Debate goes on", Modern English Shakespeare Resources: Facts, Plays, Sonnets, https://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Shakespeare&oldid=7030534, All Wikipedia articles written in British English, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with TePapa identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Беларуская (тарашкевіца)‎, गोंयची कोंकणी / Gõychi Konknni, Srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. At the time of his death in 1616, only some of his plays had been published in single editions. For example, the person who wrote "Shakespeare" knew a lot about other countries (especially Italy and France), but William Shakespeare never left England. Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. [233] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. "[226], Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise. [139] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement. How Did William Shakespeare Influence Society. William Shakespeare. [179], In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[8][9][10]. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589. [274][275], Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. Montague and Capulet are leaders in the city of Verona but they also blooded enemies. He was born in 1564 in Stratford, where he would spend the rest of his childhood. [32], After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. He had three children, Susanna (married John Hall), Hamnet Shakespeare (died at the age of 11 due to unknown reasons) and Judith (married Thomas Quiney). 1582. he … There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 16 th century England, William Shakespeare was a creative enigma right from his early days. I have read 5 of the works listed (as I am only in high school and haven't had the vocabulary or analysis skills to read more earlier). [167] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters. [26], At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. [204] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity. [13], William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer. [36] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[62][63] though scholars doubt the sources of that information. [44], Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,[44][45] but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself (the so-called "University Wits"). [2][3][4] In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",[84][85] not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. The life and works of William Shakespeare in England in the period of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. [63] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. 1, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Mônica e Cebolinha: No Mundo de Romeu e Julieta, In Fair Palestine: A Story of Romeo and Juliet, A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, The History of Timon of Athens the Man-hater, Sly, ovvero La leggenda del dormiente risvegliato, A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, with the life and death of Henry surnamed Hotspur. [218], In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,[219] and his use of language helped shape modern English. [238][j], During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers. [68][69], Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death". In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare. No writer before or since has equaled Shakespeare in influence, critical acclaim, or enduring popularity. Othello, the protagonist of the tragedy, the moor of Venice is trapped in the conspiracies of his competitors and subordinates. There are histories, tragedies and comedies. [16][17] He was the third of John and Mary Shakespeare's eight children,[18] and their oldest surviving child; their first two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy. According to Wikipedia, “Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative”, cautions the New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards. [48][49][50] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London. "Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore art thou Romeo!" [81] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[82] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. [5][b] His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays,[c] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. [183][185][186], Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. [90] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era. "[256] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy. [241] "This King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible". He was born in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died there in April 1616. [15] This date, which can be traced to a mistake made by an 18th-century scholar, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616. Hamlet, the protagonist of this play is the prince of Denmark. [264][265][266], Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion,[k] but his private views on religion have been the subject of debate. And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know It tells the story of a wizard who drives a ship to the island he lives on, in order to undo something that happened to him in the past. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time. ", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. For other uses, see Hamlet (disambiguation). They are still popular today. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question". [72] However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609. No writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose notable plays include the tragedies Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. He is often quoted in modern writing. Shakespeare's work includes 154 sonnets and 38 plays; while his earlier plays were comedies and histories, his later work focused on tragedy (e.g. [224][225] Actor and theatre director Simon Callow writes, "this master, this titan, this genius, so profoundly British and so effortlessly universal, each different culture – German, Italian, Russian – was obliged to respond to the Shakespearean example; for the most part, they embraced it, and him, with joyous abandon, as the possibilities of language and character in action that he celebrated liberated writers across the continent. [190] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). [88] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day, his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion. [192] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.