William Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564 to John Shakespeare, a successful leather merchant and alderman, and Mary Arden, a local heiress. Their family lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it is believed that William Shakespeare attended King Edward VI School, although records of his education are scarce at best. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582 while she was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. Two years later, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Unfortunately, Hamnet died when he was eleven. After the birth of the twins, seven years passed in which no records of shakespeare can be found. Theories that explain what he may have been doing include: he went into hiding for poaching on Sir Thomas Lucy’s land, he worked as an assistant schoolmaster in Lancashire, and, most accepted, he moved to London and worked as an aspiring actor. Records show that Shakespeare was working as an actor in london by 1592. By the 1590s, Shakespeare was working as a managing partner for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a successful and popular acting company in London. Shakespeare was able to start publishing his …show more content…
As he continued to write, he began forming his own style of play using unrhymed iambic pentameter with occasional prose or poetry in order to give himself a more dynamic flow of words. Most of Shakespeare’s early plays were historical, such as Richard II, but during this time he also wrote some of his most famous comedies and tragedies. Romeo and Juliet, arguably Shakespeare’s most famous play, was written fairly early in his career, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Merchant of Venice were written at this time. After Shakespeare’s historical plays, he wrote mostly comedies until around 1600. 1600 saw a shift in genre from mainly comedies to a majority of tragedies and tragicomedies, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and The