William Shakespeare was an accomplished actor, writer, and poet in the 16th century. He had a variety of work in a large span of categories such as narratives, sonnets, plays, and poems. He is most-commonly known for his many plays. Yet, there are many things that most people do not know about him nor his life.
William Shakespeare was born on or around April 23, 1564. Scholars believe this was his birthdate, anyhow. He was born to John Shakespeare, a glove-maker and trader and to Mary Arden who was the daughter of a farmer. He was actually his mother’s third child but the only one to make it past infancy. In 1552, his father moved to Stratford, “and rapidly became a prominent figure in the town’s business and politics” before rising to bailiff, the highest positioned official in the town (poetryfoundation.org 2). His father was a very successful man, popular in the town for his excellence in his craft until “his prosperity declined markedly and he withdrew from public life” in about 1575 (poetryfoundation.org 2). Then, in 1596, due to his son’s great success, he was “granted a coat of arms by the
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Even though Shakespeare was a member, and shareholder, of Lord Chamberlin’s Men, many of the texts that have survived from the 1590’s “imply that Shakespeare preferred to work alone” but there is no way of telling what all has been lost over the centuries (Ousby 850). In his career, Shakespeare had written over thirty plays. His plays are generally separated into four totally different categories: romances, tragedies, comedies, and histories. When most people think of Shakespearian tragedies, the pieces that usually come to mind are “Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus” (Ryan