(1564-1616) English poet and dramatist whose writings helped to shape not only our Theatre but our language. Shakespearian venues, scenes, themes, Icons and formal quotations – not to mention innumerable tags and scraps and catchphrases from the plays – have penetrated deeply into the matrix of Western literary and popular culture. In many of our acts of communication and storytelling Shakespeare underlies us, and we quote him often without knowing we do so. Many of his characters, too, are Underliers (> The Encyclopedia of Fantasy).
The universal influence of Shakespeare did not come about immediately. Although he remained well known throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, it was not until nearly 1800 that his works became unassailable lynchpins of literary tradition. The apotheosis of his work and life coincided roughly with the beginnings of Fantasy as a self-conscious genre. Fantasy has therefore been permeated by Shakespeare from its beginnings, both in English-speaking countries and on the European continent, and the influence has necessarily though less pervasively seeped through into sf. The twentieth century saw much related critical activity, resulting in a proper and necessary contextualizing of the works and humanizing of the man. Such textual analysis, and a proliferation of editions of his works, make Shakespeare's bibliography difficult; here we give estimated year of first performance and year of first book publication; when relevant, the first folio – Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (coll 1623) – and the third folio (1664) are cited. No attempt is made to trace any further the history of the texts.
Shakespeare's most notable direct influence on sf is through his last solo play The Tempest (performed circa 1611; 1623), which established several archetypes with its remote Island setting, its reclusive magician/philosopher Prospero who orchestrates the story's Godgame, his beautiful daughter Miranda, his supernatural servitor Ariel and the indigenous Monster Caliban (> Apes as Human). All these Proto SF tropes famously underwent a sea-change into sf forms in Forbidden Planet (1956): the remote planet, the Scientist Morbius, the daughter, the Robot servant and the Id Monster. Secondary echoes, particularly scientists and Mad Scientists with daughters, are very numerous in the genre. An excruciatingly detailed sf retelling of The Tempest on a lonely Asteroid fills most of the narrative of Beyond the Void (1965) by R L Fanthorpe writing as John E Muller, featuring scientist Rosper, daughter Darmina, the robot Leira, the Mutant Canbail and others.
Several stories describe unusual productions of Shakespeare's plays: Hamlet (performed circa 1600; 1603; exp 1604) with a borderline-supernatural frisson in Fritz Leiber's "Four Ghosts in Hamlet" (January 1965 F&SF); Romeo and Juliet (performed circa 1595-1596; 1597) with human players using Identity Transfer to perform in Alien bodies before a demanding alien audience in Anne McCaffrey's "Dramatic Mission" (June 1969 Analog); a version of Macbeth (performed circa 1606; 1623) commissioned to justify rather than condemn the murderous usurper (and his wife) in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters (1988); A Midsummer Night's Dream (performed circa 1595; 1600) in Neil Gaiman's Comics episode "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1990 Sandman); King Lear (performed circa 1605-1606; 1608) as a digitally and Subliminally enhanced "compu-drama" in Isaac Asimov's "Gold" (September 1991 Analog); and The Tempest in Paul Voermans's And Disregards the Rest (1992).
It is central to the fantastical Alternate History of Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (1974) that Shakespeare was the "Great Historian" whose writings are absolute historical truth; thus the story's noble characters, though not the proletariat, do indeed speak in blank verse. But the man himself, despite his Icon status, is not always respectfully treated. In Isaac Asimov's academic Satire "The Immortal Bard" (May 1954 Universe) he is brought to the present day by Time Travel and humiliated by failing a course on his own work; a similarly time-shifted Shakespeare in Clifford D Simak's The Goblin Reservation (1968) delivers a public speech titled "How It Happened I Did Not Write The Plays". In Anthony Burgess's "The Muse" (Spring 1968 The Hudson Review) he plagiarizes his material from texts brought back by time-travelling pilgrims, setting up a Time Paradox (who did write the plays?) and suggesting why as a simple copyist he famously "scarce blotted a line" – though as no manuscript of a Shakespeare play survives, no confirmation exists of this exceedingly unlikely presumption. The developing Superman of Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone (1969) pauses to check the Baconian theory by applying his enhanced mental powers to the texts, and loftily dismisses both Francis Bacon and Shakespeare as second-rate minds. The titular world of Clifford Simak's Shakespeare's Planet (1976) is named for a future space-traveller who is not the playwright.
The notion that Shakespeare's works were actually written by Francis Bacon or various other candidates has generated a vast literature of its own, fortunately beyond the scope of this encyclopedia, though James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010) can be recommended as a dispassionate but devastating rebuttal of such speculations. John Crowley's The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines (Fall 2002 Conjunctions #39; 2005 chap) contains a sympathetic but unbelieving description of the first book to advocate Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857) by Delia Bacon (1811-1859) (no relation). Ignatius Donnelly was a prime mover on the anti-Shakespeare front with The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888), and Mark Twain also gave countenance to the Baconian case in Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909); tales of rebuttal featuring Shakespeare himself include William Howells's The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon: A Fantasy (1914) and Hugh Kingsmill's The Return of William Shakespeare (1929).
Some further fictional appearances of the Bard in a fantastic context are Clemence Dane's The Godson: A Fantasy (1964 chap), John Mella's Transformations (fixup 1975), Susan Cooper's Timeslip tale King of Shadows (1999) and Erica Jong's Serenissima: A Novel of Venice (1987; vt Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice 2003). In Simon Hawke's nonfantastic Shakespeare & Smythe historical mysteries, beginning with A Mystery of Errors (2000), Shakespeare is half of a detective team. Diana Wynne Jones's Archer's Goon (1984) features a teasingly Shakespeare-like character living in the Elizabethan past and named Hathaway.
More remotely, the curse engraved on Shakespeare's tomb – "Blese be the man that spares thes stones, / And curst be he that moves my bones." – has inspired such stories as M Y Halidom's The Poet's Curse (1911) and Arthur C Clarke's "Nightfall" (1947 King's College Review; vt "The Curse" September 1953 Cosmos). The notion that a group of monkeys randomly prodding at typewriters might eventually generate the works of Shakespeare by sheer chance is a famous probabilistic Thought Experiment (which see). Though the use of Shakespearean quotations for story titles is too common for enumeration, one amusingly eccentric example is Anthony Boucher's trio of short fantasies about dealings with eponymous demons: "Snulbug" (December 1941 Unknown), "Sriberdegibit" (June 1943 Unknown) and "Nellthu" (August 1955 F&SF) – all three names being corrupt readings from the 1608 "bad quarto" text of King Lear.
A relevant theme anthology is Weird Tales from Shakespeare (anth 1994) edited by Martin H Greenberg and Katharine Kerr. Also of interest, though containing little fantastic material, is Shakespearean Detectives (anth 1998; vt More Shakespearean Whodunnits 1998) edited by Mike Ashley. [DRL/JC]
see also: Chris Adrian; Arts; Samuel Butler; Club Story; John Dee; Nigel Dennis; Deus Ex Machina; Entropy; Alethea Hayter; Rachel Ingalls; Ben Jonson; Sir Humphry Lunatic; Harold Mackaye; Reincarnation; J C Squire.
William Shakespeare
born Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: [baptized] 26 April 1564
died Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: 23 April 1616
works (selected)
about the author
We do not attempt to select from the thousands of biographies and critical studies of William Shakespeare. We do however cite two valuable studies here, because they effectively put paid to the kind of speculation that might seem attractive to authors of the fantastic.
links
Previous versions of this entry