William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

Reasearcher’s have concluded that there is very little that is known about the life of  William Shakespear even though he is known as the best playwright.

            William Shakespeare   was born in the year  1564. William was the third child of John and Mary Shakespeare. He had seven siblings  and five out of the set survived to adulthood. In the  days of Shakespeare’s childhood, children were seen as miniature adults and were trained for the upcoming future to take their place as adults.There is not much evudence of information about his childhood,however, we can assume that this was the case with Shakespeare.

            William Shakespeare had become a teenage father and in those days , whenever a boy gets a girl pregnant he was bound to marry her and Shakespeare took up that initiative to marry th woman he got pregnant. This may have been because he did not want his child to be referred to as a ‘bastard’, which is a child that is look down on in disgrace. Shakespeare shows the trouble it is being a ‘bastard child’  in many of his plays, For example, in the play,’Much Ado About  Nothing’.

             There is no evidence of how Shakespeare supported his children but after he got involved with the theatre, he had become more financially statble and was able to better support his family. The theatre  (the Globe Theatre ) was opened in  1599.  It feature works by Shakespeare and many other playwrights. Shakes peare benefited a lot from the theatre  because he was a shareholder in the company.

            In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII , a canon went off to mark the entrance of the king, and a stray spark set the thatch roof aflame. In one hour, the theatre was destroyed. Reconstruction of the Globe began immediately  and it was finished by June 1614. Performances continued until 1642, when the Puritans, who found  ‘theatre’ to be  vulgar and intolerable, shut all theatres down. Two years later the Globe was levelled to make way for tenement dwellings.

 Some of William Shakespeare's plays are:

1)    Hamlet

2)    Macbeth

3)    King Lear

4)    Richard  -the third

5)     Much Ado about Nothing

The Elizabethan Theatre

 The Elizabethan theatre or English Renaissance theatre, was derived from medieval theatre traditions. Many of these traditions involved mystery plays - plays that retold stories from the Bible. Chester Mystery plays, for example, were a cycle of forty-eight plays which were performed  throughout the year, covering stories starting from the creation to the Last Judgement. These plays were performed on moveable vehicles (wagons) so that the actors could move from town to town to perform these plays - as seen in the picture below. Morality plays on good and evil also developed as a result of these mystery plays.