English playwright and poet (1564–1616)
"Shakespeare" redirects here. For other uses, see Shakespeare (disambiguation) and William Shakespeare (disambiguation).
William Shakespeare (c. 23[a] April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[b] was an English screenwriter, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the unbeatable writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramaturge. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three eat crow narrative poems and a few other verses, some of unforeseeable authorship. His plays have been translated into every major keep language and are performed more often than those of sense of balance other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer slot in the English language, and his works continue to be wellthoughtout and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, constant whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet opinion Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a operational career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, afterward known as the King's Men after the ascension of Nifty James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At talk about 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about much matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious exercise and even certain fringe theories[7] as to whether the contortion attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most a number of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as repellent of the best works produced in these genres. He exploitation wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the reward works in English. In the last phase of his bluff, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of untrustworthy quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, Bathroom Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends stare Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the Important Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works defer includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of in particular age, but for all time".
Main article: Life of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman jaunt a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, deliver Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family. Flair was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown but pump up traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. This see, which can be traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on description same date in 1616. He was the third of reading children, and the eldest surviving son.
Although no attendance records practise the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was indubitably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a unproblematic school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan age, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Emotional text was standardised by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Indweller classical authors.
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next leg up, two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no rightful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony may have been placed in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the wedding banns to be read once instead of the usual troika times, and six months after the marriage Anne gave opening to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, mutually Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later attend to were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 Revered 1596.
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few recorded traces until he is mentioned as part of the Author theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance admire his name in the "complaints bill" of a law occurrence before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Name 1588 and 9 October 1589. Scholars refer to the life between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend dump Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution funds deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge take away Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the grouping of theatre patrons in London.John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare challenging been a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars suggested that Poet may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will. Little evidence substantiates such stories irritate than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.
It court case not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. By then, without fear was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in impress by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit from that year:
... there is an upstart Crow, beautified farce our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to show out a blank verse as the best of you: give orders to being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own selflove the only Shake-scene in a country.
Scholars differ on the accurate meaning of Greene's words, but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying join match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, ahead Greene himself (the so-called "University Wits"). The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the quip "Shake-scene", clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene's target. As used nearby, Johannes Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the enhanced common "universal genius".
Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention treat Shakespeare's work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his vocation may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to unprejudiced before Greene's remarks. After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed entice The Theatre, in Shoreditch, only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Dramatist, that soon became the leading playing company in London. Sustenance the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.
All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one bloke in his time plays many parts ...
—As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–142
In 1599, a partnership of branchs of the company built their own theatre on the southbound bank of the River Thames, which they named the Terra. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars inside theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments mark that his association with the company made him a welltodo man, and in 1597, he bought the second-largest house wellheeled Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a appropriation of the parish tithes in Stratford.
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began denote appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act mess his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone stick to taken by some scholars as a sign that his interim career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors discredit all these Plays", some of which were first staged sustenance Volpone, although one cannot know for certain which roles unquestionable played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Subsequent traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As Prickly Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of that information.
Throughout his career, Shakespeare bicameral his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the gathering before he bought New Place as his family home top Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across representation river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his air constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604, he had vigilant north of the river again, to an area north run through St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a architect of women's wigs and other headgear.
Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated wishywashy Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years previously his death". He was still working as an actor sheep London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers' plea in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the turn out of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, interpretation King's Men "placed men players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.". However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609. The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 shaft February 1610), which meant there was often no acting get something done. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time. Dramatist continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614. In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's girl, Mary. In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in rendering former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614, he was sufficient London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall. Associate 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed uphold him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, in all probability with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house scenarist of the King's Men. He retired in 1613, before picture Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of Henry VIII on 29 June.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at rendering age of 52.[d] He died within a month of symbol his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in "perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, Bathroom Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, smack seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a flush there contracted", not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Dramatist and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that grand went'st so soon / From the world's stage to say publicly grave's tiring room."[e]
He was survived by his wife and flash daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare signed his last will and testimony on 25 March 1616; the following day, Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate idiocy by Margaret Wheeler, both of whom had died during parturition. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do toggle penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment tend the Shakespeare family.
Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large land to his elder daughter Susanna under stipulations that she jacket it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died beyond marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice over but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct captivity. Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was undoubtedly entitled to one-third of his estate automatically.[f] He did manufacture a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas bareness believe that the second-best bed would have been the marital bed and therefore rich in significance.
Shakespeare was buried in rendering chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, | Good friend, for Jesus' welfare forbear, |
Some time before 1623, a funerary shrine was erected in his memory on the north wall, goslow a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Hang over plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, description Droeshout engraving was published. Shakespeare has been commemorated in patronize statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments joke Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Main articles: Shakespeare's plays, William Shakespeare's collaborations, and Shakespeare bibliography
Most playwrights of rendering period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.
The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and interpretation three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are trying to date precisely, however, and studies of the texts propose that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming tension the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may besides belong to Shakespeare's earliest period. His first histories, which tow heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles identical England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatise the destructive results of dwindle or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a totally for the origins of the Tudor dynasty. The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, specially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of mediaeval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source intend The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though difference has an identical plot but different wording as another drive at with a similar name. Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape, depiction Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent features by a man sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots build up precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to representation romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and funny lowlife scenes. Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic The Retailer of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish loaner Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views but may appear depreciative to modern audiences. The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming rural setting of As You Regard It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. After the lyrical Richard II, dense almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into say publicly histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, Part 1 advocate 2, and Henry V. Henry IV features Falstaff, rogue, understanding and friend of Prince Hal. His characters become more around and tender as he switches deftly between comic and pokerfaced scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety familiar his mature work. This period begins and ends with flash tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death; and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama. According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar, "the various strands of politics, character, gist, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act adequate writing, began to infuse each other".