William
Shakespeare was
born in Stratford-upon-Avon,
a small country town. Stratford
was famous for its malting. The black plague
killed in 1564 one out of seven the town's
1,500 inhabitants.
Shakespeare
was the eldest son of Mary Arden, the daughter of a local landowner,
and her
husband, John Shakespeare (c. 1530-1601), a glover and wood
dealer.
There is no record of his
birth, but his baptism was recorded by the church, thus his birthday is
assumed
to be the 23 of April. .
His father was a
prominent and prosperous alderman in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon,
and was later granted a coat of arms by the College
of Heralds.
All that is known of Shakespeare's youth is
that he presumably attended the Stratford
Grammar
School,
and did not proceed to Oxford
or Cambridge.
He may
have spent the years
1580-82 as a teacher for the Roman Catholic Houghton family in Lancashire.
Seven
years later Shakespeare
was recognized as an actor, poet, and playwright, when a rival
playwright,
Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow" in "A
Groatsworth of Wit." A few years later he joined up with one of the
most
successful acting troupes in London:
"The Lord Chamberlain's Men." When,
in 1599, the 
troupe lost the lease
of the theater where they performed
(appropriately called "The Theater"), they were wealthy enough to
build their own theater across the Thames, south of London, which they
called
"The Globe." The new theater opened in July of 1599, built from the
timbers of "The Theater", with the motto "Totus mundus agit
histrionem" (A whole world of players). When James I came to the throne
(1603) the troupe was designated by the new king as the "King's Men"
(or "King's Company"). The Letters Patent of the company specifically
charged Shakespeare and eight others "freely to use and exercise the
art
and faculty of playing Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, Interludes,
Morals,
Pastorals, stage plays ... as well for recreation of our loving
subjects as for
our solace and pleasure."
Shakespeare
entertained the
King and the people for another ten years until June
19, 1613,
when a canon fired from the roof of the
theatre for a gala performance of Henry VIII set fire to the thatch
roof and
burned the theatre to the ground. The audience ignored the smoke from
the roof
at first, being to absorbed in the play, until the flames caught the
walls and
the fabric of the curtains. Amazingly there were no casualties, and the
next
spring the company had the theatre "new builded in a far fairer manner
than before."
Shakespeare married a local girl, Anne Hathaway
(died
1623), who was eight years older. Their first child, Susannah, was born
within
six months, and twins Hamnet and Judith were born in 1585. Hamnet,
Shakespeare's only son, died in 1896, at the age of 11. It has often
been
suggested, that the lines in King John, beginning with "Grief
fills
the room of my absent child", reflects Shakespeare's grief.
Hamlet
was first printed in 1603. It
is Shakespeare's
largest drama, based on a lost play known as the Ur-Hamlet.
Prince
Hamlet, an enigmatic intellectual, mourns both his father's death and
his
mother's remarriage. His father's ghost appears to him and tells that
Claudius,
married to Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, poisoned him. Hamlet,
fascinated by
cruelly witty games, swears revenge. "The time is out of joint;
O
cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!" He
arranges an
old play whose story has a parallel to that of Claudius. Hamlet's
behavior is
considered mad. He kills the eavesdropping Polonius, the court
chamberlain, by
thrusting his
sword through a
curtain. Polonius's son Laertes returns to Denmark to avenge his father's death. Polonius's
daughter Ofelia
loves Hamlet, but the prince's sadistically brutal behavior drives her
to
madness. "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of
sinners?"
he tells Ophelia who dies by drowning. Before the slaughter that ends
the
story, Hamlet says to his friend Horatio: "I shall win at the odds. But
thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart." A duel takes
place and ends with the death of Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and
Hamlet, whose
final words are "the rest is silence."
According to a legend, he left Stratford for London to avoid a charge of poaching. After 1582
Shakespeare
probably joined as an actor one or several companies of players. By
1584 he
emerged as a rising playwright in London, and became soon a central figure in
London´s leading
theater company, the Lord Chamberlain´s Company, renamed later as
the King´s
Men. He wrote many great plays for the group. In 1599 a new theater,
called The
Globe, was built.
Shakespeare was known in his day as a very
rapid writer:
"His mind and hand went together," his publishers Heminges and
Condell reported, "and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness
that
we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." Despite all the
praise, some writer's were not enthusiastic about his plays. Samuel
Pepys
(1633-1703) called A Midsummer Night's Dream "the most insipid,
ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life." Voltaire
wrote: "Shakespeare is a drunken savage with some imagination whose
plays
please only in London and Canada," "Shakespeare is the Corneille of London, but
everywhere else he is a great fool..." Shakespeare wrote also two
heroic
narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594).
His
sonnets were written earliest by 1598 and published in 1609. The
sonnets refer
cryptically to several persons, among them a handsome young man, a
woman called
the 'Dark Lady', and a rival poet. Shakespeare's name was also on the
title
page of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), issued by the publisher
William
Jaggard. The identity of the brunette, who appreared in Shakespeare's
later
poems, has been a mystery. According to one theory, she was the
Countess of
Pembroke. George Bernard Shaw believed she was one of Elizabeth I's
ladies-in-waiting, Mary Fritton. Some have thought she was the mother
of
Shakespeare's supposed illegitimate son, Henry Davenant. Or she might
have been
Marie Mountjoy, Shakespeare's London landlady, or the black prostitute Luce Morgan,
or Emilia
Bassano, the daughter of a court musician and mistress of the Lord
Chamberlain,
Lord Hunsdon. And there is a theory that the Dark Lady was not a
"she" at all, but Shakespeare's patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton.
Romeo and Juliet was
based on real lovers who lived in Verona, Italy, and died for each other in the year 1303. At
that time
the Capulets and Montagues were 
among the
inhabitants of the town. Shakespeare
found the tale in Arthur Brooke's poem 'The Tragical Historye of Romeus
and
Juliet' (1562). The play has inspired other works, such as Berlioz's
dramatic
symphony (1839), Tchaikovsky's fantasy-overture (1869-80), and
Prokofiev's
full-length ballet (1938). The Tempest, often considered
Shakespeare's
farewell to his theatrical art, has inspired Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and
Jean
Sibelius, who wrote music for it in 1926.
About 1610 Shakespeare returned to his
birthplace, where
he had a house, called New Place. He lived
as a country gentleman, drank beer, and co-wrote with John Fletcher The
Two
Noble Kinsmen, first published in 1634. A number of Shakespeare's
plays
were published during his lifetime, but none of the original dramatic
manuscripts have survived. The original Globe burned down in 1613, but
was
rebuilt next year. Shakespeare's later plays were also performed at the
Blackfriars Theatre, which was run by a seven-man syndicate.
Shakespeare was
one of its members. Shakespeare's company used the Globe in the summer
and the
indoor Blackfrian in the winter. Under the patronage of King James I,
the
company also performed at court, more often than during the reign of
Queen
Elizabeth. The dramatist John Dennis (1657-1734) claimed, that The
Merry
Wives of Windsor was written at her command. Macbeth, with
its
witches and portrayal of the legendary ancestor of the Stuart kings,
Banquo,
had a special appeal to James. He had also written a book about
demology.
Shakespeare died on April 23,
1616. His widow was
legally entitled to a third of the estate.
Shakespeare also bequeathed his "second-best bed" to his wife - at
that time the best bed was the grand prize of a forfeited estate. Anne
Hathaway
died seven years after her husband. Accroding to a story, she and her
daughter
wished to be buried in Shakespeare's grave.
In 1623
appeared a folio edition of Shakespeare's
collected works - known as the First Folio. On Shakespeare's gravestone
are
four lines of verse. It is not certain that the Bard of Avon wrote the
famous
epitaph: "Good friend, for Jesus´ sake forbeare / To digg the
dust
enclosed here! / Blest be ye man that spares thes stones / And curst be
he that
moues my bones." However, in the text there is an onomatopoetic to his
name, with "sake" in the first line, and "spares" in the
third.
