Continental Europe in William Shakespeare's Life and Works and the Shakespeare Problem

Abstract

The article suggests a positive answer to the question whether William Shakespeare from Stratford could have visited the countries of Continental Europe, which allows one to interpret many of his texts with a fair degree of certainty and to discard the unorthodox theories offered by the disintegrators of the Shakespearean canon and by the anti-Stratfordians, as well as the not impartial theses of the politically orientated British-American academic literary criticism. The historical and literary information offered allows one to get a comprehensive idea of the problem under discussion and of the reasons of why so far consensus in this sphere has not been reached. The article also contains an overview of the significant events connected with the pre-Shakespearean and the Shakespearean periods in this history of England, which explains why so many contemporary documents had been either destroyed or lost and why in so many cases the remaining data had been either declared to be irrelevant for the Shakespeare studies or had been interpreted with no reference to the objective historical context. All this coupled with the idolization of Shakespeare eventually led quite a number of Shakespearologists to believing that his texts must have been written by somebody else. Side by side with reviewing some points of the anti-Stratfordian theories the article reveals certain facts of William Shakespeare's life and work, which are objectively relevant for reconstructing his biography and for an adequate interpretation of his works. The key idea of the paper may be formulated as follows: though the direct information concerning Shakespeare's life and works is rightly believed to be insufficient, the obstacles in this case may be overcome through carefully considering the existing direct and circumstantial evidence (analogy in this situation being the basic methodological principle) in order to create an irrefutable system of arguments in favour of attributing to their generally accepted author the Shakespearean texts which one way or another reflect the realia of contemporary Continental Europe. The main directions of the future Shakespeare studies are also outlined.

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