William shakespeare professional biography wikipedia

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 william shakespeare professional biography wikipedia 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. By the end ofShakespeare had likely written 16 of his 37 plays and amassed some wealth. At this time, civil records show Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford, called New Place, for his family. However, Shakespeare expert and professor Sir Stanley Wells posits that the playwright might have spent more time at home in Stratford than previously believed, only commuting to London when he needed to for work.

Although the theater culture in 16 th century England was not greatly admired by people of high rank, some of the nobility were good patrons of the performing arts and friends of the actors. ByShakespeare and several fellow actors built their own theater on the south bank of the Thames River, which they called the Globe Theater. Julius Caesar is thought to be the first production at the new open-air theater.

Owning the playhouse proved to be a financial boon for Shakespeare and the other investors. The company quickly rebuilt it, and it reopened the next year. InPuritans outlawed all theaters, including the Globe, which was demolished two years later. Centuries passed until American actor Sam Wanamaker began working to resurrect the theater once more.

The third Globe Theater opened inand today, more than 1. Some plays blur these lines, and over time, our interpretation of them has changed, too. However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words. With only small degrees of variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays.

At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose. Download our complete William Shakespeare Study Guide for free to explore the key themes and characters from three of his most important plays. Shakespeare wrote plays of different kinds, or genres. There are histories, tragedies and comedies.

There is a popular myth that Shakespeare was the first person to write a tragicomedy. Tragicomedies were being written well before Shakespeare's birth and baptism. Shakespeare's plays are written in poetic language. Many of the plays are set in strange, distant places and times. The stories are often exciting, romantic and happy in the comediesor very sad in the tragedies.

These stories make people want to know what will happen to the characters. The plays talk about things that are still important today, like lovesadnesshope, pridehatredjealousyand foolishness. Shakespeare added new words and phrases to the English language. He created over 1, English words. Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in He was probably the third of eight children.

Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford. When Shakespeare was 18, he married Anne Hathaway, a year-old woman. Their wedding was rushed because Anne was already pregnant. They had three children: Susanna who married John Hall ; Hamnet who died at the age of 11 from unknown causes ; and Judith who married Thomas Quiney.

ByShakespeare had become an actor and was becoming well known as a writer of plays. His plays were collected and published inseven years after he died. There is proof that people in Shakespeare's time thought highly of him. 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 Shakespearea successful glover originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Ardenthe 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 Septemberdied in infancyMargaret baptised 2 December — buried 30 AprilWilliam, Gilbert baptised 13 October — buried 2 FebruaryJoan baptised 15 April — buried 4 NovemberAnne baptised 28 September — buried 4 AprilRichard baptised 11 March — buried 4 February and Edmund baptised 3 May — buried London, 31 December Shakespeare's william shakespeare professional biography wikipedia 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 inculminating in a term as bailiffthe chief magistrate of the town councilin For reasons unclear to history he fell upon hard times, beginning inwhen 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 Terenceand 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.

William shakespeare professional biography wikipedia

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 NovemberShakespeare was issued a special licence to marry Anne Hathawaythe 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, Susannaon 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 Februarybefore Shakespeare was 21 years of age.

After the baptism of the twins inand 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 williams shakespeare professional biography wikipedia — 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 RoweShakespeare fled Stratford after he got in trouble for poaching deer from local squire Thomas Lucyand 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 Lifethat 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 inwilliam shakespeare professional biography wikipedia 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. 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 inthe 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 lateShakespeare was part-owner of a playing companyknown 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 Ithe new monarch adopted the company, which then became known as the King's Menafter 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 Heraldsbut evidently his worsening financial status prevented him from obtaining it. The application was successfully renewed inmost 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. ByShakespeare had moved to the parish of St. He is also listed among the actors in Jonson's Sejanus His Fall.

Also byhis 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 Itand the Chorus in Henry V.

He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around InShakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents fromwhen 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". When it came to specifics about the size of the dowry and promised inheritance due the daughter, Shakespeare did not remember. A second set of questions was prepared for Shakespeare to testify again, but that appears not to have happened.

The case was then turned over to the elders of the Huguenot church for arbitration. By the early 17th century, Shakespeare had become very prosperous. Although his professional career was spent in London, he maintained close links with his native town. 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. On his father's death inWilliam 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 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.