William Shakespeare Research Paper

William Shakespeare is known as the greatest playwright and poet in the history of English literature. However, there is little information on his life. William Shakespeare’s birth date is still unknown but many believe that he was born in April 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon. His parents were John and Mary Shakespeare. “Shakespeare presumably attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have received an education in Latin, but he did not go on to either Oxford or Cambridge universities” (Bloom 1). There is very little information on Shakespeare up until his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582. They had three children, the first born, Susanna, and a set of twins, Hamnet and Judith. Shakespeare worked as an actor, playwright, and a poet. In

Sonnets are a form of poetry that consists of fourteen lines with any number of formal rhyme schemes. Shakespeare’s sonnets consist of 154 sonnets and were broken down into two groups: sonnets 1-126 talked about a handsome friend and sonnets 127-152 talk about the “Dark Lady” which the poet loves. Shakespeare’s sonnets, composed probably sometime between 1590 and 1600, are very different than those of other contemporaries of Shakespeare’s time because “they are not based on the traditional Petrarchan theme of a proud, virtuous lady and an abject, scorned lover” (“Sonnets of Shakespeare”) and the sequence of the poems are unclear. His sonnets were also not traditional. “The emotions he expresses in his sonnets have a depth and complexity, an intensity, that can be encountered elsewhere only in the speeches of some of his greatest dramatic creations” (“Sonnets of Shakespeare”). Shakespeare had a way to convey a particular image with the right feeling or idea. He also developed his own sonnet form, the Shakespearean sonnet form, with which Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard Surrey experimented earlier in the century. The main reason that Shakespeare’s sonnets are so popular is because the sonnets never fail to show human experience in the best possible ways. “The opening lines of the sonnets show a remarkable number of questions and commands that heighten the reader’s sense” (“Sonnets of Shakespeare”) of the