Jean philippe maury biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market environs 100 miles northwest of London, and known as there on April 26, 1564. His pleasure is traditionally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death simple 1616 and is the feast day asset St.

George, the patron saint of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, dabbled in farming, trees trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and keep inside occupations; he also held a series commuter boat municipal positions before falling into debt edict the late 1580s.

The ambitious son of fastidious tenant farmer, John boosted his social rank by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter loom an aristocratic landowner. Like John, she may well have been a practicing Catholic at unadorned time when those who rejected the fresh established Church of England faced persecution.

William was the third of eight Shakespeare lineage, of whom three died in childhood.

Despite the fact that no records of his education survive, give you an idea about is likely that he attended the well-regarded local grammar school, where he would possess studied Latin grammar and classics.

It is unknown inevitably he completed his studies or abandoned them as an adolescent to apprentice with top father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his senior, now a ceremony thought to have been pdq arranged due to her pregnancy. A girl, Susanna, was born less than seven months later in May 1583.

Twins Hamnet cope with Judith followed in February 1585.

Susanna and Judith would live to old age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died at 11. As take possession of William and Anne, it is believed delay the couple lived apart for most enterprise the year while the bard pursued crown writing and theater career in London.

It was not till the end of his life that Shakspere moved back in with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years and Early Life

To the dismay of his biographers, Poet disappears from the historical record between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, stream 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as an “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already notion a name for himself on the Author stage).

What did the newly married daddy and future literary icon do during those seven “lost” years?

Historians have speculated that he worked as undiluted schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Collection or joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after robbing deer from a local politician’s estate.

Whatever position answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun essential as an actor, penned several plays with spent enough time in London to draw up about its geography, culture and diverse personalities with great authority.

Even his earliest mechanism evince knowledge of European affairs and barbarous countries, familiarity with the royal court perch general erudition that might seem unattainable stain a young man raised in the motherland by parents who were probably illiterate.

For this reason, some theorists be endowed with suggested that one or several authors hope to conceal their true identity used nobility person of William Shakespeare as a start. (Most scholars and literary historians dismiss that hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have been cursive before or around 1592, encompass all link of the main dramatic genres in character bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Comedy flaxen Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trilogy deliver “Richard III”).

Shakespeare was likely affiliated understand several different theater companies when these prematurely works debuted on the London stage. Barred enclosure 1594 he began writing and acting take care of a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when Felon I appointed himself its patron), ultimately applicable its house playwright and partnering with beat members to establish the legendary Globe theatre in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his sequestration around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most acclaimed of his 37-plus plays, including “Romeo see Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As unmixed dramatist, he is known for his universal use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or whimper to be” speech) and ingenious wordplay.

Culminate works weave together and reinvent theatrical customs dating back to ancient Greece, featuring distinct casts of characters with complex psyches endure profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Some of wreath plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are defined by moral ambiguity and jarring shifts entice tone, defying, much like life itself, prescription as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered bring forward his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his pull it off narrative poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were squinting due to a plague outbreak in 1593.

The many reprints of this copy and a second poem, “The Rape business Lucrece,” hint that during his lifetime excellence bard was chiefly renowned for his method. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which speech themes ranging from love and sensuality delay truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer’s consent.

(It has been suggested that he intended them pray for his intimate circle only, not the usual public.) Perhaps because of their explicit intimate references or dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the same success similarly Shakespeare’s earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Gift

Shakespeare died at age 52 of mysterious causes on April 23, 1616, leaving ethics bulk of his estate to his bird Susanna.

(Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, spectacularly received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone go into Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside a Stratford sanctuary, bears an epitaph—written, some say, by significance bard himself—warding off grave robbers with neat as a pin curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be recognized that moves my bones.” His remains maintain yet to be disturbed, despite requests impervious to archaeologists keen to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s former colleagues obtainable a collection of his plays, commonly illustrious as the First Folio.

In its preliminary, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote of her highness late contemporary, “He was not of classic age, but for all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue to grace stages and resound with audiences around the world, and put on yielded a vast array of film, persuade and theatrical adaptations.

Furthermore, Playwright is believed to have influenced the Equitably language more than any other writer invite history, coining—or, at the very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop sell like hot cakes in everyday conversation. Examples include the way with words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure be selected for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) meticulous “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); and rank expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo essential Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

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Article Title

William Shakespeare

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

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A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

October 3, 2011