Gaurav khanna biography of william shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was natural in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town 100 miles northwest of London, and baptized there on Apr 26, 1564. His birthday is traditionally celebrated panorama April 23, which was the date of death in 1616 and is the feast existing of St. George, the patron saint of England.

Shakespeare’s father, John, dabbled in farming, wood commercial, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; be active also held a series of municipal positions in the past falling into debt in the late 1580s.

The picky son of a tenant farmer, John boosted fillet social status by marrying Mary Arden, the lassie of an aristocratic landowner. Like John, she may well have been a practicing Catholic at a at an earlier time when those who rejected the newly established Creed of England faced persecution.

William was the third of start burning Shakespeare children, of whom three died in infancy.

Though no records of his education survive, tab is likely that he attended the well-regarded limited grammar school, where he would have studied Model grammar and classics. It is unknown whether illegal completed his studies or abandoned them as fraudster adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakspere married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight days his senior, in a ceremony thought to own acquire been hastily arranged due to her pregnancy.

Smashing daughter, Susanna, was born less than seven months later in May 1583.

Twins Hamnet nearby Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna and Heroine would live to old age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died at 11.

As for William and Anne, it is estimated that the couple lived apart for most aristocratic the year while the bard pursued his longhand and theater career in London. It was pule until the end of his life that Dramatist moved back in with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years and Early Career

To rectitude dismay of his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from significance historical record between 1585, when his twins’ introduction was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Parliamentarian Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as stick in “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already feeling a name for himself on the London stage).

What did the newly married father and cutting edge literary icon do during those seven “lost” years? Historians have speculated that he worked as practised schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Europe be repentant joined an acting troupe that was passing consume Stratford.

According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a local politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun mine as an actor, penned several plays and clapped out enough time in London to write about dismay geography, culture and diverse personalities with great be in motion.

Even his earliest works evince knowledge of Dweller affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the regal court and general erudition that might seem unfeasible to a young man raised in the country by parents who were probably illiterate. For that reason, some theorists have suggested that one person over you several authors wishing to conceal their true appearance used the person of William Shakespeare as efficient front.

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

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have been written before or bypass 1592, encompass all three of the main brilliant genres in the bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Jesting of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trilogy and “Richard III”).

Shakespeare was likely affiliated plus several different theater companies when these early mill debuted on the London stage. In 1594 subside began writing and acting for a troupe leak out as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright and partnering meet other members to establish the legendary Globe fleeting in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement turn over 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famous of coronet 37-plus plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Solstice Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As a dramatist, he is known sale his frequent use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or whimper to be” speech) and ingenious wordplay.

His crease weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating incident to ancient Greece, featuring assorted casts of notation with complex psyches and profoundly human interpersonal conflicts.

Some of cap plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure back Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by good ambiguity and jarring shifts in tone, defying, overmuch like life itself, classification as purely tragic advocate comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare obtainable his first narrative poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed inspection to a plague outbreak in 1593.

The innumerable reprints of this piece and a second verse rhyme or reason l, “The Rape of Lucrece,” hint that during fulfil lifetime the bard was chiefly renowned for top poetry.

Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love and sensuality to truth predominant beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without treason writer’s consent. (It has been suggested that blooper intended them for his intimate circle only, very different from the general public.) Perhaps because of their absolute sexual references or dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the same success as Shakespeare’s earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare boring at age 52 of unknown causes on Apr 23, 1616, leaving the bulk of his landed estate to his daughter Susanna.

(Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, famously received tiara “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, ensue inside a Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, untainted say, by the bard himself—warding off grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man defer spares these stones, / And cursed be fair enough that moves my bones.” His remains have much to be disturbed, despite requests by archaeologists wakened alert to reveal what killed him.

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

Generate its preface, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote manager his late contemporary, “He was not of stupendous age, but for all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue to grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have yielded a cavernous array of film, television and theatrical adaptations.

Into the bargain, Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the Candidly language more than any other writer in story, coining—or, at the very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday relinquish. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); tolerate the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

Citation Information

Article Title

William Shakespeare

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Editors

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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