William Shakespeare – Author Biography
Early Life
William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, the son of John Shakespeare, a glover and civic official, and Mary Arden. He was likely educated at the local grammar school, where he would have studied Latin and the classics. In 1582, at eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six; they had three children, Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith. Little is documented about his life between the mid-1580s and 1592, the so-called “lost years.”
Career
By 1592 Shakespeare was working in London as an actor and playwright. He became a principal member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, the leading theatre company of the age, for which he wrote most of his plays and in which he held a share. The company performed at the Theatre, the Globe, which it built in 1599, and the indoor Blackfriars. His career spanned the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. Around 1613 he retired to Stratford, where he died on April 23, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church. Seven years after his death, two fellow actors published the First Folio (1623), preserving thirty-six of his plays, half of which had never been printed.
Major Works
Shakespeare wrote at least thirty-seven plays: tragedies including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet; comedies including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and All’s Well That Ends Well; histories such as Henry IV and Henry V; and late romances like The Tempest. He also wrote 154 sonnets and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Writing Style and Themes
Shakespeare wrote primarily in blank verse of extraordinary flexibility, mixing verse and prose to distinguish rank and mood. His language, inventive, musical, and endlessly quotable, coined or popularized hundreds of English words and phrases. His great themes are power and its corruption, love in its many forms, jealousy, ambition, identity, and the gap between appearance and reality. His characters, Hamlet, Othello, Lady Macbeth, Falstaff, possess an interior depth that transformed drama into a vehicle for psychological exploration.
Legacy
Shakespeare is universally regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the most influential playwright in world history. His plays have been performed continuously for four centuries, translated into every major language, and adapted into countless films, operas, and novels. Phrases from his work saturate everyday English, and his characters have become archetypes. The Globe Theatre has been reconstructed in London, and his birthday is celebrated worldwide.
