The Life of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in April of 1564 and died April 23, 1616. He wrote 37 plays in total, 17 of them being Comedies, 10 of them Histories, and 10 tragedies. He also wrote 4 poems and a myriad of sonnets. His most famous plays being his tragedies, Shakespeare wrote his plays and plunged his legacy into the future with works like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. His birthday is usually celebrated on the anniversary of his death April 23rd. At 18 he married a woman named Anne Hathaway, the episcopal registry preserves a bond dated Nov 28th, 1582 for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and “Anne Hathaway of Stratford” Shakespeare has three children, two girls and a boy. His first-born daughter was named Susanna, his last two children were twins, a girl, Judith, and a boy, Hamnet, who died at 11 years old. The things that William did throughout his life, especially his early years were often speculation that have been made from the internal “Evidence” of his writings, so we don’t have much to go on about his personal life outside of the official records that have been found.
One of the earliest references to Shakespeare working in the literary world comes from London 1592, when his fellow practitioner Robert Greene declared on his deathbed: “There is an upstart crow, beautiful with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” Though we cannot find what the words mean exactly, those words do appear in the book Greenes, groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance, 1952, which was published after Greene’s death. A mutual acquaintance wrote a preface when the book was published apologizing to Shakespeare and testifying to his worth, which to scholars shows that Shakespeare was by then making friends with important people in London. During Shakespeare early years in Theatre London society was generally hostile towards the theatre, but many noble persons were good patrons of the drama and friends of the actors.
Shakespeare’s first full length play was Titus Andronicus. A lot of the theme, structure and language is owed to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The style of plays such as these would then come to be called Revenge Tragedies which would later be refigured into what we see in Hamlet.
For his full length plays there are three major genres that those plays could fit in. You had your Tragedies, which tend to be seen as Shakespeare’s greatest genre of plays. The Tragedies are very dark and usually does not have a good ending for the protagonist. They end on very dark notes where the protagonist or their lover end up dying at the end. Then you have the Histories, these plays Shakespeare used as propaganda during the reign of Elizabeth the first to show the dangers of civil war and to celebrate the founders of the Tudor dynasty. Lastly you have the Comedies which are just as they sound. They are his more light hearted works that end happily and with merriment.
Shakespeare also wrote four poems and a series of sonnets during his time that are still used today in theatre today to show the versatility of Shakespeare’s work throughout the ages.
All info gathered on this page is from: Spencer, Terence John Bew, et al. “William Shakespeare.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Apr. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/William-Shakespeare.
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