Shakespeare William

Shakespeare Day


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The English playwright, poet, and actor William Shakespeare was a popular dramatist. He was born six years after Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) ascended the throne, in the height of the English Renaissance. He found in the theater of London a medium just coming into its own and an audience eager to reward talents of the sort he possessed. He is generally acknowledged to be the greatest of English writers and one of the most extraordinary creators in human history.

Early life

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a wealthy landowner from a neighboring village. His father, John, was a maker of gloves and a trader in farm produce. John also held a number of responsible positions in Stratford's government and served as mayor in 1569.

Though no personal documents survive from Shakespeare's school years, he probably attended the Stratford grammar school and studied the classics, Latin grammar and literature. It is believed that he had to discontinue his education at about thirteen in order to financially help his father. At eighteen he married Ann Hathaway. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith.

There are no records of Shakespeare's activities between 1585 and 1592. Some have speculated (guessed) that he was a traveling actor or a country schoolmaster. The earliest surviving mention of his career in London, England, is a jealous attack by Robert Greene, a playwright, which indicates that Shakespeare had already established himself in the capital. It is hard to believe that even Shakespeare could have shown the mastery evident in his plays without several years of apprenticeship (the period of time a person works to learn a skill).

Transcript
Ok, so one of the first questions you might ask about William Shakespeare is when was he born and how do we know that fact? But we don’t know precisely when he was born unfortunately because the document we’re looking at here is not the record of Shakespeare’s birth but rather the record of Shakespeare’s baptism. And you can see it entered here by a clerk copying out older records into a new document. You can tell that because the hand-writing is all the same so you can tell all these entries were entered in fact at the same time from older records. But here we have the recording of Shakespeare’s baptism on the 26th of April 1564, and the interesting thing about that of course is that it doesn’t tell us when he was born it only tells us when he was baptised. Our guess then that Shakespeare’s birthday  is the 23rd of April comes from the fact that we know it was common practice for children to be baptised between two and four days after the birth. Often depending on how fragile the child seemed if they appeared to be sickly then it was considered risky to take them out down to the church to be baptised and they’d wait hopefully to see whether  the child prospered before they did the baptism. So there we have the record of Shakespeare’s baptism later marked by someone else with the three x's. So that’s all the evidence we have about his birth.
Source Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
ELA Centro de Idiomas
San Pedro de Alcántara