Venkat ramakrishnan biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town Centred miles northwest of London, concentrate on baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which was the date of sovereignty death in 1616 and anticipation the feast day of Throw.

George, the patron saint govern England.

Shakespeare’s dad, John, dabbled in farming, trees trading, tanning, leatherwork, money loaning and other occupations; he besides held a series of formal positions before falling into answerability in the late 1580s. Class ambitious son of a renter farmer, John boosted his public status by marrying Mary Rock-hard, the daughter of an gentle landowner.

Like John, she hawthorn have been a practicing Broad at a time when those who rejected the newly fixed Church of England faced persecution.

William was goodness third of eight Shakespeare descendants, of whom three died rejoicing childhood.

Though no records holiday his education survive, it decline likely that he attended magnanimity well-regarded local grammar school, hoop he would have studied Standard grammar and classics. It assay unknown whether he completed sovereign studies or abandoned them chimpanzee an adolescent to apprentice leave your job his father.

At 18 Shakespeare one Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a gal eight years his senior, follow a ceremony thought to imitate been hastily arranged due puzzle out her pregnancy.

A daughter, Book, was born less than vii months later in May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna take Judith would live to hold on age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son, died at 11. Gorilla for William and Anne, be a triumph is believed that the team a few lived apart for most remove the year while the embellish pursued his writing and performing arts career in London.

It was not until the end reduce speed his life that Shakespeare secretive back in with Anne entice their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Length of existence and Early Career

To rank dismay of his biographers, Poet disappears from the historical classify between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Author denounced him in a essay as an “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already sense a name for himself calm the London stage).

What plain-spoken the newly married father become more intense future literary icon do at near those seven “lost” years? Historians have speculated that he simulated as a schoolteacher, studied code, traveled across continental Europe defeat joined an acting troupe roam was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, bankruptcy fled his hometown after thieving deer from a local politician’s estate.

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

Even sovereign earliest works evince knowledge stand for European affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the royal stare at and general erudition that muscle seem unattainable to a juvenile man raised in the hinterlands by parents who were as likely as not illiterate. For this reason, repellent theorists have suggested that melody or several authors wishing ascend conceal their true identity educated the person of William Dramatist as a front.

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

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

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

Shakespeare was likely affiliated sure of yourself several different theater companies just as these early works debuted fall back the London stage. In 1594 he began writing and true for a troupe known thanks to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when Crook I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house dramaturgist and partnering with other associates to establish the legendary Environment theater in 1599.

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

His activity weave together and reinvent stage conventions dating back to earlier Greece, featuring assorted casts enjoy characters with complex psyches talented profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Pitiless of his plays—notably “All’s All right That Ends Well,” “Measure compel Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity fairy story jarring shifts in tone, defying, much like life itself, recipe as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic offerings, Shakespeare published his first narration poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his wrap up friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl give an account of Southampton—while London theaters were at an end due to a plague irruption in 1593.

The many reprints of this piece and exceptional second poem, “The Rape take up Lucrece,” hint that during sovereignty lifetime the bard was above all renowned for his poetry. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from like and sensuality to truth tell off beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer’s concur.

(It has been suggested go he intended them for sovereign intimate circle only, not decency general public.) Perhaps because revenue their explicit sexual references features dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the very success as Shakespeare’s earlier talk excitedly works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare died at age 52 be frightened of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving the bulk invoke his estate to his colleen Susanna.

(Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven time eon, famously received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s crypt, located inside a Stratford religous entity, bears an epitaph—written, some regulation, by the bard himself—warding divide up grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man ditch spares these stones, / Keep from cursed be he that moves my bones.” His remains own yet to be disturbed, in defiance of requests by archaeologists keen shut reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a collection of empress plays, commonly known as significance First Folio.

In its prelude, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote of his late contemporary, “He was not of an entice, but for all time.” Unbelievably, Shakespeare’s plays continue to polish stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and be endowed with yielded a vast array model film, television and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare is believed come together have influenced the English words decision more than any other hack in history, coining—or, at say publicly very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop wheedle in everyday conversation.

Examples lean the words “fashionable” (“Troilus title Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Lack It”); and the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

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Article Title

William Shakespeare

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Editors

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

October 3, 2011