Good friend, for Jesus’s sake, forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here.Blest be the man that spares

these stonesAnd cursed be he that moves

my bones.

William Shakespeare (23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)

All his life is under the sign of probability. Even the lines on his tombstone throw us in the atmosphere of an epoch. If his plays and poems are the monument of a remarkable genius, they are also the monument of a remarkable age.

23 April 1564 – William, the third son of John and Mary Shakespeare was born at Stratford.

1582 - early age of 18 – married to Anne Hathaway (Susannah his first daughter was born, two years later his twins Hamnet and Judith were born.)

1586 - He leaves Stratford at 22 to seek employment in London. For a time he worked at the Blackfriars Theatre where he prepared old plays for public performance, acted occasionally, etc. He met Lord of Southampton who became his protector.

To the public theatre of the 16th century Shakespeare came as actor, playwright and shareholder in theatrical undertakings.

Much speculation evolved from the few known facts of his life:

- of his life it is clear that the Stratford man wrote the plays and that he had a wider reading and more opportunities for mingling with the GREAT than is sometimes realized. In the years that followed, until the Globe was burnt down on 29 June 1613 during the first performance of Henry VIII, the theatre dominated his life.

- of his personality, it can be affirmed that he had, in an absolute form, the intuition far gathering every “unconsidered trifle”, and every weighty matter, that could profit his art, with, in addition, the concentration which is a necessary attribute of GENIUS.

- of his art in its relationship to ideas, it cannot be disputed that he held to a consistent outlook. In human conduct he was possessed by the conception of loyalty and disloyalty and their consequences in human life. In the exercise of the passions, he contemplated the strange conflict of REASON and EMOTION and the disorder that arose when reason was obliterated.

He allowed his characters a freedom to live their own lives to the uttermost confines of good and evil, but he was conscious that they existed in a moral world, functioning under a divine Providence.

He wrote always for the contemporary theatre, manipulating the Elizabethan stage with great resource and invention. To satisfy the audience was his primary purpose as well as himself. He is known as an actor.

He had a range of imagery which was more comprehensive than in any other poet and remains a proof of the universality of his interest. Unfortunately, the conditions of his period did not permit of the regular and authorized publications of his plays.

1590 – Henry VI 1592 – Richard III; the Comedy of

Errors (comic situation with twin brothers and twin servants and mistaken identity)

1593 – Titus Andronicus; The Taming of the Shrew; Venus and Adonis (poem)

1594 – The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a romantic comedy; Love’s Labour Lost, about courtly life and graceful manners. Romeo and Juliet, tragedy.

1595 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, comedy, no play in Shakespeare is so original, so ingenious, or so perfectly designed.

1596 – Hamnet dies at the age of 11; The Merchant of Venice

1598 – together with actors from The Barbage family, Shakespeare laid foundation for the GLOBE. Much Ado About Nothing

1599 – Julius Caesar; As You Like It; Twelfth Night, the last and finest of the romantic comedy full of symbol and reality.

1600 – Hamlet, the earliest of the great tragedies, is the most self-conscious. The renaissance atmosphere of art, ostentation, learning, and crime, governs a play in which the central character is himself a renaissance scholar prince, clever, melancholic, introspective; The Merry Wives of Windsor

1602 – All’s Well that Ends Well1603 – he joins the Royal Company of Players1604 – Measure for Measure; Othello in the

tragedy his vision seems deeper and his powers

1605 – King Lear; Macbeth in verse and dramatic genius are at their highest

1606 – Anthony and Cleopatra; Coriolanus

The great tragedies share some characteristics; each portrays some noble figure, caught in a difficult situation, when some weakness, or bias, of his nature is exposed; upon his action depends not only his own fate, but that of an entire nature. Each of the play is so made that it can appeal to different audiences at different levels of intelligence.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609 but they were probably written between 1595-1599; 154 in number and they explored personal relations in friendship and in love, the impression of the passage of time, an awareness of the possible range of human feelings, of the existence of complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion, death. Some of them were themes later dramatized in the plays.

1610 – The Winter’s Tale1611 – The Tempest; Shakespeare

retired at New Place, a small estate in Stratford

23 April, 1616 – aged 52, he dies and is buried in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.