Shakespeare
William Shakespeare’s Life
William Shakespeare was an English poet, actor and playwright of the of the late 16th Century and early 17th Century. His birth date is unknown, however he was baptised on the 26 April 1564. He died at the age of 52 on the 23 April 1616. He is widely believed to be the greatest writer in the English language and still has a great impact on English language even today! Shakespeare is also known as the “Bard of Avon” and “England’s national poet”. Through his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote a massive 38 plays, 154 sonnets (generally love poems) and 2 long narrative poems! Every major living language has translations of William Shakespeare’s plays. The names of Shakepeare's plays are:
Comedies:
Alls well that ends well
As you like it
Comedy of errors
Love's labour’s lost
Measure for measure
Merchant of Venice
Merry wives of Windsor
Midsummer night’s dream
Much ado about nothing
Taming of the Shrew
Tempest
Twelfth night
Two gentlemen of Verona
Winter’s tale
Histories:
Henry IV, Part I
Henry IV, Part II
Henry V
Henry VI, Part I
Henry VI, Part II
Henry VI, Part III
Henry VIII
King John
Pericles
Richard II
Richard III
Tragedies:
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
King Lear
Macbeth
Othello
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
Troilus and Cressida
William Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden in Stratford-upon-Avon, and was baptised there on the 26th of April 1564. He was in a family of 8 children, and was the 3rd oldest. He was also the eldest surviving son, living until 23rd April 1616, dying at the age of 52 years. Most biographers believe that Shakespeare was educated at the King’s New School, Stratford. This was a free school about 400m from his home.
When William Shakespeare was 18 years old, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 years old at the time. Six months after getting married, William and Anne were parents. They had a daughter named Susanna, who was baptised on the 26th May 1583. Almost 2 years later Anne gave birth to twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith. The twins were baptised on the 2nd February 1585. However, at the age of 11, Hamnet died of unknown causes. He got buried on the 11th August 1596.
Several of Shakespeare’s plays were on the London stage by 1592. By this time, he had made a man called Robert Greene angry because Shakespeare was trying to out-write writers that had been educated in Universities. Shakespeare’s plays were extremely popular with commoners and before he had died, Shakespeare had built his own theatre called the Globe Theatre.
Life in Shakespeare’s time
Life in Shakespeare’s time period was very different to life in the 21st Century. In Elizabethan times money was very different. If you had 12 pence to spend within a day (it was a lot of money then!), you could hire a horse for the day, buy 12 loaves of bread, buy 4 very small pipes of tobacco to smoke, buy 2 dinners at an inn or go to the theatre and watch, standing in the yard, 12 times! Also sport was very different. Football had no limit to the amount of people allowed to play at any one time, or the size of the pitch. People often stopped playing when they had an injury like a broken nose, or broken leg!
In Elizabethan times people’s class depended on where they were put in the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain of Being went in the order:
God
King
Queen
Lords
Ladies
Soldiers
Peasants
Criminals and Witches.
This meant that if somebody got told to do something by a person above them, they had to do it because if they didn’t they would be cast out of the chain and be known as a disrupter of it.
Many Peasants would like to go to the theatre after a hard day’s work and would often get drunk and get into fights. In 1591, London theatres were stopped on Thursdays because a popular form entertainment called Bear-Baiting took place. Bear-baiting involved tying a bear to a post in a pit where wild dogs would attack it. Ladies who went to the theatre would often wear masks so that their faces would not be seen by others. This is because it was seen as a dangerous place for women and too manly. When women characters were used in plays, they would often have a teenage boy as the woman.