Life of William Shakespeare

-
Shakespeare was born on Stratford on Avon and baptized on 26 April 1564. His father John Shakespeare was a farmer's son from the neighbouring village of Snitterfield who came to stratford in about 1551. His mother Mary Arden was the daughter of a farmer. His friend Ben Johnson said about him that he knew 'small Latin and less Greek'. Stratford is located in Warwickshire. Nearby are the forest of Arden, castles of Warwick and Kenilworth.
Shakespeare gave up his studies at the age of 14. The character of Holofernes in Love's Labour Lost may suggest the occupation which he undertook.
In 1582, Shakespeare was married to Ann Hathway, the daughter of a peasant family of Shottery. Shakespeare after retirement left London and went back to stratford.
In about 1587 Shakespeare joined the burbage's company.
His poem Venus and Adonis is very popular. Soon he became part owner of the Globe and the Blackfriars theatre.
In 1597 he bought a house in stratford. He retired in the year 1611 and probably died on April 23 1616. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 24

-
Aristotle continues to give important points related to epic poetry. He says that just like tragedy, epic is also of various kinds such as simple, complex, that which depend upon character, and that which depends upon suffering. Other then this, the epic and tragedy are similar in the sense that both have the same constituent elements except for song and spectacle. There is also reversal, recognition, and suffering in the epic. The thought and diction of the tragedy must also be good. Homer had excelled in these two in his ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. The ‘Iliad’ is a story of suffering and is simple in structure while the ‘Odyssey’ is complex in structure because it has scenes of recognition and is based on character. The epic differs form a tragedy in length and meter . The proper length of a literary genre should be such that it’s beginning and end could be viewed as a complete whole. The poets of the present should try to compose poems which are limited in size. The epic, according t...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 26

-
Aristotle in the final chapter of The Poetics has compared the epic form of poetry and tragedy. He analyses which is the greater between the two. If the greater form of art is that which is the less vulgar one and if the greater form of art pleases the specific kind of audience then the art which appeals to every one is the vulgar one. And in fact, the performers tend to bring various unnecessary movements on the stage as if they would not be identified if they do not perform such actions. Bad flute players twist and twirl, if they have to represent ‘the quoit-throw’, or hustle the Corpyhaeus when they perform the ‘Scylla’. Tragedy is said to have the same defects. It could be compared to what the older actors said of the later ones; for, Myniscus used to call Callipides, ‘the ape’, because he over acted. The same view was presented for Pindarus. Thus tragedy is related to the epic art just as the later actors are related to the older ones. Thus the epic poetry is the higher form of p...
Read more

Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 20

-
Language viewed as a whole consists of the following parts - letter, syllable, connecting word, noun, verb, inflection or case and phrase or sentence. A letter is an indivisible sound but not any sound without intelligence. It is true that animals also utter indivisible sound but that sound cannot be called letter. These indivisible sound can be vowel, semi vowel or mute. A vowel has an audible sound which does not need the contact of the two organs of speech to be produced. A semi vowel such as s or r has an audible which needs this contact. The audible sound produced by a semi vowel is because of this contact. A mute even with the aid of this contact is not able to produce an audible sound, it needs to be combined with letters that possess some sort of sound such as g and d. The letters have different types of sounds depending upon the shape of the mouth while they are spoken and also on the places from where they originate, as aspirated or not aspirated, as short or long, as acute,...
Read more