her husband. She, we may assume, planted a desire to rise in the world in the mind of her clever son. Young William attended the Stratford grammar school. Ben Jonson, a fellow dramatist (and friend) famously cracked that Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. But by our standards he was formidably well educated.
He left school in his teens and for a year or two probably worked for his father. He may have been arrested for poaching.Aged eighteen he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older and several months pregnant. The marriage would produce two daughters and a son, Hamnet, who died in infancy and who is commemorated in Shakespeare's most famous, and gloomy, play.
It has been argued that the Shakespeares' marriage was unhappy – the recurrence in the plays of difficult, cold and domineering women such as Lady Macbeth is cited as evidence, as is the fact that the couple had, for the time, few children (three). But the fact is we know little of Shakespeare's private life. Even more frustratingly, we know absolutely nothing about the remainder of his formative years, between 1585 and 1592. He may have left Stratford and found employment as a country schoolteacher. Another theory about the so-called ‘lost years’ is that he was in the north of England, working as a tutor for a noble Catholic family, absorbing their dangerous creed. A third speculation is that he joined a troupe of travelling players, and picked up the dramatic skills evident in even his very earliest plays.
He resurfaces in the early 1590s as a rising figure in the London theatre scene, writing plays and acting. He found a medium suited to his extraordinary talent. There was a thriving network of theatres on the south bank of the Thames alongside the bullbaiting arenas and taverns – outlaw territory compared with the north bank, with its inns of court, St Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, and royal residences.
Just as importantly, there was an existing, but still immature, literary medium for Shakespeare to adapt to his own huge talent. His predecessor Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), in plays such as Dr Faustus , had innovated the so-called ‘mighty line’: blank verse. What is it? Consider the following lines – probably the most famous lines in English literature. (Hamlet is thinking about killing himself, unable to bring himself to do what the ghost, his father, has told him to do – kill his stepfather.)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them …
The verse is unrhymed (hence ‘blank’). It has the suppleness of everyday speech, but the dignity (‘mightiness’) of poetry – tease out, for example, the complexity of ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’. It's also something that Shakespeare handled particularly brilliantly – a ‘soliloquy’: that is, someone totally by themselves, talking to themselves. But is Hamlet actually talking, or thinking? In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier (the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time) did it as voice-over, his lips not moving, his face locked in a fixed expression. Shakespeare perfected this way of getting inside the minds of characters on stage. All his great plays – particularly the tragedies – hinge on soliloquy: what is going on inside.
By 1594 Shakespeare had risen to the top of the London theatrical world – as an actor, a shareholder, but most spectacularly as a playwright who was changing the whole idea of what plays could do. He would go on to live for many years in London (his family meanwhile were kept out of the way in distant Stratford), dabbling at times in commerce and adding substantially to his net worth. Over a twenty-year career he penned some thirty-seven plays (occasionally with collaborators) as well as many poems. Notable among the latter is his
He left school in his teens and for a year or two probably worked for his father. He may have been arrested for poaching.Aged eighteen he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older and several months pregnant. The marriage would produce two daughters and a son, Hamnet, who died in infancy and who is commemorated in Shakespeare's most famous, and gloomy, play.
It has been argued that the Shakespeares' marriage was unhappy – the recurrence in the plays of difficult, cold and domineering women such as Lady Macbeth is cited as evidence, as is the fact that the couple had, for the time, few children (three). But the fact is we know little of Shakespeare's private life. Even more frustratingly, we know absolutely nothing about the remainder of his formative years, between 1585 and 1592. He may have left Stratford and found employment as a country schoolteacher. Another theory about the so-called ‘lost years’ is that he was in the north of England, working as a tutor for a noble Catholic family, absorbing their dangerous creed. A third speculation is that he joined a troupe of travelling players, and picked up the dramatic skills evident in even his very earliest plays.
He resurfaces in the early 1590s as a rising figure in the London theatre scene, writing plays and acting. He found a medium suited to his extraordinary talent. There was a thriving network of theatres on the south bank of the Thames alongside the bullbaiting arenas and taverns – outlaw territory compared with the north bank, with its inns of court, St Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, and royal residences.
Just as importantly, there was an existing, but still immature, literary medium for Shakespeare to adapt to his own huge talent. His predecessor Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), in plays such as Dr Faustus , had innovated the so-called ‘mighty line’: blank verse. What is it? Consider the following lines – probably the most famous lines in English literature. (Hamlet is thinking about killing himself, unable to bring himself to do what the ghost, his father, has told him to do – kill his stepfather.)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them …
The verse is unrhymed (hence ‘blank’). It has the suppleness of everyday speech, but the dignity (‘mightiness’) of poetry – tease out, for example, the complexity of ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’. It's also something that Shakespeare handled particularly brilliantly – a ‘soliloquy’: that is, someone totally by themselves, talking to themselves. But is Hamlet actually talking, or thinking? In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier (the greatest Shakespearian actor of his time) did it as voice-over, his lips not moving, his face locked in a fixed expression. Shakespeare perfected this way of getting inside the minds of characters on stage. All his great plays – particularly the tragedies – hinge on soliloquy: what is going on inside.
By 1594 Shakespeare had risen to the top of the London theatrical world – as an actor, a shareholder, but most spectacularly as a playwright who was changing the whole idea of what plays could do. He would go on to live for many years in London (his family meanwhile were kept out of the way in distant Stratford), dabbling at times in commerce and adding substantially to his net worth. Over a twenty-year career he penned some thirty-seven plays (occasionally with collaborators) as well as many poems. Notable among the latter is his
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