St andrew biography information on william shakespeare

William Shakespeare The most famous of all English playwrights was born in and died on St Georges Day, in His birthday is celebrated on 23rd April in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. William Shakespeare was born on April 23, , in Stratford-upon-Avon. At eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, a woman seven or eight years his senior. Together, they raised two daughters: Susanna, who was born in , and Judith whose twin brother died in boyhood , born in Shakespeare may have taught at school during this period, but it seems more probable that shortly after he went to London to begin his apprenticeship as an actor.

William Shakespeare (c.

Due to the plague, the London theaters were often closed between June and April During that period, Shakespeare probably had some income from his patron, Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first two poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece The former was a long narrative poem depicting the rejection of Venus by Adonis, his death, and the consequent disappearance of beauty from the world.

With his share of the income from the Globe, Shakespeare was able to purchase New Place, his home in Stratford. While Shakespeare was regarded as the foremost dramatist of his time, evidence indicates that both he and his contemporaries looked to poetry, not playwriting, for enduring fame. That edition, The Sonnets of Shakespeare , consists of sonnets, all written in the form of three quatrains and a couplet that is now recognized as Shakespearean.

In his poems and plays, Shakespeare invented thousands of words, often combining or contorting Latin, French, and native roots. His impressive expansion of the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , includes such words as: arch-villain, birthplace, bloodsucking, courtship, dewdrop, downstairs, fanged, heartsore, hunchbacked, leapfrog, misquote, pageantry, radiance, schoolboy, stillborn, watchdog, and zany.

Shakespeare wrote more than thirty plays. These are usually divided into four categories: histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. His earliest plays were primarily comedies and histories such as Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors , but in , Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet , his second tragedy, and over the next dozen years he would return to the form, writing the plays for which he is now best known: Julius Caesar , Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra.

Nonetheless, his contemporaries recognized Shakespeare's achievements.