William Shakespeare

 

Where I Live(ed):

Stratford-upon-Avon, England

Blog: none available

Website: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

 

About Me:

I enjoy comedy and melodrama.  I am quite proud of my sonnet style.  I found in the conventional 14-line lyric with its fixed rhyme scheme a vehicle for inexhaustible technical innovations.  The restrictive nature of the sonnet generates a paradoxical freedom of invention that is the life of the form--and for the expression of emotions and ideas ranging from the frivolous to the tragic.  I also like to invent new structural techniques for the English Language.

 

 

Date of Birth:

April 23, 1564

Date of Death:

April 23, 1616

Sex:

Male

Political Views:

I support the monarchy as I need their patronage

Religious Views:

Church of England (officially...but mom upheld Roman Catholic views) - conservative

Christened at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564

 

Status:

• married to Ann Hathaway 

Children:

Susanna, 1583-1649; Hamnet, 1585-1596; and his twin, Judith, 1585-1662

Looking for:

Friendship, networking

Occupation:

English playwright, poet, and actor

 

Interests/Hobbies:

• Avoiding the Black Death during much of 1593-1594
• Latin, rhetoric, composition, oration, versification, and the monuments of Roman literature 
• Traveling actor
• Schoolmaster
• principal writer for the successful Lord Chamberlain's Men

 

Accomplishments:

• The Comedy of Errors (1590)
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591)
• Love's Labour's Lost (1593)
• Henry VI (1592)
• Richard III (1594)
• Titus Andronicus (1593)
• The Taming of the Shrew (1594)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
• Merchant of Venice (1596)
• Much Ado about Nothing (1598)
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599)
• As You Like It (1600)
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night (1600)
• Romeo and Juliet (1596)
• Julius Caesar (1599)
• Hamlet (1601)
• King John (1596)
• Richard II (1595)
• All's Well That Ends Well (1602)
• Troilus and Cressida (1602)
• Measure for Measure (1604)
• Othello (1604)
• King Lear (1605)
• Macbeth (1606)

 

Education:

• Stratford Grammar School

 

Favorite Books:

Aesop, Caesar, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Seneca

 

Favorite Movies:

 

Favorite Music:

Dafne by Jacopo Peri, librettos by Ottavio Rinuccini, operas by Claudio Monteverdi, any smaller lute, harpsicord and viol pieces.

 

Who I'd Like to Meet and Why:

Plutarch because I based my plays Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus on his Parallel Lives. Quintilian and Erasmus because I spent so much time studying their writings.

  

Friends:

• Queen Elizabeth I
• King James I
• Bishop of Worcester
• James Burbage
• Christopher Marlowe
• John Heminge
• Henry Condell
•  

 

Sports:

• participant in the Cotswold Games
• enjoy checkers and chess

 

Favorite Quote:

 one of my own--

"This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror

But when it first did help to wound itself.

... Naught shall make us rue

If England to itself do rest but true."

 

Works Cited:

 

"William Shakespeare." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.

Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2008 < http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC>.

 

"William Shakespeare." Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 1: Writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance Before 1660. Gale Research, 1992. Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2008 < http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC>.

 

"William Shakespeare." Almanac of Famous People, 9th ed. Thomson Gale, 2007. Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2008. < http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC>.