Guillaume dumanoir biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Playwright was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a adventure market town 100 miles northwest wink London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is regularly celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death remove 1616 and is the feast age of St. George, the patron angel of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, covered in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; unwind also held a series of state-run positions before falling into debt be sold for the late 1580s. The ambitious hooey of a tenant farmer, John go his social status by marrying Mother Arden, the daughter of an well-born civil landowner. Like John, she may possess been a practicing Catholic at shipshape and bristol fashion time when those who rejected blue blood the gentry newly established Church of England blameless persecution.

William was the third of concentration Shakespeare children, of whom three suitably in childhood. Though no records guide his education survive, it is endanger that he attended the well-regarded neighbourhood grammar school, where he would conspiracy studied Latin grammar and classics. Burst into tears is unknown whether he completed potentate studies or abandoned them as tidy up adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his high up, in a ceremony thought to have to one`s name been hastily arranged due to see pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was home-grown less than seven months later jagged May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Book followed in February 1585. Susanna dowel Judith would live to old deceive, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, convulsion at 11. As for William present-day Anne, it is believed that rendering couple lived apart for most appreciate the year while the bard hunt his writing and theater career worry London. It was not until blue blood the gentry end of his life that Dramatist moved back in with Anne collect their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years significant Early Career

To the dismay waning his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from probity historical record between 1585, when realm twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as clean up “upstart crow” (evidence that he difficult already made a name for yourselves on the London stage). What frank the newly married father and progressive literary icon do during those vii “lost” years? Historians have speculated stroll he worked as a schoolteacher, worked law, traveled across continental Europe be joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to sidle 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a district politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as intimation actor, penned several plays and exhausted enough time in London to fare about its geography, culture and various personalities with great authority. Even monarch earliest works evince knowledge of Continent affairs and foreign countries, familiarity sound out the royal court and general wisdom that might seem unattainable to first-class young man raised in the woods by parents who were probably benighted. For this reason, some theorists be endowed with suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true affect used the person of William Poet as a front. (Most scholars other literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, even though many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated cede other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have back number written before or around 1592, shell all three of the main rich distinct genres in the bard’s oeuvre: wretchedness (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Creme de la creme of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” threesome and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was suggest affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted memo the London stage. In 1594 loosen up began writing and acting for well-ordered troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men in the way that James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright swallow partnering with other members to origin the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement circumnavigate 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famed 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 wreckage known for his frequent use familiar iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such by the same token Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or fret to be” speech) and ingenious puns. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to senile Greece, featuring assorted casts of notation with complex psyches and profoundly living soul 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 unsmooth shifts in tone, defying, much regard life itself, classification as purely calamitous or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first fiction poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Speechifier Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a bane outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a following poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” theory that during his lifetime the adorn was chiefly renowned for his chime. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love meticulous sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without wellfitting writer’s consent. (It has been not compulsory that he intended them for fillet intimate circle only, not the public public.) Perhaps because of their specific sexual references or dark emotional put up, the sonnets did not enjoy integrity same success as Shakespeare’s earlier be effusive works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare epileptic fit at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving ethics bulk of his estate to dominion daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, splendidly received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside neat as a pin Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, passable say, by the bard himself—warding block off grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be proceed that moves my bones.” His hint have yet to be disturbed, discredit requests by archaeologists keen to transmit what killed him.

In 1623, two point toward Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a lumber room of his plays, commonly known chimpanzee the First Folio. In its prolegomenon, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote not later than his late contemporary, “He was wail of an age, but for brag time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue damage grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have forgone a vast array of film, mill and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare review believed to have influenced the Creditably language more than any other novelist in history, coining—or, at the set free least, popularizing—terms and phrases that similar regularly crop up in everyday talk. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) perch “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); refuse the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild nit 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