A brief highlight on Shakespeare


1556 – Anne Hathaway is born.
1564 – William Shakespeare was born on April 23rd in Stratford on Avon (94 miles from London).
1582 – Marries Anne Hathaway on November 27.
1583 – Susanna Shakespeare is born.
1585 – The twins Judith and Hamnet Shakespeare were born.
1592 – After leaving Stratford for London, William was recognized as a successful actor, as well as a leading poet. He was a member of ‘The Chamberlain’s Men’.
1596 – Hamnet dies at the age of eleven. Shakespeare becomes a “gentleman” when the College of Heralds grants his father a coat of arms.
1597 – He bought a large house called “The Great House of New Place”.
1599 – The ‘Globe Theater’ is built from the pieces of ‘Theater’ in July.
1603 – “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men” became ‘The king’s Men’ on May 19.
1613 – “The Globe Theater” burns during a performance of Henry VII when a canon fired on the roof sets fire to the straw thatch. The theatre is rebuilt, but Shakespeare retires.
1616 – April 23, in Stratford, on his 52nd birthday he died.


William Shakespeare: His life
No truly reliable or authentic biography of Shakespeare can be written because very little about the man has come down to us from genuine sources. The available facts about his life are based chiefly on guess-work and conjecture.
Parentage
William Shakespeare was born on April 23rd ,1564, in the village of Stratford on Avon in the country of Warwickshire. His father, John Shakespeare, was a farmer’s son who had gone to Stratford about 1331, and begun to prosper as a trader in corn, wheat, leather and agricultural products. His mother, Mary Arden , was the daughter of a prosperous farmer, descended from an old family of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Norman blood. It is generally believed that neither the poet’s mother nor his father could read or write.

Early life
Of Shakespeare’s education, little is known. For a few years he probably attended the Grammar School at Stratford where he picked up “small Latin and less Greek”. His real teachers meanwhile were the men and woman and the natural influences. Which surrounded him. Stratford is a charming little village in the beautiful country of Warwickshire. Near at hand were the forests of Arden, the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps and military roads, all of which appealed powerfully to the boy’s active imagination. Every aspect of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in Shakespeare’s poetry; just as his character reflect the nobility and the littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions of the people about him. The nurse in Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is simply the reflection of some forgotten nurse with whom Shakespeare had talked by the wayside, one whose endless gossip and vulgarity could not hide a kind heart. Not only the gossip but also the dreams, the unconscious poetry that sleeps in the heart of the common people, appealed tremendously to Shakespeare’s imagination and are reflected in his greatest plays. In the same way, his education at the hands of Nature came from keeping his heart as well as his eyes wide open to the beauty of the world. Because he noted and remembered every significant thing in the changing scenery of earth and sky, no other writher has ever approached him in the perfect natural selling of his characters.

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