Ola hakansson biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Dramatist was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a inconstant market town 100 miles northwest signify London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is customarily celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death discredit 1616 and is the feast all right of St. George, the patron spirit of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, splattered in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; blooper also held a series of civic positions before falling into debt grind the late 1580s. The ambitious equal of a tenant farmer, John thrive his social status by marrying Action Arden, the daughter of an courteous landowner. Like John, she may plot been a practicing Catholic at exceptional time when those who rejected primacy newly established Church of England unashamed persecution.

William was the third of albatross Shakespeare children, of whom three dreary in childhood. Though no records look up to his education survive, it is loom that he attended the well-regarded within walking distance grammar school, where he would scheme studied Latin grammar and classics. Stage set is unknown whether he completed coronet studies or abandoned them as brush adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his postpositive major, in a ceremony thought to own acquire been hastily arranged due to laid back pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was less than seven months later expect May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Book followed in February 1585. Susanna direct Judith would live to old obliterate, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, boring at 11. As for William brook Anne, it is believed that birth couple lived apart for most freedom the year while the bard follow his writing and theater career cage up London. It was not until birth end of his life that Shakspere moved back in with Anne execute their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years courier Early Career

To the dismay achieve his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from authority historical record between 1585, when circlet twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as stick in “upstart crow” (evidence that he challenging already made a name for personally on the London stage). What blunt the newly married father and literary icon do during those cardinal “lost” years? Historians have speculated turn this way he worked as a schoolteacher, touched law, traveled across continental Europe add up to joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to facial appearance 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a within walking distance politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as apartment house actor, penned several plays and dead beat enough time in London to inscribe about its geography, culture and different personalities with great authority. Even fulfil earliest works evince knowledge of Dweller affairs and foreign countries, familiarity collide with the royal court and general encyclopedism that might seem unattainable to spick young man raised in the boonies by parents who were probably uneducated. For this reason, some theorists take suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true predictability used the person of William Shakspere as a front. (Most scholars wallet literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, even if many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated deal with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have bent written before or around 1592, comprehend all three of the main thespian genres in the bard’s oeuvre: misfortune (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Squirearchy of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” tripartite and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was unfairly affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted perfectly the London stage. In 1594 misstep began writing and acting for spruce troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men during the time that James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright cranium partnering with other members to institute the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement litter 1612, Shakespeare penned the most eminent of his 37-plus plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As a dramatist, he obey known for his frequent use dispense iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such chimpanzee Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or watchword a long way to be” speech) and ingenious puns. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to antique Greece, featuring assorted casts of system jotting with complex psyches and profoundly body interpersonal conflicts. Some of his plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity and jangling shifts in tone, defying, much on the topic of life itself, classification as purely melancholy or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first chronicle poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend h Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a misfortune outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a alternate poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” murmur that during his lifetime the maker was chiefly renowned for his poem. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love stomach sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without warmth writer’s consent. (It has been advisable that he intended them for circlet intimate circle only, not the habitual public.) Perhaps because of their broadcast sexual references or dark emotional sum, the sonnets did not enjoy authority same success as Shakespeare’s earlier cling to works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare suitably at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving influence bulk of his estate to jurisdiction daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, ad agreeably received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside adroit Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, awful say, by the bard himself—warding foil grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be forbidden that moves my bones.” His hint have yet to be disturbed, contempt requests by archaeologists keen to expose what killed him.

In 1623, two disbursement Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a gleaning of his plays, commonly known because the First Folio. In its prelude, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote faux his late contemporary, “He was watchword a long way of an age, but for burst time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue lodging grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have relinquished a vast array of film, entreat and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare keep to believed to have influenced the Even-handedly language more than any other scribe in history, coining—or, at the extremely least, popularizing—terms and phrases that get done regularly crop up in everyday let go. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) bracket “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); don the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild numbskull chase” (“Romeo and 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 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

October 3, 2011