"Cliff Notes - Merchant of Venice, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

than Shakespeare's farcical early comedies.

We do not know the exact date of The Merchant of Venice's first
performance. Most likely it was in 1596. It was revived during
Shakespeare's lifetime, for a performance at court before King James
I in 1605.

After his retirement in 1612, William Shakespeare moved back to his
hometown of Stratford where he lived the quiet life of a country
gentleman. He died in 1616, survived by his widow and two daughters.
(Hamnet, the only son, died in childhood.) Although Shakespeare had
a certain reputation as the author of the Sonnets and several
narrative poems, no one had any reason to anticipate at the time
that his plays would be the basis of lasting literary fame, much
less become celebrated as masterpieces of English literature.

Shakespeare does not seem to have taken any interest at all in
preserving his works for posterity. As was traditional at the time,
the rights to Shakespeare's plays belonged to his theater company
and were not considered his personal property. In fact, Elizabethans
did not usually think of contemporary plays as being serious
literature.

A few of Shakespeare's plays were published in his lifetime in cheap
editions. These versions contained a good many errors. Sometimes
stage directions or comments written in by the prompters got mixed
up with Shakespeare's lines. Sometimes the actual speeches were
based not on what Shakespeare wrote down, but on what an actor who
had played the part happened to remember.

It was only after Shakespeare's death in 1623 that some members of
his acting company set out to produce an accurate edition of
Shakespeare's dramatic works. This edition, called the First Folio,
still contained some errors. One play which we now attribute to
Shakespeare--Pericles--was not even included. A real detective
mystery for Shakespeare scholars has been the effort to separate the
words Shakespeare actually wrote from the many mistakes and
alterations that crept into the texts of the plays over the years.
Even today, scholars continue to debate over which is the correct
version of some lines in Shakespeare's plays. But we can count on
the fact that the plays as we know them are quite close to what
Shakespeare wrote. We can be even more sure there are no "new"
Shakespeare plays waiting to be discovered--though this does not
stop some people from dreaming about finding a dusty manuscript of a
long-forgotten masterpiece.

As for Shakespeare the man, he will probably always be a mystery. We
know who he was. But we can only guess what inspired him to write as
he did, or how his plays were related to the events and concerns of
his personal life.