Biografy of William Sharespeare - Essay Example

He must have formed his great love of literature from reading the classical Roman writers. Not much is known about Shakespeare’s teenage years but it is likely that the worked in some field connected with acting and the theater, and very possibly like modern actors had to support his acting ambitions with other odd jobs as he went along. It is clear from his later writings that he gained a lot of knowledge about many different trades and common people, and this suggests that he learned practical things as well as his literary skills.

Thanks to surviving church records it is possible to establish the fact that during this period he also got married to a woman called Anne Hathaway. She was considerably older than William Shakespeare, and was already pregnant when the wedding took place in 1582. The first baby was a girl, and then there were girl and boy twins after that but Shakespeare abandoned his family in Stratford to seek his fortune in the much bigger city of London. Sadly the boy twin, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven and not much is known of what happened to the other children.

By the end of 1592 Shakespeare was an established actor, performing in London and other towns with a group of actors called “The Chamberlain’s Men” who in those days were known as “players.” In this period in England theaters were often closed down because of plague, and Shakespeare therefore had time to gather and read books and plays which would later inspire his own writing. He appears to have been very successful a player: “There is proof that Shakespeare had performed with the Chamberlain’s Men before Elizabeth 1 on several occasions.

” (Mabillard, section headed “Shakespeare the Actor and Playwright”). In the middle of his life Shakespeare began writing sonnets and non-dramatic poems and then he began to write historical plays, comedies and tragedies in the period from 1590 to 1612. Some of the exact dates are difficult to pin down because the historical record is not complete. There are also several versions of some plays, and the authorship of some of these has been disputed over the years by scholars. The general consensus is that he wrote thirty seven plays but it is possible also that he wrote fewer than this, or that he wrote and collaborated on more than this.

The majority are comedies, but some of his most memoral work like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear and Othello are tragedies. Even the tragedies and historical plays contain elements of humor in them also, and Shakespeare was well known for his ability to weave silly and serious plotlines together. Mabillard identifies four features which characterize Shakespeare’s literary style and guaranteed his popularity both during his own lifetime and in the centuries since his death: “Illumination of the Human Experience… Great Stories … Compelling Characters… and the ability to turn a phrase.

” (Mabillard: section entitled Why Study Shakespeare) He was quickly recognized as a man of genius, and his plays became a major part of English and later also world culture. His innovative use of language entertained the people of his own time but then also became part of the English language, as for example phrases like “band of brothers” and “the green-eyed monster” which we still use today. There is no firm evidence of the way that