William Shakespeare, the great Renaissance playwright of England and national poet of international acclaim, was born in the town of Stratford, north of London. History has only preserved information about his baptism on April 26, 1564.
In Stratford little William Shakespeare received a good education for those times. As a child he entered a grammar school, where they studied Latin and ancient Greek. For a deeper and fuller mastery of the ancient languages, students were supposed to participate in the school’s productions of plays in Latin.
According to some reports, in addition to this school, William Shakespeare in his youth also attended the royal school, which was also located in his native town. There he had an opportunity to get acquainted with the ancient Roman poetic works.
Unknown seven years
William Shakespeare is one of the few authors about whom information was collected literally in bits and pieces. Very few direct accounts of his life remain. For the most part, all information about William Shakespeare has been extracted from secondary sources, such as the statements of contemporaries or administrative records. Therefore, about seven years after the birth of his twin and before the first mentions of his work in London, researchers build enigmas.
Shakespeare is attributed both to his service to a noble landowner as a teacher and to his work in London theaters as a prompter, stagehand, and even a horse breeder. But there is no truly reliable information about this period of the poet’s life.
The London period
In 1592 the English poet Robert Green’s opinion of young William’s work appears in the press. This is the first mention of Shakespeare as an author. The aristocrat in his pamphlet tried to ridicule the young playwright, as he saw him as a strong competitor, but which was not distinguished by noble birth and good education. At the same time mentions the first productions of Shakespeare’s play “Henry VI” in London’s “Rose” theater.
This work was written in the spirit of the popular English genre of chronicle. This type of performance was common in Renaissance England; it bore the epic nature of the narrative, with scenes and pictures often unconnected. Chronicles were intended to celebrate the statehood of England as opposed to feudal fragmentation and internecine wars.
It is known that William from 1594 enters a major acting community, the Servants of the Lord Chamberlain, and soon becomes its co-founder. Productions brought great success, and the troupe in a short time became so rich that allowed himself to build over the next five years, the famous building of the theater “Globe. And by 1608 the theatergoers also acquired a closed room, which they called “Blackfriars.
Much of the success has contributed to the favor of the rulers of England: Elizabeth I and her heir, James I, from whom the theater company has acquired permission to change its status. Since 1603 the company was called “Servants of the King. Shakespeare was not only engaged in writing plays, he also took an active part in the productions of his works. In particular, evidence has survived that William played leading roles in all of his plays.
Periods of creativity
The great playwright created an immortal treasure trove that has nourished world culture for more than five centuries in a row. The plots of his plays have become an inspiration not only for the artists of dramatic theaters, but also for many composers, as well as film directors. Throughout his creative life, Shakespeare repeatedly changed the nature of his writing.
His first plays often copied in structure the genres and plots popular at the time, such as chronicles, Renaissance comedies (The Taming of the Shrew), and “tragedies of horror” (Titus Andronicus). These were unwieldy works with a large number of characters and unnatural for the perception of the syllable. The young Shakespeare learned the basics of writing drama on the classic forms of the time.
The second half of the 1690s was marked by the appearance of dramaturgically refined in form and content works for the theater. The poet seeks a new form, not departing from the given framework of Renaissance comedy and tragedy. He fills old obsolete forms with new content. Thus came the brilliant tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. The freshness of verse in Shakespeare’s new works is combined with an unusual and memorable plot, making these plays popular with audiences of all walks of life.
At the same time, Shakespeare created a cycle of sonnets, the famous genre of love poetry at the time. For almost two centuries, these poetic masterpieces of the master were forgotten, but with the emergence of Romanticism they regained their fame. In the nineteenth century, it became fashionable to quote the immortal lines written at the end of the Renaissance by the English genius.
Thematically, the poems are love letters to an unknown young man, and only the last 26 sonnets of the 154 are appeals to a black-haired lady. Many scholars see autobiographical features in this cycle, suggesting an unconventional orientation of the playwright. But some historians believe that these sonnets use William Shakespeare’s address to his patron and friend, the Earl of Southampton, in the then accepted secular form.
At the turn of the century in the works of William Shakespeare appear works that made his name immortal in the history of world literature and theater. Practically established, successful creatively and financially the playwright creates a number of tragedies that brought him fame not only in England. These are the plays “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “King of Lear”, “Othello”. These works have raised the popularity of the Globe Theater to the heights of one of the most visited entertainment institutions in London. At the same time, the fortune of its owners, including Shakespeare, increased many times over a short period.
At the twilight of his career, Shakespeare composed a number of immortal works that surprised his contemporaries with their new form. They combine tragedy with comedy, and fairy tales are woven into the description of the situations of daily life. First of all, the plays-fantasy The Tempest, The Winter Tale, as well as dramas on ancient subjects – Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra. In these works Shakespeare acted as a great connoisseur of the laws of drama, which is easily and elegantly put together features of tragedy and fairy tale, a complex high syllable and clear speech patterns.
Individually many of Shakespeare’s dramatic works were published during his lifetime. But a complete collection of works which included almost all of the playwright’s canonical plays, appeared only in 1623. The collection was printed at the initiative of Shakespeare’s friends William John Heminge and Henry Condel, who worked with the Globe troupe. The book, consisting of 36 plays by the English author, was published under the title of the First Folio.
During the seventeenth century, three more folios were published, with some changes and additions of previously unpublished plays.
