Elective study

william shakespeare

Objectives:
1.Who Was William Shakespeare?
2. Birth , childhood and education
3. Marriage and children
4. London theater
5. Lord Chamberlain's Men
6. Shakespeare’s Globe Theater
7. Shakespeare’s Writing Style
8. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: HAMNET & HAMLET
9. Shakespeare’s works
10. Final years and Shakespeare’s Death
Under supervision of :

Dr/ khaled sabry

Made by yousap soliman sadik
?Who Was William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, also known as the "Bard of Avon," is
often called England's national poet and considered the
greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare's works are known
throughout the world, but his personal life is shrouded in
mystery.William Shakespeare (baptized on April 26, 1564 to
April 23, 1616) was an English playwright, actor and poet also
known as the “Bard of Avon” and often called England’s
national poet. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, he was
an important member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men
company of theatrical players from roughly 1594
onward. Written records give little indication of the way in
which Shakespeare’s professional life molded his artistry. All
that can be deduced is that, in his 20 years as a playwright,
Shakespeare wrote plays that capture the complete range of
.human emotion and conflict
Known throughout the world, the works
of William Shakespeare have been performed in countless
hamlets, villages, cities and metropolises for more than 400
years. And yet, the personal history of William Shakespeare is
somewhat a mystery. There are two primary sources that
provide historians with a basic outline of his life. One source is
his work — the plays, poems and sonnets — and the other is
official documentation such as church and court records.
However, these only provide brief sketches of specific events
in his life and provide little on the person who experienced
those events.

Birth and childhood

William Shakespeare was probably born on about April 23,
1564, the date that is traditionally given for his birth. He was
John and Mary Shakespeare's oldest surviving child; their first
two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy. Growing
up as the big brother of the family, William had three younger
brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger
sisters: Anne, who died at seven, and Joan.
Their father, John Shakespeare, was a leatherworker who
specialized in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar
items. A prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden, of
the prominent Arden family. John rose through local offices in
Stratford, becoming an alderman and eventually, when
William was five, the town bailiff—much like a mayor. Not long
after that, however, John Shakespeare stepped back from
public life; we don't know why.

Shakespeare, as the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost

certainly attended Stratford's grammar school. Like all such
schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on
the Latin classics, including memorization, writing, and acting
classic Latin plays. Shakespeare most likely attended until
about age 15.

Marriage and children

A few years after he left school, in late 1582, William
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already
expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly
common situation at the time. When they married, Anne was
26 and William was 18. Anne grew up just outside Stratford in
the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of
her life in Stratford.

In early 1585, the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet,

completing the family. In the years ahead, Anne and the
children lived in Stratford while Shakespeare worked in
London, although we don't know when he moved there. Some
later observers have suggested that this separation, and the
couple's relatively few children, were signs of a strained
marriage, but we do not know that, either. Someone pursuing
a theater career had no choice but to work in London, and
many branches of the Shakespeares had small families.

Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died in 1596 at the age of

11. His older daughter Susanna later married a well-to-do
Stratford doctor, John Hall. Their daughter Elizabeth,
Shakespeare's first grandchild, was born in 1608. In 1616, just
months before his death, Shakespeare's daughter Judith
married Thomas Quiney, a Stratford vintner. The family
subsequently died out, leaving no direct descendants of
Shakespeare.

London theater
For several years after Judith and Hamnet's arrival in 1585,
nothing is known for certain of Shakespeare's activities: how
he earned a living, when he moved from Stratford, or how he
got his start in the theater.

Following this gap in the record, the first definite mention of

Shakespeare is in 1592 as an established London actor and
playwright, mocked by a contemporary as a "Shake-scene."
The same writer alludes to one of Shakespeare's earliest
history plays, Henry VI, Part 3, which must already have been
performed. The next year, in 1593, Shakespeare published a
long poem, Venus and Adonis. The first quarto editions of his
early plays appeared in 1594. For more than two decades,
Shakespeare had multiple roles in the London theater as an
actor, playwright, and, in time, a business partner in a major
acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (renamed the
King's Men in 1603). Over the years, he became steadily more
famous in the London theater world;  his name, which was not
even listed on the first quartos of his plays, became a regular
feature—clearly a selling point—on later title pages. By 1597,
Shakespeare had already written and published 15 of his 37
plays. Civil records show that at this time he purchased the
second largest house in Stratford, called New House, for his
family. It was a four-day ride by horse from Stratford to
London, so it is believed that Shakespeare spent most of his
time in the city writing and acting and came home once a year
during the 40-day Lenten period, when the theaters were
closed.
Lord Chamberlain's Men
By the early 1590s, documents show William
Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord
Chamberlain's Men, an acting company in London with which
he was connected for most of his career. Considered the most
important troupe of its time, the company changed its name to
the King's Men following the crowning of King James I, in
1603.

From all accounts, the King's Men company was very popular.
Records show that Shakespeare had works published and
sold as popular literature. Although the theater culture in 16th
century England was not highly admired by people of high
rank, many of the nobility were good patrons of the performing
arts and friends of the actors.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theater

By 1599, William Shakespeare and his business partners built

their own theater on the south bank of the Thames River,
which they called the Globe. In 1605, Shakespeare purchased
leases of real estate near Stratford for 440 pounds, which
doubled in value and earned him 60 pounds a year. This
made him an entrepreneur as well as an artist, and scholars
believe these investments gave him the time to write his plays
uninterrupted. The Chamberlain's Men performed for the
queen in the royal court, but they also performed for the
middle-class public. In 1599 the company finished
construction on the Globe Theatre, a wooden, open-air
playhouse designed with the stage in the center and the
audience arranged in tiers that rose up from the polygon-
shaped floor. Many of Shakespeare's best-known plays
premiered here, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
and Twelfth Night. 

Attendance at a Globe production was hardly the dignified,

hushed event that we consider attending the theater to be
today. Since this was long before electricity was invented, all
performances were held during the day. There were no lights,
curtains, microphones, or actresses—young men played
female roles. You could shell out half-a-crown (about $50
today) for a box seat, or pay a penny ($1.66) to stand on the
floor with the other common folks. Actors—or "players," as
they were known at that time—were generally considered by
the Elizabethans to be a scruffy, itinerant bunch, though the
profession gained more respect during Shakespeare's time.
Their acting was not necessarily what we would consider
"good." To make themselves understood in the noisy, open-air
theater, actors relied on exaggerated gestures and cadence to
get their points across. Acting meant overacting.

Despite the stuffy conditions in the theater or the hamminess

of the guys on stage, Shakespeare's language made the plays
unforgettable. In an introductory note to the First Folio,
Shakespeare's actor colleagues John Heminge and Henry
Condell wrote that Shakespeare's plays appealed to all, "From
the most able, to him that can but spell."6 Perhaps only an
educated person would have caught the most obscure
references to Greek and Roman mythologies, but everyone
could understand the human emotions reflected in
Shakespeare's characters, with their all-too-human foibles,
heartaches, schemes, and joys. When a grieving King John
said, "Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his
bed, walks up and down with me, / Puts on his pretty looks,
repeats his words, / Remembers me of all his gracious parts, /
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. / Then have I
reason to be fond of grief,"7 the audience felt the pain of losing
a child. When an impish Puck said, "Lord, what fools these
mortals be!"8 the audience laughed in agreement. The plays
were often unethical ,  with bad jokes written in language that
passes over our heads today but was downright crass to
Elizabethan ears. Shakespeare was a master of language, and
his influence on English remains strong today. He invented
words to suit his purposes, many of which—
useful, lonely, bump—remain staples of our speech today. He
coined phrases since used so often that they have become
clichés—"too much of a good thing,"9 "what's done is
done,"10 "all's well that ends well,"11 "what's past is
prologue."12 Most of us now use about 2,000 words in our
vocabularies; Shakespeare used more than 25,000.13

With modern playwrights, we can easily draw connections

between events in the writer's biography and the subjects of
their plays. With Shakespeare, this isn't the case. It's
impossible to know which—if any—events in his personal life
inspired his plays. As critics have pointed out, the author
of Romeo and Juliet clearly understood the breathtaking
passion of young love.14 But did the author of Macbeth have
experience with regicide? Was the writer of As You Like It into
cross-dressing ladies? Probably not. Shakespeare's inspiration
was, as far as we know, not his personal experience. It was
the human experience, and of this he was an unparalleled
observer.

Shakespeare’s Writing Style

William Shakespeare's early plays were written in the
conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and
rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the
story's plot or characters. However, Shakespeare was very
innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes
and creating a freer flow of words. With only small degrees of
variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern
consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank
verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are
passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms
of poetry or simple prose.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: HAMNET & HAMLET

In 1601 Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. What prompted this

mournful, melancholy play, whose main character's first
actions alone on stage are to contemplate suicide, mourning
"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the
uses of this world"?15 Some believe the 1596 death from an
unknown illness of Shakespeare's 11-year-old son—the
intriguingly named Hamnet—prompted the dark tone in the
playwright's later works. Other scholars think that the death of
Shakespeare's father in 1601—the same year he wrote Hamlet
—inspired his exploration of a grieving son. These are both
plausible explanations, but there's simply no way to say for
sure if they are true. It is clear that after Hamlet, the plays took
a distinctly darker tone for the next few years. Othello, King
Lear, and Macbeth covered murder, jealousy, pride and
betrayal. 

Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, ending the Elizabethan era and

ushering in the Jacobean age. Her successor, King James
I (previously King James VI of Scotland) was equally
enamored of Shakespeare's troupe. The players changed their
name to the King's Men and performed before the royal court
a whopping eleven times in a single year. In 1608, the troupe
moved their primary playing house from the Globe to the
indoor Blackfriars Theatre in London. Shakespeare was
nearing retirement. His final plays—Henry VIII, Two Noble
Kinsmen, and the now-lost Cardenio—were written in
collaboration with John Fletcher, his replacement as the
King's Men's chief dramatist.

The golden age of the King's Men was coming to an end.

During a 1613 performance of Henry VIII—possibly the
premiere—disaster struck the Globe. Fireworks fired off to
mark the king's entry on stage sparked the thatch roof, and the
wooden Globe burned to the ground in less than an hour.
Despite the total destruction of the theater, no lives were lost
thanks to patrons' quick thinking.

Shakespeare’s works

William Shakespeare, in terms of his life and his body of work,

is the most written-about author in the history of Western
civilization. His canon includes 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2
epic narrative poems. The First Folio (cover shown at left) was
published posthumously in 1623 by two of Shakespeare's
acting companions, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Ever
since then, the works of Shakespeare have been studied,
analyzed, and enjoyed as some of the finest masterpieces of
the English language.

It is all the more wondrous when one can study the works and
see Shakespeare developing as a playwright right there upon
the pages. Love's Labours Lost and the early comedies are
the work of a gifted and clever author. Perhaps such plays
alone would have earned him literary fame in later days. The
grandeur of a Hamlet or King Lear, however, is the work of a
master who learned from his own writing and long practice.

In his time, Shakespeare was the most popular playwright of

London. As centuries have passed, his genius eclipses all
others of his age; Jonson, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, Dekker,
Heywood—none approach the craft or the humanity of
character that marks the Bard's work. He took the art of
dramatic verse and honed it to perfection. He created the most
vivid characters of the Elizabethan stage. His usage of
language, both lofty and low, shows a remarkable wit and
subtlety. Most importantly, his themes are so universal that
they transcend generations to stir the imaginations of
audiences everywhere to this day.

His plays generally fall into four categories:

1. Pre-1594 (Richard III, The Comedy of Errors)

2. 1594–1600 (Henry V, Midsummer Night's Dream)
3. 1600–1608 (Macbeth, King Lear)
4. Post-1608 (Cymbeline, The Tempest)

The first period has its roots in Roman and medieval drama—
the construction of the plays, while good, is obvious and
shows the author's hand more brusquely than the later works.
The earliest Shakespeare also owes a debt to Christopher
Marlowe, whose writing probably gave much inspiration at the
onset of the Bard's career.

The second period showed more growth in style, and the

construction becoming less labored. The histories of this
period are Shakespeare's best, portraying the lives of kings
and royalty in most human terms. He also begins the
interweaving of comedy and tragedy, which would become
one of his stylistic signatures. His comedies mature in this
period as well, portraying a greater characterization in their
subjects.

The third period marks the great tragedies, and the principal
works which would earn the Bard his fame in later centuries.
His tragic figures rival those of Sophocles, and might well
have walked off the Greek stage straight onto the Elizabethan.
Shakespeare is at his best in these tragedies. The comedies
of this period, however, show Shakespeare at a literary
crossroads—moody and without the clear comic resolution of
previous comedies. Hence, the term "problem plays" to
describe them.
 The fourth period encompasses romantic tragicomedy.
Shakespeare at the end of his career seemed preoccupied
with themes of redemption. The writing is more serious yet
more lyrical, and the plays show Shakespeare at his most
symbolic. It is argued between scholars whether this period
owed more to Shakespeare's maturity as a playwright or
merely signified a changing trend in Elizabethan theatre at the
time.

History Tragedy Poetry

Comedy
 

All's Well That Ends Well  Henry IV, part 1  Antony and Cleopatra  The Sonnets 
As You Like It  Henry IV, part 2  Coriolanus  A Lover's Complaint 
The Comedy of Errors 
Henry V  Hamlet  The Rape of Lucrece 
Cymbeline 
Love's Labours Lost  Henry VI, part 1  Julius Caesar  Venus and Adonis 
Measure for Measure  Henry VI, part 2  King Lear  Funeral Elegy by W.S.
The Merry Wives of Windsor  Henry VI, part 3  Macbeth 
The Merchant of Venice  Henry VIII  Othello 
A Midsummer Night's Dream  King John  Romeo and Juliet 
Much Ado About Nothing  Richard II  Timon of Athens 
Pericles, Prince of Tyre 
Taming of the Shrew 
Richard III Titus Andronicus
The Tempest 
Troilus and Cressida 
Twelfth Night 
Two Gentlemen of Verona 
Winter's Tale

Final years and Shakespeare’s Death

Sometime between 1610 and 1613, Shakespeare left London

and moved back to Stratford, where his wife and married
daughters had been living all the while. By this time,
Shakespeare was a wealthy and well-known man. Thanks to
shrewd investments with the returns from his shares in
the Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare had become rich. He
owned the second-largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon. He
moved in lofty circles among prominent people he met
through his associations with the royal court and with wealthy
patrons like Southampton. He had made his name and a
successful career, and settled into a retirement that turned out
to be rather short. By the spring of 1616, Shakespeare fell ill
with some kind of illness; his precise ailment has been lost to
history. On 23 April 1616, his 52nd birthday, William
Shakespeare died. He was buried in Holy Trinity Church in
Stratford, the same place he was baptized. As one final
testament to his famous wit, he had his tombstone inscribed
with a rather hilarious curse: "Good friend for Jesus sake
forbear / To dig the dust enclosed here! / Blest be the man
that spares these stones, / And curst be he that moves my
bones." It was somehow a fitting way to draw the curtain on
Shakespeare's life.

In his memorial bust in Stratford (said to be one of only two

accurate representations of the way he actually looked),
Shakespeare holds a quill above an inscription that refers to
"all that he hath writ."17 Shakespeare was known to his
contemporaries as a great playwright, but there was no way of
knowing if future generations would remember him as such.
Most of his plays were never published, and printed only on
flimsy sheets used by the actors who performed them. In
1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, King's Men
actors John Heminge and Henry Condell collected his 36
plays and published them together as Mr. William
Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, a collection
now known as the First Folio. Without this volume, many of
Shakespeare's best-known plays, including Macbethand Julius
Caesar, would have been lost for good. 

Thus began the Cult of Shakespeare. In the 400 years since

his death, Shakespeare has been read, performed, translated
and studied more than any other writer.  Once all of the people
who knew Shakespeare personally had died, a version of his
life story circulated that was more myth than fact. Until the
late eighteenth century, Shakespeare was rumored to have
been a barely-literate genius son of a poor farmer who made
his way to London and somehow produced his matchless
body of work. Thanks to this unlikely (and untrue) biography,
some scholars began to question whether William
Shakespeare even wrote "Shakespeare's" plays in the first
place. Several candidates have been put forth as possible
"real" authors of Shakespeare's works, including Sir Francis
Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and
even Queen Elizabeth herself.

Serious scholars are nearly unanimous in finding such claims

bogus, however. The rather boring truth is that William
Shakespeare was a real person, that he received the type of
education a person would need to write the things he did, that he
went to London and enjoyed fame and fortune as a playwright.
What gave him his unique genius? How did Shakespeare's plays
transcend time and become Shakespeare's Plays? "How this
particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of
much of the world almost four hundred years after his death is one
of life's mysteries . In his will, he left the bulk of his possessions to
his eldest daughter, Susanna. Though entitled to a third of his
estate, little seems to have gone to his wife, Anne . The memorial
bust of Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford is
considered one of two authentic likenesses, because it was
approved by people who knew him. (The bust in the Folger's
Paster Reading Room, shown below , is a copy of this statue.) The
other such likeness is the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the
1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, produced seven
years after his death by his friends and colleagues from the King's
Men.
  

Shakespeare's Bust in the Folger's Paster Reading Room

The End