Joseph henri moissan biography of william shakespeare

Macbeth , based on the history of an ancient Scottish king, Duncan, is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. Its theme is the danger of unrestrained ambition. Macbeth, a Scottish noble, meets three witches who predict that he will become king. Though he had been King Duncan's loyal general, Macbeth now wishes to fulfill the prophecy. His wife urges him to go along with her plan to murder the king while he is staying in their castle.

Though at first he worries about committing such an immoral act, Macbeth stabs the king to death and seizes the throne. Increasingly concerned that his enemies will rise against him, Macbeth slaughters many innocents before he is killed in battle. One of the most notable features of the play is the character of Lady Macbeth, who is more bloodthirsty and cold-hearted than her husband.

Shakespeare based King Lear on an old English legend. In Shakespeare's version, Lear, an old man, needs to decide how to divide up his kingdom among his daughters. He demands that they demonstrate their love for him. He fails to recognize that his two older daughters, who pretend affection, care only about getting the inheritance. By contrast, his youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play her sisters' game because she recognizes it is insincere.

Lear, however, is blind to the truth and banishes her. He realizes his mistake too late, after Cordelia dies. In the play's most powerful scene, the man who was once a great king is now ragged and in despair, wandering over the moors carrying Cordelia's lifeless body. In Othello a jealous husband is driven to murder when his trusted general, Iago, suggests that Othello's wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful.

Othello cannot see that Iago hates him and wishes to destroy him. He goes along with Iago's scheme to demonstrate proof of Desdemona's betrayal, and finally kills her. The play's subtitle, "The Moor of Venice," refers to the fact that Othello is a black African; his wife is white. Shakespeare uses black-white imagery throughout the play, especially in Iago's speeches, which demonstrate the villain's crude racism and contempt for women.

In James I —; see entry granted the Lord Chamberlain's Men a royal patent, and the company changed its name to the King's Men. This royal support helped to increase the status of theater professionals. James enjoyed plays, and the company performed at court several times a year. The plays that Shakespeare wrote in the final years of his career are sometimes classified as romances.

They conform less closely to conventional genres of comedy or tragedy, mixing elements from several genres within one work. The Winter's Tale is considered one of Shakespeare's finest plays. It begins as a tragedy but then shifts to pastoral comedy, or a comedy about country life. Leontes, king of Bohemia, irrationally suspects his friend, Polixenes, of having an affair with Leontes's wife.

He orders Polixenes killed and orders the wife, Hermione, thrown into prison where she gives birth to a daughter. Leontes orders this child to be killed as well, but instead she is adopted by shepherds. Polixines, too, escapes. Sixteen years later the action shifts and the tragic actions are resolved, often through wondrous events. The Tempest is Shakespeare's best-known play from this late period, and some scholars consider it his farewell to the theater, since he retired soon after producing it.

Magic plays a prominent part in the play, which concerns a powerful sorcerer, Prospero, whose brother stole his kingdom and set him adrift at sea with his baby daughter. They are saved by an enchantress, and live on a remote island for several years. Discovering that this untrustworthy brother will be passing near the island on a ship, Prospero conjures a storm that makes his brother a castaway on the island.

After much romantic plotting and scheming with his servant, the strange and demonic creature Ariel, Prospero sees to it that kingdoms and relationships are restored to their proper order. From to London theaters were closed because of plague in the city. The plague was a disease that killed nearly one-fourth of the city's population. Needing income, Shakespeare wrote two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece , for his patron, or financial supporter, the earl of Southampton.

These works are considered masterpieces of Elizabethan narrative poetry. A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story. Shakespeare's best-known poems, however, are his sonnet sequence, probably also composed around this time but not published until Sonnets are fourteen-line poems written in iambic pentameter—ten syllables in each line, with the emphasis on the second syllable in each word or phrase.

The sonnet sequence, in which individual poems are arranged to develop a particular theme or argument, had been made popular by Philip Sidney —; see entry. Shakespeare's contribution to the genre established him as one of the finest poets in the English language. The poems of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence form an extended dialogue between the poet or speaker and two mysterious characters: a "friend" who appears to be a young man, and a "dark lady.

They are considered masterpieces that, alone, would have established Shakespeare's reputation as a poetic genius. Shakespeare's career was quite successful. He earned a comfortable income from his plays and from his share in the profits of the theater company. In his father had obtained the right to have a coat-of-arms a symbol representing a family , and Shakespeare inherited this after his father's death in The playwright was also granted the right to call himself a gentleman—a distinguished achievement in an age that often considered actors to be disreputable.

In Shakespeare purchased a large house, New Place, in Stratford. This became his family home. Over the years he invested in additional property in Stratford. He retired there around , and lived quietly with his family. He died there on his birthday, April 23, , at age He was buried at Holy Trinity Church. While most critics and historians believe that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the writer of the plays now credited to him, many others over the years have doubted it.

Most point to the limited education Shakespeare received in Stratford and note the vast knowledge displayed by the author of the plays. Some find evidence that the plays were written from the perspective of a member of the aristocracy, not the son of a glove maker. Others point to the lack of any reference to a playwright from Stratford in the documents of the era.

These skeptics have suggested other authors for the plays, primarily the scientist and writer Francis Bacon —; see entry , Christopher Marlowe , William Stanley Earl of Derby; — , and Edward de Vere Earl of Oxford; — Most such claims have been discredited, however. Shakespeare's work was so admired in his own time that, in , two actors compiled his plays and published them in the First Folio.

The First Folio did not contain Pericles , which is not accepted by most scholars as Shakespeare's work. Actors, audiences, and readers through the centuries have continued to find new excitement in Shakespeare's work. As his contemporary Ben Jonson — wrote in a preface to the First Folio , Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time!

Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. New York : Nan A. Talese, Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York : Riverhead Books, Braunmuller, A. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. New York: Penguin Classics, Charney, Maurice. All of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, Fraser, Russell. Shakespeare: The Later Years.

Greenblatt, Stephen. New York: W. Norton, Prefatory Material to the First Folio, Shakespeare Homepage. Shakespeare Online. Shakespeare is universally recognized as the foremost writer in the English language to date. The thirty-seven plays associated with his name, including the major tragedies Hamlet, King Lear , Othello, and Macbeth, and his romances and comedies, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream among them, have been translated into many languages and have crossed all kinds of cultural divide.

His poetry, in particular his intricately woven and fiercely passionate love sonnets, have stirred the senses of reader and critic alike for generations past and will do so for generations to come. Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England , and he was probably educated in the s at the free grammar school there known as the King's New School.

His father, John Shakespeare, has been described as a glover or whittawer, which means someone who works with animal skins. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was from a noted local family, the daughter of Robert Arden, John Shakespeare's landlord. At some point, perhaps in when his father was high bailiff mayor of the town and responsible for Stratford's entertainment, Shakespeare must have first seen actors perform as traveling players visiting on tour.

In about , Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a rich yeoman's daughter. The marriage was undertaken during a notable downturn in the affairs of Shakespeare's father. Having been a respected and confident town official during Shakespeare's earliest years — initiating an application for gentry status in , for example — during John Shakespeare's alderman status was withdrawn.

Although controversy surrounds the possible reasons for Shakespeare's marriage to a woman who was eight years his senior, three children were produced from the marriage. Susanna was the first-born in with a pair of twins produced in — a son, Hamnet, who died in childhood, and a daughter, Judith. Whether Shakespeare had to leave Stratford for some reason, or whether he joined a visiting touring company such as the Queen's Men, we first hear of him as a London playhouse personality seven years after the birth of the twins.

This is when he is mentioned in a pamphlet called A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance written by a writer and playwright named Robert Greene. This text was written while the writer knew that he was dying, and in it he urged his fellow well-educated peers, Christopher Marlowe , Thomas Nashe, and George Peele, to forsake the stage.

By this time, scholars believe that the player Shakespeare had not only embarked on his English history cycle with the three Henry VI plays, but had also presented the highly successful if violent Titus Andronicus as well. In this play a woman is raped, has both her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and a queen unknowingly eats her own children, baked in a pie.

However, in a matter of a few years Shakespeare was also provably capable of writing the extraordinarily poised and tragic Romeo and Juliet.

Joseph henri moissan biography of william shakespeare

Here two young lovers, divided by their families' antagonism to one another, meet, marry, and die while speaking the most beautiful words of love written for the English stage. By , Shakespeare, as a sharer member of the acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was entitled to a portion of the company's takings. This status was acquired through his investment in things for the company like costumes, playbooks, and props.

However, there is some evidence to show that Shakespeare wanted to be perceived more as a serious poet than as either an actor or a playwright. In and he published his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece , both dedicated to his supposed patron Henry Wroithesley, 3rd earl of Southampton. This period also marks the time when it is believed he had begun his sonnets, published as a collection in , with Southampton a candidate for the "Fair Youth" to whom the first possibly allude.

The fourteen-line sonnet, quietly evolving in form since its first emergence in fourteenth-century Italy, had reached England through poet-courtiers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey earlier in the sixteenth century. In the hands of Shakespeare, many sonnet conventions were challenged, questioning the poetic expectation of comparing one's lover to nature, for example.

Thus Shakespeare chose to use the sonnet to engage, not only with the passions and intellect of the person to whom the sonnet is addressed, but even with poetry itself. It is interesting that Greene chose to mark out Shakespeare's verse as his primary objection to him as an "upstart. However, Shakespeare's energy when approaching his plays did not hold back on inventiveness and variety.

The blank verse form reached its apotheosis with Shakespeare, but a few of his early plays contain sonnet moments too. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, given by the Chorus, is a sonnet, and later in this lovers' play, one is interwoven through the dialogue when the protagonists first speak together act 1, scene 5, lines 90 — By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Lord Chamberlain's Men had rebuilt their Shoreditch amphitheater called the "Theater" as the Globe on London's Bankside the south bank of the Thames.

They were now the most well established of the city's playing companies. By this time Shakespeare had begun to write his heavyweight tragedies for them, beginning with Hamlet published in If Titus Andronicus was violent, and Romeo and Juliet tragically romantic, Hamlet was Shakespeare's play concerned with the human mind. The eponymous prince of Denmark , whose father's ghost tells him how he was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, sets out on a course of revenge, while at the same time, as the philosopher prince studying at Wittenburg University, he questions life and death and any decision involving them.

Shakespeare is creative with the revenge tragedy form, using the vengeful mindset of the main character to explore highly philosophical questions. Hamlet is the most widely quoted and most investigated of Shakespeare's plays, attracting a phenomenal amount of scholarly study, just as much because of the questions it poses as because of the answers it fails to give.

In , after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of James I, the company were renamed the King's Men, acquiring royal patronage status. In they also acquired a new, small, more select playhouse known as the Blackfriars that was to be used alongside the Globe, the public playhouse. Shares in this venture, which company members were given, were very lucrative acquirements for the actors — including Shakespeare.

This period marked the writing of plays such as Othello, first performed — and published in the s, King Lear of , published in , and Macbeth, again c. The plot lines and characters of these tragedies continued to demonstrate the extraordinary range of Shakespeare's mind as he dealt with, for example, jealousy and deception in Othello ; madness, mercy, and true filial love in King Lear ; and the dangers of encouraged ambition in Macbeth.

In about , however, at the peak of his writing powers, Shakespeare was to give up his career on London's stage. By , Shakespeare had returned to Stratford and the substantial home called New Place that he had bought for his family. It was there that he was to die in of a fever, reputedly after a rowdy visit from his friend and colleague Ben Jonson.

He died where he began, therefore, not in London where he made his name, but in the Stratford of his birth. Back in , gentry status had finally been achieved for his family, and the payee for this was likely to have been William. He died, therefore, not only rich, but respected and esteemed in his community, to become later in the minds of many the man most associated with the finest use of poetic English.

In the historical context of his day-to-day existence as an actor and a companyman, Shakespeare's significant output as a dramatic writer can be interpreted as simple good business sense that resulted in his family's bettered status at home. By writing good plays he drew audiences to playhouses in which he had financial interests.

Shakespeare's plays did not, in fact, belong to him, but were the property of his company. Despite evidence that Shakespeare was involved in the printing of his poetry, there is no proof of authorial concern with the printed publication of his plays. His dramas were only collected as serious "works" seven years after his death in for what we now know as Shakespeare's "First Folio," put together by his fellow actors.

A man of extraordinary talent, however, at a time when there were no rulebooks for the English language or its lexicon, his contribution to what we now perceive as beauty through dramatic story and words is inestimable. Shakespeare, William. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Norton facsimile, prepared by Charlton Hinman. New York and London, The Norton Shakespeare.

Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. Based on the Oxford Edition. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edited by Stephen Booth. New Haven , Dobson, Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. Oxford, Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage, — Cambridge, U. Kermode, Frank. Shakespeare's Language. New York , William Shakespeare drew upon elements of classical literature to create distinctly English forms of poetry and drama.

His work was hardly limited to strict classical idioms, however; he successfully utilized a much broader range of literary sources than any of his contemporaries. Moreover, his extraordinary linguistic abilities—his gift for complex poetic imagery, mixed metaphor, and brilliant puns—combined with a penetrating insight into human nature, are widely recognized as the makings of a unique literary genius.

Over the centuries Shakespeare's works have obtained an unparalleled critical significance and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of world literature. Family and Early Life William Shakespeare was probably born on April 23, , though the precise date of his birth is uncertain. He was the eldest of the five children of John Shakespeare, a tradesman, and Mary Arden Shakespeare, the daughter of a gentleman farmer.

It is thought that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school, where the main course of instruction was in Latin. There is no evidence that he attended college. In , he married Ann Hathaway of Stratford; they would have three children together. Shakespeare's life from this date until , when he became known as a dramatist, is not well documented.

Early Work Shakespeare's first plays, the three parts of the Henry VI history cycle, were presented in — He also wrote a pair of narrative poems directly modeled after Ovid's Metamorphoses : Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece These works, which acknowledged the contemporary fashion for poems written with mythological themes, were immensely successful, and established Shakespeare as a poet of the first rank.

Success as Actor and Playwright Shakespeare further enhanced his reputation as a professional actor and playwright when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a well-regarded acting company formed in The success of the Lord Chamberlain's Men is largely attributable to the fact that after joining the group in , Shakespeare wrote for no other company.

In , shortly after his accession to the throne, James I granted the Lord Chamberlain's Men a royal patent, and the company's name was changed to the King's Men to reflect the king's direct patronage. Surviving records of Shakespeare's business transactions indicate that he benefited financially from his long career in the theater.

By , with his fortune made and his reputation as the leading English dramatist unchallenged, he appears to have largely retired to Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare died on April 23, He was buried in the chancel of Trinity Church in Stratford. Publication History The publication history of Shakespeare's plays is extremely complex and the subject of much scholarly debate.

The earliest collected edition of his dramas, known as the First Folio, was compiled by two fellow actors and published posthumously in The First Folio, which classifies the dramas into distinct genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, contains thirty-six of the thirty-seven plays now believed to be written by Shakespeare. Of the works included, thirteen had never before been published.

The plays in this group, such as The Comedy of Errors — , The Taming of the Shrew — , and Love's Labour's Lost — , generally adhere closely to established comedic forms. This group, which also includes The Tempest , is characterized by an emphasis on themes of separation and loss. These plays typically include a wandering journey that ultimately results in a reunion amid a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Eight of the ten history plays collectively trace the English monarchy from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century. This last work presents the king as the triumphant leader of his people in a glorious battle against the French. Within the history plays Shakespeare demonstrated his capacity for investing plot with extraordinary dramatic tension, and demonstrated his flair for original characterization through the use of subtle, ironic language.

The Roman plays drew their inspiration from histories of classical antiquity. The major tragedies of this type, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra — , explore the themes of political intrigue and personal revenge and are distinguished by their clear, poetic discourse and ironic representation of historical incidents. The four great tragedies are Hamlet — , regarded by many critics as Shakespeare's finest work, King Lear , Macbeth , which explores the issue of regicide, and Othello , a story of domestic intrigue set in the Venetian Republic.

In these works Shakespeare characteristically presents the fall of the heroes in terms that suggest a parallel collapse of all human values or a disordering of the universe itself. Although frequently judged by critics to be of a lesser rank than the great tragedies, Romeo and Juliet — remains one of the most frequently performed of Shakespeare's dramas.

Shakespeare's Sonnets The Sonnets are also considered a central work in the Shakespeare canon. Shakespeare's sonnets are arranged in a narrative order. Their brilliant versification and subtle analysis of human emotion are together regarded as the work of a unique poetic genius. Consequently, scholars often place the Sonnets on an equal level with Shakespeare's dramas.

Dramatic Influences Shakespeare's approach to drama was eclectic. He appropriated stylistic elements from Roman classicism specifically comedy as defined by Plautus and Terence and tragedy by Seneca , medieval morality plays, French popular farce, and Italian drama such as the improvised comedic forms of the commedia dell'arte. Shakespeare's use of these sources was not purely imitative, however; he experimented with traditional forms in an original way.

His surviving body of work includes 38 plays, sonnets and two narrative poems, the majority of which he penned between and While much of Shakespeare's biography is unknown, murky or subject to dispute, historians have managed to verify factual data through his own writings, the works of his contemporaries and historical documents.

The Bard of Avon, as William Shakespeare is also known, was the child of a leather merchant and glover, John Shakespeare. His mother was from a family of landed gentry. In the absence of records detailing Shakespeare's early education, historians guess he attended a nearby school where he learned to read and write English as well as Latin.

In , when he was just 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior. They would have three children, a daughter in and a set of twins in They lost their only son, Hamnet, when the boy was 11 years old. Daughters Susanna and Judith would live to be 66 and 77, respectively. From until , very little information is available regarding the Shakespeare household or the bard himself.

During this period that historians refer to as the writer's lost years, only a scant legal document or two gives evidence of Shakespeare's existence. Over the years, various biographers have speculated that he may have been a poacher on the run from a disgruntled landowner, a horse-minder at a London theater, or more probably, a local schoolmaster.

Also during his lost years, the bard was devoting a good portion of his time to playwriting. By , solid evidence shows that one if not more of his plays was underway on London stages. The first of his plays in production was probably "Henry IV, Part One," an historical work which not only chronicles the active years of the monarch's reign but also introduces his son Hal and Henry Percy, or Hotspur, a rival.

The bard had established himself in London prior to , as evidenced by a mention in the London Times by a fellow playwright. His writings have been compiled in various iterations of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which include all of his plays, sonnets, and other poems. William Shakespeare continues to be one of the most important literary figures of the English language.

Although his professional career was spent in London, he maintained close links with his native town. This suggests he divided his time between Stratford and London a two or three-day commute. In his later years, he may have spent more time in Stratford-upon-Avon than scholars previously thought. On his father's death in , William Shakespeare inherited the old family home in Henley Street part of which was then leased to tenants.

Further property investments in Stratford followed, including the purchase of acres of land in Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April at the age of He is buried in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity. This means there is the possibility of you seeing more adverts from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on other websites that you visit.

No birth records exist, but an old church record indicates that William Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, Shakespeare was the third child of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker and leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local heiress to land. John held official positions as alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor.

Eventually, he recovered somewhat and was granted a coat of arms in , which made him and his sons official gentleman. John and Mary had eight children together, though three of them did not live past childhood. Their first two children—daughters Joan and Margaret—died in infancy, so William was the oldest surviving offspring. Anne died at age 7, and Joan was the only sibling to outlive William.

He attended until he was 14 or 15 and did not continue to university. The uncertainty regarding his education has led some people question the authorship of his work. Hathaway was from Shottery, a small village a mile west of Stratford. Shakespeare was 18, and Anne was 26 and, as it turns out, pregnant. Their first child, a daughter they named Susanna, was born on May 26, Two years later, on February 2, , twins Hamnet and Judith were born.

Hamnet died of unknown causes at age One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from local landlord Sir Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant schoolmaster in Lancashire. By , there is evidence Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in London and possibly had several plays produced.

Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention and patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first and second published poems: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece Scholars broadly categorize the sonnets in groups based on two unknown subjects that Shakespeare addresses: the Fair Youth sonnets the first and the Dark Lady sonnets the last The identities of the aristocratic young man and vexing woman continue to be a source of speculation.

Some sources describe Shakespeare as a founding member of the company, but whatever the case, he became central to its success. Initially, he was an actor and eventually devoted more and more time to writing. Records show that Shakespeare, who was also a company shareholder, had works published and sold as popular literature. They were printed in in quarto, an eight-page pamphlet-like book.

By the end of , Shakespeare had likely written 16 of his 37 plays and amassed some wealth.