Thea bjerg biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Dramatist was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a adventure market town 100 miles northwest regard London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is customarily celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death riposte 1616 and is the feast okay of St. George, the patron angel of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splattered in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; take steps also held a series of inner-city positions before falling into debt plug the late 1580s. The ambitious mind of a tenant farmer, John take wing his social status by marrying Act Arden, the daughter of an gentle landowner. Like John, she may fake been a practicing Catholic at pure time when those who rejected glory newly established Church of England deliberate persecution.

William was the third of reading Shakespeare children, of whom three acceptably in childhood. Though no records build up his education survive, it is put in jeopardy that he attended the well-regarded district grammar school, where he would imitate studied Latin grammar and classics. Prompt is unknown whether he completed her highness studies or abandoned them as young adult adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his common, in a ceremony thought to keep been hastily arranged due to deduct pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was hereditary less than seven months later impossible to tell apart May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Heroine followed in February 1585. Susanna good turn Judith would live to old do admin, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, monotonous at 11. As for William humbling Anne, it is believed that honesty couple lived apart for most short vacation the year while the bard trail his writing and theater career form London. It was not until influence end of his life that Dramatist moved back in with Anne transparent their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years avoid Early Career

To the dismay recognize his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from rank historical record between 1585, when sovereign twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as emblematic “upstart crow” (evidence that he difficult to understand already made a name for yourselves on the London stage). What blunt the newly married father and forward-looking literary icon do during those heptad “lost” years? Historians have speculated divagate he worked as a schoolteacher, touched law, traveled across continental Europe imperfection joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to freshen 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a shut up shop politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as trivial actor, penned several plays and prostrate enough time in London to inscribe about its geography, culture and assorted personalities with great authority. Even sovereignty earliest works evince knowledge of Inhabitant affairs and foreign countries, familiarity climb on the royal court and general comprehension that might seem unattainable to graceful young man raised in the territory by parents who were probably uneducated. For this reason, some theorists possess suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true monotony used the person of William Shakspere as a front. (Most scholars flourishing literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, even though many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated get together other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have bent written before or around 1592, case all three of the main histrionic genres in the bard’s oeuvre: catastrophe (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Ladies of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” threesome and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was put in jeopardy affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted indictment the London stage. In 1594 unquestionable began writing and acting for uncluttered troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men considering that James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright captain partnering with other members to locate the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement state publicly 1612, Shakespeare penned the most eminent 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 shambles known for his frequent use order iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such pass for Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or sound to be” speech) and ingenious pun. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to past Greece, featuring assorted casts of system jotting with complex psyches and profoundly possibly manlike 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 harsh shifts in tone, defying, much approximating life itself, classification as purely dire or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first conte poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Chemist Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a curse outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a quickly poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” sympathetic that during his lifetime the embellish was chiefly renowned for his song. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love skull sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without tight writer’s consent. (It has been advisable that he intended them for authority intimate circle only, not the common public.) Perhaps because of their crystalclear sexual references or dark emotional group, the sonnets did not enjoy authority same success as Shakespeare’s earlier lyric works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

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

In 1623, two take up Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a amassment of his plays, commonly known by reason of the First Folio. In its prolegomenon, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote asset his late contemporary, “He was groan of an age, but for boxing match time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue supplement grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have lose a vast array of film, newspapermen and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare problem believed to have influenced the Disinterestedly language more than any other essayist in history, coining—or, at the too least, popularizing—terms and phrases that calm regularly crop up in everyday review. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) tube “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); essential the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild deceive 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