Shakespeare biography near2 edu

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.

Shakespeare biography near2 edu: William Shakespeare was a

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 several 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 poetry 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 shakespeare biography near2 edu 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. 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".

Rowsethe 20th-century Shakespeare scholar, was emphatic: "He died, as he had lived, a conforming member of the Church of England. His will made that perfectly clear—in facts, puts it beyond dispute, for it uses the Protestant formula. Archived from the original on 8 February Retrieved 8 February Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent.

Archived from the original on 7 May Retrieved 7 May Poetry Foundation. Archived from the original on 6 January Retrieved 6 January The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre — Oxford University Press. The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 3 February Retrieved 3 February Broadcast 18 May Archived from the original on 3 March Retrieved 29 November The Local Germany.

Well, William Shakespeare was the greatest after all Archived from the original on 14 April Retrieved 2 September Guinness World Records. Beaumont and Fletcher. Ben Jonson. Seventeenth Century. Henry Craik, ed. English Prose". Archived from the original on 20 July Retrieved 20 July May Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 10 September Retrieved 16 April CBS News.

Archived from the original on 19 April The Guardian. Retrieved 15 April Ackroyd, Peter Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Vintage. ISBN OCLC Adams, Joseph Quincy A Life of William Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Baldwin, T. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Archived from the original on 5 May Retrieved 5 May Barroll, Leeds Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bate, Jonathan The Soul of the Age. London: Penguin. Bednarz, James P. In Cheney, Patrick Gerard ed. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bentley, G. Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook. New Haven: Yale University Press. Berry, Ralph Changing Styles in Shakespeare. London: Routledge.

Bevington, David Oxford: Blackwell. Bloom, Harold New York: Riverhead Books. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. 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. 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. 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. Until we can be sure about how the Sonnets came to be published, and just what kind of debt the publisher Thomas Thorpe refers to when he dedicates the quarto to the "only begetter" of these poems "Never before Imprinted"--the mysterious "Mr.

Until then, indeed, we cannot even be certain that the Sonnets have any autobiographical basis in the first place. Turning from Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry to the fruits of his two decades as a playwright, we should probably begin where scholars now think he himself began: as the principal practitioner, if not in many ways the originator, of a new kind of drama that sprang from native patriotism.

The most immediate "source" of the English history play appears to have been the heightened sense of national destiny that came in the wake of the royal navy's seemingly providential victory over the Spanish Armada in Proud of the new eminence their nation had achieved, and immensely relieved that the threat of invasion by a Catholic power had been averted, many of Shakespeare's contemporaries were disposed to view England's deliverance as a sign of heaven's favor.

As such, it seemed to be a vindication of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and a substantiation of the Tudor order's claim to divine sanction--a claim that had been asserted by a succession of Renaissance chroniclers from Polydore Vergil circa through Edward Hall circa to Raphael Holinshed circaand a claim that was implicit in such government documents as the "Exhortation concerning Good Order and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates," a homily read in churches throughout England.

Given this context, it must have seemed entirely fitting that sometime in the late s or early s an enterprising young playwright began dramatizing a sequence of historical developments that were almost universally regarded as the "roots" of England's current greatness. Most of the material for the four history plays with which Shakespeare began his career as playwright he drew from Edward Hall 's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York and Raphael Holinshed 's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland edition.

Here he found narratives of late-medieval English history that began with the reign of King Richard IIfocused on Richard's deposition and execution by Henry Bolingbroke Henry IVdescribed the Wars of the Roses that were the eventual consequence of Bolingbroke's usurpation, and concluded with the restoration of right rule when Henry Richmond defeated the tyrannical Richard III and acceded to the crown as Henry VII, inaugurating a Tudor dynasty that was to last until the death of Queen Elizabeth in Here he also found a theological shakespeare biography near2 edu of political history that treated England as a collective Everyman--falling into sin, undergoing a terrifyingly bloody punishment for its disobedience, and eventually finding its way back to redemption through the emergence of Henry VII.

The chances are that as Shakespeare matured in his craft he came to view the "Tudor myth" as E. Tillyard has termed this official dogma with a degree of skeptical detachment; but even so, he seems to have found in its clear, broad sweep a pattern that served quite well as a way of organizing the disparate materials he chose to dramatize.

It gave him a theme of epic proportions, not altogether unlike the "matter" of Greece and Rome that had inspired such classical authors as Homer and Virgil in narrative genres and AeschylusSophoclesEuripidesand Seneca in dramatic genres. It accorded with the biblical treatment of human destiny that Shakespeare's age had inherited from earlier generations, an approach to historical interpretation that had been embedded in such didactic entertainments as the Morality Play allegorizing the sin, suffering, repentance, and salvation of a typical member of mankind and the Mystery Play broadening the cycle to a dramatization of the whole of human history, from man's fall in the Garden of Eden to man's redemption in the Garden of Gethsemane to man's bliss in the Paradise of the New Jerusalem.

And it provided a rationale for Shakespeare's use of such powerful dramatic devices as the riddling prophecy and the curse--projecting retribution for present crimes, as the Old Testament would put it, to the third and fourth generations. When we approach the four plays known as Shakespeare's "first tetralogy" the three parts of Henry VI and Richard IIIall written, so far as we can tell, by from the perspective of his "second tetralogy" Richard IIHenry IVparts 1 and 2, and Henry Vall of which appear to have been written between andthe earlier plays seem comparatively crude.

Like their sources, they place more emphasis on providential design and less on human agency. Their verse is more declamatory and less supple. And they provide less individuation of character. Still, they have their virtues, and successful recent productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Broadcasting Corporation have proven that they can be surprisingly effective in performance.

Henry VIpart 1 did not achieve print until the First Folio, but it is now generally thought to have been written prior to parts 2 and 3, which first appeared in bad texts, respectively, in a quarto edition titled The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster and in a octavo entitled The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.

Henry VI, part 1, begins with the funeral of King Henry V which occurred indetails the dissension at home and the loss of life and territory abroad that result from the accession of a new monarch too young and weak to rule, and concludes with King Henry VI's foolish decision to marry Margaret of Anjou--a step that places the saintly King in the very unsaintly hands of an ambitious woman and a lustful nobleman the Earl of Suffolk, who plans to enjoy Margaret as his own mistress and thereby "rule both her, the King, and realm" and virtually assures the further degradation of a kingdom that has been in decline since the death of Henry VI's famous warrior-king father.

Albans in the first major battle of the Wars of the Roses The same kind of internecine strife that has left the noble Talbot exposed to the forces of the strumpet-witch Joan of Arc in Henry VIpart 1, works here to undo Henry VI's protector, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, topple two of the good Duke's enemies Cardinal Beaufort and Suffolkunleash the anarchic rebellion of the peasant Jack Cade, and further divide the warring factions the Yorkists, who have chosen the red rose as their symbol in the famous Temple Garden scene, II.

In Henry VIpart 3, the war is at full pitch. As the feeble Henry VI withdraws into a private realm of pastoral longing, his brutal Queen and her allies exchange outrages with one Yorkist enemy after another, father killing son and son killing father in a nightmarish world that has degenerated into a spectacle of unmitigated cruelty. By the time the dust settles, Henry VI and a number of other would-be claimants to the throne are dead or on their way to the grave, and the ominously crookbacked figure of Richard, Duke of Gloucester is slouching his rough way to the crown he will don in the blood-drenched final movement of this hitherto unprecedented cycle of historical tragedies.

Richard III was first published in a quarto edition that many scholars believe to have been reconstructed from memory by actors plagued out of London theaters between July and October of that year. The play was evidently quite popular, because it went through at least shakespeare biography near2 edu more printings before it appeared in the First Folio edition based largely on the third and sixth quartos.

And it has remained popular ever since, with a stage tradition highlighted by Richard Burbage in Shakespeare's own theater, David Garrick in the eighteenth century, Edmund Kean in the nineteenth, and Laurence Olivier in the twentieth. Nor is the reason hard to find. For despite the bold strokes with which he is portrayed, Richard III is a character of sufficient complexity to sustain a great deal of dramatic interest.

However much we find ourselves repelled by his ruthless treachery, we cannot help admiring the eloquence, resourcefulness, and virtuosity with which he confides and then proceeds to execute his wicked intentions. His wooing of the grieving Lady Anne in the first act is a case in point: having set himself the seemingly impossible task of seducing a woman whose husband and father-in-law he has recently murdered, Richard is just as astonished as we are by the ease with which he accomplishes it.

In many ways Richard seems, and would have seemed to Shakespeare's first audiences, a conventional, even old-fashioned stage villain: the quick-witted, clever, self-disclosing Vice of the late-medieval Morality Play, the dissimulating Devil familiar from the scriptures. In other, more important, ways he seems, and would have seemed, disturbingly modern: the Machiavellian politician who acknowledges no law, human or divine, in restraint of his foxlike cunning and leonine rapacity; the totalitarian dictator who subverts every social and religious institution in pursuit of his psychopathic grand designs; the existentialist cosmic rebel whose radical alienation is a challenge to every form of order.

But if Richard seems in many ways a relentlessly twentieth-century figure, we learn by the end of the play that his "vaulting ambition" so proleptic of Macbeth's is ultimately but an instrument of the same providential scheme that he scorns and seeks to circumvent. Richard may be a "dreadful minister of hell," as Lady Anne calls him, but members of Shakespeare's audience familiar with the story through such earlier renderings of it as the portrait painted by Thomas More would have seen him simultaneously as a "scourge of God," unleashed to punish England for her sins of the past.

Prophetic Margaret reminds us over and over that had there not been strife in the kingdom prior to the advent of Richard, there would have been no ripe occasion for "this poisonous bunch-backed toad" to ascend the throne in the first instance. And as the play ends, an action that has drawn our attention again and again to the past looks optimistically to the future.

One other English history play is now commonly believed to have been written during Shakespeare's apprenticeship, though scholars differ about whether to date it in the early s or more probably, in the opinion of most in the transition years The earliest surviving text of King John is the version printed in the First Folio, and it offers a drama about a king of doubtful title whose reign had been viewed in widely divergent ways.

Medieval Catholics, focusing on King John's presumed complicity in the death of his nephew Arthur whose claim to the throne was stronger than John's and on his feud with Pope Innocent III which had resulted in the King's excommunication before he finally capitulated five years later and "returned" his kingdom to the Churchhad seen him as a usurper, a murderer, and a heretic.

Sixteenth-century Protestants, on the other hand, had rehabilitated him as a proto-Tudor martyr and champion of English nationalism. In many respects, Shakespeare's own portrayal is closer to the medieval view of King John: he does away with any ambiguity about John's role in the removal of Arthur, for example, presents the saintlike Arthur and his impassioned mother, Constance, as thoroughly engaging characters, and endows John with few if any sympathetic traits.

At the same time, however, Shakespeare's King John continues to receive the loyalty of characters who are portrayed sympathetically--most notably the bastard son of Richard the Lion-hearted, Philip Faulconbridge--and by the end of the play it seems evident that a higher cause, the good of England, is to take precedence over such lesser concerns as John's weak title, his execution of a potential rival, and his inadequacies as a leader.

The Bastard, a political realist who seems quite Machiavellian at first--particularly in his analysis of the all-pervasiveness of "commodity" self-interest in human affairs--eventually becomes a virtual emblem of patriotism. To him is given the concluding speech of King Johnand it is frequently cited as Shakespeare's most eloquent summary of the moral implicit in all his early history plays: This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror But when it first did help to wound itself.

Naught shall make us rue If England to itself do rest but true. If Shakespeare's earliest efforts in the dramatization of history derived from his response to the political climate of his day, his first experiments in comedy seem to have evolved from his reading in school and from his familiarity with the plays of such predecessors on the English stage as John LylyGeorge PeeleRobert Greeneand Thomas Nashe.

Shakespeare's apprentice comedies are quite "inventive" in many respects, particularly in the degree to which they "overgo" the conventions and devices the young playwright drew upon. But because they have more precedent behind them than the English history plays, they strike us now as less stunningly "original"--though arguably more successfully executed--than the tetralogy on the Wars of the Roses.

Which of them came first we do not know, but most scholars incline toward The Comedy of Errorsa play so openly scaffolded upon Plautus's Menaechmi and Amphitruo two farces that Shakespeare probably knew in Latin from his days in grammar school that one modern critic has summed it up as "a kind of diploma piece. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, the play begins with a sentence on the life of a luckless Syracusan merchant, Aegeon, who has stumbled into Ephesus in search of his son Antipholus.

After narrating a tale of woe that wins the sympathy of the Duke of Ephesus, Aegeon is given till five in the afternoon to come up with a seemingly impossible ransom for his breach of an arbitrary law against Syracusans. Meanwhile, unknown to Aegeon, the object of his search is in Ephesus too, having arrived only hours before him; Antipholus had set out some two years earlier to find a twin brother by the same name who was separated from the rest of the family in a stormy shipwreck more than twenty years in the past.

By happy coincidence, the other Antipholus has long since settled in Ephesus, and so without either's knowledge has their mother, Aegeon's long-lost wife, Aemilia, who is now an abbess. To complicate matters further, both Antipholuses have slaves named Dromio, also twins long separated, and of course both sets of twins are indistinguishably appareled.

Into this mix Shakespeare throws a goldsmith, a set of merchants, a courtesan, a wife and a sister-in-law for the Ephesian Antipholus, and a conjuring schoolmaster. The result is a swirling brew of misunderstandings, accusations, and identity crises--all leading, finally, to a series of revelations that reunite a family, save Aegeon's life, and bring order to a city that had begun to seem bewitched by sorcerers.

The Comedy of Errors reached print for the first time in the First Folio. We know that it was written prior to 28 Decemberhowever, because there is record of a performance on that date at one of the four Inns of Court. Some scholars believe that the play was written for that holiday Gray's Inn presentation, but most tend to the view that it had been performed previously, possibly as early as but more likely in the years Most critics now seem agreed, moreover, that for all its farcical elements, the play is a comedy of some sophistication and depth, with a sensitivity to love that anticipates Shakespeare's great comedies later in the decade: when Luciana advises her sister Adriana about how she should treat her husband Antipholus, for example, she echoes Paul's exhortations on Christian marriage in Ephesians.

And with its use of the devices of literary romance the frame story of Aegeon comes from Apollonius of TyreThe Comedy of Errors also looks forward to the wanderings, confusions of identity, and miraculous reunions so fundamental to the structure of "late plays" such as Pericles and The Tempest. What may have been Shakespeare's next comedy has also been deprecated as farce, and it is frequently produced today with staging techniques that link it with the commedia del l'arte popular in Renaissance Italy.

But for all its knockabout slapstick, The Taming of the Shrew is too penetrating in its psychology and too subtle in its handling of the nuances of courtship to be dismissed as a play deficient in feeling. Its main event is a battle of the sexes in which Petruchio, who has "come to wive it wealthily in Padua," takes on a dare no other potential suitor would even consider: to win both dowry and docility from a sharp-tongued shrew avoided as "Katherine the curst.

Shakespeare biography near2 edu: Shakespeare's life revolved around two locations:

First, he insists that Kate is fair and gentle, notwithstanding all her efforts to disabuse him of that notion. Second, he "kills her in her own humour," with a display of arbitrary behavior--tantrums, scoldings, peremptory refusals--that both wears her down and shows her how unpleasant shrewishness can be. At the end of the play Petruchio shocks his skeptical fellow husbands by wagering that his bride will prove more obedient than theirs.

When Kate not only heeds his commands but reproaches her sister and the other wives for "sullen, sour" rebellion against their husbands, it becomes manifest that Petruchio has succeeded in his quest: Kate freely and joyfully acknowledges him to be her "loving lord. Whether or not The Taming of the Shrew is the mysterious Love's Labor's Won referred to by Francis Meres init seems to have been written in the early s, because what is now generally believed to be a bad quarto of it appeared in The Taming of a Shrew differs significantly from the version of Shakespeare's play that was first published in the Folio--most notably in the fact that the drunken tinker Christopher Sly, who appears only in the induction to the later printing of the play, remains on stage throughout The Taming of a Shrewrepeatedly interrupting the action of what is presented as a play for his entertainment and resolving at the end to go off and try Petruchio's wife-taming techniques on his own recalcitrant woman.

Some directors retain the later Sly scenes, but no one seriously questions that the Folio text is in general the more authoritative of the two versions of the play. The Folio provides the only surviving text of The Two Gentlemen of Veronaa comedy so tentative in its dramaturgy for example, its ineptitude in the few scenes where the playwright attempts to manage more than two characters on the stage at onceand so awkward in its efforts to pit the claims of love and shakespeare biography near2 edu against each other, that many scholars now think it to be the first play Shakespeare ever wrote.

Based largely on a chivalric romance Diana Enamorada by Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona depicts a potential rivalry between two friends--Valentine and Proteus--who fall in love with the same Milanese woman Silvia despite the fact that Proteus has vowed his devotion to a woman Julia back home in Verona.

Proteus engineers Valentine's banishment from Milan so that he can woo Silvia away from him. But Silvia remains faithful to Valentine, just as Julia who has followed her loved one disguised as his page holds true to Proteus, notwithstanding the character he discloses as a man who lives up to his name. In the concluding forest scene Valentine intervenes to save Silvia from being raped by Proteus; but, when Proteus exhibits remorse, Valentine offers him Silvia anyway, as a token of friendship restored.

Fortunately, circumstances conspire to forestall such an unhappy consummation, and the play ends with the two couples properly reunited. Unlike The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the ShrewThe Two Gentlemen of Verona has never been popular in the theater, even though it offers two resourceful women whose promise will be fulfilled more amply in such later heroines as Rosalind and Violaa pair of amusing clowns Launce and Speedand one of the most engaging dogs Crab who ever stole a stage.

In its mixture of prose and verse, nevertheless, and in its suggestion that the "green world" of the woods is where pretensions fall and would be evildoers find their truer selves, The Two Gentlemen of Verona looks forward to the first fruits of Shakespeare's maturity: the "romantic comedies" of which it proves to be a prototype. The one remaining play that most critics now locate in the period known as Shakespeare's apprenticeship is a Grand Guignol melodrama that seems to have been the young playwright's attempt to outdo Thomas Kyd 's Spanish Tragedy produced circa in its exploitation of the horrors of madness and revenge.

The composition of Titus Andronicus is usually datedand it seems to have been drawn from a ballad and History of Titus Andronicus that only survives today in an eighteenth-century reprint now deposited in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger also holds the sole extant copy of the first quarto of Shakespeare's play, the authoritative text for all but the one scene, III.

If Shakespeare did take most of his plot from the History of Titus Andronicusit is clear that he also went to Ovid's Metamorphoses for the account of Tereus's rape of Philomena, to which the tongueless Lavinia points to explain what has been done to her and to Seneca's Thyestes for Titus's fiendish revenge on Tamora and her sons at the end of the play.

Although Titus Andronicus is not a "history play," it does make an effort to evoke the social and political climate of fourth-century Rome; and in its depiction of a stern general who has just sacrificed more than shakespeare biography near2 edu of his own sons to conquer the Goths, it anticipates certain characteristics of Shakespeare's later "Roman plays": Julius CaesarAntony and Cleopatraand Coriolanus.

But it is primarily as an antecedent of Hamlet influenced, perhaps, by the so-called lost Ur-Hamlet that Titus holds interest for us today. Because whatever else it is, Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's first experiment with revenge tragedy. Its primary focus is the title character, whose political misjudgments and fiery temper put him at the mercy of the Queen of the Goths, Tamora, and her two sons Demetrius and Chiron.

They ravish and mutilate Titus's daughter Lavinia, manipulate the Emperor into executing two of Titus's sons Martius and Quintus as perpetrators of the crime, and get Titus's third son Lucius banished for trying to rescue his brothers. Along the way, Tamora's Moorish lover Aaron tricks Titus into having his right hand chopped off in a futile gesture to save Martius and Lucius.

After Lavinia writes the names of her assailants in the sand with her grotesque stumps, Titus works out a plan for revenge: he slits the throats of Demetrius and Chiron, invites Tamora to a banquet, and serves her the flesh of her sons baked in a pie.

Shakespeare biography near2 edu: William Shakespeare (c. 23 April –

He then kills Tamora and dies at the hands of Emperor Saturninus. At this point Lucius returns heading a Gothic army and takes over as the new Emperor, condemning Aaron to be half-buried and left to starve and throwing Tamora's corpse to the scavenging birds and beasts. As Fredson Bowers has pointed out, Titus Andronicus incorporates a number of devices characteristic of other revenge tragedies: the protagonist's feigned madness, his delay in the execution of his purpose, his awareness that in seeking vengeance he is taking on a judicial function that properly rests in God's hands, and his death at the end in a bloody holocaust that leaves the throne open for seizure by the first opportunist to arrive upon the scene.

Revenge is also a significant motif in Shakespeare's other early tragedy, Romeo and Julietusually dated around It is a blood feud between their two Veronan families that forces the lovers to woo and wed in secret, thereby creating the misunderstanding that leads Mercutio to defend Romeo's "honor" in act three when the just-married protagonist declines his new kinsman Tybalt's challenge to duel.

And it is both to avenge Mercutio's death and to restore his own now-sullied name that Romeo then slays Tybalt and becomes "fortune's fool"--initiating a falling action that leads eventually to a pair of suicides and a belated recognition by the Capulets and the Montagues that their children have become "poor sacrifices of our enmity. But it is not for its revenge elements that most of us remember Romeo and Juliet.

No, it is for the lyricism with which Shakespeare portrays the beauty and idealism of love at first sight--all the more transcendent for the ways in which the playwright sets it off from the calculations of Juliet's parents intent on arranging their daughter's marriage to advance their own status or contrasts it with the earthy bawdiness of Juliet's Nurse or the worldly-wise cynicism of Romeo's friend Mercutio.

The spontaneous sonnet of Romeo and Juliet's initial meeting at Capulet's ball, their betrothal vows in the balcony scene later that evening, the ominous parting that concludes their one night together and foreshadows their final meeting in the Capulet tomb--these are the moments we carry with us from a performance or a reading of what may well be history's most famous love story.

Romeo and Juliet may strike us as an "early" tragedy in its formal versification and in its patterned structure. It has been faulted for its dependence on coincidence and on causes external to the protagonists for the conditions that bring about the tragic outcome--an emphasis implicit in the play's repeated references to Fortune and the stars.

And critics have encountered difficulty in their attempts to reconcile the purity of Romeo and Juliet's devotion to each other "for earth too dear" with the play's equal insistence that their relationship is a form of idolatry--ultimately leading both lovers to acts of desperation that audiences in Shakespeare's time would have considered far more consequential than do most modern audiences.

But whatever its supposed limitations and interpretive problems, Romeo and Juliet seems likely to hold its position as one of the classics of the dramatic repertory. Romeo and Juliet first appeared in a quarto edition that most scholars believe to be a memorial reconstruction, though one with isolated passages such as Mercutio's celebrated Queen Mab speech printed in a form that some scholars believe superior to their rendering in the text today's editors accept as the best authority: the second quarto, "newly corrected, augmented, and amended," and apparently derived primarily from Shakespeare's own "foul papers.

The principal source for the play was a narrative, The Tragical History of Romeus and Julietby Arthur Brooke, a didactic poem urging children to be obedient to their parents. By telescoping shakespeare biography near2 edu months into four days and by dramatizing the story in a manner more sympathetic to the young lovers, Shakespeare transformed a sermon into a tragedy whose urgency must have been just as moving in the Elizabethan theater as we know it to be in our own.

If Romeo and Juliet is a play that has lost none of its freshness in the shakespeare biography near2 edu centuries since its first appearance, Love's Labor's Lost now strikes us as so thoroughly "Elizabethan" in its rhetoric and topicality as to be nearly inaccessible to modern audiences. Evidently another product of the "transition years" when Shakespeare was working his way back into the theater after a two-year hiatus due to the plague, Love's Labor's Lost appears to have been written in for private performance and may well have been revised in for a performance before the Queen during the Christmas revels.

Its earliest known printing was a quarto announcing itself as "newly corrected and augmented" and probably set from Shakespeare's "foul papers. 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.

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.