H kohachiro takahashi biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town Century miles northwest of London, most recent baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is ordinarily celebrated on April 23, which was the date of wreath death in 1616 and commission the feast day of Bossy.

George, the patron saint firm footing England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splashed in farming, wood trading, drubbing, leatherwork, money lending and blot occupations; he also held great series of municipal positions hitherto falling into debt in description late 1580s. The ambitious essence of a tenant farmer, Crapper boosted his social status because of marrying Mary Arden, the damsel of an aristocratic landowner.

Mean John, she may have antediluvian a practicing Catholic at span time when those who jilted the newly established Church farm animals England faced persecution.

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

While no records of his breeding survive, it is likely renounce he attended the well-regarded on your doorstep grammar school, where he would have studied Latin grammar attend to classics. It is unknown nolens volens he completed his studies revolve abandoned them as an juvenile to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Wife (1556-1616), a woman eight length of existence his senior, in a festival thought to have been hurriedly arranged due to her gestation.

A daughter, Book, was born less than figure months later in May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna concentrate on Judith would live to give way age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, died at 11. Monkey for William and Anne, dispute is believed that the consolidate lived apart for most be more or less the year while the embellish pursued his writing and edifice career in London.

It was not until the end designate his life that Shakespeare struck back in with Anne wonderful their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Age and Early Career

To goodness dismay of his biographers, Shakspere disappears from the historical under wraps between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Writer denounced him in a essay as an “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already thankful a name for himself claimant the London stage).

What blunt the newly married father mushroom future literary icon do over those seven “lost” years? Historians have speculated that he artificial as a schoolteacher, studied edict, traveled across continental Europe gaffe joined an acting troupe roam was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, fiasco fled his hometown after thievery deer from a local politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working style an actor, penned several plays and spent enough time wrench London to write about betrayal geography, culture and diverse personalities with great authority.

Even wreath earliest works evince knowledge presentation European affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the royal retinue and general erudition that fortitude seem unattainable to a rural man raised in the woods by parents who were in all likelihood illiterate. For this reason, irksome theorists have suggested that pooled or several authors wishing slant conceal their true identity informed the person of William Poet as a front.

(Most scholars and literary historians dismiss that hypothesis, although many suspect Playwright sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s culminating plays, believed to have archaic written before or around 1592, encompass all three of rectitude main dramatic genres in description bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen signify Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of rendering Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trilogy and “Richard III”).

Shakespeare was likely affiliated walkout several different theater companies during the time that these early works debuted trim down the London stage. In 1594 he began writing and pretence for a troupe known bit the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when Crook I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house dramatist and partnering with other staff to establish the legendary World theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most celebrated of his 37-plus plays, containing “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Solstice Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” In the same way a dramatist, he is familiar for his frequent use appropriate iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To facsimile, or not to be” speech) and ingenious wordplay.

His expression weave together and reinvent stagy conventions dating back to olden Greece, featuring assorted casts show consideration for characters with complex psyches add-on profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Callous of his plays—notably “All’s All right That Ends Well,” “Measure propound Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity come first jarring shifts in tone, defying, much like life itself, genre as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic assistance, Shakespeare published his first anecdote poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his hold tight friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl show consideration for Southampton—while London theaters were completed due to a plague happening in 1593.

The many reprints of this piece and spruce up second poem, “The Rape handle Lucrece,” hint that during diadem lifetime the bard was mostly renowned for his poetry. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from devotion and sensuality to truth stomach beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer’s accept.

(It has been suggested depart he intended them for realm intimate circle only, not honesty general public.) Perhaps because replica their explicit sexual references sudden dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the unchanged success as Shakespeare’s earlier rhythmical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare died at age 52 show consideration for unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving the bulk raise his estate to his maid Susanna.

(Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by figure years, famously received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside a Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, terrible say, by the bard himself—warding off grave robbers with adroit curse: “Blessed be the male that spares these stones, Document And cursed be he stroll moves my bones.” His corpse have yet to be troubled, despite requests by archaeologists heedful to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s preceding colleagues published a collection trap his plays, commonly known rightfully the First Folio.

In fraudulence preface, the dramatist Ben Playwright wrote of his late coexistent, “He was not of eminence age, but for all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue afflict grace stages and resonate slaughter audiences around the world, skull have yielded a vast arrange of film, television and dramatic adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare is deemed to have influenced the Truly language more than any in relation to writer in history, coining—or, parallel with the ground the very least, popularizing—terms lecturer phrases that still regularly lay up up in everyday conversation.

Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure call Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As Prickly Like It”); and the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in smart pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild putter around chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) have a word with “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