William Shakespeare

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William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is generally regarded as the greatest English language playwright--indeed, the greatest English language writer--of all time. Many of his plays are required reading in school curricula throughout the English-speaking world and beyond; those taught in schools often include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet.

Evidently he was a devout Christian, because he wrote in his Will: "I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting."[1] Yet his work is also loved by people who are not religious, who consider it "the secular canon, or even the secular scripture."[2]


Shakespeare spent his early years in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire and is also known as "the Bard of Avon." Because of sharing the name "Stratford," the towns of Stratford, Ontario, in Canada and Stratford, Connecticut, have become the homes of Shakespeare festivals where his plays are performed on a regular basis.


The idea of an ill-educated (to his contemporaries) person coming among them and making a success was upsetting to the University-educated playwrights of the time. It is believed that the poet, Philip Green, was referring to Shakespeare when he wrote

There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers


The 'tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' is a reference to one of Shakespeare's plays, The Third Part of King Henry VI,[5] while 'shake-scene' is a pun or play on words on Shakespeare's name.


A long-standing theatrical superstition holds that it is bad luck to refer to Macbeth directly by its name while inside a theatre, and accordingly, actors traditionally refer to it obliquely as "the Scottish play." It is considered acceptable to voice the play's name only while rehearsing or performing the production itself.


The reverence in which Shakespeare is held, and the archaic language of his plays (from the same era as the King James translation of the Bible) should not obscure the fact that his plays were (and still are) fabulously successful.

He is also famous for his 154 sonnets, short poems written in a very strict rhyme scheme. The sonnets fall into series or sequences. Most of them are usually read as expressions of romantic or platonic love; some appear to be written to a married woman known in the sonnets as the "Dark Lady," some to a young man known as the "Fair Lord."


His tomb in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, England, reads as follows:[6]



List of Plays by Shakespeare[7]


Shakespeare f. Reuters.jpg




  • "Shakespeare" was spelled many ways before English spelling was standardized. Some of the more unexpected forms are "Shaxper," "Shaxberd," "Shaksper," and "Shake-Speare". The hyphenated version adding fuel to the ongoing Shakespeare authorship question.[8]

See also

External links


  1. Shakespeare's Last and Testament
  2. Hurrah for Dead White Males! - TIME
  3. Shakespeare
  4. In Search of Shakespeare, by Michael Wood. BBC Books, 2003.
  6. American minute for April 23
  7. Bibliography
  8. Shakespeare authorship

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