William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare (bapt. bapt. bapt. 26 April 1564 – April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely known as the best writer in the English language and the world's best dramatist.

He is often referred to as England's national poet and "the Bard" (or simply "the Bard").

Some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other lines are among his surviving works, some of which are of uncertain authorship.

His plays have been adapted into every major living language and are now performed more often than those of any other playwright.Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and were produced in a greater variety of living languages.

He married Anne Hathaway, who had three children: Susanna and Judith, Hamnet and Judith.

He began working in London as an actor, essayist, and member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men, between 1585 and 1592.

He appears to have resigned to Stratford, where he died three years later at the age of 49 (about 1613).

Only few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has sparked a lot of curiosity about such things as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious convictions, and whether the Shakespeare works attributed to him were written by others.

His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, and they are considered some of the finest work produced in those genres.

Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among which Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, among others, which are among the best works in the English language.

He wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights in the last phase of his life. In Shakespeare's lifetime, several of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy.

However, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and acquaintances of Shakespeare's, published the First Folio, a posthumous collection of Shakespeare's dramatic performances that included only two of his plays in 1623.

In a now-famous quote, Shakespeare's works have been continuously revised and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance throughout the twentieth and 21st centuries.

His plays are still popular, performed, and interpreted in a variety of cultural and political contexts around the world.

Life

Shakespeare was the son of an influential landowning family in Warwickshire, as well as Mary Arden, an alderman and a highly skilled glover (glove-maker). He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptized on April 26 in 1564. The date of birth is uncertain, but Saint George's Day is traditionally held on the 23rd of April. Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616, and the time, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has been appealing to biographers. He was the third of eight children and the eldest living son.

Although no attendance data for the period exist, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school established in 1553, about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools in the Elizabethan period were diverse, but grammar school curricula were generally similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree, and grammar classes would have concentrated on Latin classical authors.

Anne Hathaway, 26, was married at the age of 18. On November 27, 1582, the Diocese of Worcester's regular court granted a marriage license. Two of Hathaway's neighbors released bonds securing that no criminal charges had hindered the marriage. Susanna's daughter was baptized 26 May 1583, and the ceremony may have been held in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once rather than three times. The twins, son Hamnet, and daughter Judith were baptised on February 285. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on August 1596.

Shakespeare left no historical traces after the twins' birth until he was mentioned as a member of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a law lawsuit before the Queen's Bench court in Westminster between 1588 and 1995. Scholars refer to the period from 1585 to 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years." Many apocryphal tales have appeared in biographers trying to relate to this period. In the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy, Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recalled a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to avoid arrest for deer poaching. Shakespeare is also said to have retaliated against Lucy by wrote a scurrilous ballad about him. Shakespeare's career began in 18th-century theatre by imagining the horses of theatre patrons in London. Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster, according to John Aubrey. Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who introduced a particular "William Shakeshafte" in his will, according to 20th-century scholars. There are no records that back up such tales other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.

It's not known when Shakespeare first wrote, but recent allusions and recordings of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. By then, he was sufficiently well-known in London to be assaulted in print by playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit:

Scholars disagree on the exact meaning of Greene's words, but most agree that Shakespeare was accusing Shakespeare of rising above his rank in his attempts to attract such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself (the so-called "University Wits"). The parodydoutput: The line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, as well as the pun "Shake-scene" specifically identify Shakespeare as Greene's victim. Johannes Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the contributions of others rather than the more common "universal genius."

Greene's remark is the first living mention of Shakespeare's appearance in the theatre. According to biographers, his career may have started in the mid-1980s to just before Greene's words. Shakespeare's performances were only performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company run by a group of players, including Shakespeare, and quickly became London's most popular theatre company since 1594. Since Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the company was granted a royal license by the new King James I, who also changed the company's name to King's Men.

On the south bank of the River Thames in 1599, a group of members of the company established their own theatre, which they referred to as the Globe. In 1608, the Blackfriars indoor theatre was also taken over by the partnership. Shakespeare's permanent documents show that his connection with the company made him a wealthy man, and that he purchased the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, in 1597, and in 1605, he invested in a stake in the parish tithes in Stratford.

Beginning in 1594, some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, but by 1598, his name had become a selling point and appeared on the title pages. Since being a playwright, Shakespeare continued to perform on his own and other roles. He appears on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603) in Ben Jonson's Works, 1616. Some scholars believe the absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone indicates that his acting career is coming to an end. Shakespeare is listed as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays," according to the First Folio of 1623, although one of which were first performed after Volpone is unknown. "Good Will" played "kingly" roles in 1610, according to John Davies of Hereford. Rowe wrote Rowe in 1709, ending a tradition that Shakespeare used to portray the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions claim he appeared in As You Like It and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars disagree about the sources of that information.

Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford throughout his career. Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames in 1596, the year before he purchased New Place as his family's home in Stratford. He migrated across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year that his company built the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had migrated north of the river to a neighborhood north of St Paul's Cathedral and saw many fine buildings. There, he rented rooms from Christopher Mountjoy, a French Huguenot who is a designer of women's wigs and other headgear.

Rowe was the first biographer to record Shakespeare's return to Stratford "years before his death." In an answer to the stockholder's petition in 1608, Cuthbert Burbage said that after purchasing the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc." However, it is also significant that the bubonic plague wreaked havoc in London in 1609. During prolonged outbreaks of the plague, the London public playhouses were repeatedly closed (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610), ensuring there was often no acting work. At that time, most people's resignation from all work was unheardible. During the years 1611-1614, Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612, he was summoned as a witness in Bellott vs. Mountjoy, a court case involving Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. He purchased a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars prior to 1613, and from November 1614, he and his son-in-law, John Hall, were in London for several weeks. Shakespeare wrote fewer plays after 1610, and none of them are attributed to him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, most with John Fletcher, who took over the King's Men's House. He died in 1613, long before the Globe Theatre burned down during Henry VIII's appearance on June 29th.

Shakespeare died on April 23rd, 1616, at the age of 52. He died within a month of signing his will, a document in which he begins by claiming himself as in "perfect health." There is no credible contemporary source who explains how or why he died. "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, the vicar of Stratford, had a merry meeting but, it seems, drank too much for Shakespeare, not an impossible situation considering Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. One of the tributes from fellow writers relates to Shakespeare's death: "We wonder, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon."

He was aided by his wife and two children. Susanna married John Hall, a surgeon, in 1607, and Judith married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare died on March 25th, 1616, and Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found guilty of fathering an unlegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to perform public penance, which would have caused a lot of shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his elder daughter Susanna under stipulations that it be left intact to "the first son of her body." The Quineys had three children, none of whom died without marrying. Elizabeth, a single child who married twice but died without children in 1670, putting an end to Shakespeare's direct line. Anne, Shakespeare's wife, was barely mentioned in his epoch, who was most likely entitled to one-third of his estate automatically, but not so much. He did make a point of leaving her "my second best bed" at a bequest that has sparked a lot of rumors. Some scholars see Anne's bequest as an insult, while others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore valuable in importance.

Two days after Shakespeare's death, he was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was purposefully avoided during the restoration of the church in 2008:

A funerary monument was erected in his honour on the north wall some time before 1623, along with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. He is compared to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil on the plaque. The Droeshout engraving was published in 1623, in connection with the First Folio's publication. Shakespeare has been commemorated in many monuments and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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