Fairies In A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare’s life had an important role in the development of his works. Bill Bryson was able to dig deep into Shakespeare’s life through acquiring records, accounts, and using logical speculation and concluded that Shakespeare had quite the interesting and adventurous life, starting in a grammar school and then moving on to theatre arts, travelling through cities and performing in different places, experiencing different things such as; different religions, different ethnic groups of people, his personal life and experiences, politics, and even social norms. Shakespeare’s life, according to the information that Bill Bryson was able to gather from a number of different sources, was filled with a variety of different factors one

Bryson states that a man by the name of Philip Henslowe kept a diary of multiple activities, “it included a recipe for curing deafness, notes on casting a spell, even advice on how to best pasture a horse” which Shakespeare could have used in his plays (Bryson, 70). A relation to this that this could be the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fairies used potions and magic, which could have were possibly inspired by the beliefs of Henslowe or a different person with similar beliefs and practices. Because of the fairies foreign nature to humans, it could be plausible that their personalities are based off of different ethnic groups. This theory could be acceptable due to the lack of knowledge of Shakespeare’s whereabouts, especially between

Bryson says that “Shakespeare’s marine allusions mostly depict a sea as a hostile and forbidding environment...the perspective one would expect from someone who wasn’t comfortably acquainted with it” which suggests that Shakespeare did not like travelling by sea or he may have had a poor experience at sea once. “Thou’dst shun a bear, But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea”, this is saying how one might turn and confront a bear rather than go into a raging sea (Lr. 3.4. 9-10). Shakespeare’s experiences would have probably been from an incident with a storm or he could have possibly been referring to a “storm” of emotions he or someone he knew had to deal with, also going along with King Lear’s mental state in King Lear.
Politics could have also played a role in the influence of Shakespeare’s writings. Bryson stated that Shakespeare was around the same place as two different different assassination attempts, one against the Queen of England and the other against the King and Parliament at once, both of these being foiled. This could have been an idea for betrayal, such as Edmund in King Lear, who betrayed both his father and his