Diarmuid corr biography of william shakespeare

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 , 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. 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. Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. Further property investments in Stratford followed, including the purchase of acres of land in Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April at the age of He is buried in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity.

This means there is the possibility of you seeing more adverts from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on other websites that you visit. An Introduction William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in in Stratford-upon-Avon. 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, sonnets, and a variety of other poems.

Watch our video for more about Shakespeare as a literary commuter:. Help keep Shakespeare's story alive. More like this. Go behind the scenes. Though more is known about Shakespeare's life than those of most other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, few personal biographical facts survive, which is unsurprising in the light of his social status as a commoner, the low esteem in which his profession was held, and the general lack of interest of the time in the personal lives of writers.

Nevertheless, hundreds of biographies have been written and more continue to be, most of which rely on inferences and the historical context of the 70 or so hard facts recorded about Shakespeare the man, a technique that sometimes leads to embellishment or unwarranted interpretation of the documented record. Shakespeare [ b ] was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

His exact date of birth is not known—the baptismal record was dated 26 April —but has been traditionally taken to be 23 April , which is also the Feast Day of Saint George , the patron saint of England. He was the first son and the first surviving child in the family; two earlier children, Joan and Margaret, had died early. His parents were John Shakespeare , a successful glover originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden , the youngest daughter of John's father's landlord, a member of the local gentry.

The couple married around and lived on Henley Street when Shakespeare was born, purportedly in a house now known as Shakespeare's Birthplace. They had eight children: Joan baptised 15 September , died in infancy , Margaret baptised 2 December — buried 30 April , William, Gilbert baptised 13 October — buried 2 February , Joan baptised 15 April — buried 4 November , Anne baptised 28 September — buried 4 April , Richard baptised 11 March — buried 4 February and Edmund baptised 3 May — buried London, 31 December Shakespeare's family was above average materially during his childhood.

His father's business was thriving at the time of William's birth. John Shakespeare owned several properties in Stratford and had a profitable—though illegal—sideline of dealing in wool. He was appointed to several municipal offices and served as an alderman in , culminating in a term as bailiff , the chief magistrate of the town council , in For reasons unclear to history he fell upon hard times, beginning in , when William was After four years of non-attendance at council meetings, he was finally replaced as burgess in A close analysis of Shakespeare's works compared with the standard curriculum of the time confirms that Shakespeare had received a grammar school education.

It was free to all male children, and though there is no direct evidence of which grammar school Shakespeare attended, there is hardly a possibility that it was any other than the school in Stratford. The school day typically ran from 6 a. Direct evidence of the curriculum at Shakespeare's particular school or the paedagogical methods of his schoolteachers is lacking, but William Lily 's Latin grammar was required to be used throughout England by royal decree, [ 21 ] [ 22 ] and the curriculum was essentially uniform with slight variations.

After Aesop, Shakespeare would have had his first introduction to dramatic structure by studying the comedies of Terence , and perhaps some of Plautus as well. At about the age of 10, Shakespeare progressed to the upper grammar school taught by the master. It was also in the upper grammar school that Shakespeare began his study of classical Latin verse.

Subject matter for Shakespeare's composition exercises in both prose and verse would have been drawn from authors of history, of whom Sallust and Caesar were nearly always required. Ben Jonson's statement that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and lesse Greeke " is the strongest evidence that Shakespeare knew any Greek whatsoever. By the end of their studies, grammar school pupils were quite familiar with the great Latin authors, and with Latin drama and rhetoric.

Shakespeare is unique among his contemporaries in the extent of figurative language derived from country life and nature. On 27 November , Shakespeare was issued a special licence to marry Anne Hathaway , the daughter of the late Richard Hathaway, a yeoman farmer of Shottery, about a mile west of Stratford the clerk mistakenly recorded the name "Anne Whateley".

The licence, issued by the consistory court of the diocese of Worcester, 21 miles 34 km west of Stratford, allowed the two to marry with only one proclamation of the marriage banns in church instead of the customary three successive Sundays. The reason for the special licence became apparent six months later with the baptism of their first daughter, Susanna , on 26 May Their twin children — a son Hamnet and a daughter Judith named after Shakespeare's neighbours Hamnet and Judith Sadler — were baptised on 2 February , before Shakespeare was 21 years of age.

After the baptism of the twins in , and except for being party to a lawsuit to recover part of his mother's estate which had been mortgaged and lost by default, Shakespeare leaves no historical traces until Robert Greene jealously alludes to him as part of the London theatrical scene in This seven-year period — known as the "lost years" to Shakespeare scholars — was filled by early biographers with inferences drawn from local traditions and by more recent biographers with surmises about the onset of his acting career deduced from textual and bibliographic hints and the surviving records of the various troupes of players, acting at that time.

While this lack of records bars any certainty about his activity during those years, it is certain that by the time of Greene's attack on the year-old, Shakespeare had acquired a reputation as an actor and burgeoning playwright. Several hypotheses have been put forth to account for his life during this time, and a number of accounts are given by his earliest biographers.

According to Shakespeare's first biographer Nicholas Rowe , Shakespeare fled Stratford after he got in trouble for poaching deer from local squire Thomas Lucy , and that he then wrote a scurrilous ballad about Lucy. It is also reported, according to a note added by Samuel Johnson to the edition of Rowe's Life , that Shakespeare minded the horses for theatre patrons in London.

Johnson adds that the story had been told to Alexander Pope by Rowe. In a book, W. Nicholas Knight presented a theory that Shakespeare pursued a legal career, finding evidence of such training in his written works. Knight for a "lack of scholarly objectivity. In E. Honigmann proposed that Shakespeare acted as a schoolmaster in Lancashire , [ 65 ] on the evidence found in the will of a member of the Houghton family, referring to plays and play-clothes and asking his kinsman Thomas Hesketh to take care of "William Shakeshaft, now dwelling with me".

Honigmann proposed that John Cottam, Shakespeare's reputed last schoolmaster, recommended the young man. Another idea is that Shakespeare may have joined Queen Elizabeth's Men in , after the sudden death of actor William Knell in a fight while on a tour which later took in Stratford. Samuel Schoenbaum speculates that, "Maybe Shakespeare took Knell's place and thus found his way to London and stage-land.

Though Shakespeare is known today primarily as a playwright and poet, his main occupation was as a player and sharer in an acting troupe. How or when Shakespeare got into acting is unknown.

Diarmuid corr biography of william shakespeare

The profession was unregulated by a guild that could have established restrictions on new entrants to the profession—actors were literally "masterless men"—and several avenues existed to break into the field in the Elizabethan era. Certainly Shakespeare had many opportunities to see professional playing companies in his youth. Before being allowed to perform for the general public, touring playing companies were required to present their play before the town council to be licensed.

Players first acted in Stratford in , the year that John Shakespeare was bailiff. Before Shakespeare turned 20, the Stratford town council had paid for at least 18 performances by at least 12 playing companies. In one playing season alone, that of —87, five different acting troupes visited Stratford. By late , Shakespeare was part-owner of a playing company , known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men —like others of the period, the company took its name from its aristocratic sponsor, in this case the Lord Chamberlain.

The group became so popular that, after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I , the new monarch adopted the company, which then became known as the King's Men , after the death of their previous sponsor. Shakespeare's works are written within the frame of reference of the career actor, rather than a member of the learned professions or from scholarly book-learning.

The Shakespeare family had long sought armorial bearings and the status of gentleman. William's father John, a bailiff of Stratford with a wife of good birth, was eligible for a coat of arms and applied to the College of Heralds , but evidently his worsening financial status prevented him from obtaining it. The application was successfully renewed in , most probably at the instigation of William himself as he was the more prosperous at the time.

The motto "Non sanz droict" "Not without right" was attached to the application, but it was not used on any armorial displays that have survived. The theme of social status and restoration runs deep through the plots of many of his plays, and at times Shakespeare seems to mock his own longing. By , Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St.

He is also listed among the actors in Jonson's Sejanus His Fall. Also by , his name began to appear on the title pages of his plays, presumably as a selling point. There is a tradition that Shakespeare, in addition to writing many of the plays his company enacted and concerned with business and financial details as part-owner of the company, continued to act in various parts, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in As You Like It , and the Chorus in Henry V.

He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around In , Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from , when the case was brought to trial, show that Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker a maker of ornamental headdresses in the northwest of London in Mountjoy's apprentice Stephen Bellott wanted to marry Mountjoy's daughter.

Shakespeare was enlisted as a go-between, to help negotiate the terms of the dowry. On Shakespeare's assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Bellott sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry. During the Bellott v Mountjoy case one witness, in a deposition, said that Christopher Mountjoy called on Shakespeare and encouraged him to persuade Stephen Belott to the marriage of his daughter.

Then Shakespeare was called to testify, and according to the record, said that Belott was "a very good and industrious servant". Greenblatt, Stephen London: Pimlico. Greenblatt, Stephen ; Abrams, Meyer Howard , eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Greer, Germaine Holland, Peter, ed. Archived from the original on 29 August Retrieved 14 June Honan, Park Shakespeare: A Life.

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Online books Resources in your library Resources in other libraries. Listen to this article 48 minutes. This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 11 April , and does not reflect subsequent edits. William Shakespeare. Quarto publications First Folio Second Folio. The Passionate Pilgrim To the Queen. Links to related articles.

Early editions of William Shakespeare 's works. Shakespearean tragedy.