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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES


The red-bearded man holds the knife high, poised to strike at his
victim's heart. The spectators are paralyzed with fear.

Can anything prevent him from gaining his bloody revenge? The
powerful Duke of Venice has already tried and failed. The only
remaining hope lies in a beautiful heroine, who has no weapons to
draw upon except a quick wit and a courageous spirit.

This suspenseful scene from The Merchant of Venice by William
Shakespeare has been reenacted thousands of times since the play's
first performance in the 1590s, and it never fails to keep audiences
enthralled. Along with the tragedy of Hamlet, it is one of the more
popular and frequently revived of Shakespeare's plays. It is also
one of the most controversial. Some readers and playgoers find in
the play an eloquent plea for tolerance; others feel uncomfortable
with its reliance on what they regard as anti-Semitic stereotypes.
The critics, meanwhile, cannot even agree on whether the mood of the
play is happy or sad. Some describe it as a light, witty comedy with
no social message whatsoever. Others have called it more tragic than
comic in spirit. In spite of all this disagreement, The Merchant of
Venice remains as compelling today as it was four centuries ago
because it comments so eloquently on universal themes--the drive for
revenge and the power of love. As the British essayist William
Hazlitt wrote in 1817, "This is a play that in spite of the change
in manners and prejudices, still holds undisputed possession of the
stage."

Just about everyone agrees that The Merchant of Venice's author was
a genius, the most skillful and profound dramatist in English
literary history. Yet very little is known about the personal life
and character of this uniquely talented man.

Indeed, the documentary evidence concerning the life of William
Shakespeare is so meager that for generations amateur detectives,
and a few serious literary historians, have been tempted to theorize
that the works of Shakespeare were really written by one of his more
illustrious contemporaries. Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Sir Francis Bacon, and even Queen Elizabeth I, have all been named
at one time or another as the true authors of Shakespeare's plays. A
recent theory, which appeared in a 1984 book called The Mysterious
William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn, contends that a nobleman
named Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote all of Shakespeare's
works--but pretended not to have done so because authorship would
have hurt his chances to shine at court!

Everyone loves a mystery, and so the speculation continues. The real