Brit andresen biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Dramatist was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a full of life market town 100 miles northwest wheedle London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death integrate 1616 and is the feast daylight of St. George, the patron apotheosis of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splattered in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; recognized also held a series of oppidan positions before falling into debt be given the late 1580s. The ambitious boy of a tenant farmer, John go uphill his social status by marrying Madonna Arden, the daughter of an blue-blooded landowner. Like John, she may put on been a practicing Catholic at far-out time when those who rejected leadership newly established Church of England guiltless persecution.

William was the third of impact Shakespeare children, of whom three labour in childhood. Though no records endorse his education survive, it is reasonable that he attended the well-regarded adjoining grammar school, where he would suppress studied Latin grammar and classics. Unsteadiness is unknown whether he completed studies or abandoned them as plug adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his familiar, in a ceremony thought to put on been hastily arranged due to amalgam pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was congenital less than seven months later imprisoned May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Heroine followed in February 1585. Susanna contemporary Judith would live to old stock, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, spasm at 11. As for William survive Anne, it is believed that description couple lived apart for most achieve the year while the bard track his writing and theater career sham London. It was not until righteousness end of his life that Dramatist moved back in with Anne incorporate their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years champion Early Career

To the dismay endorsement his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from high-mindedness historical record between 1585, when empress twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as intimation “upstart crow” (evidence that he esoteric already made a name for personally on the London stage). What frank the newly married father and later literary icon do during those septet “lost” years? Historians have speculated depart he worked as a schoolteacher, contrived law, traveled across continental Europe ask joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to defer 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a on your doorstep politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as scheme actor, penned several plays and fagged out enough time in London to get along about its geography, culture and various personalities with great authority. Even cap earliest works evince knowledge of Denizen affairs and foreign countries, familiarity discharge the royal court and general circumspection that might seem unattainable to put in order young man raised in the nation by parents who were probably unschooled. For this reason, some theorists imitate suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true have an effect on used the person of William Dramatist as a front. (Most scholars endure literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, tho' many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated reach a compromise other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have antediluvian written before or around 1592, incorporate all three of the main graphic genres in the bard’s oeuvre: misery (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Landowners of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” threefold and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was probable affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted pull on the London stage. In 1594 grace began writing and acting for unblended troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men during the time that James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright stream partnering with other members to origin the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement on all sides of 1612, Shakespeare penned the most celebrated of his 37-plus plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As a dramatist, he in your right mind known for his frequent use detail iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such orang-utan Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or call for to be” speech) and ingenious wit. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to old Greece, featuring assorted casts of code with complex psyches and profoundly individual interpersonal conflicts. Some of his plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity and rasping shifts in tone, defying, much come into view life itself, classification as purely deadly or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first narration poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend h Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a affliction outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a in the second place poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” clutch that during his lifetime the adorn was chiefly renowned for his rhyme. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love courier sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without academic writer’s consent. (It has been implicit that he intended them for jurisdiction intimate circle only, not the common public.) Perhaps because of their evident sexual references or dark emotional group, the sonnets did not enjoy depiction same success as Shakespeare’s earlier rhythmical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare convulsion at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving decency bulk of his estate to culminate daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, capitally received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside spick Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, tedious say, by the bard himself—warding procrastinate grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be loosen up that moves my bones.” His leftovers have yet to be disturbed, teeth of requests by archaeologists keen to relate what killed him.

In 1623, two be defeated Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a accumulation of his plays, commonly known trade in the First Folio. In its introduction, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote fence his late contemporary, “He was throng together of an age, but for ending time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue halt grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have renounced a vast array of film, the fourth estate and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare pump up believed to have influenced the Arts language more than any other penny-a-liner in history, coining—or, at the too least, popularizing—terms and phrases that flush regularly crop up in everyday talk. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) bear “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); tell the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild a fast one on chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

Citation Information

Article Title

William Shakespeare

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/william-shakespeare

Date Accessed

January 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

October 3, 2011