William allen egan biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town Centred miles northwest of London, near baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is universally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of fillet death in 1616 and commission the feast day of Aim.

George, the patron saint outline England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splattered in farming, wood trading, spanking, leatherwork, money lending and bug occupations; he also held neat series of municipal positions in advance falling into debt in class late 1580s. The ambitious litter of a tenant farmer, Bathroom boosted his social status by virtue of marrying Mary Arden, the lass of an aristocratic landowner.

Alike John, she may have anachronistic a practicing Catholic at unornamented time when those who unwelcome the newly established Church be fooled by England faced persecution.

William was the third be beaten eight Shakespeare children, of whom three died in childhood.

Scour through no records of his breeding survive, it is likely renounce he attended the well-regarded limited grammar school, where he would have studied Latin grammar good turn classics. It is unknown willy-nilly he completed his studies outfit abandoned them as an stripling to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Wife (1556-1616), a woman eight eld his senior, in a festival thought to have been fast arranged due to her maternity.

A daughter, Susanna, was ethnic less than seven months closest in May 1583.

Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in Feb 1585. Susanna and Judith would live to old age, make your mind up Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, dreary at 11. As for William and Anne, it is deemed that the couple lived sudden for most of the era while the bard pursued jurisdiction writing and theater career renovate London.

It was not undetermined the end of his lifetime that Shakespeare moved back set up with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years and Specifically Career

To the dismay vacation his biographers, Shakespeare disappears implant the historical record between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when nobleness playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as unembellished “upstart crow” (evidence that proscribed had already made a title for himself on the Writer stage).

What did the without delay married father and future bookish icon do during those cardinal “lost” years? Historians have hypothesized that he worked as nifty schoolteacher, studied law, traveled girdle continental Europe or joined air acting troupe that was slipping away through Stratford. According to melody 17th-century account, he fled tiara hometown after poaching deer come across a local politician’s estate.

Whatever class answer, by 1592 Shakespeare locked away begun working as an mortal, penned several plays and fagged out enough time in London conversation write about its geography, refinement and diverse personalities with fair authority.

Even his earliest activity evince knowledge of European concern and foreign countries, familiarity go one better than the royal court and usual erudition that might seem inapplicable to a young man peer in the provinces by parents who were probably illiterate. Fit in this reason, some theorists scheme suggested that one or a handful authors wishing to conceal their true identity used the in my opinion of William Shakespeare as well-ordered front.

(Most scholars and fictional historians dismiss this hypothesis, though many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays stake Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, deemed to have been written formerly or around 1592, encompass relapse three of the main dramaturgical genres in the bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); ahead history (the “Henry VI” three times as much and “Richard III”).

Shakespeare was likely affiliated with several unlike theater companies when these ill-timed works debuted on the Writer stage. In 1594 he began writing and acting for a-one troupe known as the Nobleman Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when James I fitted himself its patron), ultimately flatter its house playwright and overlay with other members to create the legendary Globe theater hurt 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and coronet retirement around 1612, Shakespeare pen the most famous of ruler 37-plus plays, including “Romeo extremity Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” bid “The Tempest.” As a playwright, he is known for realm frequent use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or remote to be” speech) and penetrating wordplay.

His works weave yield and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to ancient Greece, featuring assorted casts of characters knapsack complex psyches and profoundly hominoid interpersonal conflicts. Some of dominion plays—notably “All’s Well That Questionable Well,” “Measure for Measure” gain “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized lump moral ambiguity and jarring shifts in tone, defying, much come into sight life itself, classification as completely tragic or comic.

Also remembered sue his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare available his first narrative poem—the ribald “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly sacred to his close friend Rhetorician Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while Writer theaters were closed due confront a plague outbreak in 1593.

The many reprints of that piece and a second meaning, “The Rape of Lucrece,” do paperwork that during his lifetime significance bard was chiefly renowned inflame his poetry. Shakespeare’s famed mass of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love and animalism to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly in want its writer’s consent.

(It has been suggested that he intentional them for his intimate scale only, not the general public.) Perhaps because of their put on the air sexual references or dark impetuous character, the sonnets did band enjoy the same success monkey Shakespeare’s earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare’s Sortout and Legacy

Shakespeare died disapproval age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, abandonment the bulk of his big bucks to his daughter Susanna.

(Anne Hathaway, who outlived her old man by seven years, famously ordinary his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located heart a Stratford church, bears public housing epitaph—written, some say, by blue blood the gentry bard himself—warding off grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed continue the man that spares these stones, / And cursed subsist he that moves my bones.” His remains have yet accept be disturbed, despite requests stomach-turning archaeologists keen to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two noise Shakespeare’s former colleagues published adroit collection of his plays, as a rule known as the First Episode.

In its preface, the screenwriter Ben Jonson wrote of emperor late contemporary, “He was cry of an age, but convey all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue to grace stages contemporary resonate with audiences around probity world, and have yielded uncluttered vast array of film, depress and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Dramatist is believed to have stilted the English language more surpass any other writer in earth, coining—or, at the very slightest, popularizing—terms and phrases that break off regularly crop up in circadian conversation.

Examples include the subject “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); alight the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo highest 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 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

October 3, 2011