The Life and Times of William Shakespeare Unless you've lived in a cave for your entire life, you've probably heard the phrases "To be or not to be that is the question,"ÃÂ and "Romeo, Romeo where for art thou Romeo?"ÃÂ hundreds of times. You probably know that the man that wrote them was William Shakespeare, but what do you really know about him? Was he rich or poor? Where did he grow up? When did he write his first play? Actually historians know quite a lot about Shakespeare. In fact, they know more about Shakespeare than any other Elizabethan playwrights excluding Ben Jonson. [4,p.3] William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564. It is said by A.L. Rowse, the author of Shakespeare the Man, that had he been born twenty years earlier or later his success would have been nothing as prosperous as it actually was. Shakespeare was well thought of, because the time period he grew up in was an era when the performing arts were popular.
List of titles of works based on Shakespearean phr...
English: Christopher Sly and the Hostess from the ...
Sir John Gilbert's 1849 painting: The Plays of Wil...It wasn't just his plays that were admired either; his poems and sonnets were also hits.
Shakespeare was born into a middle class family to Mary Arden and John Shakespeare. He grew up in Snitterfield, England a village just out side of Stratford. He was the third of eight children. When William was seven years old he was sent to a very strict grammar school. At the school he studied Latin along with other difficult subjects for at least nine hours a day. It was at this school that he read many of the works of ancient authors some of which could have been the inspiration behind many of his own writings. [5] In 1582, at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare married twenty-six year old Anne Hathaway. Six months later their first...