When was born william shakespeare

As an actor, a playwright, and a partner in a leading acting company, he became both prosperous and well-known. Even without knowing everything about his life, fans of Shakespeare have imagined and reimagined him according to their own tastes, just as we see with the 19th-century family scene at the top of this page.

Primary sources: Shakespeare Documented Visit Shakespeare Documented to see primary-source materials documenting Shakespeare's life. This online resource of items from the Folger and other institutions brings together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare and his works, as well as additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter.

William Shakespeare was probably born on about April 23, , the date that is traditionally given for his birth. He was John and Mary Shakespeare's oldest surviving child; their first two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy.

Growing up as the big brother of the family, William had three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger sisters: Anne, who died at seven, and Joan. Their father, John Shakespeare, was a leatherworker who specialized in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar items. A prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden, of the prominent Arden family.

John rose through local offices in Stratford, becoming an alderman and eventually, when William was five, the town bailiff—much like a mayor. Not long after that, however, John Shakespeare stepped back from public life; we don't know why.

Shakespeare, as the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost certainly attended Stratford's grammar school. Like all such schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on the Latin classics, including memorization, writing, and acting classic Latin plays. Shakespeare most likely attended until about age On Shakespeare Documented: Primary-source materials relating to Shakespeare's family.

A few years after he left school, in late , William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly common situation at the time.

When they married, Anne was 26 and William was Anne grew up just outside Stratford in the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of her life in Stratford. In early , the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet, completing the family. In the years ahead, Anne and the children lived in Stratford while Shakespeare worked in London, although we don't know when he moved there.

Some later observers have suggested that this separation, and the couple's relatively few children, were signs of a strained marriage, but we do not know that, either. Someone pursuing a theater career had no choice but to work in London, and many branches of the Shakespeares had small families. Adapted from Wikipedia. What are idioms? And how can idioms help you become a fluent speaker? Discover a list of the most widely used idiomatic expressions!

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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 later died of unknown causes at age There are seven years of Shakespeare's life where no records exist after the birth of his twins in Scholars call this period the "lost years," and there is wide speculation on what he was doing during this period.

One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from the local landlord, Sir Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant schoolmaster in Lancashire. It's generally believed he arrived in London in the mid- to late s and may have found work as a horse attendant at some of London's finer theaters, a scenario updated centuries later by the countless aspiring actors and playwrights in Hollywood and Broadway.

By the early s, documents show Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, an acting company in London with which he was connected for most of his career. Considered the most important troupe of its time, the company changed its name to the King's Men following the crowning of King James I in From all accounts, the King's Men company was very popular. Records show that Shakespeare had works published and sold as popular literature.

Although the theater culture in 16th century England was not highly admired by people of high rank, some of the nobility were good patrons of the performing arts and friends of the actors. By , there is evidence Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in London and possibly had several plays produced. The September 20, edition of the Stationers' Register a guild publication includes an article by London playwright Robert Greene that takes a few jabs at Shakespeare: " There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country," Greene wrote of Shakespeare.

Scholars differ on the interpretation of this criticism, but most agree that it was Greene's way of saying Shakespeare was reaching above his rank, trying to match better known and educated playwrights like Christopher Marlowe , Thomas Nashe or Greene himself. Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention 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" By , Shakespeare had already written and published 15 of his 37 plays.

Civil records show that at this time he purchased the second-largest house in Stratford, called New House, for his family. It was a four-day ride by horse from Stratford to London, so it's believed that Shakespeare spent most of his time in the city writing and acting and came home once a year during the day Lenten period, when the theaters were closed.

By , Shakespeare and his business partners built their own theater on the south bank of the Thames River, which they called the Globe Theater. In , Shakespeare purchased leases of real estate near Stratford for pounds, which doubled in value and earned him 60 pounds a year. This made him an entrepreneur as well as an artist, and scholars believe these investments gave him the time to write his plays uninterrupted.

Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the story's plot or characters. 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. With the exception of the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare's first plays were mostly histories. It was in Shakespeare's later period, after , that he wrote the tragedies Hamlet , Othello , King Lear and Macbeth.

In these, Shakespeare's characters present vivid impressions of human temperament that are timeless and universal. Possibly the best known of these plays is Hamlet , which explores betrayal, retribution, incest and moral failure.

These moral failures often drive the twists and turns of Shakespeare's plots, destroying the hero and those he loves.