shakespeare biography and writing style

William Shakespeare

A short biography of william shakespeare, london theater, william shakespeare’s writing style.

In the late romances, Shakespeare created the effect of spontaneity with the shifts in time and unexpected turns in plots. This inspired his last poetic style as he set short and long sentences against one another, piled up the clauses, reversed the subject and object, and omitted the words, thus exciting the audience to complete the sense of sentence by themselves.

The literary device soliloquy is used effectively by William Shakespeare in his plays. In his plays, a solitary speech is made by the character that gives the audience an insight into the inner feeling, conflict, and motivation of the character. In a soliloquy, the character either addresses the audience and speaks to them directly or speaks an imaginary realm.

Similarities to Contemporary Playwrights

Differences from contemporary playwrights, works of william shakespeare.

William Shakespeare: Biography and Writing Style

• The Albert Team
• Last Updated On: March 1, 2022

What We Review

About the Author of Hamlet

Even though William Shakespeare is regarded around the world as one of the greatest playwrights of all time, there is little information on his personal life outside of court and church records and Shakespeare’s writings themselves. 

William Shakespeare’s Childhood and Adulthood

A local church recorded William’s baptism as an infant, so historians have adopted April 23, 1564, as his birthdate (“William Shakespeare”). William was one of six children born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, and he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon (a busy town along the Avon River, about 100 miles from London) (“William Shakespeare”). 

In 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway and had three children. In 1590, Shakespeare and his family had moved to London where he worked for an acting company known first as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later the King’s Men (in 1603 when King James 1 was crowned) (“William Shakespeare”). His career within this company was highly successful as he had the support to write, produce, and publish several of his own works as well as perform on stage. 

Following his success, Shakespeare was able to afford to not only purchase a massive home for his family outside of London, but he also built his own theater, called the Globe Theater, a version of which still sits on the edge of the Thames River right in the heart of London. While the original theater burned down when the thatched roof caught fire during a performance in 1613, a new theater was built and opened by the following year (Carafano). Shakespeare did not build his own theater out of pride; rather, out of necessity. Blackfriars’, the only other theater in town, was prevented from hosting plays by the rich and judgemental residents of the same town (“Globe Theater”).

Many of Shakespeare’s greatest works were performed for large audiences within the Globe Theater. Even though Puritans tore the theater down in 1644, in 1970, the actor Sam Wanamaker had a replica theater built near the original location (“Globe Theater”). To this day, people come from around the world to visit Shakespeare’s theater in London to see these lasting works performed over 400 years later. 

William Shakespeare’s Greatest Influences

A major literary influence in Shakespeare’s life was Christopher Marlowe. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare used blank verse as their primary form of writing, and both authors portrayed tragic heroes in their plays (“Hamlet: Influences”). Another key influence was a French essayist, Michel de Montaigne. Both Shakespeare and Montaigne show sympathy for those normally ostracized by others. Shakespeare pays tribute to Montaigne’s ideas about the relationship between a father and his children in  King Lear  (“Hamlet: Influences”). Shakespeare was also influenced by many poets but primarily Petrarch, an Italian poet who mastered the sonnet form (“Hamlet: Influences”). 

William Shakespeare’s Writing Style in Hamlet

Shakespeare is a literary genius for many reasons. One such reason is how every decision he makes is intentional. Whether through his choice of metaphors for a particular situation, infusing layers of meaning into individual words to reveal hidden truth or to take a stab at someone, or by choosing which writing style to use based on the topic and situation, his writing is unparalleled. 

Figurative Language and Imagery

Shakespeare loves to play with language; after all, in a drama to be performed on stage with limited props and action, the words spoken by the actors hold significant responsibility for conveying the play’s message. Everything is intentional in a Shakespearean drama; nothing is filler. Several examples of Hamlet’s biting wit carry heavier meaning than a simple response to another character. One example is Hamlet’s response to Claudius when he dares to call Hamlet his son. Hamlet quickly retorts with “a little more than kin, and less than kind!” (Shakespeare 12).

By saying that Claudius is only a little more than kin, he recognizes him as his uncle,  not  his father. Additionally, the word “kind” has a dual meaning; one, Hamlet wants to express that he is nothing like his uncle. Secondly, he emphasizes the cruelty of his uncle in asking Hamlet to get over his father’s death already and stop mourning.

Another example immediately follows this exchange: Claudius asks Hamlet, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” and Hamlet replies, “Not so, my lord. I am too much i’ the sun” (Shakespeare 13). Here, Claudius speaks metaphorically about Hamlet’s sorrow, probably in an attempt to be gentle and appear as if he cares about Hamlet’s well-being. Hamlet quickly turns the metaphor on its head, saying he is not in the clouds but rather in the sun, but he also takes a jab at Claudius by reminding him that he will not so quickly forget his father. 

Sentence Structure

While most of Hamlet is written in verse, there are still large sections of the play written in prose (“Hamlet: Style”). Shakespeare intentionally reserved verse style for Hamlet’s long, philosophical soliloquies about more serious matters, especially his “To Be or Not to Be” monologue. However, when the situation is intended to be comedic, Shakespeare changes the language to prose (“Hamlet: Style”). The gravediggers’ scene is one such example. 

Verse and prose are also indicators of the class-level of different characters; common people in the play would always speak in prose, while royalty would only speak in verse. Hamlet intentionally talks down to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two friends ranking closely to him, as a means of insulting them for betraying him and conspiring behind his back (“Hamlet: Style”). 

Conclusion 

William Shakespeare was an ingenious playwright and poet, and it is no surprise that students across the globe study Shakespeare at some point during their high school or college career. There is much to be learned from Shakespeare’s multilayered, multidimensional use of language. So much so that many readers return to Shakespeare’s works, such as  Hamlet , to read them multiple times over, often noticing things that had never caught their eyes before. 

Works Cited

Carafano, Meghan. “Shakespeare’s Theater.” Folger Shakespeare Library , 25 Feb. 2020, www.folger.edu/shakespeares-theater. “Hamlet: Influences.” SparkNotes,   www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/life-and-times/historical-context/literary/influences/ . “Hamlet: Style.” SparkNotes,   www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/life-and-times/historical-context/literary/influences/ . “Globe Theatre.” Encyclopædia Britannica , Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/topic/Globe-Theatre . “William Shakespeare.” Biography.com , A&E Networks Television, 10 Dec. 2020, www.biography.com/writer/william-shakespeare.

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Early life in Stratford

• Career in the theatre
• Private life
• The tributes of his colleagues
• Anecdotes and documents
• The intellectual background
• Changes in language
• Shakespeare’s literary debts
• Theatrical conditions
• The dating of Shakespeare’s plays
• Publication
• Titus Andronicus
• The early romantic comedies
• The early histories
• Romantic comedies
• Completion of the histories
• Romeo and Juliet
• The “problem” plays
• Julius Caesar
• The tragedies
• The romances
• Collaborations and spurious attributions
• Shakespeare’s sources
• Questions of authorship
• Linguistic, historical, textual, and editorial problems
• Seventeenth century
• Eighteenth century
• Romantic critics
• Increasing importance of scholarship
• Historical criticism
• New Criticism
• New interpretive approaches
• Feminist criticism and gender studies
• Deconstruction
• Chronology of Shakespeare’s plays

How did Shakespeare die?

Why is shakespeare still important today.

William Shakespeare

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• Shakespeare Birthplace Trust - William Shakespeare Biography
• PlayShakespeare.com - Shakespeare's Biography
• Spartacus Educational - Biography of William Shakespeare
• Poets.org - Biography of William Shakespeare
• Poetry Foundation - William Shakespeare
• The Poetry Archive - Biography of William Shakespeare
• William Shakespeare - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• William Shakespeare - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

What was Shakespeare's family like?

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway , eight years his senior, when he was 18. They had three children: Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died at the age of 11.

How many plays did Shakespeare write?

There is some dispute about how many plays Shakespeare wrote. The general consensus is 37. 

How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets . The most famous include Sonnet 18, with opening lines “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”, and Sonnet 130, which begins “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”

The cause of Shakespeare's death is unknown. However, the vicar of the local church wrote in his journal some fifty years later that “Shakespeare, Drayton , and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.” The account cannot be verified but has led some scholars to speculate that Shakespeare may have died of typhus.

Shakespeare remains vital because his plays present people and situations that we recognize today. His characters have an emotional reality that transcends time, and his plays depict familiar experiences, ranging from family squabbles to falling in love to war. The fact that his plays are performed and adapted around the world underscores the universal appeal of his storytelling.

Recent News

William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon) was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.

Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature . Other poets, such as Homer and Dante , and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens , have transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre , are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson , that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.

It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England .

Shakespeare the man

Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms , marriages , deaths , and burials ; wills , conveyances , legal processes, and payments by the court—these are the dusty details. There are, however, many contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount of flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton.

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon , Warwickshire , shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough , who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor , before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity . His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)

Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster’s salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy’s education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go on to the university, and indeed it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic, rhetoric , and other studies then followed there would have interested him.

Instead, at age 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated November 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and “ Anne Hathaway of Stratford,” upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles [3.2 km] from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died 11 years later.)

How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not known. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries . In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare’s life have often been made from the internal “evidence” of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory: one cannot conclude, for example, from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was clearly a writer who without difficulty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.

William Shakespeare: Writing Style, Literary Works, & Life

William Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers in the world today. His works are studied in schools and colleges, while critics find new themes in his plays and poems to examine. Of course, it wasn’t always that way.

In this article, our experts have explored the author’s life, legacy, and writing style.

• 🕰️ Timeline
• 🎉 Biography
• 📚 Works & Legacy
• ✒️ Writing Style

🎓 References

🕰️ william shakespeare: timeline.

William Shakespeare’s life lacks twists and turns. Judging from what we know, he was a successful and wealthy person, with a loving family and prosperous career. Seeing his life in a timeline format can be helpful nonetheless.

🎉 William Shakespeare’s Biography

William Shakespeare’s success started in London, where he pursued the career of an actor and playwright. His popularity at the time could be explained by the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, who enjoyed the theatre and his plays. He was the favorite of both monarchs.

William Shakespeare’s works are now printed all over the world. Some of his most well-known works include Macbeth , The Merchant of Venice , Othello , Hamlet , and Romeo and Juliet .

William Shakespeare’s Childhood

Allegedly born in 1564, William was the eldest child in the family. His father was an important person in town, as he was fulfilling civic positions. His higher standing allowed him to send his children to a local grammar school. Yet, there is no record of Shakespeare having an education. This uncertainty has led to some doubts regarding the authorship of the plays.

All of his early life, Shakespear lived with his parents. When he turned 18, he married a 26-years-old Anne Hathaway. The marriage was quite rushed, as she was pregnant during the wedding.

William Shakespeare’s Career

Around the 1580s, Shakespear arrived in London. By the 1590s, he was partnered with Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was an acting company that he was connected to for most of his career. Later, it was renamed King’s Men due to the crowning of King James I.

Shakespeare mainly was earning a living as an actor and playwright. By 1597, he had already published 15 of his plays. During his lifetime, Shakespeare became quite wealthy. He purchased a real estate property near Stratford that doubled in value and brought him profit. That allowed him to write his plays without interruptions for work. Being an entrepreneur and an artist, he purchased the second-largest house in Stratford for his family.

Shakespeare and his partners built their own theatre, which was called the Globe Theatre. Unfortunately, in 1613, it was burned down after a cannon shot set fire to the roof during one of the performances. The year after, it was completely rebuilt.

William Shakespeare’s Personal Life

As we’ve mentioned above, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. Six months after their marriage, Anne gave birth to their daughter, Susanna. She later gave birth to twins – Hanneth and Judith. However, Hanneth died at the age of 11 due to unknown causes.

William Shakespeare’s Death

It is suggested that Shakespeare died on his 52nd birthday in 1616. The exact cause of death is unknown. However, many believe he died after a brief illness of some sort. He left all of his possessions to his eldest daughter, Susanna.

📚 William Shakespeare’s Works & Legacy

Shakespeare was a respected man during the time of his career. However, scholars didn’t recognize his true genius until the 19th century. The popularity of his works reached its height. During the 20th century, his works were rediscovered once again and adopted.

Now, William Shakespeare’s books are incredibly popular. People study them at educational institutions and interpret them in plays.

William Shakespeare’s Plays

Throughout his literary career, Shakespear wrote 37 plays. Most of his first works, except for Romeo and Juliet , were historical. As a writer, he mostly portrayed the destructive results of corrupt rulers. The play that most likely resonated the most with the audience was Julius Caesar that describes the shift in Roman politics. At that time, an aging monarch, Elizabeth I, had no heir, which created a potential for political struggles.

Shakespeare also wrote comedies, such as Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice , and Much Ado About Nothing .

In his later period, he wrote such tragedies as Macbeth , Othello , King Lear , and Hamlet . His characters represented the qualities of humans that are timeless.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet might be the most popular one of his plays. The story tells about a prince who wants to avenge his father’s death but gets entangled in philosophical issues he can’t solve. Why did Shakespeare write Hamlet ? There is no specific reason. It was the product of Reformation – a religious revolution where Protestants broke from the Catholic Church. So, what heavily influenced Hamlet, if not humanism and religion.

Finally, Shakespeare wrote several tragicomedies and other plays. Some of them are Cymbeline , The Tempest , and Coriolanus .

William Shakespeare’s Poems

Among other accomplishments of the writer, there are poems. Although Shakespeare became more famous for his plays, he did write a handful of poetry in his early career. At that time, he wasn’t thought of as a poet. Serious artists who could be considered poets were highly educated people, unlike children of glove-makers.However, the poems that have survived these days show that Shakespeare was indeed a great lyrist. These are A Lover’s Complaint, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and The Phoenix and the Turtle, among other incredible examples.

✒️ William Shakespeare’s Writing Style

Shakespeare’s writing style improved over the years. In his early career, he wrote conventionally. As he got more comfortable, he started using the language derived from the needs of characters. The main idea of Shakespeare’s writing style was to make his heroes talk in the natural language while being quite poetic.

The writer used a pattern consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameter, which was called blank verse. Most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries used the same pattern. The danger with blank verse was of being monotonous. That could be seen in some of the early Shakespeare plays. However, as he progressed, he mastered the iambic pentameter to the extent where he could perfectly portray human emotions. Readers can observe this pattern in Shakespeare’s writing style used in Macbeth .

He also wrote his plays in a combination of verse and prose. Shakespeare’s prose style was primarily used in soliloquies. These provide the necessary information about the plot to the reader and give scenes an emotional appeal. Take Hamlet , for example. The protagonist’s lengthy monologues help the audience understand his struggles and emotions.

Also, Shakespeare switches between verse and prose to show the difference between a careful and disordered speech. When Hamlet switched to prose, it meant that he wasn’t thinking clearly. Plus, the Prince had to pretend to be crazy most of the play. The scenes where Hamlet deliberately speaks in prose are the ones where he’s acting insane. That’s also shown in the scene where Ophelia goes mad and talks in prose.

Shakespeare used the flexibility of blank verse together with poetic devices to present different characters. For instance, in Othello , Shakespeare uses the techniques to show two polar opposites. The protagonist, Othello , speaks with round, open vowels, poetics images, which present a picture of a noble, well-educated person. The antagonist, Iago , is a hissing character. Shakespeare highlighted the “s’s” in his speech and used a lot of short words.

Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays was questioned 150 years after his death. Many scholars suggested that people of more known backgrounds were the real authors. How large was Shakespeare’s vocabulary, considering there is no evidence about his education? Could he write all the sophisticated plays without a proper educational background?

The vast majority of Shakespearean scholars argue that yes. He did exist, was a genius, and wrote all of his plays. There is evidence of contemporaries who communicated with Shakespeare as an actor and playwright. Plus, he was recognized as a member of the King’s Men.

Thanks for reading the article! We hope you’ve learned about William Shakespeare everything you were interested in. You can check our study guides on his Hamlet and Othello for more information about the plays.

• William Shakespeare: Facts, Life, and Complete Work — Fultus.com
• William Shakespeare: Quotes, Plays & Wife — Biography
• William Shakespeare’s Biography — Shakespeare Birthplace, Arts Council, England
• William Shakespeare — Poetry Foundation
• Shakespeare’s Writing Style and Metrical Pattern — Shakespeare-Online.com
• Dramatic Techniques in Shakespeare — Kristine Tucker, Pen and the Pad
• Shakespeare’s Poetic Techniques & Devices — No Sweat Shakespeare
• Prose and Verse in Shakespeare’s Plays — The British Library
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• Play’s Plot Explored
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William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare Biography

Who was william shakespeare.

• In this section

An Introduction

William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon . His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23 April (see  When was Shakespeare born ), which is also believed to be the date he died in 1616.

Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of British theatre (sometimes called the English Renaissance or the Early Modern Period). Shakespeare’s plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are not all he wrote. Shakespeare’s poems  also remain popular to this day. 

Shakespeare's Family Life

Records survive relating to  William Shakespeare’s family  that offer an understanding of the context of Shakespeare's early life and the lives of his family members. John Shakespeare married Mary Arden , and together they had eight children. John and Mary lost two daughters as infants, so William became their eldest child. John Shakespeare worked as a glove-maker, but he also became an important figure in the town of Stratford by fulfilling civic positions. His elevated status meant that he was even more likely to have sent his children, including William, to the local grammar school . 

William Shakespeare would have lived with his family in their house on Henley Street until he turned eighteen. When he was eighteen,  Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway , who was twenty-six. It was a rushed marriage because Anne was already pregnant at the time of the ceremony. Together they had three children. Their first daughter, Susanna , was born six months after the wedding and was later followed by twins  Hamnet and Judith . Hamnet died when he was just 11 years old.

• For an overview of William Shakespeare's life, see Shakespeare's Life: A Timeline

Shakespeare in London

Shakespeare's career jump-started in London, but when did he go there? We know Shakespeare's twins were baptised in 1585, and that by 1592 his reputation was established in London, but the intervening years are considered a mystery. Scholars generally refer to these years as ‘ The Lost Years ’.

During his time in London, Shakespeare’s first printed works were published. They were two long poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594). He also became a founding member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors. Shakespeare was the company's regular dramatist, producing on average two plays a year, for almost twenty years. 

He remained with the company for the rest of his career, during which time it evolved into The King’s Men under the patronage of King James I (from 1603). During his time in the company Shakespeare wrote many of his most famous tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth , as well as great romances, like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest . 

• For more about Shakespeare's patrons and his work in London see; Shakespeare's Career

Shakespeare's Works

Altogether  Shakespeare's works include 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a variety of other poems. No original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays are known to exist today. It is actually thanks to a group of actors from Shakespeare's company that we have about half of the plays at all. They collected them for publication after Shakespeare died, preserving the plays. These writings were brought together in what is known as the First Folio ('Folio' refers to the size of the paper used). It contained 36 of his plays, but none of his poetry. 

Shakespeare’s legacy is as rich and diverse as his work; his plays have spawned countless adaptations across multiple genres and cultures. His plays have had an enduring presence on stage and film. His writings have been compiled in various iterations of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which include all of his plays, sonnets, and other poems. William Shakespeare continues to be one of the most important literary figures of the English language.

New Place; a home in Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare’s success in the London theatres made him considerably wealthy, and by 1597 he was able to purchase  New Place ,   the largest house in the borough of  Stratford-upon-Avon . Although his professional career was spent in London, he maintained close links with his native town. 

Recent archaeological evidence discovered on the site of Shakespeare’s New Place shows that Shakespeare was only ever an intermittent lodger in London. This suggests he divided his time between Stratford and London (a two or three-day commute). In his later years, he may have spent more time in Stratford-upon-Avon than scholars previously thought.

• Watch our video for more about Shakespeare as a literary commuter:

On his father's death in 1601, William Shakespeare inherited the old family home in Henley Street part of which was then leased to tenants. Further property investments in Stratford followed, including the purchase of 107 acres of land in 1602.

Shakespeare died  in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. He is buried in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity.

All the world's a stage /And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts. — As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare by Andrew Hadfield , Amy Kenny LAST REVIEWED: 27 November 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 27 November 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0085

William Shakespeare (b. 1564–d. 1616) is widely regarded as the greatest writer and dramatist of all time. His poetry, plays, and life continue to fascinate academics, theater practitioners, and the general public over four hundred years after his death. Over the course of his career, he wrote 154 sonnets, forty plays that are known about (not all of which are extant), two narrative poems, and had a major influence on the development of English as a world language. Literary and theater critics, historians, cultural commentators, journalists, major authors, and philosophers have engaged in a variety of ways with his work, studying and analyzing an enormous range of themes: editorial and textual issues, feminism, psychoanalysis, politics, patronage, performance history, and film studies. This selective bibliography aims to provide the reader with an introductory guide through the enormous amount of material available that tries to explain why Shakespeare’s work matters and is relevant in the 21st century. Shakespeare has been analyzed and studied in almost every conceivable way, and there is a massive bibliography of literary criticism, historical contextualization, theater history, theoretical readings, biography, and, of course, speculation.

From his early years in Stratford-upon-Avon to his successful career in the playhouse of London, Shakespeare’s life and art have been profusely studied and analyzed for clues about his work. This section will give a sense of the different approaches to exploring Shakespeare’s life. Shakespeare was thought of as an untutored genius and was regarded with some suspicion by 18th-century men of letters and embraced by the Romantics; however, recent evidence has pointed out that he had a series of entrepreneurial dealings with his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and this has influenced recent conceptions of him. Instead of merely being thought of as a writer, Shakespeare is now thought to be a shrewd business man who was a shareholder in his company and profited from their success. Schoenbaum 1991 provides an exhaustive list of the stories that have circulated about Shakespeare in order to provide the basis for analyzing the life records. Shapiro 2006 isolates one year of Shakespeare’s life as a microcosm for his biography and as a means of explaining the cultural life of London at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, while Ackroyd 2005 analyze records from various points in his life to create cradle-to-grave biographies. Duncan-Jones 2001 compiles evidence to suggest that Shakespeare was less the untutored genius of romantic legend and more a social climber who was interested in material gain. Bate 2009 uses information about early modern life and theater to create a portrait of Shakespeare’s life based on his own writing techniques and style. Greenblatt 2004 and Potter 2012 analyze his canon for clues about his personal life, drawing data from his characters and plot devices.

Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography . New York: Nan A. Talese, 2005.

A biography that is keen to show a close relationship between the life and the works and that Shakespeare’s art was rooted in his life experience, suggesting that we can read what he wrote autobiographically.

Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare . New York: Random House, 2009.

Explores Shakespeare’s life through the Elizabethan philosophy of the seven ages of man, based on Jacques’s speech in As You Like It , providing historical information about 16th-century life for each of the seven stages.

Bevington, David. Shakespeare and Biography . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

A useful resource for those interested in the history of Shakespearean biography, which outlines the issues that have been the focus of several biographies of Shakespeare, including politics, religion, and familial relationships.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life . London: Arden, 2001.

Shows Shakespeare’s life as a playwright who has a shrewd business sense as well as an aptitude for verse, and consequently is the object of envy in late Elizabethan London.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare . New York: Norton, 2004.

Like Ackroyd 2005 , this book is eager to relate Shakespeare’s works to his life and, in particular, his experiences. Greenblatt makes much of the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet as an inspiration for Hamlet and Shakespeare having witnessed miracle plays as a youth.

Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography . Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2012.

DOI: 10.1002/9781118231746

Considers the role that early modern actors and playwrights had in collaborating, revising, or influencing Shakespeare’s works. Potter explores Shakespeare’s life chronologically through a series of his own words and pays particular attention to the construction of memory in Shakespeare’s works and in their afterlives.

Schoenbaum, Samuel. Shakespeare’s Lives . Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

A comprehensive study of the various myths and narratives about Shakespeare’s life, including those now-discredited yet imaginative tales introduced by famous authors

Shapiro, James. 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare . London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

Investigates one year of Shakespeare’s life and the events that took place in that year such as the building of the Globe Theatre, Will Kempe leaving his acting company, and writing Henry V and As You Like It as a turning point in Shakespeare’s career.

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Biography.com’s Ultimate William Shakespeare Study Guide

Everything you need to know about the world’s most famous playwright, including how his life influenced his work and how his legacy lives on today

In this study guide, we explore the life and legacy of William Shakespeare . Through his iconic plays and poems, you’ll learn why his works continue to be studied, performed, and celebrated worldwide.

Learning Objectives

Through this study guide, students will: 1. demonstrate an understanding of themes and characters in three of Shakespeare’s most important plays. 2. demonstrate an understanding of language and literary structure in Shakespeare’s sonnets. 3. examine Shakespeare’s life and times to understand the historical context for his work. 4. explore Shakespeare’s lasting legacy on our language and popular culture.

Who Was William Shakespeare?

Shakespeare’s plays, shakespeare’s sonnets, shakespeare today, shakespeare onscreen, how to cite shakespeare in mla style, additional resources.

While many details surrounding the life of William Shakespeare remain unclear, scholars believe he was born around April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, a market town some 100 miles from London. His father was John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who also served as an elected official before suffering business losses that left his family in debt beginning when William was in his teens. William’s mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a wealthy nearby landowner.

William was the third of eight children, two of whom died in infancy and another who died before age 10. His younger sister, Joan, was the only sibling to outlive the famous playwright, who left her money, clothing, and the deed to the family home in his later will. Scholars believe there is strong evidence that the Shakespeare family was Catholic, a fact they would have likely kept secret due to anti-Catholic sentiment following the Reformation of the English church earlier in the 16 th century.

Shakespeare likely attended the nearby grammar school, and while some scholars have expressed doubt that Shakespeare’s education was comprehensive enough to allow him to create his later work, it’s now believed that the Stratford school was well-regarded and Shakespeare would have received a solid education, including Latin and the Classics.

He left school in his mid-teens and, unlike some of his contemporaries including Christopher Marlowe , didn’t attend college. Shakespeare was expected to become an apprentice, but that plan was interrupted in 1592 when the 18-year-old married Anne Hathaway , a woman eight years his senior who was already pregnant with their first child. Their daughter, Susanna, was born the next year, then the couple had twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. Hamnet died in 1596 at age 11, but by that time, Shakespeare had moved to London, returning to Stratford only intermittently over the next several decades. Shakespeare retired from his writing career around 1613 and returned permanently to his family in Stratford where he died in late April 1616 at age 52 of unknown causes.

Little is known about Shakespeare’s life in the years immediately after his marriage, a period scholars consider “the lost years.” But by 1592, Shakespeare had moved to London and established himself as an actor in The Lord Chamberlain’s men, a theater group led by its star Richard Burbage. The troupe eventually made their home in the newly-built Globe Theatre on London’s Southbank. Shakespeare helped with the Globe’s construction, and his partial ownership stake brought him much-needed financial security.

However, it was through his work as the group’s primary playwright that he found fame. Between the late 1580s and 1613, Shakespeare wrote at least 38 plays. Some scholars believe he might have made contributions to plays by other people or that some original Shakespearean works were subsequently lost. Despite their place in the literary canon, there has been much debate over whether Shakespeare was actually the author of his plays . Opponents claim Shakespeare didn’t have the educational background and knowledge displayed in the works and have proposed several alternate candidates, but the consensus among scholars is that he was indeed the real author.

His works drew deeply on historic events and were frequently set in foreign lands few of his audience had ever visited. As with much of Shakespeare’s life, the timeline of the writing of his plays remains unclear. He likely started on his first plays around 1589. Although there is continued debate surrounding which came first, his earliest works are the three Henry VI plays, The Taming of the Shrew , and The Two Gentlemen of Verona . Shakespeare’s plays are generally grouped into three categories:

🎭 Comedies:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona (written between 1589–1591*)
• The Taming of the Shrew (1590–1591)
• The Comedy of Errors (1594)
• Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–1595)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595)
• The Merchant of Venice (1596–1597)
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–1598)
• Much Ado About Nothing (1598–1599)
• As You Like It (1599–1600)
• Twelfth Night (1601)
• Troilus and Cressida (1602)
• Measure for Measure (1603–1604)
• All’s Well That Ends Well (1606–1607)
• Pericles (1607)
• The Winter’s Tale (1609–1610)
• Cymbeline (1610–1611)
• The Tempest (1610–1611)
• The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613)

→ Get an overview of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , including key themes and characters, by downloading our free Shakespeare study guide PDF

🎭 Tragedies:

• Titus Andronicus (1592)
• Romeo and Juliet (1595)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• Hamlet (1600–1601)
• Othello (1603–1604)
• King Lear (1605–1606)
• Timon of Athens (1606)
• Macbeth (1606)
• Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
• Coriolanus (1608)

→ Get an overview of Romeo and Juliet , including key themes and characters, by downloading our free Shakespeare study guide PDF

🎭 Histories:

• Henry VI, Part 2 (1590–1591)
• Henry VI, Part 3 (1591)
• Henry VI, Part 1 (1592)
• Richard III (1592–1593)
• Richard II ( 1595)
• King John (1596)
• Henry IV , Part 1 (1596–1597)
• Henry IV, Part 2 (1597–1598)
• Henry V (1598–1599)
• Henry VIII (1613)

→ Get an overview of Richard III , including key themes and characters, by downloading our free Shakespeare study guide PDF

*Editor’s Note: Sources vary on when Shakespeare wrote many of his plays. Data based on The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Second Edition ) and the Royal Shakespeare Company

Shakespeare also wrote poetry, including at least 154 sonnets. The sonnets were first published in 1609 likely without his permission. Each sonnet is 14 lines long, divided into three stanzas of four lines each (known as a quatrain ) followed by a two-line couplet . Like his plays, the sonnets were written in iambic pentameter rhyming scheme with 10 syllables in each line.

Scholars believe 126 of the sonnets are addressed to a handsome, young aristocratic man, known as the “Fair Youth.” In these poems, Shakespeare details his close relationship with the Fair Youth, praising his beauty and urging him to marry and procreate to carry on his line. While some scholars believe these sonnets depict a romantic intimacy between the two men, others believe that the relationship was platonic.

Each sonnet is 14 lines long, divided into three stanzas of four lines each (known as a quatrain ) followed by a two-line couplet . Like his plays, the sonnets were written in iambic pentameter rhyming scheme with 10 syllables in each line

Approximately two dozen of the sonnets were addressed to the “Dark Lady,” a woman who infatuates Shakespeare. Based on his physical descriptions, some scholars believe the Dark Lady might have been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I , a female poet, or even a London prostitute. As in the case of the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady’s identity hasn’t been confirmed. In any case, these sonnets alternate between desire, obsession, jealousy, and anguish.

In addition to the sonnets, Shakespeare wrote several longer narrative poems. The two most important of which were Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

📝 Activity Time

Download our complete William Shakespeare Study Guide—for free—to delve into Sonnet 18, arguably the most famous of his sonnets. Read and discuss the text, plus test your own sonnet-writing ability.

Download Free Study Guide

Shakespeare’s influence on our language is deep and everlasting. But did you know that he even invented words we still use today? Scholars estimate he used more than 20,000 different words in his work. Among them are some 1,700 words that Shakespeare either invented or published for the first time in his works.

Check out a few of his inventions:

• Alligator ( Romeo and Juliet )
• Bedazzled ( The Taming of the Shrew)
• Cold-blooded ( King John )
• Eyeball ( Henry VI, Part 1 )
• Fashionable ( Troilus and Cressida )
• Gossip ( The Comedy of Errors )
• Obscene ( Love’s Labour’s Lost )
• Rant ( Hamlet )
• Swagger ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream )
• Uncomfortable ( Romeo and Juliet)

He didn’t just stick to innovative words and phrases, either. Shakespeare’s plays also introduced or popularized names that have become widespread in the centuries that followed, including Jessica, Miranda, Olivia, and Viola.

Shakespeare’s works are also full of some of the best examples of Elizabethan humor: insults.

Here are five of his best put-downs, with modern-day translations in the dropdown:

“[thy] tongue outvenoms all the worms of the nile.” — cymbeline.

Translation: They have a poisonous tongue and spread lies.

“His wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.” — Henry IV, Part 2

Translation: He’s stupid.

“Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.” — As You Like It

Translation: Take whatever offers you get because you’re unattractive and not everybody’s “cup of tea.”

“You have a February face, so full of frost, of storm, and cloudiness.” — Much Ado About Nothing

Translation: You have a sour, cold, and deadpan expression.

“I am pigeon-livered and lack gall” — Hamlet

Translation: I’m a coward.

Shakespeare’s plays have been continuously performed around the world for more than 425 years, and several of them have been made into movies . Some are straightforward versions of the original plays, while others have used Shakespeare’s stories as a launching pad for original works. These include musicals like West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet ) and Kiss Me Kate ( The Taming of the Shrew ).

The creators of the Disney musical The Lion King based much of its plot and several characters on Hamlet . Simba is a prince whose father is murdered just like Hamlet, and he also receives ghostly visitations from his father. Simba must avenge his father’s death and vanquish his murderous uncle Scar (a stand-in for Claudius). The Lion King also makes nods to other Shaskpearian works, including a character named Timon (the lead character’s name in Timon of Athens ) and Pumbaa, the gluttonous warthog many scholars believe resembles the character of Falstaff, who appears in three of Shakespeare’s history plays.

🎞️ Films Based on Shakespeare Works

The Taming of the Shrew also served as inspiration for 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), reusing several of the original character’s names to tell the story of Katherine “Kat,” an unlikable “shrew” who is tricked into a fake relationship with Patrick so that her father will allow her younger sister, Bianca, to date.

Another adaptation involving high school is She’s the Man (2006), which stars Amanda Bynes as Viola, a teen who switches places with her twin brother, Sebastian, as in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night . Both are set in Illyria, an island in the play and a boarding school in the film. In both versions, Olivia falls in love with “Sebastian,” not realizing it’s really Viola in disguise.

When listing Shakespeare’s plays in your works cited, include the author’s last name then first name separated by a comma. Next comes the italicized play title followed by the book or website name. For book citations, include the version or edition information, editor(s), publisher, publication year, and page range. Web sources should be followed by the URL and access date. Examples:

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Cambridge Edition , edited by William Aldis Wright, Doubleday & Company Inc., 1936, pp. 731–779.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library , www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

Including Shakespeare’s poetry in your works cited follows similar rules. Remember the name of the sonnet or poem should appear in quotation marks. Examples:

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 116.” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Cambridge Edition , edited by William Aldis Wright, Doubleday & Company Inc., 1936, p. 1418.

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” Poetry Foundation , www.poetryfoundation.org/poems /45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds. Accessed 1 Aug. 2024.

To cite Shakespeare using an in-text parenthetical citation, include the italicized play name then the act, scene, and line number(s). For sonnets, include the author’s last name and the line number(s). The citation should appear at the end of the sentence. Examples:

( Hamlet 3.1.55-57)

(Shakespeare 1-2)

As each edition of Shakespeare’s work has different line numbers, make sure to check the accuracy based on the edition you are using.

• Biography.com’s Complete Biography of William Shakespeare
• Why Is William Shakespeare’s Life Considered a Mystery?

Was Shakespeare the Real Author of His Plays?

• Shakespeare Wrote Three of His Famous Tragedies During Turbulent Times
• 20 Famous Shakespeare Quotes That Show the Bard’s Wit and Wisdom
• How Did Shakespeare Die? What the Few Intriguing Clues Tell Us
• Folger Shakespeare Library
• Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
• Poetry Foundation: William Shakespeare

Barbara Maranzani is a New York–based writer and producer. She is a frequent contributor to HISTORY and Biography.com , covering American and European history, politics, pop culture, and more. In her free time, she enjoys planning and plotting her next travel adventure.

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William Shakespeare

While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare’s activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare’s exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother’s third child, but the first to survive infancy. This has led scholars to conjecture that he was born on April 23rd, given the era’s convention of baptizing newborns on their third day. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, moved to Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a prominent figure in the town’s business and politics. He rose to be bailiff, the highest official in the town, but then in about 1575-1576 his prosperity declined markedly and he withdrew from public life. In 1596, thanks to his son’s success and persistence, he was granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms, and the family moved into New Place, the grandest house in Stratford.

Speculation that William Shakespeare traveled, worked as a schoolmaster in the country, was a soldier and a law clerk, or embraced or left the Roman Catholic Church continues to fill the gaps left in the sparse records of the so-called lost years. It is conventionally assumed (though attendance registers do not survive) that Shakespeare attended the King’s New School in Stratford, along with others of his social class. At the age of 18, in November 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. She was pregnant with Susanna Shakespeare, who was baptized on May 26, 1583. The twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptized on February 2, 1585. There were no further children from the union.

William Shakespeare had probably been working as an actor and writer on the professional stage in London for four or five years when the London theaters were closed by order of the Privy Council on June 23, 1592. The authorities were concerned about a severe outbreak of the plague and alarmed at the possibility of civil unrest (Privy Council minutes refer to “a great disorder and tumult” in Southwark). The initial order suspended playing until Michaelmas and was renewed several times. When the theaters reopened in June 1594, the theatrical companies had been reorganized, and Shakespeare’s career was wholly committed to the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until 1603, when they were reconstituted as the King’s Men.

By 1592 Shakespeare already enjoyed sufficient prominence as an author of dramatic scripts to have been the subject of Robert Greene’s attack on the “upstart crow” in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit . Such renown as he enjoyed, however, was as transitory as the dramatic form. Play scripts, and their authors, were accorded a lowly status in the literary system, and when scripts were published, their link to the theatrical company (rather than to the scriptwriter) was publicized. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare’s name first appeared on the title page of his plays— Richard II and a revised edition of Romeo and Juliet .

While the London theaters were closed, some actors tried to make a living by touring outside the capital. Shakespeare turned from the business of scriptwriting to the pursuit of art and patronage; unable to pursue his career in the theatrical marketplace, he adopted a more conventional course. Shakespeare’s first publication, Venus and Adonis (1593), was dedicated to the 18-year-old Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The dedication reveals a frank appeal for patronage, couched in the normal terms of such requests. Shakespeare received the Earl’s patronage and went on to dedicate his next dramatic poem, Lucrece, to the young lord as well. Venus and Adonis was printed by Richard Field, a professionally accomplished printer who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare’s choice of printer indicates an ambition to associate himself with unambiguously high-art productions, as does the quotation from Ovid’s Amores on the title page: “Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret acqua” (Let worthless stuff excite the admiration of the crowd: as for me, let golden Apollo ply me with full cups from the Castalian spring, that is, the spring of the Muses). Such lofty repudiation of the vulgar was calculated to appeal to the teenage Southampton. It also appealed to a sizable slice of the reading public. In the midst of horror, disease, and death, Shakespeare was offering access to a golden world, showing the delights of applying learning for pleasure rather than pointing out the obvious morals to be drawn from classical authors when faced with awful catastrophe.

With Venus and Adonis Shakespeare sought direct aristocratic patronage, but he also entered the marketplace as a professional author. He seems to have enjoyed a degree of success in the first of these objectives, given the more intimate tone of the dedication of Lucrece to Southampton in the following year. In the second objective, his triumph must have outstripped all expectation. Venus and Adonis went though 15 editions before 1640; if was first entered in the Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593. It is a fine and elegantly printed book, consisting of 1,194 lines in 199 six-line stanzas rhymed ababcc . The verse form was a token of social and literary ambition on Shakespeare’s part. Its aristocratic cachet derived from its popularity at court, being favored by several courtier poets, such as Sir Walter Ralegh , Sir Arthur Gorges , and Sir Edward Dyer . Venus and Adonis is unquestionably a work of its age. In it a young writer courts respectability and patronage. At one level, of course, the poem is a traditional Ovidian fable, locating the origin of the inseparability of love and sorrow in Venus’s reaction to the death of Adonis: “lo here I prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend /... all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.” It invokes a mythic past that explains a painful present. Like so many texts of the 1590s, it features an innocent hero, Adonis, who encounters a world in which the precepts he has acquired from his education are tested in the surprising school of experience. His knowledge of love, inevitably, is not firsthand (“I have heard it is a life in death, / That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath”). There is a staidly academic quality to his repudiation of Venus’s “treatise,” her “idle over-handled theme.

Shakespeare’s literary and social aspirations are revealed at every turn. In his Petrarchism, for example, he adopts a mode that had become a staple of courtly discourse. Elizabethan politicians figured themselves and their personal and political conditions in Petrarchan terms. The inescapable and enduring frustrations of the courtier’s life were habitually figured via the analogy of the frustrated, confused, but devoted Petrarchan lover. Yet Shakespeare’s approach to this convention typifies the 1590s younger generation’s sense of its incongruity. Lines such as “the love-sick queen began to sweat” are understandably rare in Elizabethan courtly discourse. Power relations expressed through the gendered language of Elizabeth’s eroticized politics are reversed: “Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing / ... Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdain’d the wooing.” It is Venus who deploys the conventional carpe diem arguments: “Make use of time / ... Fair flowers that are not gath’red in their prime, / Rot, and consume themselves in little time”; she even provides a blason of her own charms: “Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow, / Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in turning.”

Like most Elizabethan treatments of love, Shakespeare’s work is characterized by paradox (“She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d”), by narrative and thematic diversity, and by attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, exploring the psychology of perception (“Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled”). The poem addresses such artistic preoccupations of the 1590s as the relation of poetry to painting and the possibility of literary immortality, as well as social concerns such as the phenomenon of “masterless women,” and the (to men) alarming and unknowable forces unleashed by female desire, an issue that for a host of reasons fascinated Elizabeth’s subjects. Indeed, Venus and Adonis flirts with taboos, as do other successful works of the 1590s, offering readers living in a paranoid, plague-ridden city a fantasy of passionate and fatal physical desire, with Venus leading Adonis “prisoner in a red-rose chain.” In its day it was appreciated as an erotic fantasy glorying in the inversion of established categories and values, with a veneer of learning and the snob appeal of association with a celebrated aristocrat.

Since the Romantic period the frank sexuality of Shakespeare’s Venus has held less appeal for literary critics and scholars than it had to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers. C.S. Lewis concludes in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) that “if the poem is not meant to arouse disgust it was very foolishly written.” In more recent years a combination of feminism, cultural studies, renewed interest in rhetoric, and a return to traditional archival research has begun to reclaim Venus and Adonis from such prejudice.

The elevated subject of Shakespeare’s next publication, Lucrece , suggests that Venus and Adonis had been well received, Lucrece comprises 1,855 lines, in 265 stanzas. The stanza (as in Complaint of Rosamund ) is the seven-line rhyme royal ( ababbcc ) immortalized in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) and thereafter considered especially appropriate for tragedy, complaint, and philosophical reflection. In places the narrator explicitly highlights the various rhetorical set pieces (“Here she exclaims against repose and rest”). Lucrece herself comments on her performance after the apostrophes to “comfort-killing Night, image of Hell,” Opportunity, and Time. Elizabethan readers would have appreciated much about the poem, from its plentiful wordplay (“to shun the blot, she would not blot the letter”; “Ere she with blood had stain’d her stain’d excuse”) and verbal dexterity, to the inner debate raging inside Tarquin. Though an exemplary tyrant from ancient history, he also exemplifies the conventional 1590s conflict between willful youthful prodigality and sententious experience (“My part is youth, and beats these from the stage”). The arguments in his “disputation / ‘Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will” are those of the Petrarchan lover: “nothing can affection’s course control,” and “Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy.” But the context of this rhetorical performance is crucial throughout. Unlike Venus and Adonis , Lucrece is not set in a mythical golden age, but in a fallen, violent world. This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and ultimately physical competition of their debate--contrasting Tarquin’s speeches with Lucrece’s eloquent appeals to his better nature.

The combination of ancient and contemporary strengthens the political elements in the poem. It demonstrates tyranny in its most intimate form, committing a private outrage that is inescapably public; hence the rape is figured in terms both domestic (as a burglary) and public (as a hunt, a war, a siege). It also reveals the essential violence of many conventional erotic metaphors. Shakespeare draws on the powerful Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman: although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece’s chamber connects the two assaults. His attack figures a society at war with itself, and he himself is shown to be self-divided.” Tyranny, lust, and greed translate the metaphors of Petrarchism into the actuality of rape, which is figured by gradatio , or climax: “What could he see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?”

The historically validated interpretation—for Shakespeare’s readers, descendants of Brutus in New Troy—is figured by Brutus, who “pluck’d the knife from Lucrece’s side.” He steps forward, casting off his reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at Lucrece’s death into a determination to “publish Tarquin’s foul offense” and change the political system. Brutus emerges from the shadows, reminding the reader that the poem, notwithstanding its powerful speeches and harrowing images, is also remarkable for what is unshown, untold, implicit. Until recently few commentators have taken up the interpretative challenge posed by Brutus. Traditionally Lucrece has been dismissed as a bookish, pedantic dry run for Shakespeare’s tragedies, in William Empson ‘s phrase, “the Bard doing five-finger exercises,” containing what F.T. Prince in his 1960 edition of the poems dismisses as defective rhetoric in the treatment of an uninteresting story. Many critics have sought to define the poem’s genre, which combines political fable, female complaint, and tragedy within a milieu of self-conscious antiquity. But perhaps the most significant recent developments have been the feminist treatments of the poem, the reawakening interest in rhetoric, and a dawning awareness of the work’s political engagement. Lucrece , like so many of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, problematizes the categories of history and myth, of public and private, and exemplifies the bewildering nature of historical parallels. The self-conscious rhetorical display and the examination of representation is daringly politicized, explicitly, if inconclusively, connecting the aesthetic and the erotic with politics both sexual and state. At the time of its publication, Lucrece was Shakespeare’s most profound meditation on history, particularly on the relations between public role and private morality and on the conjunction of forces—personal, political, social—that creates turning points in human history. In it he indirectly articulates the concerns of his generation and also, perhaps, of his young patron, who was already closely associated with the doomed earl of Essex.

In 1598 or 1599 the printer William Jaggard brought out an anthology of 20 miscellaneous poems, which he eventually attributed to Shakespeare, though the authorship of all 20 is still disputed. At least five are demonstrably Shakespearean. Poem 1 is a version of Sonnet 138 (“When My Love Swears that She Is Made of Truth”), poem 2 of Sonnet 144 (“Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair”), and the rest are sonnets that appear in act 4 of Love’s Labor’s Lost (1598). Investigation of Jaggard’s volume, called The Passionate Pilgrime, has yielded and will continue to yield insight into such matters as the relationship of manuscript to print culture in the 1590s, the changing nature of the literary profession, and the evolving status of the author. It may also, as with The Phoenix and Turtle (1601), lead to increased knowledge of the chronology and circumstances of Shakespeare’s literary career, as well as affording some glimpses of his revisions of his texts.

“With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” wrote William Wordsworth in “ Scorn not the Sonnet “ (1827) of the Sonnets . “If so,” replied Robert Browning in his poem “House” (1876), “the less Shakespeare he.” None of Shakespeare’s works has been so tirelessly ransacked for biographical clues as the 154 sonnets, published with A Lover’s Complaint by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Unlike the narrative poems, they enjoyed only limited commercial success during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no further edition appeared until Benson’s in 1640. The title page, like Jaggard’s of The Passionate Pilgrim , relies upon the drawing power of the author’s name and promises “SHAKE-SPEARES / SONNETS / Never before Imprinted.”

The 154 sonnets are conventionally divided between the “young man” sonnets (1-126) and the “dark lady” sonnets (127-152), with the final pair often seen as an envoy or coda to the collection. There is no evidence that such a division has chronological implications, though the volume is usually read in such a way. Shakespeare employs the conventional English sonnet form: three quatrains capped with a couplet. Drama is conjured within individual poems, as the speaker wrestles with some problem or situation; it is generated by the juxtaposition of poems, with instant switches of tone, mood, and style; it is implied by cross-references and interrelationships within the sequence as a whole.

There remains a question, however, of how closely Shakespeare was involved in preparing the text of the sonnets for publication. Some commentators have advocated skepticism about all attempts to recover Shakespeare’s intention. Others have looked more closely at Thorpe, at Benson, and at the circulation of Shakespeare’s verse in the manuscript culture: these investigations have led to a reexamination of the ideas of authorship and authority in the period. Although scholarly opinion is still divided, several influential studies and editions in recent years have argued, on a variety of grounds, for the authority, integrity, and coherence of Thorpe’s text, an integrity now regarded as including A Lover’s Complaint .

The subsequent history of the text of the sonnets is inseparable from the history of Shakespeare’s reputation. John Benson’s Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (1640) was part of an attempt to “canonize” Shakespeare, collecting verses into a handsome quarto that could be sold as a companion to the dramatic folio texts (“to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his poems”). Benson dropped a few sonnets, added other poems, provided titles for individual pieces, changed Thorpe’s order, conflated sonnets, and modified some of the male pronouns, thereby making the sequence seem more unambiguously heterosexual in its orientation. In recent years there has been increasing study of Benson’s edition as a distinct literary production in its own right.

The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to tell their story more clearly. It also led to attempts to relate them to what was known or could be surmised about Shakespeare’s life. Some commentators speculated that the publication of the sonnets was the result of a conspiracy by Shakespeare’s rivals or enemies, seeking to embarrass him by publishing love poems apparently addressed to a man rather than to the conventional sonnet-mistress. The five appendices to Hyder Edward Rollins’s Variorum edition document the first century of such endeavors. Attention was directed toward “problems” such as the identity of Master W. H., of the young man, of the rival poet, and of the dark lady (a phrase, incidentally, never used by Shakespeare in the sonnets). The disappearance of the sonnets from the canon coincided with the time when Shakespeare’s standing as the nation’s bard was being established. The critics’ current fascination is just as significant for what it reveals about contemporary culture, as the “Shakespeare myth” comes under attack from various directions.

The sonnets were apparently composed during a period of ten or a dozen years starting in about 1592-1593. In Palladis Tamia Meres refers to the existence of “sugared sonnets” circulating among Shakespeare’s “private friends,” some which were published in The Passionate Pilgrim. The fact of prior circulation has important implications for the sonnets. The particular poems that were in circulation suggest that the general shape and themes of the Sonnets were established from the earliest stages. Evidence suggesting a lengthy period of composition is inconvenient for commentators seeking to unlock the autobiographical secret of the sonnets. An early date (1592-1594) argues for Southampton as the boy and Christopher Marlowe as the rival poet; a date a decade later brings George Herbert and George Chapman into the frame. There are likewise early dark ladies (Lucy Negro, before she took charge of a brothel) and late (Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton). There may, of course, have been more than one young man, rival, and dark lady, or in fact the sequence may not be autobiographical at all.

No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse. Shakespeare’s is no exception. Yet neither are the Sonnets a random anthology, a loose gathering of scattered rhymes. While groups of sonnets are obviously linked thematically, such as the opening sequence urging the young man to marry (1-17), and the dark lady sequence (127-152), the ordering within those groups is not that of continuous narrative. There are many smaller units, with poems recording that the friend has become the lover of the poet’s mistress (40-42), or expressing jealousy of the young man’s friendship with a rival poet (78-86). Sonnet 44 ends with a reference to two of the four elements “so much of earth and water wrought,” and 45 starts with “The other two, slight air and purging fire.” Similarly indivisible are the two “horse” sonnets 50 and 51, the “Will” sonnets 135 and 136, and 67 and 68. Sonnets 20 and 87 are connected as much by their telling use of feminine rhyme as by shared themes. Dispersed among the poems are pairs and groups that amplify or comment on each other, such as those dealing with absence (43-45, 47-48, 50-52, and 97-98).

“My name is Will,” declares the speaker of 136. Sonnet 145 apparently puns on Anne Hathaway’s name (“I hate, from hate away she threw”). Elizabethan sonneteers, following Sir Philip Sidney , conventionally teased their readers with hints of an actuality behind the poems. Sidney had given Astrophil his own coat of arms, had quibbled with the married name of the supposed original for Stella (Penelope Rich) and with the Greek etymology of his own name (Philip, “lover of horses”) in Astrophil and Stella sonnets 41, 49, and 53. Shakespeare’s speaker descends as much from Astrophil as from Daniel’s more enigmatic persona, most obviously in the deployment of the multiple sense of will in 135 and 136. Yet Shakespeare’s sequence is unusual in including sexual consummation (Spenser’s Amoretti led to the celebration of marriage in Epithalamion , 1595) and unique in its persuasion to marry. There is evidence that some contemporary readers were disturbed by the transgressive and experimental features of 1590s erotic writing. Works by Marston and Marlowe were among those banned in 1599 along with satires and other more conventional kindling. Benson’s much-discussed modification of the text of the Sonnets indicates at least a certain level of anxiety about the gender of the characters in the poems. Benson retained Sonnet 20 but dropped 126 (“O Thou My Lovely Boy”) and changed the direct address of 108 (“Nothing, Sweet Boy”) to the neutral “Nothing, Sweet Love.”

The speaker sums up his predicament in 144, one of the Passionate Pilgrim poems:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman color’d ill.

The speaker’s attraction to the “worser spirit” is figured in harsh language throughout the sequence: in fact, the brutal juxtaposition of lyricism and lust is characteristic of the collection as a whole. The consequent disjointedness expresses a form of psychological verisimilitude by the standards of Shakespeare’s day, where discontinuity and repetition were held to reveal the inner state of a speaker.

The anachronism of applying modern attitudes toward homosexuality to early modern culture is self-evident. Where Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew their boundaries cannot be fully determined, but they were fascinated by the Platonic concept of androgyny, a concept drawn on by the queen herself almost from the moment of her accession. Sonnet 53 is addressed to an inexpressible lover, who resembles both Adonis and Helen. Androgyny is only part of the exploration of sexuality in the sonnets, however. A humanist education could open windows onto a world very different from post-Reformation England. Plato’s praise of love between men was in marked contrast to the establishment of capital punishment as the prescribed penalty for sodomy in 1533.

In the Sonnets the relationship between the speaker and the young man both invites and resists definition, and it is clearly presented as a challenge to orthodoxy. If at times it seems to correspond to the many Elizabethan celebrations of male friendship, at others it has a raw physicality that resists such polite categorization. Even in sonnet 20, where sexual intimacy seems to be explicitly denied, the speaker’s mind runs to bawdy puns. The speaker refers to the friend as “rose,” “my love,” “lover,” and “sweet love,” and many commentators have demonstrated the repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). On the other hand, the acceptance of the traditional distinction between the young man and the dark lady sonnets obscures the fact that Shakespeare seems deliberately to render the gender of his subject uncertain in the vast majority of cases.

For some commentators the sequence also participates in the so-called birth of the author, a crucial feature of early modern writing: the liberation of the writer from the shackles of patronage. In Joel Fineman’s analysis, Shakespeare creates a radical internalization of Petrarchism, reordering its dynamic by directing his attention to the speaker’s subjectivity rather than to the ostensible object of the speaker’s devotion: the poetry of praise becomes poetry of self-discovery.

Sidney’s Astrophil had inhabited a world of court intrigue, chivalry, and international politics, exemplifying the overlap between political and erotic discourse in Elizabethan England. The circumstances of Shakespeare’s speaker, in contrast, are not those of a courtier but of a male of the upwardly mobile “middling sort.” Especially in the young man sonnets, there is a marked class anxiety, as the speaker seeks to define his role, whether as a friend, a tutor, a counselor, an employee, or a sexual rival. Not only are comparisons drawn from the world of the professional theater (“As an unperfect actor on the stage” in sonnet 23), but also from the world of business: compared to the prodigal “Unthrifty loveliness” of the youth (sonnet 4), “Making a famine where abundance lies” (1), the speaker inhabits a bourgeois world of debts, loans, repayment, and usury, speaking in similar language to the Dark Lady: “I myself am mortgaged to thy will” (134).

Yet Shakespeare’s linguistic performance extends beyond the “middling sort.” He was a great popularizer, translating court art and high art—John Lyly, Sidney, Edmund Spenser —into palatable and sentimental commercial forms. His sequence is remarkable for its thematic and verbal richness, for its extraordinary range of nuances and ambiguities. He often employs words in multiple senses (as in the seemingly willfully indecipherable resonance, punning, polysemy, implication, and nuance of sonnet 94). Shakespeare’s celebrated verbal playfulness, the polysemy of his language, is a function of publication, whether by circulation or printing. His words acquire currency beyond himself and become the subject of reading and interpretation.

This linguistic richness can also be seen as an act of social aspiration: as the appropriation of the ambiguity axiomatically inherent in courtly speech. The sequence continues the process of dismantling traditional distinctions among rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry begun in the poems of 1593-1594. The poems had dealt in reversal and inversion and had combined elements of narrative and drama. The Sonnets occupy a distinct, marginal space between social classes, between public and private, narrative and dramatic, and they proceed not through inverting categories but rather through interrogating them. Variations are played on Elizabethan conventions of erotic discourse: love without sex, sex without love, a “master-mistress” who is “prick’d ... out for women’s pleasure” as the ultimate in unattainable (“to my purpose nothing,” 20) adoration. Like Spenser’s Amoretti , Shakespeare’s collection meditates on the relationships among love, art, time, and immortality. It remains a meditation, however, even when it seems most decided.

The consequences of love, the pain of rejection, desertion, and loss of reputation are powerful elements in the poem that follows the sequence. Despite Thorpe’s unambiguous attribution of the piece to Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint was rejected from the canon, on distinctly flimsy grounds, until quite recently. It has been much investigated to establish its authenticity and its date. It is now generally accepted as Shakespearean and dated at some point between 1600 and 1609, possibly revised from a 1600 first version for publication in Thorpe’s volume. The poem comprises 329 lines, disposed into 47 seven-line rhyme-royal stanzas. It draws heavily on Spenser and Daniel and is the complaint of a wronged woman about the duplicity of a man. It is in some sense a companion to Lucrece and to All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1602-1603) as much as to the sonnets. Its connections with the narrative poems, with the plays, and with the genre of female complaint have been thoroughly explored. The woman is a city besieged by an eloquent wooer (“how deceits were gilded in his smiling”), whose essence is dissimulation (“his passion, but an art of craft”). There has been a growing tendency to relate the poem to its immediate context in Thorpe’s Sonnets volume and to find it a reflection or gloss or critique of the preceding sequence.

Interest in Shakespeare’s nondramatic writings has increased markedly in recent years. They are no longer so easily marginalized or dismissed as conventional, and they contribute in powerful ways to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the Elizabethan era in which he lived and wrote.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, on what may have been his 52nd birthday.

• Renaissance
• Northern Europe

William Shakespeare

1564 - 1616 (52 years)

Born : Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England.

Occupation : Playwright, Poet, Actor

Genre : Tragedy, Comedy, History, Poetry (Sonnet)

Quick Fact : He wrote 154 sonnets

Era : English Renaissance

• Commonly used Iambic Pentameter in his poetry.
• The character of the Dark Lady: embodies complex sensuality and the poet's conflicting emotions of lust and love, representing the darker, more consuming aspects of desire.
• The character of the Fair Youth: symbolizes idealized beauty and platonic love, reflecting themes of admiration, the fleeting nature of youth, and homoerotic affection.
• Human Nature : Explores the complexities of human emotions and behaviors.
• Power and Ambition : Examines the effects of power and personal ambition.
• Love and Relationships : Investigates the various forms and consequences of love.
• Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")
• Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds")
• Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun")

William Shakespeare was a renowned English playwright, poet, and actor who lived during the 16th and 17th centuries. Considered to be the greatest writer in the English language, he wrote more than 30 plays and over 150 sonnets, which are studied and celebrated to this day.

Similar Poet Biographies

William Shakespeare: The Bard Who Shaped the English Language

William Shakespeare is considered to be one of, if not the most important English-language writers of all time. His plays and poems are read all over the world. Interestingly,  from the 1730s onward, Shakespeare’s plays made up 25% of all theatrical productions . Some of the best remembered and most commonly performed and read are  Romeo and Juliet , Macbeth , A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and  Othello . The English poet has inspired many poets to this day and is widely regarded as the pinnacle of poetry and the greatest dramatist of all time.

Living during Elizabethan England, many scholars are still unsure of the full extent of his private life, as not many records were kept during his lifetime. However, his literary legacy of narrative poems , tragedies , and comedies remains.

About William Shakespeare

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 7 Later Life
• 9 Influence from other Poets
• Shakespeare was likely born on April 23rd, 1564, although there are no records of the day.
• He got married to Anne Hathaway when he was 18.
• Together, they had three children, only two of whom survived into adulthood.
• He worked for and with a popular performing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
• He died on April 23rd, 1616.

Interesting Facts

• He wrote 38 plays and 154 sonnets .
• Shakespeare was an actor and writer.
• He wrote some of the most quoted lines in the English language.
• Shakespeare’s home in Stratford was called New Place.
• At least two of Shakespeare’s plays have been lost.

Famous Poems

• Sonnet 130: ’ My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’   is one of Shakespeare’s most popular sonnets . Here, the speaker compares his lover’s eyes to other beautiful things. But it doesn’t turn out well. She doesn’t have many similarities to the natural items he points out. Her lips are dull, her breasts aren’t white enough, and she walks on the ground. If she were a real goddess, she would never need to. Shakespeare loves a twist ending, and the couplet provides that. His love might not be outrageously beautiful, but that doesn’t make her less important or loveable to him.
• Sonnet 18: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’   is very likely Shakespeare’s most famous, or at least his most quoted. It begins with the much-loved line, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The answer is clearly yes, as the following thirteen lines are devoted to doing just that. The listener is better than even the best parts of summer. They are “more lovely and more temperate.” The most important part of the poem comes at the end, where a real distinction is drawn between the listener and a perfect, warm sunny day. The summer is temporary; it isn’t going to last. But, luckily for the listener, their beauty is.
• Sonnet 29: ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’    is another sonnet focusing on the redeeming power of love; the speaker begins by mourning his own situation. He is lost, an outcast, and separate from those he would like to know. Even if he spoke, no one would hear or listen to him. He is not a lucky man. But, perhaps he is. He has a love that comes to him his mind and improves his outlook. He is like a rising bird, escaping from his earthly troubles and singing to God.
• Sonnet 104 : ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old’ is one of the many poems dedicated to the Fair Youth. The speaker, who some believe to be Shakespeare himself, addresses the facts of aging and the possibility that the Fair Youth is affected. Throughout the text, the speaker compliments the Fair Youth on his beauty. He seems not to have aged the whole time the speaker has known him. Over the last three years, he had remained just as fresh and green as when they first met. But, the speaker acknowledges towards the end he knows this can’t be the case. All people’s age and time move so slowly that he can’t see it.
• Sonnet 27: ‘Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed’    is a haunting description of mental and emotional unrest. The speaker spends fourteen lines struggling with his thoughts of a lost love, which is, for some unknown reason, far away from him. Shakespeare uses memorable phrases such as “zealous pilgrimage” to relate love to religious adoration. The last lines are very striking as well. The poem ends immediately after the speaker declares that he can’t find quiet for himself or “For thee.” The emptiness beyond the final line speaks to weariness and exhausted reverence.

Explore more of William Shakespeare’s poems .

The only record, from the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, of William Shakespeare’s birth is from April 26, 1564, when he was baptized. His birthday is generally celebrated on the 23rd, the same day, years later, that he died. Remarkably, despite him being his mother’s third child, he was the only one to survive infancy.

It is believed that William’s childhood was one of privilege but did not remain that way for its entirety. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess, an alderman, and later a bailiff. Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, or Mary Shakespeare, came from money and inherited land from her family. Shakespeare came from a relatively large family, with three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger sisters, Anne and Joan.

As a boy, Shakespeare likely attended the Stratford Grammar School, where he probably studied Latin and Classical history. He did not go to university. Instead, he married Anne Hathaway when he was 18. The two had their first child, a daughter, Susanna, in 1583. Following this was the birth of twins Hamnet (who died when he was eleven) and Judith in 1585. The twins were baptized in February 1585.

The following years of Shakespeare’s life are something of a mystery. Between the years 1585 and 1592, not much is really known about Shakespeare’s activities. This period is known as ‘The Lost Years.’ However, scholars believe that he had been active in London during the spell, as by 1592, he had garnered somewhat of a reputation. It was not until his name started turning up in reference to theatres that any definitive answers to how he lived his life could be drawn.

There has been speculation surrounding how he survived financially during the years of the plague, as many London theaters were closed regularly. Scholars believe that Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was responsible for providing Shakespeare with sufficient income. They had built a connection, shown by his decision to dedicate some of his poetry to Wriothesley. The poetic works ‘ Venus and Adonis ‘ and ‘ The Rape of Lucrece ‘ were two of these.

Literary Career

From 1594 onward, he was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company of Players, later called the King’s Men. Shakespeare became a full-time dramatist working for the company. Unfortunately, these years of his life are also without detail. He spent the next 20 or so years writing the plays and poems with which we associate his name today. His earliest plays tended to be comedies and histories.  Henry VI  and  The Comedy of Errors  are some of the most notable of these.

In 1593 ‘ Venus and Adonis’  was published. The first quarto of Shakespeare’s plays was published a year later. One of Shakespeare’s final plays was  The Two Noble Kinsmen  which was written alongside John Fletcher. 

It was in the period beginning in 1596 that Shakespeare was most prolific, creating such works as:

• Julius Caesar
• Anthony and Cleopatra

Writing Career and Relationships

Today, Shakespeare is considered to be one of, if not the, most important English-language writers of all time. His plays and poems are read all over the world. Shakespeare may be best known for his plays, such as  Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth , but he also wrote 154 sonnets  and several long poems that proved his skill in this  style  as well. Throughout all forms of his writing, readers will come across skilled  metaphors , complex  allusions , and  syntax  and diction, which is often hard for contemporary readers or audiences to understand.

His plays were written in what is known as  blank verse or unrhymed  iambic pentameter . The poems, on the other hand, which were mostly sonnets, used iambic  pentameter  but also followed a strict  rhyme scheme  of ABABCDCDEFEFGG.

William Shakespeare’s poems and plays were not without progression as he expanded his repertoire. In the late 1580s to the early 1590s, he took a new direction in comedies. Some of the most notable of these is  A Midsummer’s Night Dream ,  Much Ado About Nothing ,  As You Like It , Merchant of Venice , and  Twelfth Night .

A Midsummer’s Night Dream  is actually one of the most popular of his plays.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream  accounted for more than 7% of all professional Shakespeare performances worldwide from 2011-2016,  according to Shakespearances .

Again, William Shakespeare showed his ability to adapt and write across many themes. Towards the latter stages of his life, the majority of his last plays focused on the romantic side of writing, creating a number of tales of love.  Cymbeline , The  Winter’s Tale , and  The Tempest  were some of these.

Sadly, William Shakespeare passed away on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. The exact cause of his death is still shrouded in mystery. Numerous theories have been put forward, but none have been confirmed as the definitive explanation. Nonetheless, many historians have suggested that Shakespeare passed away due to natural causes, likely resulting from a combination of ailments such as pneumonia and liver disease.

Influence from other Poets

William Shakespeare was notably influenced by writers such as Ovid and Plutarch, as well as the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and Christopher Marlow .

His influence has been felt by many more writers. His pioneering style has inspired writers in all languages around the world. Some of the best-known names are Walt Whitman , Charles Dickens , William Faulkner, and many more.

During the years 1585 to 1592, there are no records of William Shakespeare, creating a sense of mystery around the period of his life in which he gained his reputation. Scholars have penned this time of Shakespeare’s life, ‘The Lost Years.’

There is some debate surrounding the real name of William Shakespeare. However, many conclude that his name was indeed William. At his baptism in 1564, he was named Gulielmus Shakspere, which means ‘William’ in Latin. Alongside this, his own reference to himself in some of his works was indeed ‘Will,’ and his peers called him William.

Shakespeare was arguably the greatest playwright and poet of all time, so inherently he has a plethora of celebrated works. However, there is a strong case for ‘ Romeo and Juliet ‘ being his most famous.

Like many parts of his life, there was an element of mystery around the cause of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The most common explanation among modern scholars is that he died of liver problems or pneumonia. However, more extreme theories have suggested that he succumbed to syphilis, with some even going as far as to say that he was murdered.

Interestingly, William Shakespeare’s tomb in Trinity Church, located in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, features a poem on its outside. It acts as a warning to anyone who might consider disturbing his final resting place. The poem includes the phrase, “and cursed be he that moves my bones.”

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Short Biography William Shakespeare

Short bio of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564.

His father William was a successful local businessman, and his mother Mary was the daughter of a landowner. Relatively prosperous, it is likely the family paid for Williams education, although there is no evidence he attended university.

In 1582 William, aged only 18, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Juliet. Their only son Hamnet died aged just 11.

Due to some well-timed investments, Shakespeare was able to secure a firm financial background, leaving time for writing and acting. The best of these investments was buying some real estate near Stratford in 1605, which soon doubled in value.

It seemed Shakespeare didn’t mind being absent from his family – he only returned home during Lent when all the theatres were closed. It is thought that during the 1590s he wrote the majority of his sonnets. This was a time of prolific writing and his plays developed a good deal of interest and controversy. His early plays were mainly comedies (e.g. Much Ado about Nothing , A Midsummer’s Night Dream ) and histories (e.g. Henry V )

By the early Seventeenth Century, Shakespeare had begun to write plays in the genre of tragedy. These plays, such as Hamlet , Othello and King Lear , often hinge on some fatal error or flaw in the lead character and provide fascinating insights into the darker aspects of human nature. These later plays are considered Shakespeare’s finest achievements.

When writing an introduction to Shakespeare’s First Folio of published plays in 1623, Johnson wrote of Shakespeare:

“not of an age, but for all time”

Shakespeare the Poet

William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets mostly in the 1590s. These short poems, deal with issues such as lost love. His sonnets have an enduring appeal due to his formidable skill with language and words.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove:”

– Sonnet CXVI

The Plays of Shakespeare

The plays of Shakespeare have been studied more than any other writing in the English language and have been translated into numerous languages. He was rare as a play-write for excelling in tragedies, comedies and histories. He deftly combined popular entertainment with an extraordinary poetic capacity for expression which is almost mantric in quality.

 “This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!”

– Lord Polonius, Hamlet Act I, Scene 3

During his lifetime, Shakespeare was not without controversy, but he also received lavish praise for his plays which were very popular and commercially successful.

His plays have retained an enduring appeal throughout history and the world. Some of his most popular plays include:

• Twelfth Night
• Romeo and Juliet

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…”

Death of Shakespeare

Shakespeare died in 1616; it is not clear how he died, and numerous suggestions have been put forward. John Ward, the local vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford (where Shakespeare is buried), writes in a diary account that:

“Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”

In 1616, there was an outbreak of typhus (“The new fever”) which may have been the cause. The average life expectancy of someone born in London, England in the Sixteenth Century was about 35 years old, Shakespeare died age 52.

Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

Some academics, known as the “Oxfords,” claim that Shakespeare never actually wrote any plays. They contend Shakespeare was actually just a successful businessman, and for authorship suggest names such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford .  Arguments have also been made for Francis Bacon . The argument that Shakespeare was actually the Earl of Oxford relies on circumstantial evidence and similarities in his writing style and relationships between his life and the play of Shakespeare. 

However, there is no hard evidence tying the Earl of Oxford to the theatre or writing the scripts.  By contrast, there is evidence of William Shakespeare working in theatres and he received a variety of criticism from people such as Ben Johnson and Robert Greene. Also, the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and it is generally agreed there were 12 plays published after this date. (Oxfords contend these plays were finished by other writers.)

It is also hard to believe the vain Earl of Oxford (who killed one of his own servants) would write such amazing scripts and then be happy with anonymity. Also, to maintain anonymity, it would also require the co-operation of numerous family members and other figures in the theatre world. The theory of other writers to Shakespeare only emerged centuries after the publishing of the First Folio.

Shakespeare’s Epitaph

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare Blessed by y man y spares hes stones And curst be he y moves my bones

– More interesting facts on Shakespeare

Quotes on Shakespeare

“Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge became habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glorysmitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton’s his compeer, not rival.”

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Biographia Literaria (1817)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of William Shakespeare”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net , 18th May 2006. Last updated 1 March 2019.

Popular quotes of Shakespeare

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

– Polonius, giving Laertes a pep talk. ( Hamlet )

“To be, or not to be: that is the question Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die: to sleep;”

– Hamlet

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

– Hamlet (to Horatio on seeing a ghost)

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”

– The Tempest (Prospero)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Julius Caesar (Cassius to Brutus)

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

– Macbeth (on learning of the death of Queen)

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Hamlet in Hamlet

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

—Dauphin in Henry V

“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.”

—Lucio in Measure for Measure

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition at Amazon

Shakespeare: The Biography

Shakespeare: The Biography at Amazon

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• Jokes about Shakespeare
• Facts about Shakespeare
• Popular poems of William Shakespeare
• Shakespeare at BBC

Shakespeare’s Poetic Techniques

William Shakespeare is generally considered as one of the greatest poets who ever lived: This isn’t confined to the relatively small body of poems he produced , or his 154 sonnets but also to the poetic content of his plays . Throughout his works Shakespeare used many classic poetic devices :

Homerian & Classical Poetic Devices

No writer ever comes up with anything absolutely new: all poetry is produced as steps on a progressing path and so all poets are, in a sense, the heirs of the great poets of the past: they learn techniques and devices from those poetic ancestors, duplicating them and building on them. And so we see in Shakespeare’s poetry, devices used by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey , and employed by subsequent poets, and so on, up to Shakespeare and beyond.

Devices in the epic poems of Homer run through Shakespeare’s poetry:

• Alliteration – the repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters in a group of words, is one of the staples of Shakespeare’s verse and indeed, one of the building blocks of poetry generally.   Romeo and Juliet begins with this memorable statement: “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes; A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.” The effect of alliteration is to place emphasis on an image or a line, and this image from Sonnet 12 also does that most effectively: ‘Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard’. The intensity is increased when more than one consonant is repeated, as in,  “When wasteful war s hall s tatue s overturn.” Alliteration was also one of the most prominent features of Old English verse, another significant model for Shakespeare.
• Allusion references to various cultural areas like history, mythology, philosophy, religion and astronomy – is a strong feature in Shakespeare’s poetry.
• Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as another of the building blocks of verse. Assonance is rhyming brought about by the repetition of vowel sounds:

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents…

There are two assonance examples there; the first is the short “i” sound in “princes” and “outlive” and the second is the long “i” sound in “shine” and “bright.”

One of the most famous short sentences in the English language – strange, mysterious and memorable – is built with a combination of alliteration and assonance: “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” from Macbeth .

• Imagery appealing to the five senses –  is an element in most poetry, and particularly strong in Shakespeare’s. It is also a prominent feature in Homer. Shakespeare’s verse is saturated with Personification . Homer’s vivid description of the world of his epics is frequently expressed with this device, describing, for example, sunrise as the ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’ In Hamlet, the sunrise is vividly conveyed by ‘ the morn, in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill,’ – a superb personification of daybreak.
• Metaphor is a term that refers to the non-literal and is the soul of all literature, particularly strong in literature’s most concentrated form – poetry.
• The Simile , a direct metaphor, contributes centrally to the compressed nature of verse, unlike prose, that allows for some elaboration.  Shakespeare frequently uses a device that is known as the Homeric Simile – an extended simile that compares two unlike things and draws particular attention to a number of ways in which they are alike. For example, in the Iliad :

So in a rush each Argive captain killed his man. As ravenous wolves come swooping down on lambs or kids To snatch them away-from right amidst their flock—all lost When a careless shepherd leaves them straggling down the hills And quickly spotting a chance the wolf pack picks them off, No heart for the fight – so the Achaeans mauled the Trojans.

In Shakespeare:

All the world’s a stage , and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts. ( As You Like It )

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief. ( Romeo and Juliet )

It is one thing to outline the influence of the Greek poets on Shakespeare but it is the way Shakespeare uses those poetic devices that makes him unique.

Blank Verse, Iambic Pentameter and Natural Speech

Shakespeare’s technique developed as he gained experience. In the early plays he wrote in the conventional style of the day but as he moved more comfortably in writing plays to be performed before an audience in the theatre the more he moved away from stylised language to language that sprang from the needs of the characters and the dramas. Rhetorical language gave way to the naturalistic speech of real people, even though it was written in verse. This is a central point in Shakespeare’s technique: his use of verse to make his characters appear to be talking in the natural language of speech while at the same time being highly poetic.

His standard poetic form was blank verse, all in iambic pentameter ; ie. Unrhymed verse consisting of ten syllables in a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. Shakespeare’s contemporaries used the same form but his verse is very much more alive and vibrant than most of theirs. Iambic pentameter has a sing-song movement and is in danger of being monotonous if sentences start at the beginning and finish at the end of lines. This occurs in Shakespeare’s early plays but he became a master of manipulating the iambic pentameter by interrupting and varying its flow, pausing at various places in a line, running one line into another, using long and short vowels and so on, forcing actors to speak the lines in a way that was like natural speech, even though the basic ten-syllable line with the stress on every second syllable, remained. By doing that he had the flexibility to portray every expression of human feeling. Here is Othello almost literally drowning in his emotions as he compares his state of mind to an ocean current. The verse imitates the swirling, tugging, movement of a strong ocean current that will drown anyone caught in it:

Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up.

And in Measure for Measure , Claudio, about to be executed, shows his aguish as he imagines the horror of being dead.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world;

In both examples Shakespeare sticks strictly to iambic pentameter. His manipulation of it demonstrates his poetic technique. His use of blank verse iambic pentameter allowed him to go deeper and deeper, and so we have the tumultuous mind of Hamlet and the chaotic madness of Lear, expressed, using the same technique.

Characterisation Through Sounds

Shakespeare used the flexibility of blank verse combined with iambic pentameter, together with poetic devices like assonance, alliteration, extended similes and personification to present characters with varied motivations expressed through their individual patterns of speech.  For example, in Othello , the tension and conflict are created by the interaction of two protagonists who have opposing motivations and outlooks on life. Othello speaks with round, open vowels and formal, poetic images, full of allusions, delivered in measured sentences in a stately manner which, put together, present a picture of a noble, educated man. Iago is a linguistic chameleon who infiltrates the minds of his victims by mimicking their speech patterns when he talks to them. However, when Iago is alone and expressing himself with only the audience hearing him his language is something completely different. Here is Othello addressing the Venetian senate, explaining how it was that Desdemona fell in love with him:

My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: She swore, in faith, twas strange, ’twas passing strange, ‘Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful: She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me, And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story. And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake: She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used.

Notice Shakespeare’s use of long vowels to create a character who comes across as deliberate, noble and serious. Words like ‘world’, ‘sighs’, ‘wondrous’, ‘loved’, ‘woo,’ and so on, long vowels combined with soft consonants – lots of ‘w’s and ‘h’s – give the speaker his distinctive speech pattern, which is maintained throughout and becomes even more marked as his deepest emotions are unveiled. A line like ‘She gave me for my pains a world of sighs’, can be stretched out at the actor’s leisure but designed not to be able to be spoken fast.

Here is Iago speaking when only the audience can hear him:

When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, As I do now: for whiles this honest fool Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor, I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear, That she repeals him for her body’s lust; And by how much she strives to do him good, She shall undo her credit with the Moor. So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all.

The passage is almost devoid of long vowels and full of short ones in words like ‘credit’, ‘net’, ‘pitch’ etc. Shakespeare presents Iago as a hissing, spitting, character by saturating his speech with ‘s’s and using words like ‘devils,’ ‘pestilence,’ ‘lust,’ ‘pitch,’ ‘enmesh’.  The passage is designed to be spoken at a rapid pace.

Shakespeare uses this characterising technique throughout his works to create characters so distinct from each other that someone well-read in Shakespeare will be able to identify characters from extracts from their dialogue.

And so, Shakespeare’s poetic techniques can be described as the use of every device available to a poet but stretched, subverted and transformed to meet his needs. It is the genius with which he approaches the available poetic devices that produces his poetic technique.

Shakespeare’s poetic techniques put him at the top of the list of most influential poets

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--> directory Shakespeare used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, called blank verse. His plays were composed using blank verse, although there are passages in all the plays that deviate from the norm and are composed of other forms of poetry and/or simple prose. Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, with the exception of Sonnet 145, which is written in iambic tetrameter. Shakespeare's style of writing and metre choice were typical of the day, and other writings of the time influenced how he structured his compositions. For a detailed look at iambic pentameter with examples, please see . For more information on blank verse and rhyme in the plays, please see . For more information on the origin and history of blank verse, please see the beginning of the article . Mabillard, Amanda. . . 20 Aug. 2000. (date when you accessed the information) _________ A Timeline of William Shakespeare's Life Major Life Events That Shaped The Bard's Literary Career Shakespeare's Life and World Best Sellers Classic Literature Plays & Drama Short Stories Children's Books M.A., Theater Studies, Warwick University B.A., Drama and English, DeMontfort University This timeline of the legendary William Shakespeare reveals that his plays and sonnets  cannot be separated. Although he was undoubtedly a genius, he was also a product of his time . Follow along and piece together both the historical and personal events that shaped the world's most influential dramatist and poet. 1564: Shakespeare Born The life of William Shakespeare begins in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England when he was born into a prosperous family (his father was a glove maker). Learn more about Shakespeare’s birth and early childhood, and discover the house in which he was born . 1571-1578: Schooling Thanks to the social standing of William Shakespeare's father, he managed to gain a place at King Edward IV Grammar School in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was schooled there between the ages of 7 and 14, where he would have been introduced to the classic texts that later informed his playwriting. 1582: Married Anne Hathaway A shotgun marriage to ensure that their first child was not born out of wedlock sees the young William Shakespeare married to Anne Hathaway , daughter of a wealthy local farmer. The couple had three children together. 1585-1592: The Shakespeare Lost Years The life of William Shakespeare disappears from the history books for several years. This period, now known as the Lost Years , has been the subject of much speculation. Whatever happened to William in this period formed the foundations for his subsequent career and by 1592 he had established himself in London and was making a living from the stage. 1594: 'Romeo and Juliet' With " Romeo and Juliet ", Shakespeare really makes his name as a London playwright. The play was as popular then as it is today and was regularly played at The Theatre, the predecessor to the Globe Theatre. All of Shakespeare’s early work was produced here. 1598: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Erected In 1598, the timbers and materials for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre were stolen and floated across the River Thames after a dispute over the lease of The Theatre became impossible to resolve. From the stolen materials of The Theatre, the now famous Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was erected. 1600: 'Hamlet' "Hamlet" is often described as “ the greatest play ever written ” -- remarkable when you think it’s first public production was in 1600! " Hamlet " may have been written while Shakespeare was coming to terms with the devastating news that his only son, Hamnet, had died at the young age of 11. 1603: Elizabeth I Dies Shakespeare was known to Elizabeth I and had his plays had been performed to her on many occasions. She ruled during England’s so-called, “Golden Age”, a period in which artists and writers flourished. Her reign was politically unstable because she adopted Protestantism  -- generating conflict with the Pope, Spain and her own Catholic citizens. Shakespeare, with his Catholic roots, drew upon this in his plays. 1605: The Gunpowder Plot There is evidence to suggest that Shakespeare was a “secret” Catholic , so he may have been disappointed that the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 failed. It was a Catholic attempt to derail King James I and Protestant England -- and there is evidence that the plot was hatched in Clopton, now a suburb of Stratford-upon-Avon. 1616: Shakespeare Dies After retiring to Stratford-upon-Avon in around 1610, Shakespeare died on his 52nd birthday. By the end of his life, Shakespeare had certainly done well for himself and owned New Place , the largest house in Stratford. Although we have no record of the cause of death, there are a few theories . 1616: Shakespeare Buried You can still visit Shakespeare’s grave today -- and read the curse written upon his tomb.  Biography of William Shakespeare, History's Most Famous Playwright Shakespeare's Brothers and Sisters Biography of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife Was Shakespeare Gay? Shakespeare Authorship Debate William Shakespeare's School Life, Childhood, and Education Was Shakespeare a Businessman? Facts About Shakespeare Comparing the Work of Edward de Vere and William Shakespeare What We Know About Shakespeare's Death Discover the Mysterious Shakespeare Lost Years The Shakespeare Authorship Controversy Continues William Shakespeare's Family Where Was Writer William Shakespeare Born? Shakespearean Insults From A to Z What Happened to Shakespeare's Skull Website navigation Shakespeare's Life: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions Listen to this essay: Surviving documents that give us glimpses into the life of William Shakespeare show us a playwright, poet, and actor who grew up in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, spent his professional life in London, and returned to Stratford a wealthy landowner. He was born in April 1564, died in April 1616, and is buried inside the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. We wish we could know more about the life of the world’s greatest dramatist. His plays and poems are testaments to his wide reading—especially to his knowledge of Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Holinshed’s  Chronicles , and the Bible—and to his mastery of the English language, but we can only speculate about his education. We know that the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon was considered excellent. The school was one of the English “grammar schools” established to educate young men, primarily in Latin grammar and literature. As in other schools of the time, students began their studies at the age of four or five in the attached “petty school,” and there learned to read and write in English, studying primarily the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. After two years in the petty school, students entered the lower form (grade) of the grammar school, where they began the serious study of Latin grammar and Latin texts that would occupy most of the remainder of their school days. (Several Latin texts that Shakespeare used repeatedly in writing his plays and poems were texts that schoolboys memorized and recited.) Latin comedies were introduced early in the lower form; in the upper form, which the boys entered at age ten or eleven, students wrote their own Latin orations and declamations, studied Latin historians and rhetoricians, and began the study of Greek using the Greek New Testament. Title page of a 1573 Latin and Greek catechism for children. From Alexander Nowell, Catechismus paruus pueris primum Latine  . . . (1573). Since the records of the Stratford “grammar school” do not survive, we cannot prove that William Shakespeare attended the school; however, every indication (his father’s position as an alderman and bailiff of Stratford, the playwright’s own knowledge of the Latin classics, scenes in the plays that recall grammar-school experiences—for example,  The Merry Wives of Windsor , 4.1 ) suggests that he did. We also lack generally accepted documentation about Shakespeare’s life after his schooling ended and his professional life in London began. His marriage in 1582 (at age eighteen) to Anne Hathaway and the subsequent births of his daughter Susanna (1583) and the twins Judith and Hamnet (1585) are recorded, but how he supported himself and where he lived are not known. Nor do we know when and why he left Stratford for the London theatrical world, nor how he rose to be the important figure in that world that he had become by the early 1590s. We do know that by 1592 he had achieved some prominence in London as both an actor and a playwright. In that year was published a book by the playwright Robert Greene attacking an actor who had the audacity to write blank-verse drama and who was “in his own conceit [i.e., opinion] the only Shake-scene in a country.” Since Greene’s attack includes a parody of a line from one of Shakespeare’s early plays, there is little doubt that it is Shakespeare to whom he refers, a “Shake-scene” who had aroused Greene’s fury by successfully competing with university-educated dramatists like Greene himself. It was in 1593 that Shakespeare became a published poet. In that year he published his long narrative poem  Venus and Adonis ; in 1594, he followed it with  The Rape of Lucrece.  Both poems were dedicated to the young earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley), who may have become Shakespeare’s patron. It seems no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote these narrative poems at a time when the theaters were closed because of the plague, a contagious epidemic disease that devastated the population of London. When the theaters reopened in 1594, Shakespeare apparently resumed his double career of actor and playwright and began his long (and seemingly profitable) service as an acting-company shareholder. Records for December of 1594 show him to be a leading member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was this company of actors, later named the King’s Men, for whom he would be a principal actor, dramatist, and shareholder for the rest of his career. So far as we can tell, that career spanned about twenty years. In the 1590s, he wrote his plays on English history as well as several comedies and at least two tragedies ( Titus Andronicus  and  Romeo and Juliet ). These histories, comedies, and tragedies are the plays credited to him in 1598 in a work,  Palladis Tamia , that in one chapter compares English writers with “Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets.” There the author, Francis Meres, claims that Shakespeare is comparable to the Latin dramatists Seneca for tragedy and Plautus for comedy, and calls him “the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.” He also names him “Mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”: “I say,” writes Meres, “that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.” Since Meres also mentions Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” it is assumed that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not published until 1609) were also written in the 1590s. In 1599, Shakespeare’s company built a theater for themselves across the river from London, naming it the Globe. The plays that are considered by many to be Shakespeare’s major tragedies ( Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , and  Macbeth ) were written while the company was resident in this theater, as were such comedies as  Twelfth Night  and  Measure for Measure .  Many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed at court (both for Queen Elizabeth I and, after her death in 1603, for King James I), some were presented at the Inns of Court (the residences of London’s legal societies), and some were doubtless performed in other towns, at the universities, and at great houses when the King’s Men went on tour; otherwise, his plays from 1599 to 1608 were, so far as we know, performed only at the Globe. Between 1608 and 1612, Shakespeare wrote several plays—among them  The Winter’s Tale  and  The Tempest —presumably for the company’s new indoor Blackfriars theater, though the plays were performed also at the Globe and at court. Surviving documents describe a performance of  The Winter’s Tale  in 1611 at the Globe, for example, and performances of  The Tempest  in 1611 and 1613 at the royal palace of Whitehall. Shakespeare seems to have written very little after 1612, the year in which he probably wrote  King Henry VIII .  (It was at a performance of  Henry VIII  in 1613 that the Globe caught fire and burned to the ground.) Sometime between 1610 and 1613, according to many biographers, he returned to live in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he owned a large house and considerable property, and where his wife and his two daughters lived. (His son Hamnet had died in 1596.) However, other biographers suggest that Shakespeare did not leave London for good until much closer to the time of his death. During his professional years in London, Shakespeare had presumably derived income from the acting company’s profits as well as from his own career as an actor, from the sale of his play manuscripts to the acting company, and, after 1599, from his shares as an owner of the Globe. It was presumably that income, carefully invested in land and other property, that made him the wealthy man that surviving documents show him to have become. It is also assumed that William Shakespeare’s growing wealth and reputation played some part in inclining the Crown, in 1596, to grant John Shakespeare, William’s father, the coat of arms that he had so long sought. William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616 (according to the epitaph carved under his bust in Holy Trinity Church) and was buried on April 25. Seven years after his death, his collected plays were published as  Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies  (the work now known as the First Folio). Ptolemaic universe. From Marcus Manilius, The sphere of . . . (1675). The years in which Shakespeare wrote were among the most exciting in English history. Intellectually, the discovery, translation, and printing of Greek and Roman classics were making available a set of works and worldviews that interacted complexly with Christian texts and beliefs. The result was a questioning, a vital intellectual ferment, that provided energy for the period’s amazing dramatic and literary output and that fed directly into Shakespeare’s plays. The Ghost in  Hamlet , for example, is wonderfully complicated in part because he is a figure from Roman tragedy—the spirit of the dead returning to seek revenge—who at the same time inhabits a Christian hell (or purgatory); Hamlet’s description of humankind reflects at one moment the Neoplatonic wonderment at mankind (“ What a piece of work is a man! ”) and, at the next, the Christian attitude toward sinful humanity (“ And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ”). As intellectual horizons expanded, so also did geographical and cosmological horizons. New worlds—both North and South America—were explored, and in them were found human beings who lived and worshiped in ways radically different from those of Renaissance Europeans and Englishmen. The universe during these years also seemed to shift and expand. Copernicus had earlier theorized that the earth was not the center of the cosmos but revolved as a planet around the sun. Galileo’s telescope, created in 1609, allowed scientists to see that Copernicus had been correct: the universe was not organized with the earth at the center, nor was it so nicely circumscribed as people had, until that time, thought. In terms of expanding horizons, the impact of these discoveries on people’s beliefs—religious, scientific, and philosophical—cannot be overstated. London, too, rapidly expanded and changed during the years (from the early 1590s to around 1610) that Shakespeare lived there. London—the center of England’s government, its economy, its royal court, its overseas trade—was, during these years, becoming an exciting metropolis, drawing to it thousands of new citizens every year. Troubled by overcrowding, by poverty, by recurring epidemics of the plague, London was also a mecca for the wealthy and the aristocratic, and for those who sought advancement at court, or power in government or finance or trade. One hears in Shakespeare’s plays the voices of London—the struggles for power, the fear of venereal disease, the language of buying and selling. One hears as well the voices of Stratford-upon-Avon—references to the nearby Forest of Arden, to sheepherding, to small-town gossip, to village fairs and markets. Part of the richness of Shakespeare’s work is the influence felt there of the various worlds in which he lived: the world of metropolitan London, the world of small-town and rural England, the world of the theater, and the worlds of craftsmen and shepherds. That Shakespeare inhabited such worlds we know from surviving London and Stratford documents, as well as from the evidence of the plays and poems themselves. From such records we can sketch the dramatist’s life. We know from his works that he was a voracious reader. We know from legal and business documents that he was a multifaceted theater man who became a wealthy landowner. We know a bit about his family life and a fair amount about his legal and financial dealings. Most scholars today depend upon such evidence as they draw their picture of the world’s greatest playwright. Such, however, has not always been the case. Until the late eighteenth century, the William Shakespeare who lived in most biographies was the creation of legend and tradition. This was the Shakespeare who was supposedly caught poaching deer at Charlecote, the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy close by Stratford; this was the Shakespeare who fled from Sir Thomas’s vengeance and made his way in London by taking care of horses outside a playhouse; this was the Shakespeare who reportedly could barely read, but whose natural gifts were extraordinary, whose father was a butcher who allowed his gifted son sometimes to help in the butcher shop, where William supposedly killed calves “in a high style,” making a speech for the occasion. It was this legendary William Shakespeare whose Falstaff (in  1  and  2 Henry IV ) so pleased Queen Elizabeth that she demanded a play about Falstaff in love, and demanded that it be written in fourteen days (hence the existence of  The Merry Wives of Windsor ). It was this legendary Shakespeare who reached the top of his acting career in the roles of the Ghost in  Hamlet  and old Adam in  As You Like It —and who died of a fever contracted by drinking too hard at “a merry meeting” with the poets Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. This legendary Shakespeare is a rambunctious, undisciplined man, as attractively “wild” as his plays were seen by earlier generations to be. Unfortunately, there is no trace of evidence to support these wonderful stories. Perhaps in response to the disreputable Shakespeare of legend—or perhaps in response to the fragmentary and, for some, all-too-ordinary Shakespeare documented by surviving records—some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford), and Christopher Marlowe. Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays is a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held. Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of Shakespeare’s life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an “important” person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good “grammar-school” education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater. How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world four centuries after his death is one of life’s mysteries—and one that will continue to tease our imaginations as we continue to delight in his plays and poems. Further Reading Baldwin, T. W.  William Shakspere’s Petty School.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1943. Baldwin here investigates the theory and practice of the petty school, the first level of education in Elizabethan England. He focuses on that educational system primarily as it is reflected in Shakespeare’s art. Baldwin, T. W.  William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.  2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944. Baldwin attacks the view that Shakespeare was an uneducated genius—a view that had been dominant among Shakespeareans since the eighteenth century. Instead, Baldwin shows, the educational system of Shakespeare’s time would have given the playwright a strong background in the classics, and there is much in the plays that shows how Shakespeare benefited from such an education. Beier, A. L., and Roger Finlay, eds.  London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis.  New York: Longman, 1986. Focusing on the economic and social history of early modern London, these collected essays probe aspects of metropolitan life, including “Population and Disease,” “Commerce and Manufacture,” and “Society and Change.” Chambers, E. K.  William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems.  2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. Analyzing in great detail the scant historical data, Chambers’s complex, scholarly study considers the nature of the texts in which Shakespeare’s work is preserved. Cressy, David.  Education in Tudor and Stuart England.  London: Edward Arnold, 1975. This volume collects sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and early eighteenth-century documents detailing aspects of formal education in England, such as the curriculum, the control and organization of education, and the education of women. Duncan-Jones, Katherine.  Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life.  London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010. This biography, first published in 2001 under the title  Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life,  sets out to look into the documents from Shakespeare’s personal life—especially legal and financial records—and it finds there a man very different from the one portrayed in more traditional biographies. He is “ungentle” in being born to a lower social class and in being a bit ruthless and more than a bit stingy. As the author notes, “three topics were formerly taboo both in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money. I have been indelicate enough to give a good deal of attention to all three.” She examines “Shakespeare’s uphill struggle to achieve, or purchase, ‘gentle’ status.” She finds that “Shakespeare was strongly interested in intense relationships with well-born young men.” And she shows that he was “reluctant to divert much, if any, of his considerable wealth towards charitable, neighbourly, or altruistic ends.” She insists that his plays and poems are “great, and enduring,” and that it is in them “that the best of him is to be found.” Dutton, Richard.  William Shakespeare: A Literary Life.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Not a biography in the traditional sense, Dutton’s very readable work nevertheless “follows the contours of Shakespeare’s life” as it examines Shakespeare’s career as playwright and poet, with consideration of his patrons, theatrical associations, and audience. Honan, Park.  Shakespeare: A Life.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Honan’s accessible biography focuses on the various contexts of Shakespeare’s life—physical, social, political, and cultural—to place the dramatist within a lucidly described world. The biography includes detailed examinations of, for example, Stratford schooling, theatrical politics of 1590s London, and the careers of Shakespeare’s associates. The author draws on a wealth of established knowledge and on interesting new research into local records and documents; he also engages in speculation about, for example, the possibilities that Shakespeare was a tutor in a Catholic household in the north of England in the 1580s and that he acted particular roles in his own plays, areas that reflect new, but unproven and debatable, data—though Honan is usually careful to note where a particular narrative “has not been capable of proof or disproof.” Potter, Lois.  The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography.  Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters “follow a chronological sequence,” each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright’s life. In the chapters that cover his playwriting years (5–17), each chapter focuses on events in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London (especially in the commercial theaters) while giving equal space to discussions of the plays and/or poems Shakespeare wrote during those years. Filled with information from Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical worlds, the biography also shares frequent insights into how modern productions of a given play can shed light on the play, especially in scenes that Shakespeare’s text presents ambiguously. Schoenbaum, S.  William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Schoenbaum’s evidence-based biography of Shakespeare is a compact version of his magisterial folio-size  Shakespeare: A Documentary Life  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Schoenbaum structures his readable “compact” narrative around the documents that still exist which chronicle Shakespeare’s familial, theatrical, legal, and financial existence. These documents, along with those discovered since the 1970s, form the basis of almost all Shakespeare biographies written since Schoenbaum’s books appeared. Stay connected Find out what’s on, read our latest stories, and learn how you can get involved. Inside Story Sign up Search Search Search Stylometric Shakespeare An immense database of early modern plays reveals “a veritable avian community, a magpie nest, each writer borrowing from each other” Robert White Books 19 September 2024 1416 words Reading and listening: detail from the “Chandos portrait” of Shakespeare. Alamy Leaving aside the fringe-dwellers who don’t believe “the Stratford man” wrote any of the plays published under his name, attribution scholars have employed sophisticated, increasingly computerised “stylometric” methodologies to ascertain exactly which parts, lines and phrases in each play attributed to Shakespeare were written by the playwright himself, and which by other writers. Despite the apparently scientific deployment of evidence, however, the results are by no means settled among the various exponents. The one major point of agreement within this intimidating and contentious branch of Shakespeare research is that the Romantic-era genius writing in splendid isolation has been well and truly swept away, to be replaced by a figure who was one of many in an Elizabethan community of collaborating playwrights who were also actors and shareholders in London’s theatrical companies. Nonetheless, and to keep things in perspective, we need not abandon our regard for a singular Shakespeare as a master-craftsman of the stage. Will Sharpe’s measured approach in Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing (2023) shows that the wholly collaborative plays of which he was joint author were written only in his early apprenticeship years ( Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI plays) and when he had semi-retired at the end of his career ( Pericles , Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen ), which leaves all those between (except Timon of Athens ) as written alone and unaided. Thus, as Darren Freebury-Jones shows in his new book, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers , the vast majority of plays in the First Folio (a kind of posthumous publishing collaboration) are entirely single-authored, marked by Shakespeare’s inimitable, chameleon-like and richly metaphorical signature style, though replete also with recontextualised verbal “borrowings” from fellow dramatists and writers. We need not worry that Shakespeare’s pre-eminence, recognised by the Folio editors and contemporaries, will be swept away by the view that the plays we value were compiled by committee. Freebury-Jones voices some doubts about other authorship schools, in particular the New Oxford Shakespeare team led by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor and John Jowett in the 1980s, which radically changed the editorial landscape towards acknowledging collaboration. But he turns away from debates about systematic collaborations and conscious adaptations to peg out his own allotment. His interest is in the extent to which Shakespeare was influenced by the verbal constructions of his contemporaries, in some of whose plays he himself acted. To do this, he uses a recent computer database with what must be the most forbidding title imaginable for a work on drama, Collocations and N-Grams , developed by digital scholar Pervez Rizvi. This resource has digitised an almost complete collection of the surviving texts of 527 early modern plays dated between 1552 and 1657, enabling us speedily and in granular detail to find matches of words and phrases between plays. Freebury-Jones recognises that this “treasure trove” enables a scholar to identify with great precision mutual influences between dramatists repeating exact shared word sequences (“n-grams”) and matching phrases spliced with intervening words (“collocations”). These he analyses to identify Shakespeare’s “borrowed feathers,” pillaged from or shared with his contemporary writers. The result is a “revelation” of micro-level verbal mirroring that doesn’t rely on assumptions of joint authorship but instead on mutual influences, some stronger than others. And when he does raise his eyes above the computer spreadsheets, he reveals himself to be a sensitively close reader, showing how shared phrases are purposefully adapted to illuminate different dramatic contexts. Freebury-Jones does intervene in attribution studies in some cases, for example arguing that collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe in the Henry VI plays may have been overstated and that Thomas Kyd is a stronger presence in Shakespeare’s works than otherwise believed. But his main focus is on linguistic and dramatic influence between dramatists, and in these stakes even Shakespeare’s self-styled rival Robert Greene has claims: “Greene’s feathers, far more colourful than often credited, helped the works of later playwrights to take flight.” Professional ties were also social, and Freebury-Jones provides at the beginning of each chapter entertaining pen-portraits of a motley range of personalities before moving to the nitty-gritty of their stylistic influence on Shakespeare. For these alone the book might reach a more general audience, though Stanley Wells’s authoritative Shakespeare and Co. (2006) provides more biographical detail. Among the subjects of Freebury-Jones’s portraits is the playwright John Lyly, now largely forgotten, who pioneered a new kind of dramaturgy written for boy actors with mixed genres from which Shakespeare forged romantic comedy, and a uniquely scholastic style that became famous in his time as “euphuism” and which Shakespeare parodies. Marlowe burst on the theatrical scene with his altogether more volcanic presence, carrying the racy aura of espionage, while Kyd, his early room-mate, was probably unjustly caught up in accusations of crime, tainted by association. Freebury-Jones shows that both were enormously influential over Shakespeare. Robert Greene, who famously announced to the coterie world of playmakers the emergence of an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” as “the only Shake-scene in a countrey,” was dogged by lifelong penury and suffered an early and infamous death. Ben Jonson, who (unlike Marlowe) lived to be Shakespeare’s main dramatic rival and frenemy, was turbulently implicated in a criminal underworld, providing jargon and a rogues’ gallery of characters to the dramatic repertoire. And on we go through a range of writers including Peele, Dekker, Marston and Middleton, ending with John Fletcher, who was accepted as the true heir by fully collaborating on at least the two last plays in the Shakespearean canon. Freebury-Jones’s detailed evidence builds towards an argument that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical world was a community of writers who were acquaintances, rivals and hired journeymen, and that they freely borrowed “feathers” from each other in openly intertextual fashion. In an age when literary imitation was a central plank of humanist education at school, it is not surprising that early modern drama was “a veritable avian community, a magpie nest, each writer borrowing from each other” and that many of the borrowings would have often been recognised by audiences. Though lacking attributions by name (and in an age before strict copyright laws operated), the process was perhaps not so different in spirit from modern scholars scrupulously documenting their sources and acknowledging friends and teachers who have contributed suggestions and inspiration that enhance the autonomy of the final product. This did not always pre-empt charges of plagiarism or professional rancour though Shakespeare seems to have avoided these through his adroitly adapted recoinings to new contexts and uses. Freebury-Jones has some of his own stylistic habits. For example, he often half-advances a stimulating hypothesis but then coyly half-retracts it as unprovable — “Was Peele Shakespeare’s first co-author?”; “Are we witnessing Shakespeare’s recall of lines he delivered on stage here?” — signalling findings that are tentative and pointing to new searches. Armed with the Collocations and N-Grams database of plays as his primary research tool, Freebury-Jones necessarily tells only a portion of the story of Shakespeare’s stylistic borrowings and evolution. The playwright was also an avid and deep reader of prose and poems, and we would need a computer cache even more voluminous to explore this wider terrain of influence. After all, among Shakespeare’s primary sources were Holinshed’s Chronicles for all the English history plays, North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans for the Greco-Roman plays, and almost certainly the huge output in poetry and translations by George Chapman (perhaps the “rival poet” of the sonnets). In developing his unique brand of romantic comedy Shakespeare dramatised Thomas Lodge’s prose fiction Rosalynde , while the late romance tragi-comedy The Winter’s Tale was based on Robert Greene’s Pandosto . Moreover, Shakespeare shows keen appreciation of Sir Philip Sidney’s lengthy Arcadia , the most celebrated proto-novelistic romance of the period, and Spenser’s allegorical epic The Faerie Queene , which held the same lofty status in poetry. Specific episodes Shakespeare adapted for the stage have been thoroughly dredged by Freebury-Jones and others, but these are all huge works that Shakespeare had evidently read and learned from. Alert to contemporary popular fashions and on the lookout for novel language and analogues, he had also evidently read some of the many pamphlets describing rogue life in the Elizabethan criminal world. Plenty more grist to the mill for scholars in their own collaborative task of re-creation. • Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer By Darren Freebury-Jones | Manchester University Press | £25 | 272 pages Robert White Robert White has been Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Winthrop Professor of English at the University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions 1100–1800. His latest books are John Keats’s Anatomy of Melancholy: The 1820 Collection (2020) and Shakespeare Against War: Pacifist Readings   (2024). Topics: biography | books | poetry | theatre Related Articles Keep up to date Three times a week in your inbox… Back to top © 2024 Inside Story and contributors | ISSN 1837-0497 Follow Us: Inside Story on Twitter Inside Story on Facebook 169 IMAGES William Shakespeare: Writing Style, Literary Works, & Life William Shakespeare William Shakespeare📚 The Writing Style of William Shakespeare William Shakespeare Biography writing template THE WRITING STYLE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE VIDEO The fascinating life of Shakespeare! #Shakespeare #Biography #ShaniWorldBiography William Shakespeare biography #education William Shakespeare Biography Literary Contributions #youtubeshorts #facts #youtube #shortvideo #shorts #shakespeare Shakespeare biography TGT PGT LT GRADE BPSC TRE 4.0 #english #shortvideo #khan mam Biography of Shakespeare #uptgt #uppgt#kvstgtpgt#bpsctgt#kvs #giclecturer#nvsenglish#emrstgtpgt#gic COMMENTS William Shakespeare's Writing Style and Short Biography William Shakespeare is one of the most famous English playwright, poets, and actors. He is viewed as the supreme writer in English literature and the greatest dramatist of the world. He is also called as the national poet of England and the "Bard of Avon.". He has written 154 sonnets, few other verses, two long narrative poems, and 39 plays. William Shakespeare: Biography and Writing Style William was one of six children born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, and he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon (a busy town along the Avon River, about 100 miles from London) ("William Shakespeare"). In 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway and had three children. In 1590, Shakespeare and his family had moved to London where he worked for ... Shakespeare's writing style William Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama. [ 1 ] The poetry depends on extended, elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical —written for actors to ... William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon) was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature.Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo ... William Shakespeare: Writing Style, Literary Works, & Life 6,796. William Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers in the world today. His works are studied in schools and colleges, while critics find new themes in his plays and poems to examine. Of course, it wasn't always that way. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts. William Shakespeare: Biography, Playwright, Poet William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor of the Renaissance era. He was an important member of the King's Men theatrical company from roughly 1594 onward. Known throughout ... Biography and Literary Works of William Shakespeare His writing style influenced a large number of renowned writers such as Charles Dickens, Maya Angelou, John Keats, and Herman Melville. Various writers and poets use his style as a guiding model for writing plays and poetry. Also, genres of tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy owe a great deal to Shakespeare for popularity and universal recognition. William Shakespeare Biography William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon.His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23 April (see When was Shakespeare born), which is also believed to be the date he died in 1616. Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of British theatre (sometimes called the English Renaissance or the Early ... William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (c. 23 [a] April 1564 - 23 April 1616) [b] was an English playwright, poet and actor.He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. [4] [5] [6] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 ... William Shakespeare Bate 2009 uses information about early modern life and theater to create a portrait of Shakespeare's life based on his own writing techniques and style. Greenblatt 2004 and Potter 2012 analyze his canon for clues about his personal life, drawing data from his characters and plot devices. Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. New York ... The Ultimate William Shakespeare Study Guide 1. demonstrate an understanding of themes and characters in three of Shakespeare's most important plays. 2. demonstrate an understanding of language and literary structure in Shakespeare's ... William Shakespeare William Shakespeare. 1564—1616. Circa 1600, English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616). (Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images) While William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for ... William Shakespeare ‑ Plays, Biography & Poems Between the mid-1590s and his retirement around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famous of his 37-plus plays, including "Romeo and Juliet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Hamlet ... William Shakespeare: The Bard Who Shaped the English Language Today, Shakespeare is considered to be one of, if not the, most important English-language writers of all time. His plays and poems are read all over the world. Shakespeare may be best known for his plays, such as Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, but he also wrote 154 sonnets and several long poems that proved his skill in this style as well. Short Biography William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (1564-1616). English poet and playwright - Shakespeare is widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 38 plays and 154 sonnets. Short bio of William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564. His father William was a successful local businessman ... Life of William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, poet, and theatre entrepreneur in London during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. He was baptised on 26 April 1564 [a] in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in the Holy Trinity Church. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. Biography of William Shakespeare, Famous Playwright William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564-April 23, 1616) wrote at least 37 plays and 154 sonnets, which are considered among the most important and enduring ever written. Although the plays have captured the imagination of theatergoers for centuries, some historians claim that Shakespeare didn't actually write them. Shakespeare's Poetic Techniques & Devices ️ Devices in the epic poems of Homer run through Shakespeare's poetry: Alliteration - the repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters in a group of words, is one of the staples of Shakespeare's verse and indeed, one of the building blocks of poetry generally. Romeo and Juliet begins with this memorable statement ... 1 Shakespeare's Styles Writing verse, or tight, vigorous prose, is an athletic skill, involving muscle memory and unconscious processing. As time went on there was more wrist in Shakespeare's language game, giving it increased subtlety and power. ... But Shakespeare's style also matured simply because he got older, because he saw life differently as he saw more ... Shakespeare's Writing Style and Metrical Pattern Shakespeare used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, called blank verse. His plays were composed using blank verse, although there are passages in all the plays that deviate from the norm and are composed of other forms of poetry and/or simple prose. Shakespeare's sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, with ... A Timeline of William Shakespeare's Life The life of William Shakespeare begins in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England when he was born into a prosperous family (his father was a glove maker). Learn more about Shakespeare's birth and early childhood, and discover the. Thanks to the social standing of William Shakespeare's father, he managed to gain a place at King Edward IV ... Shakespeare's Life: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. This critical biography of Shakespeare takes the playwright from cradle to grave, paying primary attention to his literary and theatrical milieu. The chapters "follow a chronological sequence," each focusing on a handful of years in the playwright's life. Stylometric Shakespeare • Inside Story Among the subjects of Freebury-Jones's portraits is the playwright John Lyly, now largely forgotten, who pioneered a new kind of dramaturgy written for boy actors with mixed genres from which Shakespeare forged romantic comedy, and a uniquely scholastic style that became famous in his time as "euphuism" and which Shakespeare parodies. essay homework paper phd project resume review speech thesis