Coordinates	51°9′″N19°0′″N
region	Western philosophy
era	The Scientific Revolution
color	#B0C4DE
birth date	January 22, 1561
birth place	Strand, London, England
death date	April 09, 1626
death place	Highgate, London, England
school tradition	Empiricism
influences	Presocratics (Democritus, Empedocles, Parmenides), Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michel de Montaigne, Vanoccio Biringuccio, Bernard Palissy, Bernardino Telesio, William Gilbert
influenced	Thomas Hobbes, French Encyclopédistes
signature	Francis Bacon Signature.svg }}

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the ''Baconian method'', or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. His dedication probably led to his death, bringing him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments.

Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created both the Baron Verulam in 1618, and the Viscount St Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs both peerages became extinct upon his death. He famously died of pneumonia contracted while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.

Biography

Early life

Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House near the Strand in London, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon by his second wife Anne (Cooke) Bacon, the daughter of noted humanist Anthony Cooke. His mother's sister was married to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, making Burghley Francis Bacon's uncle. Biographers believe that Bacon was educated at home in his early years owing to poor health (which plagued him throughout his life), receiving tuition from John Walsall, a graduate of Oxford with a strong leaning towards Puritanism. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, on 5 April 1573 at the age of twelve, living for three years there together with his older brother Anthony under the personal tutelage of Dr John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Bacon's education was conducted largely in Latin and followed the medieval curriculum. He was also educated at the University of Poitiers. It was at Cambridge that he first met Queen Elizabeth, who was impressed by his precocious intellect, and was accustomed to calling him "the young Lord Keeper".

His studies brought him to the belief that the methods and results of science as then practised were erroneous. His reverence for Aristotle conflicted with his loathing of Aristotelian philosophy, which seemed to him barren, disputatious, and wrong in its objectives.

On 27 June 1576, he and Anthony entered ''de societate magistrorum'' at Gray's Inn. A few months later, Francis went abroad with Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador at Paris, while Anthony continued his studies at home. The state of government and society in France under Henry III afforded him valuable political instruction. For the next three years he visited Blois, Poitiers, Tours, Italy, and Spain. During his travels, Bacon studied language, statecraft, and civil law while performing routine diplomatic tasks. On at least one occasion he delivered diplomatic letters to England for Walsingham, Burghley, and Leicester, as well as for the queen.

The sudden death of his father in February 1579 prompted Bacon to return to England. Sir Nicholas had laid up a considerable sum of money to purchase an estate for his youngest son, but he died before doing so, and Francis was left with only a fifth of that money. Having borrowed money, Bacon got into debt. To support himself, he took up his residence in law at Gray's Inn in 1579.

Parliamentarian

Bacon's threefold goals were to uncover truth, to serve his country, and to serve his church. He sought to further these ends by seeking a prestigious post. In 1580, through his uncle, Lord Burghley, he applied for a post at court, which might enable him to pursue a life of learning. His application failed. For two years he worked quietly at Gray's Inn, until he was admitted as an outer barrister in 1582.

In 1584, he took his seat in parliament for Melcombe in Dorset, and subsequently for Taunton (1586). At this time, he began to write on the condition of parties in the church, as well as on the topic of philosophical reform in the lost tract, ''Temporis Partus Maximus''. Yet, he failed to gain a position he thought would lead him to success. He showed signs of sympathy to Puritanism, attending the sermons of the Puritan chaplain of Gray's Inn and accompanying his mother to the Temple chapel to hear Walter Travers. This led to the publication of his earliest surviving tract, which criticised the English church's suppression of the Puritan clergy. In the Parliament of 1586, he openly urged execution for Mary, Queen of Scots.

About this time, he again approached his powerful uncle for help; this move was followed by his rapid progress at the bar. He became Bencher in 1586, and he was elected a reader in 1587, delivering his first set of lectures in Lent the following year. In 1589, he received the valuable appointment of reversion to the Clerkship of the Star Chamber, although he did not formally take office until 1608 – a post which was worth £16,000 a year.

Attorney General

Bacon soon became acquainted with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth's favourite. By 1591, he acted as the earl's confidential adviser.

In 1592, he was commissioned to write a tract in response to the Jesuit Robert Parson's anti-government polemic, which he entitled ''Certain observations made upon a libel'', identifying England with the ideals of democratic Athens against the belligerence of Spain.

Bacon took his third parliamentary seat for Middlesex when in February 1593 Elizabeth summoned Parliament to investigate a Roman Catholic plot against her. Bacon's opposition to a bill that would levy triple subsidies in half the usual time offended many people. Opponents accused him of seeking popularity. For a time, the royal court excluded him.

When the Attorney-Generalship fell vacant in 1594, Lord Essex's influence was not enough to secure Bacon that office. Likewise, Bacon failed to secure the lesser office of Solicitor-General in 1595. To console him for these disappointments, Essex presented him with a property at Twickenham, which he sold subsequently for £1,800.

In 1596, Bacon became Queen's Counsel, but missed the appointment of Master of the Rolls. During the next few years, his financial situation remained bad. His friends could find no public office for him, and a scheme for retrieving his position by a marriage with the wealthy and young widow Lady Elizabeth Hatton failed after she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to a wealthier man. In 1598 Bacon was arrested for debt. Afterwards however, his standing in the Queen's eyes improved. Gradually, Bacon earned the standing of one of the learned counsels, though he had no commission or warrant and received no salary. His relationship with the Queen further improved when he severed ties with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, a shrewd move because Essex was executed for treason in 1601.

With others, Bacon was appointed to investigate the charges against Essex, his former friend and benefactor. A number of Essex's followers confessed that Essex had planned a rebellion against the Queen. Bacon was subsequently a part of the legal team headed by Attorney General Sir Edward Coke at Essex's treason trial. After the execution, the Queen ordered Bacon to write the official government account of the trial, which was later published as ''A DECLARATION of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Majestie and her Kingdoms ...'' after Bacon's first draft was heavily edited by the Queen and her ministers.

James I comes to the throne

The succession of James I brought Bacon into greater favour. He was knighted in 1603. In another shrewd move, Bacon wrote his ''Apologie'' in defence of his proceedings in the case of Essex, as Essex had favoured James to succeed to the throne.

The following year, during the course of the uneventful first parliament session, Bacon married Alice Barnham. In June 1607 he was at last rewarded with the office of Solicitor-General. The following year, he began working as the Clerkship of the Star Chamber. In spite of a generous income, old debts still couldn't be paid. He sought further promotion and wealth by supporting King James and his arbitrary policies.

In 1610 the fourth session of James' first parliament met. Despite Bacon's advice to him, James and the Commons found themselves at odds over royal prerogatives and the king's embarrassing extravagance. The House was finally dissolved in February 1611. Throughout this period Bacon managed to stay in the favour of the king while retaining the confidence of the Commons.

In 1613, Bacon was finally appointed attorney general, after advising the king to shuffle judicial appointments. As attorney general, Bacon prosecuted Somerset in 1616. The so-called "Prince's Parliament" of April 1614 objected to Bacon's presence in the seat for Cambridge and to the various royal plans which Bacon had supported. Although he was allowed to stay, parliament passed a law that forbade the attorney-general to sit in parliament. His influence over the king had evidently inspired resentment or apprehension in many of his peers. Bacon, however, continued to receive the King's favour, which led to his appointment in March 1617 as the temporary Regent of England (for a period of a month), and in 1618 as Lord Chancellor. On 12 July 1618 the king created Bacon Baron Verulam of Verulam or, as the new peer styled himself, ''Francis, Lord Verulam''.

Bacon continued to use his influence with the king to mediate between the throne and Parliament and in this capacity he was further elevated, as Viscount St Alban, on 27 January 1621.

Lord Chancellor and public disgrace

Bacon's public career ended in disgrace in 1621. After he fell into debt, a Parliamentary Committee on the administration of the law charged him with twenty-three separate counts of corruption. To the lords, who sent a committee to enquire whether a confession was really his, he replied, "My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart; I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed." He was sentenced to a fine of £40,000 that was remitted by King James and committed to the Tower of London during the king's pleasure; his imprisonment lasted only a few days. More seriously, parliament declared Bacon incapable of holding future office or sitting in parliament. He narrowly escaped being deprived of his titles. Subsequently the disgraced viscount devoted himself to study and writing.

There seems little doubt that Bacon had accepted gifts from litigants, but this was an accepted custom of the time and not necessarily evidence of deeply corrupt behaviour. While acknowledging that his conduct had been lax, he countered that he had never allowed gifts to influence his judgement and, indeed, he had on occasion given a verdict against those who had paid him. The true reason for his acknowledgement of guilt is the subject of debate, but it may have been prompted by his poor state of health, or by a view that through his fame and the greatness of his office he would be spared harsh punishment. He may even have been blackmailed, with a threat to charge him with sodomy, into confession.

Relationships

When he was 36, Bacon engaged in the courtship of Elizabeth Hatton, a young widow of 20. Reportedly, she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to a wealthier man—Edward Coke. Years later, Bacon still wrote of his regret that the marriage to Hatton had not taken place.

At the age of forty-five, Bacon married Alice Barnham, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a well-connected London alderman and MP. Bacon wrote two sonnets proclaiming his love for Alice. The first was written during his courtship and the second on his wedding day, 10 May 1606. When Bacon was appointed Lord Chancellor, "by special Warrant of the King", Lady Bacon was given precedence over all other Court ladies.

Reports of increasing friction in his marriage to Alice appeared, with speculation that some of this may have been due to financial resources not being as readily available to her as she was accustomed to having in the past. Alice was reportedly interested in fame and fortune, and when reserves of money were no longer available, there were complaints about where all the money was going. Alice Chambers Bunten wrote in her ''Life of Alice Barnham'' that, upon their descent into debt, she actually went on trips to ask for financial favours and assistance from their circle of friends. Bacon disinherited her upon discovering her secret romantic relationship with John Underhill. He rewrote his will, which had previously been very generous to her (leaving her lands, goods, and income), revoking it all.

Though the well-connected antiquary John Aubrey noted among his private memoranda concerning Bacon, "He was a Pederast. His Ganimeds and Favourites tooke Bribes", biographers continue to debate about Bacon's sexual inclinations and the precise nature of his personal relationships. Several authors believe that despite his marriage Bacon was primarily attracted to the same sex. Professor Forker for example has explored the "historically documentable sexual preferences" of both King James and Bacon – and concluded they were all oriented to "masculine love", a contemporary term that "seems to have been used exclusively to refer to the sexual preference of men for members of their own gender." The Jacobean antiquarian, Sir Simonds D'Ewes implied there had been a question of bringing him to trial for buggery. This conclusion has been disputed by others, who consider the sources to be more open to interpretation.

Death

On 9 April 1626 Bacon died of pneumonia while at Arundel mansion at Highgate outside London. An influential account of the circumstances of his death was given by John Aubrey's ''Brief Lives''. Aubrey has been criticised for his evident credulousness in this and other works; on the other hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, Bacon's fellow-philosopher and friend. Aubrey's vivid account, which portrays Bacon as a martyr to experimental scientific method, had him journeying to Highgate through the snow with the King's physician when he is suddenly inspired by the possibility of using the snow to preserve meat: "They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it".

After stuffing the fowl with snow, Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia. Some people, including Aubrey, consider these two contiguous, possibly coincidental events as related and causative of his death: "The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging ... but went to the Earle of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into ... a damp bed that had not been layn-in ... which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation."

Being unwittingly on his deathbed, the philosopher wrote his last letter to his absent host and friend Lord Arundel:

{{bquote|My very good Lord,—I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius; for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey between London and Highgate, I was taken with such a fit of casting as I know not whether it were the Stone, or some surfeit or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three. But when I came to your Lordship's House, I was not able to go back, and therefore was forced to take up my lodging here, where your housekeeper is very careful and diligent about me, which I assure myself your Lordship will not only pardon towards him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed your Lordship's House was happy to me, and I kiss your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure you give me to it. I know how unfit it is for me to write with any other hand than mine own, but by my troth my fingers are so disjointed with sickness that I cannot steadily hold a pen."}}

Another account appears in a biography by William Rawley, Bacon's personal secretary and chaplain:

At his funeral, over thirty great minds collected together their eulogies of him, which was then later published in Latin.

He left personal assets of about £7,000 and lands that realised £6,000 when sold. His debts amounted to more than £23,000, equivalent to more than £3m at current value.

Philosophy and works

Francis Bacon is the father of the scientific method, which is fundamental to natural philosophy. In his magnum opus, ''Novum Organum'', or "new instrument", Francis Bacon argued that although philosophy at the time mainly used deductive syllogisms to interpret nature, mainly owing to Aristotle's logic (or Organon), the philosopher should instead proceed through inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to physical law. Before beginning this induction, the enquirer is to free his or her mind from certain false notions or tendencies which distort the truth. These are called "Idols" (''idola''), and are of four kinds:

"Idols of the Tribe" (''idola tribus''), which are common to the race;

"Idols of the Den" (''idola specus''), which are peculiar to the individual;

"Idols of the Marketplace" (''idola fori''), coming from the misuse of language; and

"Idols of the Theatre" (''idola theatri''), which result from an abuse of authority.

The end of induction is the discovery of forms, the ways in which natural phenomena occur, the causes from which they proceed.

Bacon explicated his somewhat fragmentary ethical system – derived through use of his methods – in the seventh and eighth books of his ''De augmentis scientiarum'' (1623) – where he distinguished between duty to the community (an ethical matter) and duty to God (a religious matter). Bacon claimed that:

Any moral action is the action of the human will, which is governed by belief and spurred on by the passions;

Good habit is what aids men in directing their will toward the good; and

No universal rules can be made, as both situations and men's characters differ.

Regarding faith, in ''De augmentis'', he wrote that "the more discordant, therefore, and incredible, the divine mystery is, the more honour is shown to God in believing it, and the nobler is the victory of faith." He wrote in "The Essays: Of Atheism" that "a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion." Meanwhile in the very next essay called: "Of Superstition" Bacon remarks- "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue... but superstition dismounts all these and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men: therefore atheism never did perturb states; for it makes men wary of themeselves... and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Caesar) were civil times; but superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new 'primum mobile.' that ravisheth all the spheres of government." However, Bacon did maintain his own Christian beliefs, of which he differentiated from "superstition". Bacon notes that “It is better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of him: for the one is unbelief the other is contumely; and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.” Yet even more than this, Bacon's views of God are in accordance with popular protestant theology, as he writes that “They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts in his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.”

Nevertheless, Bacon contrasted the new approach of the development of science with that of the Middle Ages:

"''Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world.''"

Since Bacon's ideal was widespread revolution of the common method of scientific inquiry, there had to be some way by which his method could become widespread. His solution was to lobby the state to make natural philosophy a matter of greater importance – not only to fund it, but also to regulate it. While in office under Queen Elizabeth, he even advocated for the employment of a Minister for Science and Technology; a position which was never realised. Later under King James, Bacon wrote in ''The Advancement of Learning'': "The King should take order for the collecting and perfecting of a Natural and Experimental History, true and severe (unencumbered with literature and book-learning), such as philosophy may be built upon, so that philosophy and the sciences may no longer float in air, but rest on the solid foundation of experience of every kind."

While Bacon was a strong advocate for state involvement in scientific inquiry, he also felt that his general method should be applied directly to the functioning of the state as well. For Bacon, matters of policy were inseparable from philosophy and science. Bacon recognised the repetitive nature of history, and sought to correct it by making the future direction of government more rational. In order to make future civil history more linear and achieve real progress, he felt that methods of the past and experiences of the present should be examined together in order to determine the best ways by which to go about civil discourse. Bacon began one particular address to the house of Commons with a reference to the book of Jeremiah: "Stand in the ancient ways, but look also into present experience in order to see whether in the light of this experience ancient ways are right. If they are found to be so, walk in them." In short, he wanted his method of progress building on progress in natural philosophy to be integrated into England's political theory.

Bacon's works include his ''Essays'', as well as the ''Colours of Good and Evil'' and the ''Meditationes Sacrae'', all published in 1597. (His famous aphorism, "knowledge is power", is found in the ''Meditations''.) He published ''Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human'' in 1605. Bacon also wrote ''In felicem memoriam Elizabethae'', a eulogy for the queen written in 1609; and various philosophical works which constitute the fragmentary and incomplete ''Instauratio magna'' (Great Renewal), the most important part of which is the ''Novum Organum'' (New Instrument, published 1620); in this work he cites three world-changing inventions:

"''Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.''"

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have argued that Bacon was not as idealistic as his utopian works suggest, rather that he was what might today be considered an advocate of genocidal eugenics. A year prior to the release of ''New Atlantis'', Bacon published an essay that reveals a version of himself not often seen in history. This essay, a lesser-known work entitled, ''An Advertisement Touching a Holy War'', advocated the elimination of detrimental societal elements by the English and compared this to the endeavours of Hercules while establishing civilised society in ancient Greece. He saw the "''extirpation and debellating of giants, monsters, and foreign tyrants, not only as lawful, but as meritorious, even divine honour...''"

Laurence Lampert has interpreted Bacon's treatise ''An Advertisement Touching a Holy War'' as advocating "spiritual warfare against the spiritual rulers of European civilisation."

Bacon's Utopia

In 1623, Bacon expressed his aspirations and ideals in ''New Atlantis''. Released in 1627, this was his creation of an ideal land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit" were the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of Bensalem. In this work, he portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, "Salomon's House", envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. There has been much speculation as to whether a real island society inspired Bacon's utopia. Scholars have suggested numerous countries, from Iceland to Japan; Dr. Nick Lambert highlighted the latter in ''The View Beyond''.

Baconian method

The ''Novum Organum'' is a philosophical work by Francis Bacon published in 1620. The title is a reference to Aristotle's work Organon, which was his treatise on logic and syllogism. In ''Novum Organum,'' Bacon detailed a new system of logic he believed to be superior to the old ways of syllogism. In this work, we see the development of the ''Baconian method'', consisting of procedures for isolating the formal cause of a phenomenon (heat, for example) through eliminative induction.

Influence

Bacon's ideas about the improvement of the human lot were influential in the 1630s and 1650s among a number of Parliamentarian scholars. During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660. In the nineteenth century his emphasis on induction was revived and developed by William Whewell, among others.

North America

Some scholars believe that Bacon's vision for a Utopian New World in North America was laid out in his novel ''New Atlantis'', which depicts a mythical island, ''Bensalem'', located somewhere between Peru and Japan. He envisioned a land where there would be greater rights for women, the abolition of slavery, elimination of debtors' prisons, separation of church and state, and freedom of religious and political expression. Francis Bacon played a leading role in creating the British colonies, especially in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Newfoundland in northeastern Canada. He has been connected to the mysterious Oak Island buried treasure. His government report on “The Virginia Colony” was submitted in 1609. In 1610 Bacon and his associates received a charter from the king to form ''the Tresurer and the Companye of Adventurers and planter of the Cittye of london and Bristoll for the Collonye or plantacon in Newfoundland'' and sent John Guy to found a colony there. In 1910 Newfoundland issued a postage stamp to commemorate Bacon's role in establishing the province. The stamp describes Bacon as, "the guiding spirit in Colonization Schemes in 1610." Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States wrote: "Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences".

Historical debates

Bacon and Shakespeare

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, in opposition to the scholarly consensus that William Shakespeare of Stratford was the author.

Occult theories

Francis Bacon often gathered with the men at Gray's Inn to discuss politics and philosophy, and to try out various theatrical scenes that he admitted writing. Bacon's alleged connection to the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons has been widely discussed by authors and scholars in many books. However others, including Daphne du Maurier (in her biography of Bacon), have argued there is no substantive evidence to support claims of involvement with the Rosicrucians. Frances Yates does not make the claim that Bacon was a Rosicrucian, but presents evidence that he was nevertheless involved in some of the more closed intellectual movements of his day. She argues that Bacon's movement for the advancement of learning was closely connected with the German Rosicrucian movement, while Bacon's ''New Atlantis'' portrays a land ruled by Rosicrucians. He apparently saw his own movement for the advancement of learning to be in conformity with Rosicrucian ideals.

Francis Bacon's influence can also be seen on a variety of religious and spiritual authors, and on groups that have utilised his writings in their own belief systems.

See also

Baconian method

Scientific method

Novum Organum Scientiarum

Francis Bacon School

Cestui que (Defense and Comment on Chudleigh's Case)

New Atlantis

Essays (Francis Bacon)

Bibliography

Many of Bacon's writings were only published after his death in 1626.

''Essays'' (1597)

''The Elements of the Common Law of England'' (1597)

''A Declaration of the Practises & Treasons Attempted and Committed by Robert, late Earl of Essex and his Complices'' (1601)

''Temporis Partus Masculus'' (''The Masculine Birth of Time''; 1603, unfinished)

''De Interpretatione Naturae Prooemium'' (1603, unfinished)

''Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature, with Annotations of Hermes Stella'' (1603, unfinished—published 1734)

''Cogitationes de Natura Rerum'' (''Thoughts on the Nature of Things''; 1604, unfinished)

''Cogitationes de Scientia Humana'' (''Thoughts on Human Knowledge''; 1604, unfinished)

''Francis Bacon His Apology, in Certain Imputations Concerning the late Earl of Essex'' (1604)

''Certain Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England'' (1604)

''The Proficience and Advancement of Learning'' (1605)

''Cogitata et Visa'' (''Thoughts and Conclusions''; 1607)

''Redargutio Philosphiarum'' (''The Refutation of Philosophies''; 1608, published posthumously)

''Inquisitio Legitima de Motu'' (1608?, published 1653)

''De sapientia veterum liber'' (1609)

''Descriptio Globi Intellectus'' (1612)

''Thema Coeli'' (1612, published 1653)

''The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's Attorney-General, Touching Duels'' (1614)

''The Wisdom of the Ancients'' (1619)

''De Principiis atque Originibus'' (1620, published 1653)

''Novum Organum'' (1620)

''The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh'' (1622)

''Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis'' (1623)

''Apophthegms, New and Old'' (1625)

''The Translation of Certain Psalms'' (1625)

''New Atlantis'' (1626)

''De Augmentis Scientiarium'' (1623)

''Sylva Sylvarum'' (1623, published 1627)

''Scripta in naturali et universli philisophia'' (pub. 1653)

''Baconiana, Or Certain Genuine Remains Of Sr. Francis Bacon'' (pub. 1679)

Notes

References

''Material originally from the 1911 Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion.''

''Material originally from the 1912 Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religion.''

John Farrell, "The Science of Suspicion." ''Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau'' (Cornell UP, 2006), chapter six.

"Our Western Heritage" Roselle / Young: Chapter five "The 'Scientific Revolution' and the 'Intellectual Revolution'".

Mary Heese, "Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science," ''Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon'', ed. Brian Vickers (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), pp. 114–139.

Benjamin Farrington, ''The Philosophy of Francis Bacon'' (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964). Contains English translations of

*''Temporis Partus Masculus''

*''Cogitata et Visa''

*''Redargutio Philosphiarum''

James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath, ''The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St Albans and Lord High Chancellor of England'' 15 vols (London, 1857–74).

External links

''Dictionary of the History of Ideas'': Baconianism

Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, Shakespeare">Francis Bacon Research Trust – Studies of Bacon's connections to the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, Shakespeare

The Twickenham Museum – Sir Francis Bacon

Contains a readable version of Bacon's New Organon

Works by/about Francis Bacon, from Internet Archive. Scanned, illustrated original editions.

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Coordinates	51°9′″N19°0′″N
name	William Shakespeare
birth date	Baptised 26 April 1564 (birth date unknown)
birth place	Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
death date	23 April 1616 (aged 52)
death place	Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
spouse
children	Susanna HallHamnet ShakespeareJudith Quiney
relations	John Shakespeare (father)Mary Shakespeare (mother)
occupation	Playwright, poet, actor
signature	William Shakepeare Signature.svg
movement	English Renaissance theatre}}

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including ''Hamlet'', ''King Lear'', ''Othello'', and ''Macbeth'', considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the ''First Folio'', a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Life

Early life

William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual birthdate remains unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, St George's Day. This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, since Shakespeare died 23 April 1616. He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence 27 November 1582. The next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times, and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.

After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592, and scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. No evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.

London and theatrical career

It is not known exactly when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. He was well enough known in London by then to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his ''Groats-Worth of Wit'':

...there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ''Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide'', supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute ''Johannes factotum'', is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of these words, but most agree that Greene is accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match university-educated writers such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the "university wits"). The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's ''Henry VI, Part 3'', along with the pun "Shake-scene", identifies Shakespeare as Greene's target. Here ''Johannes Factotum''—"Jack of all trades"— means a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".

Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare’s career in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks. From 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new king, James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.

In 1599, a partnership of company members built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they called the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that the company made him a wealthy man. In 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, he invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions from 1594. By 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's ''Works'' names him on the cast lists for ''Every Man in His Humour'' (1598) and ''Sejanus His Fall'' (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson’s ''Volpone'' is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after ''Volpone'', although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in ''As You Like It'' and the Chorus in ''Henry V'', though scholars doubt the sources of the information.

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford during his career. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a French Huguenot called Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.

Later years and death

Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.

After 1606–1607, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright for the King’s Men.

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare’s death.

In his will, Shakespeare left the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna. The terms instructed that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare’s direct line. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:

::''Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,'' ::''To digg the dvst encloased heare.'' ::''Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,'' ::''And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.''

Modern spelling: ::"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear," ::"To dig the dust enclosed here." ::"Blessed be the man that spares these stones," ::"And cursed be he who moves my bones."

Sometime before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.

Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Plays

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career. Some attributions, such as ''Titus Andronicus'' and the early history plays, remain controversial, while ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'' and the lost ''Cardenio'' have well-attested contemporary documentation. Textual evidence also supports the view that several of the plays were revised by other writers after their original composition.

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are ''Richard III'' and the three parts of ''Henry VI'', written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date, however, and studies of the texts suggest that ''Titus Andronicus'', ''The Comedy of Errors'', ''The Taming of the Shrew'' and ''The Two Gentlemen of Verona'' may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period. His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's ''Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland'', dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. ''The Comedy of Errors'' was also based on classical models, but no source for ''The Taming of the Shrew'' has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story. Like ''The Two Gentlemen of Verona'', in which two friends appear to approve of rape, the ''Shrew's'' story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics and directors.

Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his greatest comedies. ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic ''Merchant of Venice'', contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of ''Much Ado About Nothing'', the charming rural setting of ''As You Like It'', and the lively merrymaking of ''Twelfth Night'' complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical ''Richard II'', written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, ''Henry IV, parts 1'' and ''2'', and ''Henry V''. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. This period begins and ends with two tragedies: ''Romeo and Juliet'', the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and ''Julius Caesar''—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's ''Parallel Lives''—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in ''Julius Caesar'' "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".

In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" ''Measure for Measure'', ''Troilus and Cressida'', and ''All's Well That Ends Well'' and a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, ''Hamlet'', has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy "To be or not to be; that is the question". Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves. In ''Othello'', the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him. In ''King Lear'', the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the murder of his daughter and the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty". In '' Macbeth'', the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies, uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne, until their own guilt destroys them in turn. In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, ''Antony and Cleopatra'' and ''Coriolanus'', contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: ''Cymbeline'', ''The Winter's Tale'' and ''The Tempest'', as well as the collaboration, ''Pericles, Prince of Tyre''. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors. Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day. Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, ''Henry VIII'' and ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'', probably with John Fletcher.

Performances

It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of ''Titus Andronicus'' reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. After the plagues of 1592–3, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames. Londoners flocked there to see the first part of ''Henry IV'', Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest...and you scarce shall have a room". When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark. The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with ''Julius Caesar'' one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including ''Hamlet'', ''Othello'' and ''King Lear''.

After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604 and 31 October 1605, including two performances of ''The Merchant of Venice''. After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In ''Cymbeline'', for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including ''Richard III'', ''Hamlet'', ''Othello'', and ''King Lear''. The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in ''Romeo and Juliet'' and Dogberry in ''Much Ado About Nothing'', among other characters. He was replaced around the turn of the 16th century by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in ''As You Like It'' and the fool in ''King Lear''. In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that ''Henry VIII'' "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony". On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

Textual sources

In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves. No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies". Alfred Pollard termed some of them "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers. In some cases, for example ''Hamlet'', ''Troilus and Cressida'' and ''Othello'', Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern additions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto, that the ''Oxford Shakespeare'' prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.

Poems

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on erotic themes, ''Venus and Adonis'' and ''The Rape of Lucrece''. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In ''Venus and Adonis'', an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in ''The Rape of Lucrece'', the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. Influenced by Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'', the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust. Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, ''A Lover's Complaint'', in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the ''Sonnets'' in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote ''A Lover's Complaint''. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. ''The Phoenix and the Turtle'', printed in Robert Chester's 1601 ''Love's Martyr'', mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in ''The Passionate Pilgrim'', published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.

Sonnets

Published in 1609, the ''Sonnets'' were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership. Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in ''The Passionate Pilgrim'' in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends". Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence. He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication. Critics praise the ''Sonnets'' as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.

Style

Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in ''Titus Andronicus'', in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in ''The Two Gentlemen of Verona'' has been described as stilted.

Soon, however, Shakespeare began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of ''Richard III'' has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard’s vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with ''Romeo and Juliet'' perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. By the time of ''Romeo and Juliet'', ''Richard II'', and ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself.

Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony. Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as ''Julius Caesar'' and ''Hamlet''. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:

:''Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting'' :''That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay'' :''Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—'' :''And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know'' :''Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well...''

:''Hamlet'', Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8

After ''Hamlet'', Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical". In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. In ''Macbeth'', for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "...pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense. The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.

Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre. Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed. He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama. As Shakespeare’s mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.

Influence

Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre. Until ''Romeo and Juliet'', for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy. Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds. His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."

Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in ''Moby-Dick'' is a classic tragic hero, inspired by ''King Lear''. Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include two operas by Giuseppe Verdi, ''Otello'' and ''Falstaff'', whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays. Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated ''Macbeth'' into German. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, and his use of language helped shape modern English. Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his ''A Dictionary of the English Language'', the first serious work of its type. Expressions such as "with bated breath" (''Merchant of Venice'') and "a foregone conclusion" (''Othello'') have found their way into everyday English speech.

Critical reputation

Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received his share of praise. In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. And the authors of the ''Parnassus'' plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower and Spenser. In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", though he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art". Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare". For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation. By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet. In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal and Victor Hugo.

During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible". The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry". He claimed that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.

The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern. Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare. By the eighties, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African American studies, and queer studies.

Speculation about Shakespeare

Authorship

Around 150 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him. Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Several "group theories" have also been proposed. Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution, but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.

Religion

Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when Catholic practice was against the law. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. The document is now lost, however, and scholars differ as to its authenticity. In 1591 the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse. In 1606 the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove either way.

Sexuality

Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. However, over the centuries readers have pointed to Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than sexual love. At the same time, the 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.

Portraiture

There is no written description of Shakespeare's physical appearance and no evidence that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness, and his Stratford monument provide the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings and relabelling of portraits of other people.

List of works

Classification of the plays

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed below according to their folio classification as comedies, histories and tragedies. Two plays not included in the First Folio, ''The Two Noble Kinsmen'' and ''Pericles, Prince of Tyre'', are now accepted as part of the canon, with scholars agreed that Shakespeare made a major contribution to their composition. No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them ''tragicomedies'', his term is often used. These plays and the associated ''Two Noble Kinsmen'' are marked with an asterisk (*) below. In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: ''All's Well That Ends Well'', ''Measure for Measure'', ''Troilus and Cressida'' and ''Hamlet''. "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may therefore borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays." The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though ''Hamlet'' is definitively classed as a tragedy. The other problem plays are marked below with a double dagger (‡).

Plays thought to be only partly written by Shakespeare are marked with a dagger (†) below. Other works occasionally attributed to him are listed as apocrypha.

Works

; Comedies

''All's Well That Ends Well'' ‡

''As You Like It''

''The Comedy of Errors''

''Love's Labour's Lost''

''Measure for Measure'' ‡

''The Merchant of Venice''

''The Merry Wives of Windsor''

''A Midsummer Night's Dream''

''Much Ado About Nothing''

''Pericles, Prince of Tyre'' *†

''The Taming of the Shrew''

''The Tempest'' *

''Twelfth Night''

''The Two Gentlemen of Verona''

''The Two Noble Kinsmen'' *†

''The Winter's Tale'' *

; Histories

''King John''

''Richard II''

''Henry IV, Part 1''

''Henry IV, Part 2''

''Henry V''

''Henry VI, Part 1'' †

''Henry VI, Part 2''

''Henry VI, Part 3''

''Richard III''

''Henry VIII'' †

; Tragedies

''Romeo and Juliet''

''Coriolanus''

''Titus Andronicus'' †

''Timon of Athens'' †

''Julius Caesar''

''Macbeth'' †

''Hamlet''

''Troilus and Cressida'' ‡

''King Lear''

''Othello''

''Antony and Cleopatra''

''Cymbeline'' *

; Poems

''Shakespeare's sonnets''

''Venus and Adonis''

''The Rape of Lucrece''

''The Passionate Pilgrim''

''The Phoenix and the Turtle''

''A Lover's Complaint''

; Lost plays

''Love's Labour's Won''

''The History of Cardenio'' †

; Apocrypha

''Arden of Faversham''

''The Birth of Merlin''

''Edward III''

''Locrine''

''The London Prodigal''

''The Puritan''

''The Second Maiden's Tragedy''

''Sir John Oldcastle''

''Thomas Lord Cromwell''

''A Yorkshire Tragedy''

''Sir Thomas More''

See also

World Shakespeare Bibliography

Wikipedia Books: William Shakespeare

Notes

References

Bibliography

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cercignani, Fausto, ''Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation'', Oxford, University Press (Clarendon Press), 1981.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

External links

Open Source Shakespeare complete works, with search engine and concordance

Open Shakespeare complete works, search engine, stats and more all as open content/open source

Internet Shakespeare Editions

First Four Folios at Miami University Library, digital collection

Shakespeare's Will from The National Archives

William Shakespeare at Project Gutenberg

==Related information==

Category:1564 births Category:1616 deaths Category:16th-century actors Category:16th-century English people Category:17th-century English people Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:English poets Category:English Renaissance dramatists Category:People from Stratford-upon-Avon Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes Category:People of the Tudor period Category:Sonneteers Category:People educated at King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon

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Coordinates	51°9′″N19°0′″N
name	Will Durant
birth date	November 05, 1885
birth place	North Adams, Massachusetts
death date	November 07, 1981
death place	Los Angeles, California
occupation	Historian, writer, philosopher, teacher
nationality	American
subject	History, philosophy, religion
spouse	Ariel Durant
children	Ethel Durant
website	}}

William James Durant (November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for ''The Story of Civilization'', 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for ''The Story of Philosophy'', written in 1926, which one observer described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

He conceived of philosophy as total perspective, or, seeing things "''sub specie totius''," a phrase derived from Spinoza's "''sub specie aeternitatis''." He sought to unify and humanize the great body of historical knowledge, which had grown too voluminous and become fragmented into esoteric specialties, and to vitalize it for contemporary application. Durant was a gifted prose stylist and storyteller who won a large readership in great part because of the nature and excellence of his writing, which, in contrast to formal academic language, is lively, witty, colourful, ornate, epigrammatic, in short, "humanized."

Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1968 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

Early life

Durant was born in North Adams, Massachusetts of French-Canadian parents Joseph Durant and Mary Allard, who had been part of the Quebec emigration to the United States.

In 1900, Durant was educated by the Jesuits in St. Peter's Preparatory School and, later, Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. Historian Joan Rubin writes of this period, "Despite some adolescent flirtations, he began preparing for the vocation that promised to realize his mother's fondest hopes for him: the priesthood. In that way, one might argue, he embarked on a course that, while distant from Yale's or Columbia's apprenticeships in gentility, offered equivalent cultural authority within his own milieu."

In 1905, he began experimenting with socialist philosophy but, after World War I, began recognizing that a "lust for power" underlay all forms of political behavior. However, even before the war, "other aspects of his sensibility had competed with his radical leanings," notes Rubin. She adds that "the most concrete of those was a persistent penchant for philosophy. With his energy invested in Spinoza, he made little room for Bakunin. From then on, writes Rubin, "his retention of a model of selfhood predicated on discipline made him unsympathetic to anarchist injunctions to 'be yourself'. . . To be one's 'deliberate self,' he explained, meant to 'rise above' the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause."

He graduated in 1907. He worked as a reporter for Arthur Brisbane's ''New York Evening Journal'' for ten dollars a week. At the ''Evening Journal'', he wrote several articles on sexual criminals. In 1907, he began teaching Latin, French, English and geometry at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. Durant was also made librarian at the college.

Teaching career

In 1911 he left the seminary. He became the principal of Ferrer Modern School, an advanced school intended to educate the working-classes; he also taught there. Alden Freeman, a supporter of the Ferrer Modern School, sponsored him for a tour of Europe. At the Modern School, he fell in love with and married a pupil, 13 years his junior, Chaya (Ida) Kaufman, whom he later nicknamed "Ariel". The Durants had one daughter, Ethel, and adopted a son, Louis.

By 1914 he began to reject "intimations of human evil," notes Rubin, and to "retreat from radical social change." She summarizes these changes in his overall philosophy:

:"Instead of tying human progress to the rise of the proletariat, he made it the inevitable outcome of the laughter of young children or the endurance of his parents' marriage. As Ariel Durant later summarized it, he had concocted, by his mid-thirties, 'that sentimental, idealizing blend of love, philosophy, Christianity, and socialism which dominated his spiritual chemistry' the rest of his life.

:"Those attributes ultimately propelled him away from radicalism as a substitute faith and from teaching young anarchists as an alternative vocation. Instead, late in 1913 he embarked on a different pursuit: the dissemination of culture."

In 1913, he resigned his post as teacher. To support themselves, he began lecturing in a Presbyterian church for five- and ten-dollar fees; the material for these lectures became the starting point for ''The Story of Civilization''.

Author

In 1917, working on a doctorate in philosophy, Will Durant wrote his first book, ''Philosophy and the Social Problem''. He discussed the idea that philosophy had not grown because it avoided the actual problems of society. He received his doctorate in 1917. He was also an instructor at Columbia University.

''The Story of Philosophy''

''The Story of Philosophy'' originated as a series of Little Blue Books (educational pamphlets aimed at workers) and was so popular it was republished in 1926 by Simon & Schuster as a hardcover book and became a bestseller, giving the Durants the financial independence that would allow them to travel the world several times and spend four decades writing ''The Story of Civilization.'' He left teaching and began work on the eleven volume ''Story of Civilization''. Will drafted a civil rights "Declaration of Interdependence" in the early 1940s, nearly a full decade before the Brown decision (see Brown v. Board of Education) ignited the Civil Rights Movement. This Declaration was introduced into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945.

''The Story of Civilization''

The Durants strove throughout ''The Story of Civilization'' to create what they called "integral history". They opposed this to the "specialization" of history, an anticipatory rejection of what some have called the "cult of the expert." Their goal was to write a "biography" of a civilization, in this case, the West, including not just the usual wars, politics and biography of greatness and villainy, but also the culture, art, philosophy, religion, and the rise of mass communication. Much of ''The Story'' considers the living conditions of everyday people throughout the twenty-five hundred years their "story" of the West covers. They also bring an unabashedly moral framework to their accounts, constantly stressing the repetition of the "dominance of strong over the weak, the clever over the simple." ''The Story of Civilization'' is the most successful historiographical series in history. It has been said that the series "put Simon and Schuster on the map" as a publishing house.

''The Story of Civilization'' is also noteworthy because of the excellence of its writing style, and contains numerous apothegms worthy of the Roman and Renaissance authors Durant admired. Discussing certain inconsistencies in the character of Botticelli in ''The Renaissance'' (page 137), he writes: "Doubtless like all of us he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world."

For ''Rousseau and Revolution,'' (1967), the 10th volume of ''The Story of Civilization'', they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for literature; later followed one of the two highest awards granted by the United States government to civilians, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Ford in 1977.

Other works

Throughout his career, Durant had several brilliant speeches; among such was the ''"Persia in the History of Civilization"'' that was presented as an address before the ''Iran-America Society'' in Tehran on April 21, 1948, and its manuscript had been intended for inclusion in the ''Bulletin of the Asia Institute'' (formerly ''Bulletin of the American Institute for Persian'', then ''Iranian, Art and Archaeology''), Vol. VII, no. 2, which never saw publication. They were followed by ''Rousseau and Revolution'' with a slender volume of observations called ''The Lessons of History'', which was both synopsis of the series as well as analysis. Though they had intended to carry the work into the 20th century, they simply ran out of time and had expected the 10th volume to be their last. However, they went on to publish a final volume, their 11th, ''The Age of Napoleon'' in 1975. They also left behind notes for a twelfth volume, ''The Age of Darwin'', and an outline for a thirteenth, ''The Age of Einstein'', which would have taken ''The Story of Civilization'' through to 1945.

Two posthumous works by Durant have been published in recent years, ''The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time'' (2002) and ''Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age'' (2001).

;Final years The Durants also shared a love story as remarkable as their scholarship; they detail this in ''Dual Autobiography''. After Will went into the hospital, Ariel stopped eating. Will died after he heard that Ariel had died. They died within two weeks of each other in 1981 (she on October 25 and he on November 7). Though their daughter, Ethel, and grandchildren strove to keep the death of his Ariel from the ailing Will, he learned of it on the evening news, and he himself died at the age of 96. He was buried beside his wife in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Writing about Russia

In 1933, he published ''Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a Brief Visit'' and soon after, ''The Lesson of Russia''. A few years after the books were published, social commentator Will Rogers had read them and described a symposium he had attended that included Will Durant as one of the contributors. He later wrote of Durant, "He is just about our best writer on Russia. He is the most fearless writer that has been there. He tells you just what it's like. He makes a mighty fine talk. One of the most interesting lecturers we have, and a fine fellow."

Legacy

Will Durant fought for equal wages, women's suffrage and fairer working conditions for the American labor force. Durant not only wrote on many topics but also put his ideas into effect. Durant, it has been said widely, attempted to bring philosophy to the common man. He authored ''The Story of Philosophy'', ''The Mansions of Philosophy'', and, with the help of his wife, Ariel, wrote ''The Story of Civilization''. He also wrote magazine articles.

He was trying to improve understanding of viewpoints of human beings and to have others forgive foibles and human waywardness. He chided the comfortable insularity of what is now known as Eurocentrism, by pointing out in ''Our Oriental Heritage'' that Europe was only "a jagged promontory of Asia." He complained of "the provincialism of our traditional histories which began with Greece and summed up Asia in a line" and said they showed "a possibly fatal error of perspective and intelligence."

Philosophical writings

On the decline and rebuilding of civilizations

Much like Oswald Spengler, Will Durant saw the decline of a civilization as a culmination of strife between religion and secular intellectualism, thus toppling the precarious institutions of convention and morality:

"Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the character of a "conflict between science and religion." Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization."

More than twenty years after his death, Durant's quote of "''A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within''" appeared as the opening graphic of Mel Gibson's 2006 film ''Apocalypto''.

On religion and evolution

In an article in 1927, he wrote his thoughts about reconciling religion and Darwinism. An excerpt from the article:

:"As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory."

Selected books

See a full bibliography at Will Durant Online .

Durant, Will (1917) ''Philosophy and the Social Problem''. New York: Macmillan.

Durant, Will (1926) ''The Story of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1927) ''Transition''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1929) ''The Mansions of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster. Later with slight revisions re-published as ''The Pleasures of Philosophy''

Durant, Will (1930) ''The Case for India''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1931) ''Adventures in Genius''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1953) ''The Pleasures of Philosophy''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1968) ''The Lessons of History''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1970) ''Interpretations of Life''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel (1977) ''A Dual Autobiography''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (2001) ''Heroes of History: A Brief History of Civilization from Ancient Times to the Dawn of the Modern Age''. New York: Simon and Schuster. Actually copyrighted by John Little and the Estate of Will Durant.

Durant, Will (2002) ''The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

''The Story of Civilization''

Durant, Will (1935) ''Our Oriental Heritage''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1939) ''The Life of Greece''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1944) ''Caesar and Christ''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1950) ''The Age of Faith''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1953) ''The Renaissance''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will (1957) ''The Reformation''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1961) ''The Age of Reason Begins''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1963) ''The Age of Louis XIV''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1965) ''The Age of Voltaire''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1967) ''Rousseau and Revolution''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Durant, Will, & Durant, Ariel (1975) ''The Age of Napoleon''. New York: Simon and Schuster.

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

List of historians

Notes

References

Durant, Will. ''Transition: A Sentimental Story of One Mind and One Era'', Garden City NY : Garden City Pub. Company, 1927.

"Durant, Will and Durant, Ariel." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. (Accessed May 14, 2005)

''Cat Angels'', Jeff Rovin, Harper Paperbacks, ISBN 0-06-100972-5

The Pulitzer Prizes: 1968

External links

Will Durant Foundation

Will Durant's list of One Hundred Best Books for an Education

Internet Archive

Category:1885 births Category:1981 deaths Category:American historians Category:American philosophers Category:American memoirists Category:American socialists Category:American writers Category:American historians of philosophy Category:American people of French-Canadian descent Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:People from North Adams, Massachusetts Category:Saint Peter's College (New Jersey) alumni Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners

ar:ويل ديورانت da:Will Durant de:William James Durant et:Will Durant es:Will Durant fa:ویل دورانت fr:Will Durant hi:विल डुराण्ट is:Will Durant it:Will Durant he:ויל דוראנט ku:Will Durant ml:വിൽ ഡുറാന്റ് pnb:ول ڈیورنٹ pl:Will Durant pt:Will Durant ru:Дюрант, Уильям Джеймс sr:Вил Дјурант fi:Will Durant sv:Will Durant vi:Will Durant