankrupt and became alcohol addicted. This was the most shattering
thing happened to his family. All through his childhood, Ibsen had been doomed
and depressive that can easily be seen in his work which is as much a
reflection of his own life. Even in most plays he had named his characters
after his family and acquaintances like in his most surreal drama, Rosmersholm
(1886).
At the age of fifteen, he was forced to leave
his school. Then he moved to Grimstad and worked as an apprentice to a
pharmacist. That was the time when he discovered himself as an author. He
worked at the pharmacy for six years and in the rarely given spare time he
started writing plays and painting. Then in 1850 he moved to Christiania (now
Oslo) for the sake of getting admission into University of Christiania but
couldn’t pass all the entrance exams. Quitting the idea of studies Ibsen fully
concentrated on his writing. He completed and published his first verse drama,
a tragedy, Catilina with the help of a friend. Nor the play did sell any
significant number of copies neither it got accepted at any theatre for
performances. In 1851, he got a job at the National Theatre of Bergen. The Burial Mound was
his first drama to be staged and attracted few. In the following years he wrote
numerous plays that went unsuccessful but his determination to be a playwright
stayed strong.
Year 1858, Ibsen returned to Christiania to
work as creative director at a local Norwegian theatre. Later in the year, he
got married to Suzannah Thorese. The couple got blessed with one child, Sigurd
Ibsen who also became an author and was a successful politician too. Ibsen’s
family faced very hard financial crisis at that time. Disappointed from life in
Norway, Ibsen went to Italy in 1864 and didn’t return to Norway, his hometown,
for 27 years. Then in this self-imposed exile he wrote a drama, Brands, which
gave him a breakthrough and financial success he was seeking for as a
playwright. After critically acclaimed Brands
(1865), there was no looking back for Ibsen. Some of
his fine works include the
Peer Gynt (1867) which made him famous in Italy. In 1868, Ibsen
went to Germany. Here he dramatized his social and controversial plays such as The Pillars of Society followed by his
remarkably famous, A
Doll’s House (1879). Then he went to Rome again and wrote Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People. Drama, Ghosts,
includes the topics such as venereal disease and incest which even more
triggered the controversy about Ibsen’s plays. He moved back to Germany after a
few years, and wrote his most well known work, Hedda Gabbler (1890). This
was the time when Henrik Ibsen became famous across the Europe.
In 1891, Henrik Ibsen went back to Norway as a
noted but controversial literary hero. The first drama he wrote after his
return was The Master
Builder. His later plays became the sort of tourist attraction in
Christiania. In 1899, he wrote When We
Dead Awaken which proved to be his last play. In 1900, he
suffered from a series of strokes but managed to live for few years after that.
On May 23, 1906 he passed away.
Citation: http://www.famousauthors.org/henrik-ibsen
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