Kenichi hayakawa biography of william shakespeare

He was the third child in the family, with seven siblings, although three died in infancy. His father held various municipal positions, which offered the family a respectable status in their community. However, John's financial troubles during Shakespeare's childhood raised questions about their economic stability. Despite these challenges, Shakespeare's early environment in a market town flourishing with arts and commerce likely influenced his future literary career.

Regarding education, records about Shakespeare's schooling are scarce. Scholars speculate he attended the King's New School in Stratford, where he would have been exposed to a curriculum that included reading, writing, and Latin—an essential foundation for a budding playwright. Shakespeare likely attended this school until approximately age 15, after which he did not continue to university.

This lack of formal higher education has spurred debate and skepticism about his literary accomplishments, leading some to question whether someone of his background could produce such profound works. Nevertheless, the educational experience he did receive may have equipped him with a solid grasp of the classical works and languages that would inform his writing.

Shakespeare played a crucial role as both an actor and a playwright, working diligently to develop a diverse repertoire. His proficiency in creating engaging characters and compelling storylines quickly distinguished him from other playwrights of the time. By the late s, Shakespeare had written several celebrated plays, and his popularity continued to soar, drawing audiences from all walks of life.

As he ventured deeper into his career, his works evolved, showcasing a mastery of language, plot intricacy, and the ability to explore a wide range of human emotions. William Shakespeare's influence on the world of theater is immeasurable, making him a towering figure in the history of drama. His works, which include approximately 37 plays, sonnets, and 2 narrative poems, have captivated audiences for over four centuries, showcasing a profound understanding of human emotion and conflict.

Inthe partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man, [ 52 ] and inhe bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Placeand ininvested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.

Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning inand byhis name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. Inthe year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St Helen'sBishopsgatenorth of the River Thames.

There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of women's wigs and other headgear. Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel Johnsonthat Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death". Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time. Shakespeare died on 23 Aprilat the age of No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died.

Half a century later, John Wardthe vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted", [ 83 ] [ 84 ] not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.

Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in[ 86 ] and Judith had married Thomas Quineya vintnertwo months before Shakespeare's death. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family. Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna [ 88 ] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".

Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death. Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones. Some time beforea funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing.

Its plaque compares him to NestorSocratesand Virgil. Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career. The kenichi hayakawa biography of william shakespeare recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VIwritten in the early s during a vogue for historical drama.

Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however, [ ] [ ] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus AndronicusThe Comedy of ErrorsThe Taming of the Shrewand The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest period. Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mids to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.

His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called " problem plays " Measure for MeasureTroilus and Cressidaand All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.

Hamlet has probably been analysed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins " To be or not to be; that is the question ". According to the critic Frank Kermode"the play His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanuscontain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T.

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: CymbelineThe Winter's Taleand The Tempestas well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.

Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio oflisted according to their folio classification as comedieshistoriesand tragedies. In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romancesand though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomediesDowden's term is often used. It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays.

The title page of the edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 Novemberand 31 Octoberincluding two performances of The Merchant of Venice. In Cymbelinefor example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt.

The ghosts fall on their knees. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time. Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre versions as " bad quartos " because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.

In the case of King Learhowever, while most modern editions do conflate them, the folio version is so different from the quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion. In andwhen the theatres were closed because of plagueShakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonisan innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus ; while in The Rape of Lucrecethe virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaintin which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint.

Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. Intwo early drafts of sonnets and appeared in The Passionate Pilgrimpublished under Shakespeare's name but without his permission. Published inthe Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.

It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart". The edition was dedicated to a "Mr. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpewhose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr.

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. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicusin the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.

However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.

He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself. Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank versecomposed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones.

It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lineswith the risk of monotony. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind: [ ]. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.

Methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly— And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well After HamletShakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".

These included run-on linesirregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length. The listener is challenged to complete the sense. Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting, and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.

He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romanceshe deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre. Shakespeare's work has made a significant and lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisationplot, languageand genre.

The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes. His work has inspired kenichi hayakawa biography of william shakespeare operas, among them Giuseppe Verdi 's MacbethOtello and Falstaffwhose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.

In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now, [ ] and his use of language helped shape modern English. Shakespeare's influence extends far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; as early as the 18th century Shakespeare was widely translated and popularised in Germany, and gradually became a "classic of the German Weimar era ;" Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce complete translations of Shakespeare's plays in any language.

Some of the most deeply affecting productions of Shakespeare have been non-English, and non-European. He is that unique writer: he has something for everyone. According to Guinness World RecordsShakespeare remains the world's best-selling playwright, with sales of his plays and kenichi hayakawa biography of william shakespeare believed to have achieved in excess of four billion copies in the almost years since his death.

He is also the third most translated author in history. Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise. Between the Restoration of the monarchy in and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. But during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and, like Dryden, to acclaim what they termed his natural genius.

A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in and Edmond Malone inadded to his growing reputation. During the Romantic eraShakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridgeand the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism. The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde.

The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticismled a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery.

In the s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for post-modern studies of Shakespeare. He encloses us because we see with his fundamental perceptions. Around years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him. Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion, [ k ] but his private views on religion have been the subject of debate.

Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula, and he was a confirmed member of the Church of Englandwhere he was married, his children were baptised, and where he is buried. Some scholars are of the view that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when practising Catholicism in England was against the law. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his father, John Shakespearefound in in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street.

However, the document is now lost and scholars differ as to its authenticity. Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare's religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove. Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known.

At 18, he married year-old Anne Hathawaywho was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical, [ ] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love.

No written contemporary description of Shakespeare's physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. Some scholars suggest that the Droeshout portraitwhich Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness, [ ] and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance.

After a three-year study supported by the National Portrait Gallery, Londonthe portrait's owners, Cooper contended that its composition date, contemporary with Shakespeare, its subsequent provenance, and the sitter's attire, all supported the attribution. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history.

Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. English playwright and poet — For other uses, see Shakespeare disambiguation and William Shakespeare disambiguation. The Chandos portraitlikely depicting Shakespeare, c. Stratford-upon-AvonWarwickshire, England. Elizabethan Jacobean. Lord Chamberlain's Men King's Men.

Anne Hathaway. John Shakespeare Mary Arden. Play comedy history tragedy. Poetry sonnet narrative poem epitaph. Main article: Life of William Shakespeare. London and theatrical career. Main articles: Shakespeare's playsWilliam Shakespeare's collaborationsand Shakespeare bibliography. Further information: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays.

Main article: Shakespeare in performance. Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate Main article: Shakespeare's writing style. Main article: Shakespeare's influence. He was not of an age, but for all time.

Kenichi hayakawa biography of william shakespeare

Main article: Shakespeare authorship question. Main article: Religious views of William Shakespeare. Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare. Main article: Portraits of Shakespeare. He was baptised 26 April. Under the Gregorian calendaradopted in Catholic countries inShakespeare died on 3 May. This motto is still used by Warwickshire County Councilin reference to Shakespeare.

In addition to presenting the town with a statue of Shakespeare, Garrick composed a doggerel verse, lampooned in the London newspapers, naming the banks of the Avon as the birthplace of the "matchless Bard". To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students memorize his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed.

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town miles northwest of London, and baptized there on April 26, His birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death in and is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. The ambitious son of a tenant farmer, John boosted his social status by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic landowner.

Like John, she may have been a practicing Catholic at a time when those who rejected the newly established Church of England faced persecution. Did you know? However, these provide only brief sketches of specific events in his life and yield little insight into the man himself. No birth kenichi hayakawa biographies of william shakespeare exist, but an old church record indicates that William Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, Shakespeare was the third child of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker and leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local heiress to land.

John held official positions as alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor. Eventually, he recovered somewhat and was granted a coat of arms inwhich made him and his sons official gentleman. John and Mary had eight children together, though three of them did not live past childhood. Their first two children—daughters Joan and Margaret—died in infancy, so William was the oldest surviving offspring.

Anne died at age 7, and Joan was the only sibling to outlive William. He attended until he was 14 or 15 and did not continue to university. The uncertainty regarding his education has led some people question the authorship of his work. Hathaway was from Shottery, a small village a mile west of Stratford. Shakespeare was 18, and Anne was 26 and, as it turns out, pregnant.

Their first child, a daughter they named Susanna, was born on May 26, Two years later, on February 2,twins Hamnet and Judith were born. Hamnet died of unknown causes at age One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from local landlord Sir Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant schoolmaster in Lancashire.

Bythere is evidence Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in London and possibly had several plays produced. Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention and patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first and second published poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece Scholars broadly categorize the sonnets in groups based on two unknown subjects that Shakespeare addresses: the Fair Youth sonnets the first and the Dark Lady sonnets the last The identities of the aristocratic young man and vexing woman continue to be a source of speculation.

Some sources describe Shakespeare as a founding member of the company, but whatever the case, he became central to its success. Initially, he was an actor and eventually devoted more and more time to writing. Records show that Shakespeare, who was also a company shareholder, had works published and sold as popular literature. They were printed in in quarto, an eight-page pamphlet-like book.