Complete Poems

English poet and playwright born in 1564, in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and died in 1616. His birthday is celebrated on April 23 and it is known that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. Stratford-Upon-Avon was then a prosperous market town, one of the most important in the county of Warwickshire. His father, John Shakespeare, was a successful merchant and member of the town council. His mother, Mary Arden, belonged to one of Warwickshire's most notable families. Shakespeare attended Stratford High School, where the children of local merchants learned Greek and Latin and received an education appropriate to their middle class. Few facts are known of Shakespeare's life between the time he left high school and his appearance in London as an actor and playwright around 1599. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, and the couple had three children: Suzanna (born 1583), and twins Hamnet and Judith (born 1585). The first reference to Shakespeare as an actor and playwright is found in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592), an autobiographical pamphlet by the London playwright Robert Greene, where the writer is accused of plagiarism. At this time Shakespeare was already known in London, although the exact date of his appearance in the capital is not known. Due to the closure of London's theatres in 1592-94, Shakespeare composed two narrative poems at this time: Venus and Adonis (published in 1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (published in 1594). In the winter of 1594 he joined the most important Elizabethan theatre company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, where he remained until the end of his career. The company owed its privileged place among other theatre companies to Shakespeare's popularity until the theatre was closed by the English Parliament in 1642. In 1598 the Globe Theatre was opened, the theatre of the company with which Shakespeare had associated, built by the actor and impresario Richard Burbage in the borough of Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. After the accession of James I to the throne (in 1603) the company The Lord Chamberlain's Men passed to royal trusteeship, and its name was changed to The King's Men. Shakespeare's passage through the stage is associated with brief performances: Adam in the play As You Like It and the ghost (Ghost) in Hamlet. After having bought some estates in Strattford, Shakespeare retired to his homeland in 1610, while maintaining contact with London. The Globe Theatre was destroyed by fire on June 23, 1613, during a performance of the play Henry VIII. His 37 plays generally fall into three categories: comedies, historical dramas and tragedies. Among the historical dramas, the genre he first cultivated, Richard III (Richard III), Richard II (Richard II) and Henry IV (Henry IV) stand out. His comedies include Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, the serious-minded comedy The Merchant of Venice , As You Like It , and A Midsummer Night's Dream . Tragedy is not a form that belongs exclusively to a certain period in the evolution of Shakespeare's work. Under Marlowe's influence, the form of tragedy was already found in the plays that dramatized episodes of English history. In Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar , Shakespeare combined historical perspective with a tragic interpretation of human conflicts. The period in which Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies began with Hamlet, written between 1600-1602, followed by Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, all of them composed between 1601 and 1608. In the last phase of Shakespeare's career are the lighter-toned plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Thempest. Some of Shakespeare's works were published during Shakespeare's lifetime, sometimes in pirated editions, but it was not until 1623 that the "Folio" edition appeared, compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two actors who had worked with Shakespeare. In the eighteenth century the plays were published by Alexander Pope (in 1725 and 1728) and Samuel Johnson (in 1765), but only with Romanticism was the depth and extent of Shakespeare's genius understood. In the twentieth century, the tendency to consider Shakespeare's work as part of the dramatic contexts that gave rise to it was reinforced.