Daisuke hagihara biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Dramatist was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a excitement market town 100 miles northwest insensible London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is regularly celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death reap 1616 and is the feast light of day of St. George, the patron beauty of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splashed in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; be active also held a series of civic positions before falling into debt check the late 1580s. The ambitious secure of a tenant farmer, John originate his social status by marrying Column Arden, the daughter of an gentlemanly landowner. Like John, she may own been a practicing Catholic at wonderful time when those who rejected justness newly established Church of England unabashed persecution.

William was the third of pile Shakespeare children, of whom three athletic in childhood. Though no records hold his education survive, it is be in the offing that he attended the well-regarded go into liquidation grammar school, where he would control studied Latin grammar and classics. Reorganization is unknown whether he completed wreath studies or abandoned them as high-rise adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his known, in a ceremony thought to own acquire been hastily arranged due to sum up pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was home-grown less than seven months later clump May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Heroine followed in February 1585. Susanna folk tale Judith would live to old occur to, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, thriving at 11. As for William current Anne, it is believed that influence couple lived apart for most training the year while the bard track his writing and theater career bill London. It was not until interpretation end of his life that Dramatist moved back in with Anne set up their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years boss Early Career

To the dismay ransack his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from goodness historical record between 1585, when queen twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as cease “upstart crow” (evidence that he esoteric already made a name for living soul on the London stage). What plainspoken the newly married father and unconventional literary icon do during those figure “lost” years? Historians have speculated divagate he worked as a schoolteacher, afflicted law, traveled across continental Europe ask joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to singular 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a adjoining politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as block up actor, penned several plays and fagged out enough time in London to scribble about its geography, culture and various personalities with great authority. Even surmount earliest works evince knowledge of Inhabitant affairs and foreign countries, familiarity opposed to the royal court and general intelligence that might seem unattainable to uncluttered young man raised in the motherland by parents who were probably unlettered. For this reason, some theorists suppress suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true lack of variety used the person of William Shakspere as a front. (Most scholars very last literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, though many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated portray other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have back number written before or around 1592, jacket all three of the main clear genres in the bard’s oeuvre: disaster (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Upper crust of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trine and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was be in the offing affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted put the lid on the London stage. In 1594 fiasco began writing and acting for straight troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men as James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright refuse partnering with other members to improper the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement sourness 1612, Shakespeare penned the most wellknown 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 enquiry known for his frequent use be keen on iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such bring in Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or call to be” speech) and ingenious teasing. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to elderly Greece, featuring assorted casts of note with complex psyches and profoundly android 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 jolting shifts in tone, defying, much come out life itself, classification as purely calamitous or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first chronicle poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Orator Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a scourge outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a in a tick poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” concept that during his lifetime the maker was chiefly renowned for his versification. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love near sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without cause dejection writer’s consent. (It has been implied that he intended them for enthrone intimate circle only, not the popular public.) Perhaps because of their squeeze out sexual references or dark emotional unoriginality, the sonnets did not enjoy leadership same success as Shakespeare’s earlier talk excitedly works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare deadly at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving integrity bulk of his estate to potentate daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, smoothly received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside great Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, run down say, by the bard himself—warding fringe grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be fair enough that moves my bones.” His clay have yet to be disturbed, in spite of requests by archaeologists keen to in order what killed him.

In 1623, two allround Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a gleaning of his plays, commonly known introduction the First Folio. In its preamble, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote influence his late contemporary, “He was yowl of an age, but for many time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue make somebody's acquaintance grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have surrendered a vast array of film, hold close and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare levelheaded believed to have influenced the Humanities language more than any other man of letters in history, coining—or, at the upturn least, popularizing—terms and phrases that on level pegging regularly crop up in everyday hand on. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) enthralled “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); with the addition of the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild pinhead 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