William Shakespeare Research Paper

William Shakespeare is known all over the world as probably the greatest English author in the entire world. Shakespeare has written 154 sonnets and thirty-seven plays in his lifetime, and many of the more popular plays including; Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Hamlet. He also wrote the very popular sonnet that starts off, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…”. These few examples are just a fraction of the great works of Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was supposedly born April 23, 1564. Because Shakespeare was born in a time when documents of people weren’t really kept, no one is completely sure when he was born, but we do know that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, so it is assumed that he was born on the 23. Shakespeare was born

Sometime around the early 1560s a Bubonic Plague spread around London, killing somewhere around a third of the population. Unfortunately, many of the infants and newborns at the time were at great risk of getting infected with this plague, so it was very fortunate that Shakespeare survived this plague as an infant. Others weren’t so lucky; “In Henley Street, a couple of doors from John Shakespeare’s house, four of the children of miller Roger Green died, as did two sons of the town clerk Richard Simmons,” (Kay 19). It was even more astounding that Shakespeare lived seeing as how, regrettably, two of his siblings had died during the late 1550s and early

“So he adopts the posture of the malcontent satirist in his outburst to Polonius in Act IV” (Kay 279). But in opposition to this, at some points of the play, Hamlet shifts between a more uplifting and merry disposition, to a much darker, profound one. For example, Hamlet makes the comment, “the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge,” which is a couple of lines from the play, The True Tragedy of Richard III. “It’s as if, through an apparent joke, Hamlet employs a historical precedent to classify his duty for revenge as a act in accordance with divine providence and justice” (Kay 279). Lastly, Macbeth is another play, written in 1606, that is still extremely popular today. Macbeth deals with a lot of political material from 1606. There is a lot of talk about equivocators committing treason in the play. Like a few of Shakespeare’s other plays, Macbeth presents “Prophecies, dreams, and oracles which are related to history, politics, and illustrate the vagaries of individual interpretations of events and signs,” (Kay