william shakespeare short biography essay

Biography Online

Short Biography William Shakespeare

Short bio of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564.

His father William was a successful local businessman, and his mother Mary was the daughter of a landowner. Relatively prosperous, it is likely the family paid for Williams education, although there is no evidence he attended university.

In 1582 William, aged only 18, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Juliet. Their only son Hamnet died aged just 11.

Due to some well-timed investments, Shakespeare was able to secure a firm financial background, leaving time for writing and acting. The best of these investments was buying some real estate near Stratford in 1605, which soon doubled in value.

It seemed Shakespeare didn’t mind being absent from his family – he only returned home during Lent when all the theatres were closed. It is thought that during the 1590s he wrote the majority of his sonnets. This was a time of prolific writing and his plays developed a good deal of interest and controversy. His early plays were mainly comedies (e.g. Much Ado about Nothing , A Midsummer’s Night Dream ) and histories (e.g. Henry V )

By the early Seventeenth Century, Shakespeare had begun to write plays in the genre of tragedy. These plays, such as Hamlet , Othello and King Lear , often hinge on some fatal error or flaw in the lead character and provide fascinating insights into the darker aspects of human nature. These later plays are considered Shakespeare’s finest achievements.

When writing an introduction to Shakespeare’s First Folio of published plays in 1623, Johnson wrote of Shakespeare:

“not of an age, but for all time”

Shakespeare the Poet

William Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets mostly in the 1590s. These short poems, deal with issues such as lost love. His sonnets have an enduring appeal due to his formidable skill with language and words.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove:”

– Sonnet CXVI

The Plays of Shakespeare

The plays of Shakespeare have been studied more than any other writing in the English language and have been translated into numerous languages. He was rare as a play-write for excelling in tragedies, comedies and histories. He deftly combined popular entertainment with an extraordinary poetic capacity for expression which is almost mantric in quality.

“This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!”

– Lord Polonius, Hamlet Act I, Scene 3

During his lifetime, Shakespeare was not without controversy, but he also received lavish praise for his plays which were very popular and commercially successful.

His plays have retained an enduring appeal throughout history and the world. Some of his most popular plays include:

Twelfth Night
Romeo and Juliet

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…”

Death of Shakespeare

Shakespeare died in 1616; it is not clear how he died, and numerous suggestions have been put forward. John Ward, the local vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford (where Shakespeare is buried), writes in a diary account that:

“Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”

In 1616, there was an outbreak of typhus (“The new fever”) which may have been the cause. The average life expectancy of someone born in London, England in the Sixteenth Century was about 35 years old, Shakespeare died age 52.

Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

Some academics, known as the “Oxfords,” claim that Shakespeare never actually wrote any plays. They contend Shakespeare was actually just a successful businessman, and for authorship suggest names such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford . Arguments have also been made for Francis Bacon . The argument that Shakespeare was actually the Earl of Oxford relies on circumstantial evidence and similarities in his writing style and relationships between his life and the play of Shakespeare.

However, there is no hard evidence tying the Earl of Oxford to the theatre or writing the scripts. By contrast, there is evidence of William Shakespeare working in theatres and he received a variety of criticism from people such as Ben Johnson and Robert Greene. Also, the Earl of Oxford died in 1604, and it is generally agreed there were 12 plays published after this date. (Oxfords contend these plays were finished by other writers.)

It is also hard to believe the vain Earl of Oxford (who killed one of his own servants) would write such amazing scripts and then be happy with anonymity. Also, to maintain anonymity, it would also require the co-operation of numerous family members and other figures in the theatre world. The theory of other writers to Shakespeare only emerged centuries after the publishing of the First Folio.

Shakespeare’s Epitaph

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust encloased heare Blessed by y man y spares hes stones And curst be he y moves my bones

– More interesting facts on Shakespeare

Quotes on Shakespeare

“Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge became habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glorysmitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton’s his compeer, not rival.”

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Biographia Literaria (1817)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of William Shakespeare”, Oxford, www.biographyonline.net , 18th May 2006. Last updated 1 March 2019.

Popular quotes of Shakespeare

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

– Polonius, giving Laertes a pep talk. ( Hamlet )

“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. To die: to sleep;”

– Hamlet

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

– Hamlet (to Horatio on seeing a ghost)

“We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”

– The Tempest (Prospero)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Julius Caesar (Cassius to Brutus)

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

– Macbeth (on learning of the death of Queen)

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

— Hamlet in Hamlet

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

—Dauphin in Henry V

“Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.”

—Lucio in Measure for Measure

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition at Amazon

Shakespeare: The Biography

Shakespeare: The Biography at Amazon

Other Biographies and Resources on Shakespeare

Jokes about Shakespeare
Facts about Shakespeare
Popular poems of William Shakespeare
Shakespeare at BBC

Essay on William Shakespeare

500 words essay on william shakespeare.

William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping one hundred fifty-four sonnets. So let us take a peek inside the life of this genius with this essay on William Shakespeare.

Essay On William Shakespeare

Early Life of William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is the world’s pre-eminent dramatist and according to many experts is the greatest writer in the English language. Furthermore, he is also called England’s National Poet and also has the nickname of the Bard of Avon. Such a worthy reputation is due to his top-notch unmatchable writing skills.

William Shakespeare was born to a successful businessman in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April in the year 1564. Shakespeare’s mother was the daughter of a landlord and came from a well-to-do family. About the age of seven, William Shakespeare began attending the Stratford Grammar School.

The teachers at Stratford were strict in nature and the school timings were long. One can say that William Shakespeare’s use of nature in his writings was due to the influence of the fields and woods surrounding the Stratford Grammar School on him.

Warwickshire was an interesting place to live, especially for those who were writers. Furthermore, the river Avon ran down through the town and because of this Shakespeare later got the title ‘Bard of Avon’. At the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman who in age was eight years older than him.

Illustrious Career of William Shakespeare

After his education, William Shakespeare became engaged in theatrical life in London. Furthermore, it was from here that his career likely took off. Moreover, by the year 1592, the popularity of William Shakespeare had grown to be very much.

Shakespeare became a member of one of the famous theatre companies in the city. Moreover, this company was ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’. Also, the theatre companies during that era were commercial organizations that were dependent upon the audience who came to watch the plays.

From the year 1594, Shakespeare became the leading member of the acting group and remained that for almost the entire rest of his career. By the year 1594, the production of at least six plays had taken place by William Shakespeare.

Evidence shows that Shakespeare became a member of a well-known travelling theatre group. After joining this theatre, Shakespeare did plays in the presence of many dignitaries in various places.

Shakespeare, throughout his life, came up with some outstanding pieces of English literature , involving memorable timeless characters with human qualities. Furthermore, the human qualities and struggles of Shakespeare’s characters are such that one can relate with them even today. Shakespeare retired from his acting profession in 1613 and became completely devoted to writing many excellent plays.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is, without a doubt, one of the greatest writers of all times. Furthermore, his excellence in story writing, narrative building, and character development is of the highest order. Individuals of such a high calibre appear once in a century or are even rarer than that.

FAQs For Essay on William Shakespeare

Question 1: Why is William Shakespeare so famous?

Answer 1: William Shakespeare’s story writing skills are of an extremely high-quality. Furthermore, his works are characterized by outstanding narrative building around the topics of jealousy, mystery, love, magic, death, murder, life, revenge, and grief. That is why William Shakespeare is so famous.

Question 2: What are some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare?

Answer 2: Some of the most famous works of William Shakespeare are as follows:

Romeo and Juliet
The Merchant of Venice
Much Ado About Nothing

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William Shakespeare’s Short Biography

Reading Comprehension: William Shakespeare’s Short Biography

William Shakespeare's Short Biography (Reading Comprehension)

Develop your reading skills. Read this text about William Shakespeare’s short biography and do the comprehesnion task.

William Shakespeare: A Literary Legacy

William Shakespeare, born on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, remains an iconic figure in the realm of literature. His parents, John Shakespeare, a prosperous local businessman, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a landowner, provided the backdrop for his upbringing. Widely acclaimed as the greatest writer in the English language, Shakespeare’s contributions to literature and drama are unparalleled.

Often referred to as England’s national poet and affectionately nicknamed the Bard of Avon, Shakespeare’s literary repertoire is extensive. He penned approximately 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other verses, though the authorship of some works remains uncertain. His writings have transcended linguistic barriers, with translations into every major living language, and his plays continue to be performed more frequently than those of any other playwright.

At the age of 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior. Together, they had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Following his marriage, Shakespeare’s life became enigmatic, but it is widely believed that he spent the majority of his time in London, honing his craft as a playwright, actor, and part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men.

Around 1613, at the age of 49, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, where he spent his remaining years. He passed away on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52. Despite the scarcity of records concerning his private life, Shakespeare’s literary legacy endures.

Shakespeare’s literary career spanned from 1589 to 1613, during which he produced an array of masterpieces. His early works encompassed comedies and historical dramas, which are revered for their wit and insight into human nature. Transitioning to tragedies, such as “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth,” Shakespeare delved into the depths of human emotion, crafting enduring classics that continue to captivate audiences.

In his later years, Shakespeare explored tragicomedies, also known as romances, collaborating with other playwrights to create innovative works that defied genre conventions. Today, Shakespeare’s plays remain integral to the literary canon, celebrated for their universal themes, complex characters, and enduring relevance. They are studied, performed, and interpreted across diverse cultural and political landscapes, attesting to Shakespeare’s enduring influence on the world stage.

Adapted from Wikipedia

Comprehension:

Shakespeare's parents were poor. a. True b. False
His wife was 18 when they got married. a. True b. False
Shakespeare died in Stratford. a. True b. False
In the last years of his life, he wrote mainly tragicomedies. a. True b. False

Romeo and Juliet
Watch Romeo and Juliet (Full Play)
Summary of Romeo and Juliet
Themes of Romeo and Juliet
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Poems by Shakespeare

william shakespeare short biography essay

English Compositions

Short Essay on William Shakespeare [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

William Shakespeare was one of the most eminent and probably the most famous poet of English Literature. His works have made him immortal. In this lesson today, you will learn how to write an essay on the greatest poet: William Shakespeare.

Feature image of Short Essay on William Shakespeare

Short Essay on William Shakespeare in 100 Words

William Shakespeare is by far the best-known literary figure in the history of English literature. He is principally known for his dramas and sonnets that have enriched British literature by folds. As the contemporary of Kyd and Marlow, Shakespeare has innovated the classical theatrical stances and defined them according to his contemporary audience.

He has written several comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies in his literary career. Some of his famous plays include Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and others. His sonnets are quite famous and are dedicated to two personalities- the Earl of Southampton and the dark lady. It is said that the great poet died on 23 April 1616.

Short Essay on William Shakespeare in 200 Words

‘’Bard of Avon’’ William Shakespeare is the master playwright and poet of Renaissance England. The perfect blending of a playwright and the poet makes his genius so captivating. His career spans over twenty-four years where he has gifted his audience and readers a bounty of productions. Shakespeare has re-defined the theatre and its heroes and heroines. His career has four distinct sections that mark out his prolific capacity.

In the beginning, he has composed history plays like Henry VI plays, Richard III and Richard II, Comedy of Errors, and Love’s Labour Lost. The second phase contains all his comedies like The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Twelfth Night. The third phase is that of tragedies that sees Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Julius Ceaser. The final stage is of lesser-known plays like Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

The sonnets of Shakespeare are lyrical poems that evoke sense and sensibilities in the readers. His sonnets are divided into a binary section- the first 126 sonnets are addressed to Earl of Southampton, while the rest 127-152 are for the dark lady. Both the identities of these two figures are mysteries, yet the most beautiful poems of Shakespeare are composed over them. He even dedicates his last two sonnets to Cupid.

Short Essay on William Shakespeare in 400 Words

Little is known about William Shakespeare, one of the greatest names in the British canon of dramas and poems. His biography does not much reveal about his childhood or early occupation. Yet among his contemporaries, Shakespeare is by far the best literary personality of all times and centuries. He was said to be born in 1564 at the Stratford-upon-Avon of United Kingdom. Within this span of twenty-four years of a literary career, he has gifted the British and European canon with his enormous creative prospects that from time immemorial has been the object of criticisms and researches.

The literary career of Shakespeare is roughly divided into four segments.

FIRST PHASE- It includes the history plays of Shakespeare, where he experiments with several aspects of tragedy, comedy, and history. To this period belong his Henry VI plays, Comedy of Errors, Love’ Labour Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the only tragedy, Titus Andronicus.

SECOND PHASE- This includes his comedies and is one of the best moments of the playwright. To this belongs his greatest comedies and historical plays- The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, As you Like It, and King John as the first historical play.

THIRD PHASE- This stage is called the stage of tragedies, where Shakespeare has given world-class tragedies including Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Ceaser, and others.

FOURTH PHASE- The last phase of the playwright’s career has some lesser-known plays like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. It is also in this stage that his sonnets are published in 1609.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are a significant aspect of his career as within the 14lines structure, he asserts a completely different style of address. Here it is not a beautiful lady, but a man and a woman of much darker complexion. The man is considered as Earl of Southampton (1-126) and the woman as Dark lady (127-152), although their identities are still a mystery. An unconventional method of sonnet writing is apparent here. He even dedicates two of the sonnets to Cupid. His poetic style is simple, sensuous, and passionate and is perfectly carried out in his poems. Shakespeare’s literary talent is profound and incomprehensible, yet a specimen of imperishable beauty.

Though we don’t have much information about his life, many researchers say that the greatest poet of all time William Shakespeare died on the 23rd of April, 1616 in the same city he was born.

In this lesson above, I have tried to picture the life of William Shakespeare within very limited words. Hopefully, after going through this session, you have understood how you can actually concise the story of such a vast life within your recommended words. If you still have any doubts, please let me know through some quick comments. If you want to read more such essays and other kinds of English compositions, keep browsing our website.

Kindly join us on Telegram to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you for being with us. Have a great day.

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Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is one of the first names that come to our mind when we talk about English Literature. He was a famous writer of his time. His remarkable work in the field of literature left an everlasting impression on this world for forever. He wrote about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 narrative poems and many other poems which are recognized as some of the greatest works in the history of English literature. He was an incredible writer whose works were so extraordinary that some had raised many speculations on the true origin of his works many years back. Here are a few sample essays on William Shakespeare.

100 Words Essay on William Shakespeare

A legendary writer and actor William Shakespeare was born on the 23April in 1564 to Mary Shakespeare and John Shakespeare. He was known for his works in the field of English Literature. He produced many plays, sonnets, poems, and verses. He was also known as a well-known stage actor. He completed his schooling at Stratford Grammar School.

He wrote almost every genre of work. Some of his famous comedy genre works are: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Romeo Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Titus Andronicus are some of his famous tragic genre works. Richard II, Richard III, and Henry V are some of his historic genre plays. This shows that William Shakespeare was a multi-talented man.

William Shakespeare died on the 23 April, in the year 1616. Shakespeare died at the age of 52 in his hometown Warwickshire, England. He died physically but his existence through his extraordinary work will live forever in this world.

200 Words Essay on William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is one of the renowned names of English playwrights. He was a multi-talented man who was a writer, poet and actor. He produced about one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, two narrative poems, thirty-eight plays and a few verses. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a good family with good financial status on 23 April, 1564.

He started his career as an actor and then he started writing. He produced most of his works from 1589 to 1613. He wrote many famous plays like Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar , etc. In the year 1608, Shakespeare wrote some of his finest works of the tragic genre like Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. These tragic genre works were some of the last works which he wrote in his last few years of life. Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet are some of his most famous plays which are played in schools and colleges on various occasions. He wrote vast, voluminous, unique and every different genre of plays.

Several of Shakespeare’s works have been translated into other languages. Several movies and plays are also played in his plays. His works are loved by everyone of every age group. He is one of the most precious playwrights of the times. He died in his hometown at the age of 52 on 23 of April, 1616.

500 Words Essay on William Shakespeare

One of the world's most famous playwrights and a dramatist William Shakespeare was known for his works in English literature. He was also known as Bard of Avon (England’s national poet) for his outstanding and incredible writing skills. He wrote amazing and unbelievable 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 narrative poems and a few verses in the English language.

Early life Of Shakespeare

He was born at Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April in the year 1564. His father was a successful businessman and his mother was a landowner’s daughter. He started his schooling at the age of 7 at Stratford Grammar School. School timing was long and the teachers there were strict. His school was surrounded by woods and fields, which could have influenced his writing skills which are full of nature. Avon is a river which flows in his town, and he was nicknamed Bard of Avon on this basis. He married an eight years older woman Anne Hathaway at the age of 18. They had three kids Susanna, and the twins Judith and Hamnet.

Shakespeare’s Inspirational Career

After completing his education, he moved to London where he started his career as an actor. He became a very famous actor by 1592. It was here that his career started taking shape. He was a member of “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men” one of the very famous theatre companies in the city. By the year 1594, he had produced about six plays which were performed in the company. He played in many of the plays as an actor at various places.

He produced many famous plays like Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V and many more. Julius Caesar was a tragic play he wrote in the last few years of his life. It was all about a bad omen that the king saw and it came true. In this play, the king is killed by his loyal and trustworthy people and friends. Romeo and Juliet are one of his other plays which were known for the beauty of the love Romeo and Juliet have for each other. All his plays give some morals to learn. His works were full of nature and he had written in almost every kind of genre. His works are known for unforgettable characters full of human qualities. In 1613, he took a break from acting and fully devoted himself to writing. And on 23 April, 1616 he died leaving this world with his incredible and irreplaceable works.

Shakespeare was a legend of English literature. His fantastic writing skills can take away anyone’s heart. His works are known for being character-centric, narrative-building, natural, realistic, and fictional and he has excellent writing skills. There is a saying that “People die but their words won’t” and it is true William Shakespeare, one of the greatest writers of all time will live forever through his words of writing and his works will always inspire and motivate us to do incredible things in our lives.

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William Shakespeare Biography

Who was william shakespeare.

In this section

An Introduction

William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon . His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23 April (see When was Shakespeare born ), which is also believed to be the date he died in 1616.

Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of British theatre (sometimes called the English Renaissance or the Early Modern Period). Shakespeare’s plays are perhaps his most enduring legacy, but they are not all he wrote. Shakespeare’s poems also remain popular to this day.

Shakespeare's Family Life

Records survive relating to William Shakespeare’s family that offer an understanding of the context of Shakespeare's early life and the lives of his family members. John Shakespeare married Mary Arden , and together they had eight children. John and Mary lost two daughters as infants, so William became their eldest child. John Shakespeare worked as a glove-maker, but he also became an important figure in the town of Stratford by fulfilling civic positions. His elevated status meant that he was even more likely to have sent his children, including William, to the local grammar school .

William Shakespeare would have lived with his family in their house on Henley Street until he turned eighteen. When he was eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway , who was twenty-six. It was a rushed marriage because Anne was already pregnant at the time of the ceremony. Together they had three children. Their first daughter, Susanna , was born six months after the wedding and was later followed by twins Hamnet and Judith . Hamnet died when he was just 11 years old.

For an overview of William Shakespeare's life, see Shakespeare's Life: A Timeline

Shakespeare in London

Shakespeare's career jump-started in London, but when did he go there? We know Shakespeare's twins were baptised in 1585, and that by 1592 his reputation was established in London, but the intervening years are considered a mystery. Scholars generally refer to these years as ‘ The Lost Years ’.

During his time in London, Shakespeare’s first printed works were published. They were two long poems, 'Venus and Adonis' (1593) and 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594). He also became a founding member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors. Shakespeare was the company's regular dramatist, producing on average two plays a year, for almost twenty years.

He remained with the company for the rest of his career, during which time it evolved into The King’s Men under the patronage of King James I (from 1603). During his time in the company Shakespeare wrote many of his most famous tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth , as well as great romances, like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest .

For more about Shakespeare's patrons and his work in London see; Shakespeare's Career

Shakespeare's Works

Altogether Shakespeare's works include 38 plays, 2 narrative poems, 154 sonnets, and a variety of other poems. No original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays are known to exist today. It is actually thanks to a group of actors from Shakespeare's company that we have about half of the plays at all. They collected them for publication after Shakespeare died, preserving the plays. These writings were brought together in what is known as the First Folio ('Folio' refers to the size of the paper used). It contained 36 of his plays, but none of his poetry.

Shakespeare’s legacy is as rich and diverse as his work; his plays have spawned countless adaptations across multiple genres and cultures. His plays have had an enduring presence on stage and film. 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.

New Place; a home in Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare’s success in the London theatres made him considerably wealthy, and by 1597 he was able to purchase New Place , the largest house in the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon . Although his professional career was spent in London, he maintained close links with his native town.

Recent archaeological evidence discovered on the site of Shakespeare’s New Place shows that Shakespeare was only ever an intermittent lodger in London. 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.

Watch our video for more about Shakespeare as a literary commuter:

On his father's death in 1601, 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 107 acres of land in 1602.

Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. He is buried in the sanctuary of the parish church, Holy Trinity.

All the world's a stage /And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts. — As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7

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William Shakespeare

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 7, 2019 | Original: October 3, 2011

Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England’s national poet, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students memorize his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed. They also hunt for clues about the life of the man who inspires such “bardolatry” (as George Bernard Shaw derisively called it), much of which remains shrouded in mystery. Born into a family of modest means in Elizabethan England, the “Bard of Avon” wrote at least 37 plays and a collection of sonnets, established the legendary Globe theater and helped transform the English language.

Shakespeare’s Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town 100 miles northwest of London, and baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death in 1616 and is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. Shakespeare’s father, John, dabbled in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; he also held a series of municipal positions before falling into debt in the late 1580s. The ambitious son of a tenant farmer, John boosted his social status by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic landowner. Like John, she may have been a practicing Catholic at a time when those who rejected the newly established Church of England faced persecution.

Did you know? Sources from William Shakespeare's lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from “Shappere” to “Shaxberd.” In the handful of signatures that have survived, he himself never spelled his name “William Shakespeare,” using variations such as “Willm Shakspere” and “William Shakspeare” instead.

William was the third of eight Shakespeare children, of whom three died in childhood. Though no records of his education survive, it is likely that he attended the well-regarded local grammar school, where he would have studied Latin grammar and classics. It is unknown whether he completed his studies or abandoned them as an adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his senior, in a ceremony thought to have been hastily arranged due to her pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was born less than seven months later in May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna and Judith would live to old age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died at 11. As for William and Anne, it is believed that the couple lived apart for most of the year while the bard pursued his writing and theater career in London. It was not until the end of his life that Shakespeare moved back in with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years and Early Career

To the dismay of his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from the historical record between 1585, when his twins’ baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as an “upstart crow” (evidence that he had already made a name for himself on the London stage). What did the newly married father and future literary icon do during those seven “lost” years? Historians have speculated that he worked as a schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Europe or joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a local politician’s estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as an actor, penned several plays and spent enough time in London to write about its geography, culture and diverse personalities with great authority. Even his earliest works evince knowledge of European affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the royal court and general erudition that might seem unattainable to a young man raised in the provinces by parents who were probably illiterate. For this reason, some theorists have suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true identity used the person of William Shakespeare as a front. (Most scholars and literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s first plays, believed to have been written before or around 1592, encompass all three of the main dramatic genres in the bard’s oeuvre: tragedy (“Titus Andronicus”); comedy (“The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”); and history (the “Henry VI” trilogy and “Richard III”). Shakespeare was likely affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted on the London stage. In 1594 he began writing and acting for a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (renamed the King’s Men when James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright and partnering with other members to establish the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famous of his 37-plus plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth” and “The Tempest.” As a dramatist, he is known for his frequent use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet’s ubiquitous “To be, or not to be” speech) and ingenious wordplay. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to ancient Greece, featuring assorted casts of characters with complex psyches and profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Some of his plays—notably “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida”—are characterized by moral ambiguity and jarring shifts in tone, defying, much like life itself, classification as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first narrative poem—the erotic “Venus and Adonis,” intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—while London theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a second poem, “The Rape of Lucrece,” hint that during his lifetime the bard was chiefly renowned for his poetry. Shakespeare’s famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love and sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer’s consent. (It has been suggested that he intended them for his intimate circle only, not the general public.) Perhaps because of their explicit sexual references or dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the same success as Shakespeare’s earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare’s Death and Legacy

Shakespeare died at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, famously received his “second-best bed.”) The slabstone over Shakespeare’s tomb, located inside a Stratford church, bears an epitaph—written, some say, by the bard himself—warding off grave robbers with a curse: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” His remains have yet to be disturbed, despite requests by archaeologists keen to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare’s former colleagues published a collection of his plays, commonly known as the First Folio. In its preface, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote of his late contemporary, “He was not of an age, but for all time.” Indeed, Shakespeare’s plays continue to grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have yielded a vast array of film, television and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the English language more than any other writer in history, coining—or, at the very least, popularizing—terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday conversation. Examples include the words “fashionable” (“Troilus and Cressida”), “sanctimonious” (“Measure for Measure”), “eyeball” (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and “lackluster” (“As You Like It”); and the expressions “foregone conclusion” (“Othello”), “in a pickle” (“The Tempest”), “wild goose chase” (“Romeo and Juliet”) and “one fell swoop” (“Macbeth”).

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Shakespeare's Life: From the Folger Shakespeare Editions

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

Listen to this essay:

Surviving documents that give us glimpses into the life of William Shakespeare show us a playwright, poet, and actor who grew up in the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, spent his professional life in London, and returned to Stratford a wealthy landowner. He was born in April 1564, died in April 1616, and is buried inside the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

We wish we could know more about the life of the world’s greatest dramatist. His plays and poems are testaments to his wide reading—especially to his knowledge of Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Holinshed’s Chronicles , and the Bible—and to his mastery of the English language, but we can only speculate about his education. We know that the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon was considered excellent. The school was one of the English “grammar schools” established to educate young men, primarily in Latin grammar and literature. As in other schools of the time, students began their studies at the age of four or five in the attached “petty school,” and there learned to read and write in English, studying primarily the catechism from the Book of Common Prayer. After two years in the petty school, students entered the lower form (grade) of the grammar school, where they began the serious study of Latin grammar and Latin texts that would occupy most of the remainder of their school days. (Several Latin texts that Shakespeare used repeatedly in writing his plays and poems were texts that schoolboys memorized and recited.) Latin comedies were introduced early in the lower form; in the upper form, which the boys entered at age ten or eleven, students wrote their own Latin orations and declamations, studied Latin historians and rhetoricians, and began the study of Greek using the Greek New Testament.

Title page of a 1573 Latin and Greek catechism for children. From Alexander Nowell, Catechismus paruus pueris primum Latine . . . (1573).

Since the records of the Stratford “grammar school” do not survive, we cannot prove that William Shakespeare attended the school; however, every indication (his father’s position as an alderman and bailiff of Stratford, the playwright’s own knowledge of the Latin classics, scenes in the plays that recall grammar-school experiences—for example, The Merry Wives of Windsor , 4.1 ) suggests that he did. We also lack generally accepted documentation about Shakespeare’s life after his schooling ended and his professional life in London began. His marriage in 1582 (at age eighteen) to Anne Hathaway and the subsequent births of his daughter Susanna (1583) and the twins Judith and Hamnet (1585) are recorded, but how he supported himself and where he lived are not known. Nor do we know when and why he left Stratford for the London theatrical world, nor how he rose to be the important figure in that world that he had become by the early 1590s.

We do know that by 1592 he had achieved some prominence in London as both an actor and a playwright. In that year was published a book by the playwright Robert Greene attacking an actor who had the audacity to write blank-verse drama and who was “in his own conceit [i.e., opinion] the only Shake-scene in a country.” Since Greene’s attack includes a parody of a line from one of Shakespeare’s early plays, there is little doubt that it is Shakespeare to whom he refers, a “Shake-scene” who had aroused Greene’s fury by successfully competing with university-educated dramatists like Greene himself. It was in 1593 that Shakespeare became a published poet. In that year he published his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis ; in 1594, he followed it with The Rape of Lucrece. Both poems were dedicated to the young earl of Southampton (Henry Wriothesley), who may have become Shakespeare’s patron.

It seems no coincidence that Shakespeare wrote these narrative poems at a time when the theaters were closed because of the plague, a contagious epidemic disease that devastated the population of London. When the theaters reopened in 1594, Shakespeare apparently resumed his double career of actor and playwright and began his long (and seemingly profitable) service as an acting-company shareholder. Records for December of 1594 show him to be a leading member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was this company of actors, later named the King’s Men, for whom he would be a principal actor, dramatist, and shareholder for the rest of his career.

So far as we can tell, that career spanned about twenty years. In the 1590s, he wrote his plays on English history as well as several comedies and at least two tragedies ( Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet ). These histories, comedies, and tragedies are the plays credited to him in 1598 in a work, Palladis Tamia , that in one chapter compares English writers with “Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets.” There the author, Francis Meres, claims that Shakespeare is comparable to the Latin dramatists Seneca for tragedy and Plautus for comedy, and calls him “the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.” He also names him “Mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”: “I say,” writes Meres, “that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase, if they would speak English.” Since Meres also mentions Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” it is assumed that many of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not published until 1609) were also written in the 1590s.

In 1599, Shakespeare’s company built a theater for themselves across the river from London, naming it the Globe. The plays that are considered by many to be Shakespeare’s major tragedies ( Hamlet , Othello , King Lear , and Macbeth ) were written while the company was resident in this theater, as were such comedies as Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure . Many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed at court (both for Queen Elizabeth I and, after her death in 1603, for King James I), some were presented at the Inns of Court (the residences of London’s legal societies), and some were doubtless performed in other towns, at the universities, and at great houses when the King’s Men went on tour; otherwise, his plays from 1599 to 1608 were, so far as we know, performed only at the Globe. Between 1608 and 1612, Shakespeare wrote several plays—among them The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest —presumably for the company’s new indoor Blackfriars theater, though the plays were performed also at the Globe and at court. Surviving documents describe a performance of The Winter’s Tale in 1611 at the Globe, for example, and performances of The Tempest in 1611 and 1613 at the royal palace of Whitehall.

Shakespeare seems to have written very little after 1612, the year in which he probably wrote King Henry VIII . (It was at a performance of Henry VIII in 1613 that the Globe caught fire and burned to the ground.) Sometime between 1610 and 1613, according to many biographers, he returned to live in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he owned a large house and considerable property, and where his wife and his two daughters lived. (His son Hamnet had died in 1596.) However, other biographers suggest that Shakespeare did not leave London for good until much closer to the time of his death. During his professional years in London, Shakespeare had presumably derived income from the acting company’s profits as well as from his own career as an actor, from the sale of his play manuscripts to the acting company, and, after 1599, from his shares as an owner of the Globe. It was presumably that income, carefully invested in land and other property, that made him the wealthy man that surviving documents show him to have become. It is also assumed that William Shakespeare’s growing wealth and reputation played some part in inclining the Crown, in 1596, to grant John Shakespeare, William’s father, the coat of arms that he had so long sought. William Shakespeare died in Stratford on April 23, 1616 (according to the epitaph carved under his bust in Holy Trinity Church) and was buried on April 25. Seven years after his death, his collected plays were published as Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (the work now known as the First Folio).

Ptolemaic universe. From Marcus Manilius, The sphere of . . . (1675).

The years in which Shakespeare wrote were among the most exciting in English history. Intellectually, the discovery, translation, and printing of Greek and Roman classics were making available a set of works and worldviews that interacted complexly with Christian texts and beliefs. The result was a questioning, a vital intellectual ferment, that provided energy for the period’s amazing dramatic and literary output and that fed directly into Shakespeare’s plays. The Ghost in Hamlet , for example, is wonderfully complicated in part because he is a figure from Roman tragedy—the spirit of the dead returning to seek revenge—who at the same time inhabits a Christian hell (or purgatory); Hamlet’s description of humankind reflects at one moment the Neoplatonic wonderment at mankind (“ What a piece of work is a man! ”) and, at the next, the Christian attitude toward sinful humanity (“ And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? ”).

As intellectual horizons expanded, so also did geographical and cosmological horizons. New worlds—both North and South America—were explored, and in them were found human beings who lived and worshiped in ways radically different from those of Renaissance Europeans and Englishmen. The universe during these years also seemed to shift and expand. Copernicus had earlier theorized that the earth was not the center of the cosmos but revolved as a planet around the sun. Galileo’s telescope, created in 1609, allowed scientists to see that Copernicus had been correct: the universe was not organized with the earth at the center, nor was it so nicely circumscribed as people had, until that time, thought. In terms of expanding horizons, the impact of these discoveries on people’s beliefs—religious, scientific, and philosophical—cannot be overstated.

London, too, rapidly expanded and changed during the years (from the early 1590s to around 1610) that Shakespeare lived there. London—the center of England’s government, its economy, its royal court, its overseas trade—was, during these years, becoming an exciting metropolis, drawing to it thousands of new citizens every year. Troubled by overcrowding, by poverty, by recurring epidemics of the plague, London was also a mecca for the wealthy and the aristocratic, and for those who sought advancement at court, or power in government or finance or trade. One hears in Shakespeare’s plays the voices of London—the struggles for power, the fear of venereal disease, the language of buying and selling. One hears as well the voices of Stratford-upon-Avon—references to the nearby Forest of Arden, to sheepherding, to small-town gossip, to village fairs and markets. Part of the richness of Shakespeare’s work is the influence felt there of the various worlds in which he lived: the world of metropolitan London, the world of small-town and rural England, the world of the theater, and the worlds of craftsmen and shepherds.

That Shakespeare inhabited such worlds we know from surviving London and Stratford documents, as well as from the evidence of the plays and poems themselves. From such records we can sketch the dramatist’s life. We know from his works that he was a voracious reader. We know from legal and business documents that he was a multifaceted theater man who became a wealthy landowner. We know a bit about his family life and a fair amount about his legal and financial dealings. Most scholars today depend upon such evidence as they draw their picture of the world’s greatest playwright. Such, however, has not always been the case. Until the late eighteenth century, the William Shakespeare who lived in most biographies was the creation of legend and tradition. This was the Shakespeare who was supposedly caught poaching deer at Charlecote, the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy close by Stratford; this was the Shakespeare who fled from Sir Thomas’s vengeance and made his way in London by taking care of horses outside a playhouse; this was the Shakespeare who reportedly could barely read, but whose natural gifts were extraordinary, whose father was a butcher who allowed his gifted son sometimes to help in the butcher shop, where William supposedly killed calves “in a high style,” making a speech for the occasion. It was this legendary William Shakespeare whose Falstaff (in 1 and 2 Henry IV ) so pleased Queen Elizabeth that she demanded a play about Falstaff in love, and demanded that it be written in fourteen days (hence the existence of The Merry Wives of Windsor ). It was this legendary Shakespeare who reached the top of his acting career in the roles of the Ghost in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It —and who died of a fever contracted by drinking too hard at “a merry meeting” with the poets Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. This legendary Shakespeare is a rambunctious, undisciplined man, as attractively “wild” as his plays were seen by earlier generations to be. Unfortunately, there is no trace of evidence to support these wonderful stories.

Perhaps in response to the disreputable Shakespeare of legend—or perhaps in response to the fragmentary and, for some, all-too-ordinary Shakespeare documented by surviving records—some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford), and Christopher Marlowe. Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays is a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held. Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of Shakespeare’s life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an “important” person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good “grammar-school” education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater. How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world four centuries after his death is one of life’s mysteries—and one that will continue to tease our imaginations as we continue to delight in his plays and poems.

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William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is one of the most famous English playwright, poets, and actors. He is viewed as the supreme writer in English literature and the greatest dramatist of the world. He is also called as the national poet of England and the “Bard of Avon.” He has written 154 sonnets, few other verses, two long narrative poems, and 39 plays. Shakespeare’s plays are translated into almost every major language of the world and are performed on stage to date.

A Short Biography of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born on 23rd April 1564 and baptized on 26th April 1564 to John Shakespeare and Mary Shakespeare. He was the oldest living child, whereas the first two children died in infancy. William Shakespeare grew up as an elder brother with five siblings that include three brothers.

Shakespeare’s father had a profession of leatherworker who had his own business. When William was five, his father became a town Bailiff, a man with the same status as the mayor. However, after some time, John Shakespeare, with some unknown reasons, did not appear to have any public life.

Shakespeare, being the privileged citizen of Stratford, attended grammar school of Stratford. Like all schools, the course curriculum of this school included the Latin classics and memorization, writing, and acting of plays. Till the age of 15, Shakespeare attended the school.

William wedded Anne Hathaway in 1582, a few years after leaving school. Anne was already pregnant with their first child Susan. At the time of the marriage, Shakespeare was 18 years old while Anne was 28. They both spent their life in Stratford after marriage.

In 1585, Shakespeare and Anne completed their family by giving birth to twins: Hamnet and Judith. In the following years, Shakespeare moved to London, leaving his family in Stratford. This period of his life is known as “lost years” as nobody knew what he was up to these days until he was seen in the London theatre in 1592. He pursued a career in the theatre as an actor.

London Theater

As mentioned before, Shakespeare appeared in 1592 as an actor in the London theatre after seven “lost years.” He appeared as a well-known London playwright and actor and was mocked by his fellow writer as “Shake-scene.” In 1593, Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis , a long poem. In 1594, the first edition of his plays was published. As an actor and playwright, Shakespeare performed multiple roles in the London theatre for the next two decades.

During that time, he also became a business partner in a leading acting company named Lord Chamberlain’s men. In 1603, the company was renamed as King’s Men. In the course of years, in the world of London theatre, Shakespeare became increasingly famous; his name turned into a brand that was sold on the title pages, though his name was not even mentioned in his first quarto plays.

Shakespeare flourished financially with acting and writing as well as with his partnership with Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He invested his finances in buying the real-estate in Stratford. In 1597, he bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford.

Shakespeare died on 23 rd April 1616. The date of his death is the same as the traditional date of his birth. The cause of death is unknown; however, it is assumed that his brother-in-law died a week prior to him with an infectious disease that could be transmitted to him as well. However, the health of Shakespeare had been declining for a long time.

William Shakespeare’s Writing Style

Shakespeare used the conventional style of his age to write his early plays. The plays were written in the stylized language , though it was not always the demand of the drama/play or character. The verses of his play have extended and elaborated conceits and metaphor s.

The language he used is, most of the time, rhetorical as it was written to be acted by an actor rather than to speak. However, in the play Titus Andronicus , the critics say that the grand speeches delay the action. Similarly, in the play Two Gentlemen of Verona , the verses have been described as artificial.

Nonetheless, Shakespeare soon started to write in t raditional styles . In the historical play, Richard III , the opening soliloquy has its origin in the self-assertion of wickedness in the medieval drama. Simultaneously, the obvious self-realization of Richard anticipates the soliloquies of the mature plays of Shakespeare. There is no single play that marks the transition from transitional style to the freer style . All his plays have a combination of both styles.

The play Romeo and Juliet is the best example that contains the blend of traditional as well as freer style . During the mid-1590s, in the plays Richard II , A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Rome Juliet, Shakespeare had started writing more natural poetry than before. The extended metaphors and conceits that he would use in his plays had turned increasingly to the need for drama.

The standard poetic form employed by Shakespeare in his plays was blank verse . It was composed of iambic pentameter with vivid use of imagery and pun . His poetry is unrhymed and has ten syllables in a line. Each second syllable was supposed to be spoken with stress. The blank verse he used in his early plays is different from the blank verse he used in his later plays.

Though the employment of blank verse is beautiful, the sentences likely to start, pause and finish by the end of the line to avoid dullness. However, when Shakespeare got hold of the blank verse, he started interrupting and varying its flow due to the unique flexibility and power of the poetry released in his famous plays, Hamlet and Julius Caesar . For example, to create turmoil in the mind of Hamlet, Shakespeare uses this technique.

Shakespeare’s poetic style changed further after writing Hamlet . This changed style is noticed in the emotional passages of his later tragedies. According to the critic A.C. Bradley, this style of Shakespeare is “more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical.”

To accomplish this effect, Shakespeare implemented many techniques. These techniques included irregular stops and pauses, run-on lines, and high alteration in length and structure of sentences. For example, in his play, Macbeth , the language of Lady Macbeth’s speeches shifts from one dissimilar simile or metaphor to another.

Was the hope drunk,

Wherein you dress’d yourself? Hath it slept since?

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely?

(Lady Macbeth, Macbeth , Act I, Scene VII)

In the late romances, Shakespeare created the effect of spontaneity with the shifts in time and unexpected turns in plots. This inspired his last poetic style as he set short and long sentences against one another, piled up the clauses, reversed the subject and object, and omitted the words, thus exciting the audience to complete the sense of sentence by themselves.

The poetic genius of Shakespeare was associated with the concrete sense of London theatre. Shakespeare, like every other contemporary playwright, used the stories from sources like Holinshed and Petrarch to dramatize. He redesigned the plots to create interest and also showed many perspectives of narratives. It was due to this strength of design that ensured the fact that the plays of Shakespeare can be translated with both wide and cutting interpretation without loss of the main plot.

With growing mastery, Shakespeare designed his characters with more diverse motivations and characteristic speech patterns. He sustained the features of his style on earlier plays in his later plays as well. He intentionally moved to artificial style in his late romances to highlight the theatrical illusions.

The punctuation that Shakespeare used at the end of the lines in his early works strengthened the rhyme. This form of blank verse was used by him, along with other contemporary dramatists and playwrights, in dialogues between the characters to uplift the poetry. He used rhyme couplet to end his scenes in the play, therefore created suspense. A well-known example of this form occurs in the play Macbeth when Macbeth leaves the stage to kill Duncan.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to Heaven, or to Hell.

(Macbeth, Macbeth ; Act II, Scene I)

The literary device soliloquy is used effectively by William Shakespeare in his plays. In his plays, a solitary speech is made by the character that gives the audience an insight into the inner feeling, conflict, and motivation of the character. In a soliloquy, the character either addresses the audience and speaks to them directly or speaks an imaginary realm.

The writing of Shakespeare is full of far-reaching puns that indent two things and subtle rhetorical additions. The key element in all his plays is humor. The bawdy puns he used in his plays made his works controversial to the degree that almost every play has sexual puns. The best example of Bawdy punning is his comedy Twelfth Night.

Certainly, the censored versions of Shakespeare’s plays were produced by Henrietta Bowdler as The family Shakespeare. His comic scenes are not restricted to his comedies only, his tragedies and historical plays have a comic interlude. For example, in Hamlet and Henry IV , there are comic scenes that relax the audience.

Similarities to Contemporary Playwrights

Though Shakespeare has a traditional style that was commonly used in his time, his general style is also compared to his contemporary writers. Shakespeare plays have lots of resemblances to the pays of Christopher Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe’s Queen’s Men have a strong influence on Shakespeare in writing his historical plays. His writing style is also compared to the other playwrights like John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont.

Shakespeare borrowed the plots of his plays from stories and plays of other writers. For example, the plot of Hamlet is taken from Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus. Similarly, the plot of Romeo Juliet is taken from The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke. It was common in Shakespeare’s time to borrow the plot of plays from old plays. Even this tradition continued after the death of Shakespeare, as playwrights started borrowing plots from Shakespeare’s works.

Differences from Contemporary Playwrights

We see the expression of a complete variety of human experiences in the works of Shakespeare. He designed his characters “round” that developed over the course of plays as a human being in the course of life, therefore commanded the sympathies of the audiences. Whereas, the characters designed by his contemporary writers used to be archetypes and flat. For example, Macbeth, in the play, Macbeth killed six people on stage and also responsible for many murders offstage.

However, he still gains the sympathies of the audience due to his flawed nature like humans. Similarly, Hamlet is well aware that he has to avenge the death of his father; however, he procrastinates until he has no choice. He experiences a downfall due to his feelings and emotions, just like humans. Characters designed by Shakespeare were complex and humanistic. He would develop the character of his protagonists with the development of the plots.

Works Of William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
Twelfth Night
The Taming of the Shrew
As You Like It
Much Ado About Nothing
The Comedy of Errors

Biography of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is arguably the most famous writer in the English language, known for both his plays and sonnets. Though much about his life remains open to debate due to incomplete evidence, the following biography consolidates the most widely accepted facts about Shakespeare's life and career.

In the mid-sixteenth century, William Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, moved to the idyllic town of Stratford-upon-Avon. There, he became a successful landowner, moneylender, glove maker, and dealer of wool and agricultural goods. In 1557, he married Mary Arden.

During John Shakespeare's time, the British middle class was expanding in both size and wealth, allowing its members more freedoms and luxuries, as well as a stronger collective voice in local government. John took advantage of the changing times and became a member of the Stratford Council in 1557, which marked the beginning of his illustrious political career. By 1561, he was elected as one of the town's fourteen burgesses, and subsequently served as Constable, then Chamberlain, and later, Alderman. In all of these positions, the elder Shakespeare administered borough property and revenues. In 1567, he became bailiff—the highest elected office in Stratford and the equivalent of a modern-day mayor.

Town records indicate that William Shakespeare was John and Mary's third child. His birth is unregistered, but legend pins the date as April 23, 1564, possibly because it is known that he died on the same date 52 years later. In any event, William's baptism was registered with the town of Stratford on April 26, 1564. Little is known about his childhood, although it is generally assumed that he attended the local grammar school, the King's New School. The school was staffed by Oxford-educated faculty who taught the students mathematics, natural sciences, logic, Christian ethics, and classical languages and literature.

Shakespeare did not attend university, which was not unusual for the time. University education was reserved for wealthy sons of the elite, and even then, mostly just those who wanted to become clergymen. The numerous classical and literary references in Shakespeare’s plays are a testament, however, to the excellent education he received in grammar school, and speaks to his ability as an autodidact. His early plays in particular draw on the works of Seneca and Plautus. Even more impressive than Shakespeare's formal education is the wealth of general knowledge he exhibits in his work. His vocabulary exceeds that of any other English writer of his time by a wide margin.

In 1582, at the age of eighteen, William Shakespeare married twenty-six-year-old Anne Hathaway . Their first daughter, Susanna, was not baptized until six months after her birth—a fact that has given rise to speculation over the circumstances surrounding the marriage. In 1585, Anne bore twins, baptized Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare. Hamnet died at the age of eleven, by which time William Shakespeare was already a successful playwright. Around 1589, Shakespeare wrote Henry VI, Part 1 , which is considered to be his first play. Sometime between his marriage and writing this play, he moved to London, where he pursued a career as a playwright and actor.

Although many records of Shakespeare's life as a citizen of Stratford have survived, including his marriage and birth certificates, very little information exists about his life as a young playwright. Legend characterizes Shakespeare as a roguish young man who was once forced to flee London under suspect circumstances, perhaps related to his love life, but the paltry amount of written information does not necessarily confirm this facet of his personality.

In any case, young Will was not an immediate universal success. The earliest written record of Shakespeare's life in London comes from a statement by rival playwright Robert Greene. In Groatsworth of Witte (1592), Greene calls Shakespeare an "upstart crow...[who] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you." While this is hardly high praise, it does suggest that Shakespeare rattled London's theatrical hierarchy from the beginning of his career. In retrospect, it is possible to attribute Greene's complaint to jealousy of Shakespeare's ability, but the scarcity of evidence renders the comment ambiguous.

With Richard III , Henry VI , The Comedy of Errors , and Titus Andronicus under his belt, Shakespeare became a popular playwright by 1590. (The dates of composition and debut performance of almost all of Shakespeare's plays remain uncertain. The dates used here are widely agreed upon by scholars, but there is still significant debate around the dates of completion for many of his plays.) The year 1593, however, marked a major leap forward in his career when he secured a prominent patron: the Earl of Southampton. In addition, Venus and Adonis was published; it was one of the first of Shakespeare's known works to be printed, and it was a huge success. Next came The Rape of Lucrece . By this time, Shakespeare had also made his mark as a poet, as most scholars agree that he wrote the majority of his sonnets in the 1590s.

In 1594, Shakespeare returned to the theater and became a charter member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men—a group of actors who changed their name to the King's Men when James I ascended the throne. By 1598, Shakespeare had been appointed the "principal comedian" for the troupe; by 1603, he was "principal tragedian." He remained associated with the organization until his death. Although acting and playwriting were not considered noble professions at the time, successful and prosperous actors were relatively well respected. Shakespeare’s success left him with a fair amount of money, which he invested in Stratford real estate. In 1597, he purchased the second-largest house in Stratford—known as "the New Place"—for his parents. In 1596, Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms for his family, in effect making himself a gentleman. Consequently, his daughters made “good matches,” and married wealthy men.

The same year that he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet , Love's Labour's Lost , The Taming of the Shrew , and several other plays. In 1600, he wrote two of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet and Julius Caesar . Many literary critics and historians consider Hamlet to be the first modern play because of its multi-faceted main character and unprecedented depiction of the human psyche.

The first decade of the seventeenth century witnessed the debut performances of several of Shakespeare’s most celebrated works, including many of his so-called history plays: Othello in 1604 or 1605, Antony and Cleopatra in 1606 or 1607, and King Lear in 1608. The last of Shakespeare's plays to be performed during his lifetime was most likely King Henry VIII in either 1612 or 1613.

William Shakespeare died in 1616. His wife Anne died in 1623, at the age of 67. Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of his church at Stratford. The lines above his tomb, allegedly written by Shakespeare himself, read:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones.

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Study Guides on Works by William Shakespeare

All's well that ends well william shakespeare.

Composed sometime between 1595 and 1603, the first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s tragicomedy All’s Well That Ends Well took place on November 8, 1623. That the next recorded performance did not occur until 1741 provides some...

Study Guide
Lesson Plan

Antony and Cleopatra William Shakespeare

Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

As You Like It William Shakespeare

As You Like It was likely written between 1598 and 1600. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on August 4, 1600 but no edition followed the entry, thereby leading to the ambiguity in its publication date. Two topical references have been...

Cardenio William Shakespeare

Cardenio is considered a lost play. The authors are believed to be John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. The attribution is based primarily upon two 1613 performances by the King’s Men acting troupe of a play listed by either the title Cardenno...

Comedy of Errors William Shakespeare

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. It was first printed in the First Folio in 1623, and the earliest known performance is recorded to have been at Gray's Inn, one of London's law schools, on December 28th, 1594. However,...

Coriolanus William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's principal source for the story of Coriolanus is a history written by Plutarch, of a Coriolanus who supposedly lived in ancient Rome. Shared with this source material is a concern for the overlap between virtue and valour; whereas, in...

Cymbeline William Shakespeare

Cymbeline , one of Shakespeare's most ambitious and complicated plays, tells the story of a mythic king of England, Cymbeline, who reigned during the first century A.D. Its several plots trace the tribulations of the King and his royal family on...

Hamlet William Shakespeare

The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth) as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the Grammarian. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de Belleforest in 1570. In it, the...

Henry IV Part 1 William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part One first appeared in print in 1598, when two separate quartos were made. The second quarto serves as the standard text for most modern editions, and was followed closely by five more quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The...

Henry IV Part 2 William Shakespeare

Henry v william shakespeare.

Henry V was probably the greatest military leader that England ever had. He laid claim to the French throne in 1414 by invoking an English royal claim, and managed to win the Battle of Agincourt the following year against seemingly impossible...

Henry VIII William Shakespeare

Although Henry VIII is attributed to the Shakespeare canon and found in nearly every single collection of his plays, the general consensus has long been that the play which brings into the cycle of Shakespeare’s histories the most drama-worthy of...

Julius Caesar William Shakespeare

The only authoritative edition of Julius Caesar is the 1623 First Folio, which appears to have used the theater company's official promptbook rather than Shakespeare's manuscript. Some anomalies exist, most notably in Act Four where there is...

King Lear William Shakespeare

The story of King Lear and his three daughters existed in some form up to four centuries before Shakespeare recorded his vision. Lear was a British King who reigned before the birth of Christ, allowing Shakespeare to place his play in a Pagan...

Love's Labour's Lost William Shakespeare

Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to be one of his early comedies performed for the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Perhaps more than any Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to be directed toward the specific...

Macbeth William Shakespeare

Legend says that Macbeth was written in 1605 or 1606 and performed at Hampton Court in 1606 for King James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark. Whether it was first performed at the royal court or was premiered at the Globe...

Measure for Measure William Shakespeare

The first performance of Measure for Measure is believed to have taken place in 1604, during the reign of King James I. By this time, Shakespeare is believed to have begun writing his plays for performance at the Blackfriars theatre, a small,...

Merchant of Venice William Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice was first printed in 1600 in quarto, of which nineteen copies survive. This was followed by a 1619 printing, and later an inclusion in the First Folio in 1623. The play was written shortly after Christopher Marlowe's...

The Merry Wives of Windsor William Shakespeare

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy written by William Shakespeare which, tradition dictates, was composed at the request of Queen Elizabeth I. The play premiered in 1597 with publication occurring in 1602. Were it not for the appearance of ...

A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream is first mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, leading many scholars to date the play between 1594 and 1596. It is likely to have been written around the same period Romeo and Juliet was created. Indeed, many similarities...

Much Ado About Nothing William Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing was first published in 1600 and was likely written in 1598. The 1600 printing was the only copy published during Shakespeare's lifetime, and bears the title inscription describing that the play "hath been sundrie times...

Othello William Shakespeare

The plot of Shakespeare's Othello is largely taken from Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi , a tale of love, jealousy, and betrayal; however, the characters, themes, and attitudes of the two works are vastly different, with Shakespeare's play being...

Pericles, Prince of Tyre William Shakespeare

There are some significant doubts over the authorship of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a Jacobean play most frequently attributed to William Shakespeare. It is widely agreed that the Bard was the author of the main portion of the play that follows...

The Phoenix and the Turtle William Shakespeare

“The Phoenix and the Turtle,” first published in 1601, is one of William Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poems. While Shakespeare is most famous for his plays and sonnets, he also wrote a number of shorter poems. Of these, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”...

Rape of Lucrece William Shakespeare

T’was a plague that gave birth to William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” Between June 1592 and May 1594, acting companies were banished from London and the theater essentially became non-existent. The reason for this was...

Richard II William Shakespeare

Richard II was first printed in 1597 in a good quality text most likely taken from Shakespeare's manuscript. Two reprints in 1598 mention Shakespeare as the author. Later prints in 1608 and 1615 appear to be taken from the earlier versions, but...

Richard III William Shakespeare

Richard III generated a great deal of interest both during and after Shakespeare's lifetime. It was published in quarto at least five times after being performed in 1592. Richard Burbage first played Richard the Third and made the "poisonous...

Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet , Shakespeare's most famous tragedy and one of the world's most enduring love stories, derives its plot from several sixteenth century sources. Shakespeare's primary inspiration for the play was Arthur Brooke's Tragical History of...

Shakespeare's Sonnets William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's sonnets comprise 154 poems in sonnet form that were published in 1609 but likely written over the course of several years. Evidence for their existence long preceding publication comes from a reference in Francis Mere's 1598 Palladis...

Sonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, which concerns a difficult relationship in which both the speaker and the lover lie to each other, was initially published in 1599 in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim . The book was attributed to William...

Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought William Shakespeare

Sonnet 30, in which the speaker reflects wistfully on his own life but is comforted by the thought of his friend, was first published in Shakespeare’s 1609 Quarto. Like the other sonnets in the collection, Sonnet 30 is made up of 14 lines: three...

The Taming of the Shrew William Shakespeare

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, the origins of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to ascertain. The play as we have it today comes from the First Folio of 1623. However, an earlier version of the play, entitled The Taming of a Shrew , was...

The Tempest William Shakespeare

The Tempest first appeared in print as the first play in Shakespeare's 1623 Folio. It has been variously regarded as a highlight of Shakespeare's dramatic output, as a representation of the essence of human life, and as containing Shakespeare's...

Titus Andronicus William Shakespeare

For centuries, Titus Andronicus has carried the reputation of being the worst play by the best playwright. Though it was a great success when first staged in the late sixteenth century, in 1687 an English producer, Edward Ravenscroft, declared ...

Troilus and Cressida William Shakespeare

Sardonic, farcical, dark and tragicomic, Troilus and Cressida is a play that seems more comfortable on today's stage than it ever was in Shakespeare's day. Indeed, Troilus went unstaged for three hundred years; following its first performance in...

Twelfth Night William Shakespeare

Twelfth Night is one of the most commonly performed Shakesperean comedies, and was also successful during Shakespeare's lifetime. The first surviving account of the play's performance comes from a diary entry written early in 1602, talking about...

The Two Gentlemen of Verona William Shakespeare

The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1590 and 1594, thus placing it among the earliest of the Bard’s plays. Some scholars suggest that the play was likely the very first play Shakespeare wrote for the...

The Two Noble Kinsmen William Shakespeare

The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy involving two cousins who battle for their city and fall in love with one woman. The play is based on "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales , a long poem written in Middle...

Venus and Adonis William Shakespeare

Venus and Adonis is a long narrative poem by William Shakespeare. It is historically important because it is believed to be Shakespeare's first ever published poem. When it was published in 1593, few had heard of the young man who would become one...

The Winter's Tale William Shakespeare

Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances is science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

William Shakespeare | A Short Biographical Sketch

Name : William Shakespeare Known as : “Bard of Avon” Date of Birth : April 23, 1564 (On assumption, as he was baptized in Holy Trinity Church on April 26) Birth Place : Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. Father : Richard Shakespeare , a dealer of agricultural product by profession Mother : Mary Shakespeare, daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmcote Early Education : No definiteness, may be in Stratford Grammar School Spouse : Anne Hathway ( Eight years older than her husband, William ) Children : Susana Hall & Judith Quiney (daughters), Hamnet Shakespeare (only son) Occupation : Playwright, Poet & Actor Literary Period : Elizabethan Age As a Poet

From 1592 to 1594 the theatrical companies in London were somewhat disorganized because of the plague. Shakespeare utilized the time beautifully by showing us his talent in verse writing. His first long narrative poem is “Venus and Adonis” (1593). He composed 154 sonnets which were published in the volume, Shakespeare ‘s Sonnet in 1609. His Sonnets, 1-126 are dedicated to his bosom friend, Mr. W. H. and 127-154 to the Dark Lady. But the identity of Mr. W.H. and the Dark Lady is still in mystery.

Popular Sonnets

1) Sonnet 18 : Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day ? 2) Sonnet 60 : Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore 3) Sonnet 65 : Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea 4) Sonnet 116 : Let me not to the marriage of true minds 5) Sonnet 130 : My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun Sonnet Style, Structure and Form

Shakespeare ‘s sonnets are written predominantly in iambic pentameter.

There are fourteen lines in a Shakespearean sonnet . The first twelve lines are divided into three quatrains with four lines each. In the three quatrains the poet establishes a theme or problem and then resolves it in the final two lines, called the couplet. The rhyme scheme of the quatrains is abab cdcd efef. The couplet has the rhyme scheme gg. As a Popular Playwright

As a phenomenal playwright his creative career is divided into four periods: First Period (1590-1594)- experiment and external influence ( The Comedy of Errors , Love’s Labour’s Lost , Romeo and Juliet etc.) Second Period (1595-1599)- mature power in comedy and historical plays ( Henry IV, Julius Ceaser , As You Like It , Twelfth Night etc.) Third Period (1600-1609)- satire and tragedy ( Troilus & Cressida , Macbeth , Hamlet , King Lear , Othelo etc.) Fourth Period (1608-1611)- romance ( The Tempest , etc) The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare’s Frequently Quoted Lines “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Romeo and Juliet ( Quote Act II, Sc. II) . “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. – Macbeth ( Quote Act I, Scene I) “To be, or not to be: that is the question”. Hamlet (Act III, Sc. I). “The course of true love never did run smooth.” “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

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All’s Well That Ends Well | Summary, Characters, Analysis

William Shakespeare | Essay | Short Biography

December 15, 2017 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

The name William Shakespeare in itself does not require any introduction. He is the great artist who ever lived on this earth. He was a dramatist. He was a poet and what not. He was literary a star. He was one of his kind. There has come no artist after him who had become great as he is.

Though he died years ago but still he is remembered. He is still talked about. He died but his works remained immortal. We are still studying his plays and poems. He has no comparison.

He was born in the year 1564. He is the greatest writer of the English language. He was a playwright and an actor too. He was also known as the national poet of England and the “Bard of Avon.” He has given number of works during his life time. He wrote plays which were later taken by film industry.

There were stage plays. The two categories of plays that he wrote was the comedy and tragedy. In comedy plays he used to show to the world happy life, merry life. In tragic plays, he glorified the noble deeds of a hero. The sufferings that the hero has to go through. The sacrifices that a hero has to make for others. In general, he depicted the human life in his plays.

He used satires in the play. The satires were used to mock at the doings of the people. The practices that people used to do at that point of time. He had great tragic plays like Macbeth. In Macbeth, he has shown the story of a noble person who got corrupt. He got trapped in the urge of gaining power.

He was very much liked by the people of his city. William Shakespeare used super natural elements in his plays. This aspect is shown in the play Macbeth itself. The downfall of Macbeth was due to the three witches who turned his future.

It was for the first time when witches had made the announcements about him and he got trapped in their evil plan. He was an innocent soul. He was trust worthy but later in the story he got provoked by her wife lady Macbeth. She deviated Macbeth and thus they both planned murder against the king of their place. Thus, this is how his downfall was shown. This is a kind of tragic play. The endings of these plays are tragic and sad.

Coming onto the comic plays, these plays depicted the happy human life. There are comic elements and characters. He had written a play named as you like it. In this play, there is a story of two girls belonging to the royal family. It is also a love story of two couples.

In this story, there is a character named melancholy Jacques. William Shakespeare had used this character of clown to mock at the human society. The clowns without getting into any controversy and revealing the real motive mock at the society. In this story people meet at the end and all the misunderstandings that was created got resolved. The story has a happy ending.

These plays are written to evoke feelings into the audience. The tragic play leads to the feeling of fear and pity. The audience sympathizes with the characters of the play. In the comic plays people feel happy and relieved at the end.

He was not only the master of dramas but also of the poetry. He wrote several poems. He wrote in blank verse. Blank verse is that where there is no rhymes in the lines. He wrote the plays of history too. His books are relevant during the contemporary time too. The recent adaptation of his play was in the movie Haider. The story of this movie has been taken by the play named hamlet.

This was a tragic play written by William Shakespeare. He wrote various plays. He wrote Othello. He wrote Midsummer’s night dream. He wrote The Tempest. These were some of his very famous plays. He even gave a very romantic play. The name of the play was Romeo and Juliet.

This play gained lot of attention. It was a story of two lovers who belonged to the rivalry families. At the end both died because they could not stay together. Some of his quotes are very famous. Few of them are.

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here

Love all, trust a few and do wrong to none

All that glitters is not gold.”

This are very few lines written by him. His plays were written in old English. The new texts have been translated into modern English for the readers. He creates pathos through his reading. Pathos is when you try to create a sense of pity through literary work. He became famous for his poems.

He wrote in sonnets. Sonnets are the poem written in 14 lines. He wrote sonnets dedicated to dark lady. He had worked as an actor for 4-5 years in the theater of London. The theaters got closed due to the fear of plague and civil unrest. William Shakespeare works had different characteristics.

He used paradox. It is seen in the line written by him which goes like this, “She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not loved”. His writings have narrative and diversity of themes. Each play is different from the other though belonging to one category. He has also tried to render the inner workings of the mind.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Shakespeare's Language

Introduction, general reference.

Editing Shakespeare’s Language
Grammar and Syntax
Linguistics, Pragmatics, Stylistics
Language on Stage and Screen
Meter and Form
Shakespeare’s English and Non-English Language
Style, Early to Late
Words, Words, Words . . .

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Shakespeare's Language by Robert Stagg , Iolanda Plescia LAST MODIFIED: 23 May 2024 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0204

The mere association of the words “Shakespeare” and “language” suggests a wide range of potential critical approaches. It is sometimes tempting to argue that Shakespeare’s language is best accessed by one method, subject, or disciplinary field. Yet none holds a singular key to Shakespeare’s language, and we must bring a variety to bear on this essential feature of his craft. As with Solomon’s judgment, any attempt to cut Shakespeare’s language into disciplinary pieces will likely mutilate his writing. This entry on “Shakespeare’s Language” brings together vastly different approaches to argue that every element of his language deserves dedicated attention. We have combined macro-linguistic and stylistic scholarship related to the social, political, philosophical, and psychological imports of linguistic choices, including detailed accounts of “style,” form, and meter, with scholarship that delves into micro-linguistic elements as miniscule as the use of single words (e.g. modals, deictics), which, however, can become so significant as to reveal whole attitudes. Tempting though it is to attribute these attitudes to Shakespeare himself, the studies we have highlighted make clear that the ultimate value of such linguistic constructions lies in, for example, the building of character and the plotting of dramatic structure. Curiously, while many studies over recent decades have focused on linguistic matters, few of them have used the word “language” in their titles, as if there were no need, or as if there was a certain reluctance to call attention to what is, in effect, the very bone and marrow of Shakespeare’s artistry. Yet, as the selections included in this bibliography show, no consideration of wider issues such as performance, scholarly editing, adaptation, and reception can do without careful linguistic study, and the scholarship presented here ranges from lexical description, etymology, and metaphor, to grammar and syntax, to idiosyncratic uses of language and their application to authorship questions; from issues of linguistic identity tied to the history of English to multilingual Shakespeare and the mediation of Shakespeare through translation. Indeed, the question of identity seems to be as crucial in dealing with Shakespeare’s language as it is with his biography: the need to identify Shakespeare as the “father of modern English” has been so pressing that numerous linguistic myths about the size and novelty of his vocabulary have long circulated. The enduring strength of such myths says a lot about us, and about whom we would like Shakespeare to be.

Of general import, these books range from the referential to the discursively critical. Some are intended to give readers a schematized, categorical, or taxonomical overview of many things that might fall under the rubric of “Shakespeare’s language”; others are organized around a selection of Shakespearean text, but treat it to a sort of critical attention that runs the gamut of Shakespeare’s language. Adamson, et al. 2001 provides a detailed introduction to Shakespeare’s language. Booth 1977 supplies richly stocked mini-essays on each of Shakespeare’s sonnets that roam across myriad aspects of their language. Crystal 2016 tries to establish a secure footing for the study of Shakespearean pronunciation, and Crystal 2010 gives a lively and clear introduction to five major dimensions of Shakespeare’s language. Das, et al. 2021 gives the reader a glossary of language central to conceptualizing identity, race, and the transcultural in the early modern period. Hope 2003 studies Shakespeare’s grammar. Iyengar 2014 and Partridge 1968 stand in for a number of dictionaries of Shakespeare’s more specialized language (listed in more detail in Iyengar 2014 ), and Spevack 1973 stands as a good example of a print concordance (with a further, online example given in this entry). Palfrey 2005 gives lucid and yet dazzling expository accounts of many features of Shakespeare’s language.

Adamson, Sylvia, Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson, Ann Thompson, Katie Wales, eds. Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide . London: Thomson, 2001.

Highly informative, this volume provides a detailed introduction to Shakespeare’s language. The second section is particularly important for its use of more markedly linguistic approaches to consider dialects and linguistic variation, compounding, conversion, and affixation (with a lingering tendency here to cast Shakespeare as an inventor, rather than popularizer, of words).

Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

More than an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Booth provides richly stocked mini-essays on each sonnet that roam across myriad aspects of their language.

Crystal, David. Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare’s Language . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

A lively and clear introduction to five major dimensions of Shakespeare’s language: writing system, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and conversational style.

Crystal, David. The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Best read alongside Crystal’s more discursive arguments about how Shakespeare might/would originally have been pronounced, such as Pronouncing Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and older studies about Shakespeare’s pronunciation, such as Helge Kokeritz’s Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953).

Das, Nandini, Joao Vicente Melo, Haig Z. Smith, and Lauren Working. Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021.

Inspired by Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), the many brief chapters in this volume provide the reader with a glossary of language central to conceptualizing identity, race, migration, and the transcultural in Shakespeare’s time.

Hope, Jonathan. Shakespeare’s Grammar . London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

A revision of sorts of E. A. Abbott’s Victorian grammar (see section on Grammar and Syntax ) which sets the referential aspect of his work on a sounder footing. In a similar vein, readers may wish to consult Norman Francis Blake’s A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

Iyengar, Sujata. Shakespeare’s Medical Language: A Dictionary . London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

One of a number of more specialized dictionaries of Shakespeare’s language—see also Charles Edelman’s Shakespeare’s Military Language (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), Chris Hassel and Sandra Clark’s Shakespeare’s Religious Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), and B. J. and Mary Sokol’s Shakespeare’s Legal Language (London: Continuum, 2005).

Palfrey, Simon. Doing Shakespeare . London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005.

Gives lucid and yet dazzling expository accounts of many features of Shakespeare’s language, from the pun to the rhyme. Especially good on Shakespeare’s lexical and syntactical “difficulty” and “excess.”

Partridge, Eric. Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay, and a Comprehensive Glossary . 3d ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

Leave aside the dubious introductory material, and make your way to the alphabetic glossary of sexual and scatological terms in Shakespeare.

Spevack, Marvin. The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.

A good alternative to online concordances such as Open Source Shakespeare , this one is keyed to the Riverside Shakespeare.

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

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22 Biography

Mark Schoenfield is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet’s Contract and of British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: ‘The Literary Lower Empire’ , co-winner of the 2009 Colby Prize. He writes about material culture within the context of institutions and the knowledge they produce, with particular interest in the interplay of law, literature, and periodicals. He has recently co-edited John Galt’s The Entail with Clare A. Simmons.

Alec Jordan is a graduate student in the Literature, Media, and Culture programme at Florida State University. He has a master’s in Higher Education (Student Affairs) and has published in both Education and Literature fields. Drawing from experiences in both, he plans to continue studying the ways in which individuals write about themselves and tell their own stories, focusing on the Romantic period and the long nineteenth century.

Published: 22 May 2024
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This chapter explores biography as a complex of various genres that challenge and extend autobiography and claim the social intelligibility of another’s life. Contributing to authorized histories and secret histories, biography solidified a historiography that centred on the individual and connected psychology and politics. Romantic print culture consolidated possessive individualism and its literary figure, the realistic hero, and biography helped establish the realistic analogue of fiction, the celebrity. The inaugural Public Characters (1798) declared biography ‘the most fascinating and instructive species of literary composition’; such comments, whether earnest or flippant, bolstered the production of Boswellian biographies, such as Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron , a reconstruction of the Romantic hero of self-consciously autobiographical living. Similarly, Walter Scott’s, William Hazlitt’s, and William Henry Ireland’s competing multi-volume lives of Napoleon, each stemming from distinct political and literary sensibilities, all seek to define European modernity through biography.

Neither a History nor an Autobiography Be

In Benjamin Disraeli’s 1832 novel, Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Autobiography , the eponymous hero receives advice from his father that echoes the counsel Polonius offers Laertes. The elder Fleming insists on the mastery of dancing, riding, and swordplay; on seeking the company and criticisms of women; and on a definite system of reading: ‘Rise early and regularly and read for three hours. Read the Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, the Life of Richelieu, everything about Napoleon: read works of that kind … Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. Then fence’. The narrator states he assiduously followed the advice, including the concentration on biography, concluding he had consequently ‘become one of the most affected, conceited, and intolerable atoms that ever peopled the sunbeam of society’. 1 In the same year that this advice to avoid history in favour of biography was circulated, Thomas Carlyle, anonymously writing for Fraser’s Magazine, declared their continuity as a truism: ‘ “History”, it has been said, “is the essence of innumerable Biographies”. Such, at least, it should be.’ Carlyle is quoting as a general remark his own observation from the 1830 ‘Thoughts on History’: ‘Social Life is the aggregate of all the individual men’s Lives who constitute society; History is the essence of innumerable Biographies’. In this earlier text, however, he immediately queries the epistemological potentials of biography, paralleling it to the murky self-understanding of human beings and placing biography as a mode of lived experience: ‘But if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us, how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purport of them, we know not, and cannot know!’ 2 The retrospective positions articulated by Disraeli and Carlyle introduce an interplay among three crucial themes of Romantic biography: its relationship to history; its claims for the autonomy of the subject and the formal disruption of that autonomy by the biography’s own narrative; and biography’s work on the individual reader, particularly as that reader recognizes his own act of reading as occurring in serial with other readers engaging the same, similar, or competing material.

In its infrequent uses in periodicals of the first half of the eighteenth century, biography was located in proximity to history; Henry Baker’s 1730 Universal Spectator described it as ‘one of the most useful Branches of History’. ‘Traditionally’, Mark Phillips argues, ‘history and biography occupied separate, but adjacent domains divided by a seemingly natural boundary, which was the distinction between public and private life’, and shifts in either dyad altered the other. Samuel Johnson, in the Rambler No. 60, initially published in October 1750, distinguished the ‘general and rapid narratives of history, which involve a thousand fortunes in the business of a day, and complicate innumerable incidents in one great transaction’ from ‘the narratives of the lives of particular persons’, that is, the biography that can ‘lay open to posterity the private and familiar character’ of its subject. Extending Johnson’s paradigm, the New London Review in 1799 opines that many ‘characters appear in history with a degree of consequence not really belonging to them’, and ‘the duty of a biographer’ in such cases is ‘to detach the man from his station, and either entirely omit, or reduce to a very slight notice, the memorial of one whose personal qualities had no real influence over the events of his age’; biography corrects historical causation by disclosing or erasing individual interiority. 3

Although autobiography more overtly corresponded to trends of individualism and expressivity, biography was also bound with Romantic ideals of selfhood and Romantic-era literary developments. In the Romantic combination of celebrity and print-culture, Julian North observes, ‘the relationship between biographer, subject, and reader shifted decisively towards its modern form’, while William Epstein identifies the ‘nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness’. 4 Isaac D’Israeli contended in ‘Some Observations on Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters’ (1796) that ‘Biography is a recent taste in Britain’, and developed ‘as the human mind became the great object of our inquiry, and to detect and separate the shades of the passions [became] the great aim of the Biographer’. 5 Periodicals such as the Irish Magazine participated in centralizing and characterizing biography in both text and image (see Figure 22.1 ). Established and popularized as a term several decades earlier than autobiography, biography’s growth and differentiation both paralleled and augmented its first-person cousin.

James Field Stanfield, in his 1813 theorization of biography, Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography (identified by Robert Folkenflik as ‘the first book on biography in English’), 6 positions autobiography as an ideal of biography: ‘There can be no perfect biography but that which is written by a man’s self’, because it can establish ‘with conscious certainty the motives’ that produce ‘pursuits and actions’. 7 In its 1822 article ‘On Auto-Biography’ (10:6, 742–745), the Edinburgh Magazine speculates that ‘if the humblest individual were to relate his own life, the narrative could not fail to be interesting’; yet the essayist selects as exemplar of this autobiographical effect of sincerity James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) in which Johnson ‘is made so frequently … to speak in his own person, that the narrative has the same effect … as if he himself were the narrator’ (742).

The Irish Magazine, and Monthly Asylum for Neglected Biography , January 1811, noting an illustrated Life as the focus of attention for the Sale of the Major’s Library. By permission of Yale University Libraries.

The Preface to the inaugural Public Characters (1798), an annual collection of brief profiles of public figures, declares that ‘ Biography , in all its forms, is allowed to be the most fascinating and instructive species of literary composition’, and highlights the advantages of ‘ contemporary Biography ’ as a contribution to public discourse, pleasure, and confidence. This public aspect is underscored by the dedication to the king, who, unable to ‘mix with [his] subjects’ might ‘be enabled to appreciate their distinguished talents, to respect their illustrious virtues, and to reward their useful and meritorious actions, during the continuance of a lengthened, happy, and prosperous reign’. 8 The editor constructs the king as at once an exception and an ideal reader, suggesting that biographies secure social connection through a print culture that supplements and exceeds the possibilities of personal contacts. The New London Review (which mixed literary accounts, contemporary and elegiac, with reviews) agrees with this potential of biography, but asserts Public Characters fails because, rather than written, it is ‘compiled, by various hands, from pamphlets, monthly publications, and newspapers’, and so constructs not a genuine biography, but a simulacrum of public character. 9 The brief review of Public Characters of 1801 – 1802 in the inaugural issue of the Edinburgh Review hypothesizes it was ‘written by some very innocent scribbler, who feels himself under the necessity of dining’, underscoring the commercial viability of contemporary biography, while also locating it within a self-reflexive paradigm of fame: the review observes that the volume would allow ‘grown-up country gentlemen’ to ‘read a story book about their living friends who would read nothing else’ (122). Such comments, ranging from earnest to flippant, outline Romantic theorization of biographical writing, and its role in print culture at intersections of celebrity, privacy, intimacy, and public recognition.

The Genres of Biography

Stanfield’s ‘contradictory’ attitude toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1789) as praiseworthy in delineating ‘distinct passions’ and yet condemnable for ‘insatiable vanity’ crisply demonstrates, as Anthony Harding contends, the conflicting ideals of ‘biography as the most engaging way of teaching morality’ and the ‘growing public curiosity, assiduously fed by printers’ for ‘private lives of the famous’. 10 In detailing this tension, using James Currie’s Life of Burns (1800) and William Wordsworth’s response to it sixteen years later, Harding places the biographical gesture as a negotiation ‘between two imperatives of modern bourgeois culture’: ‘the economic imperative to consume cultural products, thereby achieving the status of an active participant in consumer culture and a person of taste; and the libertarian imperative to be an autonomous individual, for whom the “mind” should be both a sacrosanct private preserve and the foundation of one’s social status as a free subject’ (386). Because, as Harding notes, biography was ‘considered a new genre’, with ‘its boundaries … not firmly settled’ (376), its goals and devices were provisional, even experimental, at once absorbing techniques from other genres, and loaning them out.

Biography had numerous recently established modes that grounded such experimentation. First, the long form that by its very heft announced the significance of its subject; in the ‘Preface’ to the last volume of his Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (1837–1838) , John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law, reasons, ‘If [Scott’s] greatness was a delusion, I grant that these Memoirs are vastly too copious’, and adds, reductio ad absurdum , were he himself not certain of that greatness, he would not have written at all. 11 These works looked to Boswell’s Life of Johnson as their model; William Forbes, in his 1806 biography of James Beattie, describes Boswell’s achievement as ‘one of the most characteristic and entertaining biographical works in the English language’. 12 Often composed by either relatives or close friends, like Lockhart’s Scott and Forbes’s Beattie respectively, these grand biographies tended to be chronological and guided by the subject’s letters. Although they would generally demonstrate confidential access to the subject’s correspondence, it was used to assert continuity between the private and public self, as both biographical fact and moral imperative.

More pervasive on a daily scale and more various generically are collective biographies for which Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781) provided one paradigm. Annette Cafarelli argues it is a ‘characteristically Romantic prose form’—‘interpretive, subjective, fragmentary, allusive, and iconographic’ ( Prose , 1–2). William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age (1825) is a series of biographical sketches of famous men across a range of public professions and an astute assessment of the era’s responsivity to individuals. He opens his essay on Wordsworth by declaring his ‘genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age’, and describes Lord Chancellor Eldon as exemplifying the contrast between a private ‘ good-nature’ and a public ‘phlegm’: ‘Delay seems, in his mind, to be of the very essence of justice’ (Hazlitt, Works , xi. 86, 141, 144). Hazlitt, as Cafarelli recognizes, forgoes an ‘overview’ in favour of selective ‘biographical details to signify the whole of character: Bentham “turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner” ’ (117; quoting Hazlitt, Works , xi. 16). Hazlitt uses antithetical formulations, at the levels of both sentence and argument, to affirm the complexities and clarities of the age, and—as his epigram (‘To know another well were to know one’s self’) suggests—of himself.

John Watkin first published his 900-page Universal Biographical and Historical Dictionary in 1800; a compilation of brief biographies listed alphabetically. Its preface delineates its scope across diverse professions, and stakes its value on uniquely offering a ‘ complete ’ listing. In 1820, a new edition (at least the fourth that included additions) appeared, running just under 1,200 pages. The new preface announced that because of the ‘officious zeal of friendship’ and ‘industry of literary undertakers’, ‘Biographical Memoirs have become as multitudinous, prolix, and veracious as epitaphs in a country church-yard.’ Consequently, the revised plan will ‘expunge’ articles ‘exclusively belonging to General History’ and focus on those that ‘come under the proper denomination of Biography’. While this shift of emphasis is in part Watkin’s strategy to maximize his own marketing, it also registers the professionalizing and diversifying of collective biography. Variations on the genre included illustrative sequences in periodicals, volumes of portraits, short biographical compilations of actors, lawyers, and other groupings. There were the elegiac ‘life’ of a poet that prefaced a posthumous volume (and could be longer than the rest of the volume) and its periodical counterpart, the increasingly extensive obituaries that appeared in various monthlies. As Tom Mole notes, newspaper reports and caricatures ‘recast the public fascination with [George III’s] role as monarch into a public fascination with his existence as an embodied and all-too-fallible individual’; similar reportage tracked his son, the Prince Regent, thus making the monarchy visible through a serial biography. 13 Given its expansive reach, biography asserted fundamentally the social intelligibility of the life of another person, and such an assertion was available to fiction and other frames of representation.

Michael McKeon finds an interconnection between the ‘emergences’ of ‘the biographical-novelistic subject’ and the ‘social type of the writer’; 14 this continuity enables a dialogue between the novel and the biography as Romantic forms. Claiming that ‘all fictions are founded upon facts’, the Eclectic Review postulates that Andrew Reed’s 1819 work, No Fiction, A Narrative founded on Recent and Interesting Facts , should be classified as a ‘biographical novel’, and references the dispute about the novel that had been carried on in both pamphlets and periodicals about the identity of the main character, Lefevre, and specifically whether he was meant to represent Francis Barnett. The British Critic notes that Barnett, who published his own Memoirs to refute the novel, had taken legal advice to seek an injunction, but was willing instead to settle for an apology. When, in 1832, the Literary Guardian described Sir Richard Maltravers as a ‘sort of biographical novel’, the review expected its readers to understand the generic blend. 15

In 1822, La Belle Assemblée presented ‘Biography: An Essay’, which announced that biography has ‘all the charms of that fascinating class of books called novels’ with the added pleasure of ‘the consciousness of its truth’. The use of ‘consciousness’ focuses the difference between biography and the novel on the reader’s framing of the text, which, from the outset, is judgemental, as biography ‘teem[s] with examples to invite or deter imitation’, reinforcing the loop of reading and experience. Arguing that ‘we generally feel less interest in the main story of an epic poem, than in the little episodes with which it is interspersed’, the essay proposes the biographical disposition as the most natural cast of reading, one that, in the prior age of epic, awaited the contemporary stage of selfhood. The following year, La Belle Assemblée justified a new series, ‘Female Biography’, by maintaining the genre will ‘render La Belle Assemblée, the faithful reflector of a mass of intellect, and the finer qualities of the heart, not less profitable as exciting examples, than entertaining as imitable representations’. 16

Although more frequently poetry was noted for its autobiographical features, ranging from Beattie’s 1771 The Minstrel, to Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819–1824) and Wordsworth’s Prelude , a biographical poetic impulse is discernible in the first book of the 1805 Prelude , as Wordsworth considers, among the topics worthy of song, a series of biographical themes, including Gustavus Vassa, William Wallace, and, from ‘tyrannic time’,

some unknown man [who], Unheard of in the chronicles of kings, Suffered in silence for the love of truth. ( Prelude , I. 202–204; the published 1850 version alters ‘unknown’ to ‘high-souled’. Wordsworth, Prelude , 39.)

In this last, Wordsworth is not proposing fiction, but instead a kind of paradigmatic biography, true in its impulses and consideration of human nature, rather than in its accumulation of facts.

Secret Histories and Contemporary Biography

One ‘distinguishing generic possibility of biography’, Julian North notes, was ‘the posthumous perspective’ (6), which could apply to biographies that took an elegiac view of a subject, whether alive or dead. The biographical notices that preceded a final collection of poetry could cast a nostalgic mood over the subsequent work. The preface to the 1824 Remains of Robert Bloomfield recapitulates his life as mirroring his poetry: ‘Every thing is simple and unaffected; purely pastoral and truly English’; the volume emphasizes this continuity by printing the letter to Robert from his father describing the internment of Robert’s half-brother Isaac, followed by the fragmentary ‘Elegy’ to Isaac, in which ‘affection cries’, there were ‘Meekness and truth in every word he said’. Ian Haywood’s reading of Bloomfield’s most successful poem, The Farmer’s Boy (1800), which ‘liberate[s] the poem from the generic confines of “rural,” “pastoral,” and “georgic” writing, and relocate[s] its most powerful effects in the quite different aesthetic modes of allegory and fantasy’, suggests the quiescent work performed by the preface to Remains and the aura such biographical representations cast over Bloomfield’s posthumous critical reception. 17

Alternatively to the posthumous mode which modulated between open declaration and discreteness, biography could be a contemporaneous act, consolidating or repudiating current fame by sensationalizing or exposing narratives. Many (wo)man-about-town biographical sketches imitated the earlier, somewhat scandalous ‘ “Tête-à-tête” columns in Town and Country Magazine ’ (1769–1796) that, as Kristin Samuelian has observed, provided ‘background information on celebrity courtesans like [Mary] Robinson’. Noting the continuity of ‘popular biographies, gossip columns, and caricatures’ that enveloped Robinson, Samuelian locates her, like the regent, within (using Tom Mole’s helpful phrase), ‘a hermeneutics of intimacy’. 18 This reading of Robinson adumbrates the Romantic deployment of secret histories as a potent form of biographical construction. ‘Peer[ing] into secret spaces’, as Rebecca Bullard notes, popular secret histories courted scandal and showed the empowered ‘in a metaphorical and literal state of undress’. 19 Often illicit in their sources, casual in their tone, these popular forms corroborated Johnson’s well-circulated claim in ‘ Rambler 60’ that ‘more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral’; in Rambler 68, Johnson confirms the ‘highest panegyrick’ of private virtues is the ‘praise of servants’ who ‘must commonly know the secrets of a master, who has any secrets to entrust’(Johnson, Rambler , iii. 322, 361). This claim, an implicit argument about ‘secret history’, undergirds the concepts both of a history driven by individuals, and of histories as corrected by biographies.

The image of the celebrity, appearing in prints and paragraphs of periodicals, entering systems of fashion, is an early adumbration of an individual’s brand, charged by the ‘vectors of emotional identification’, as Jason Goldsmith puts it, that ‘elaborate nations and national identities’, and depend upon imaginary, mediated relationship with a public. 20 By 1839, such branding could be associated with alterations in language itself. Miss J. Potter, writing as an anonymous persona in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of that year, proposes a ‘History of our [Humbug’s] Family’, and observes the fame of having ‘become idiomatic in the English tongue’: ‘A Duke of Wellington has given his name to a pair of boots, an Earl of Sandwich to a Vauxhall slice of beef or ham placed between two similar portions of bread and butter; a Lord Stanhope has had the honour to name a gig’. 21 The author’s comic piece—her proposed collective biography of the family of ‘Humbug’ is expansive, taking in all varieties and applications of fame—reflects a growing practice of celebrity branding, which in turn produced opportunities for impersonation. Nicholas Mason argues that Byron, whose autobiographical writings were manoeuvres that established his contemporary fame, ‘set out to make his name as a poet [when] branding logic was ascendant in a range of retail sectors’ (54). The success of these efforts was clarified, as Gary Dyer has demonstrated, in a legal construction of brand that anticipates the instantiation of trademark. As Dyer recounts, John Murray, Byron’s publisher, appeared in court to protest James Johnson ‘exploiting Byron’s commercial appeal by vending another poet’s compositions as his’; Byron owned his style, and Murray had bought it. 22 This perspective had been anticipated in the Quarterly Review ’s attack on Public Characters of 1809–10 : ‘The Editor has been, for some years, in the practice of sallying forth on the king’s highway, [and] seizing upon numbers of unsuspecting people, under the extraordinary pretence of their being “ Public Characters ”.’ The reviewer plays on the double meaning of ‘public character’ as a biographical form and as reputation, to constitute the literary marketplace as a highway in which reputations are seized and pressed into service. For the Romantic era, secret history was a strategy for evading the commodification implicit in producing for publication and consequently for sale, for maintaining the veneer and values of amateur and gentlemanly social interest, and for mimicking that strategy for profit.

Literary Biography in the Shadow of Boswell

The Westminster Magazine in 1775 reiterated the truism that ‘the Lives of Literary Men can be little more than an enumeration and account of their Works’, but then offers the biography of Tobias Smollett as an exception, suggesting that The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) fictionalizes the author’s own adventures. 23 This trope, of stating this generality and then offering a specific exception, was frequent in periodicals, whether reviewing literary biographies or offering their own biographical sketches. In 1818, the Literary Gazette states, ‘It has been frequently observed, that the lives of literary men are enlivened by few incidents, and therefore seldom afford any great scope for biographical remark’ before proposing John Gifford, founding editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review (1798–1821) and a London police magistrate from 1805 until shortly before his death in 1818, as contradicting the rule. 24 Literary biographers—and their potential subjects, authors—were aware of a negotiation between the public and private lives of an author that would impinge on the reception of work. Richard Cronin traces a range of responses to literary biography by major Romantic-era poets and demonstrates reservations regarding the genre by even Lockhart, Scott’s multi-volumed biographer, about how the Life of Johnson ‘had radically transformed the character of the genre by exploiting so fully Boswell’s records of Johnson’s private conversations’. 25 According to Jane Darcy, ‘ “To Boswellize” became a standard term for a number of biographical practices, including the use of intrusive domestic detail and the recording of private conversations.’ 26

Julian North argues that in ‘the domesticating discourse of biography, the transcendent subject became embodied, the self-sufficient subject socialized, the masculine subject feminized’ (31). She notes that for male poets—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Prefatory Observations on Modern Biography’ (1810) is her first example—‘some of the major expressions of Romantic anxiety of authorship are in essays that take biography as their central theme’. Coleridge evinced ‘unease with a form that threatens to relinquish control to the reader’ by overwhelming them with, in Coleridge’s words, ‘huge volumes of biographical minutiae, which render the real character almost invisible’ (33, quoting the 1810 Friend, ii. 285). Wordsworth concurred with Coleridge’s distrust of biography; he worried that such productions gave the public a sense of ownership over individual lives, which he felt threatened both his poetic identity and more tangible claims of copyright (North, 32). If, as Richard Altick asserts, ‘biographical data provided grist to the busy mills of the associationist psychologists’, including avid amateur readers, then biography contested the forms of self-expression characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry. 27 As Cronin notes, John Hamilton Reynolds’s suggestion—‘there was a natural war between the “children of genius” and “the malice of a biographer” ’—is validated by the tactics each deployed ( Cronin, Paper Pellets , 45).

When Wordsworth sought to vindicate Robert Burns against his representation in James Currie’s biography that Burns’s brother was considering reissuing, he regretted Boswell ‘had broken through many pre-existing delicacies’ (Wordsworth, Prose , iii. 120). He declares that if ‘records’ of Horace ‘and his contemporaries, composed upon the Boswellian plan’ were unearthed, he would ‘dread’ to read them and ‘sully the imaginative purity of their classical works with gross and trivial recollections’ (123). Wordsworth presents the biographer as an inadequate witness; if, he contends, ‘it were in the power of a biographer to relate the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, then selectivity would be unneeded. But knowing the partialness of his own information, Currie ought to have anticipated readers who ‘would be eager to sit in judgment, and pronounce decidedly upon the guilt or innocence’ (118–119). The Critical Review noted that Wordsworth acted ‘not merely from a natural love of justice, but from a peculiar resemblance between the minds and the stiles of the two poets’. The Monthly Review ‘agree[s] with Mr. Wordsworth that these “remorseless hunters after matter of fact rank among the blindest of human beings” ’. 28 Wordsworth acknowledges that his 30-page pamphlet is excessive as a ‘direct answer to the request’ for an opinion about republication, but maintains that ‘this individual case’ permits a ‘general view of the subject’ which Wordsworth then offers:

… biography, though differing in some essentials from works of fiction, is nevertheless, like them, an art ,—an art, the laws of which are determined by the imperfections of our nature, and the constitution of society. Truth is not here, as in the sciences, and in natural philosophy, to be sought without scruple, and promulgated for its own sake, upon the mere chance of its being serviceable. (Wordsworth, Prose , iii. 121)

Cafarelli locates Wordsworth’s perspective within a larger generic conceptualization of biography: ‘Although selectivity, abbreviation, and disordering of chronological sequence were some of the many acceptable narrative distortions necessary to achieve biographical truth, they sprang not from an indifference to fact but from a sense that facts did not constitute truth’ (19).

Wordsworth’s own analysis of the Boswellian effect, ultimately, recognized that ‘the gross breaches upon the sanctities, of domestic life’ were as irresistible as the ‘gross and violent stimulants’ of ‘frantic novels’ he had complained about in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth, Prose , iii. 122; i. 128). Altick summarizes Boswell’s accretive approach: ‘To Johnson’s own words, Boswell added the constant testimony of an eyewitness’ ( Lives and Letters , 61). Thomas Moore, John Galt, and R. C. Dallas, in their biographies of Byron, each vying to replace his burnt memoirs, all claimed the perspective of an eyewitness account, supplemented or confirmed, by letters; Lockhart, as Scott’s son-in-law, could make a similar assertion. Thomas Love Peacock, reviewing Moore’s memoir of Byron, observed that Byron was ‘haunted in his retirement by varieties of the small Boswell or eavesdropping genus’ eager to sell ‘his confidences to the public’. Francis Hart observed that Byron, himself a reader of Boswell, had modes of resistance: ‘the attempt to unearth personality forced the defensive creation of personae ’ just as, on the island of St Helena, ‘the supreme self-creator of the age was busy exploiting his Boswells in the creation of the Napoleonic myth’. 29

Eccentric Biography and Female Biography

The proliferation of genres of biographical sketches functioned at two coordinated levels—defining in dialogue the subject and the approach. Thus, John Watkins, writing to the Monthly Magazine in 1806, discusses how ‘neglected biography’ concerns biographical figures who have been ‘improperly omitted or slightly mentioned’ and also critiques the historical process of neglect as a form of partiality. 30 The Tradesman: or, Commercial Magazine ran a series, ‘Commercial Biography’, prefacing each exemplar of commercial success with a request for contributions to ‘stimulate to Diligence’ the ‘younger’ readers in ‘their respective situations’; the series, in addition to presenting successful men, served to conceptualize commercial labour, and included reading exemplary biography within it. Musical, theatrical, and legal biography all popularized, as well as professionalized, their fields. Amid this heterogeneity, ‘eccentric biography’ emerged appearing in book form, occasional articles, and recurrent magazines such as Kirby’s Wonderful and Eccentric Museum (1803–1820); Victoria Carroll argues that beyond serving as ‘an indicator of the prevalence of a discourse of eccentricity’, the proliferation of eccentric biography both ‘propagate[d] this discourse’ among diversifying audiences and ‘popularize[d] new ways of organizing and presenting biographical material’. 31

In 1801, a volume of Eccentric Biography appeared, declaring its roughly 300 sketches would present ‘a pleasing Delineation of the Singularity, Whim, Folly, Caprice, &c. &c. of the Human Mind’. In 1803, a revised version appeared, now divided into two complementary volumes. The first reprinted the original title page identically, highlighting the same thirteen types, including Potentates, Lawyers, Poets, Imposters, and Misers. Its subjects were all male. The title page of the second volume highlighted eight types—Actresses, Adventurers, Authoresses, Fortunetellers, Gipsies, Dwarfs, Swindlers, and Vagrants—distinguished ‘by their Chastity, Dissipation, Intrepidity, Learning, Abstinence, Credulity, &c.’ Where the first reflected the ‘Human Mind’, this one mirrored the ‘Female Mind’ (see Figures 22.2 and 22.3 ). It notes in the prefatory ‘Advertisement’ that its eccentricity is defined by ‘deviation from the generality of the sex’. This disparity in tone and approach delineated a version of female biography contested by Mary Hays’s Female Biography, or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, also published in 1803, although contemplated from at least 1798. 32

Hays’s more radical version of female biography arose in dialogue with the catastrophic reception of William Godwin’s biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin’s quickly composed testament, though drenched with the sentimentality of recent widowhood, was nonetheless described by Thomas Mathias as a ‘convenient Manual for speculative debauchery’ and, as Mitzi Myers demonstrates, became a test case for feminine and feminist representation in Romantic biography. 33 Jane Darcy reads Godwin’s work as part of a short-lived, post-Boswellian genre of ‘philosophical biography’ on two grounds. First, Wollstonecraft lived, in Godwin’s presentation, ‘according to a constant, unwavering belief’ in particular values, and secondly, because the form of his writing reflects those values in ‘the overt candour and plainness of Godwin’s methodology’ which include ‘the emphasis he places’ on a ‘new form of domesticity they manage to create’ ( Melancholy , 115, 137).

Wollstonecraft had died in September of 1797, a year after her friend Mary Hays published the controversial autobiographical novel, Memoirs of Emma Courtney . Hays commemorated Wollstonecraft with an anonymous, complimentary obituary in the Monthly Magazine and soon wrote the more extensive ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ for Richard Phillips’s Annual Necrology for 1797 – 1798 amid complex responses to Wollstonecraft triggered by Godwin’s memoir; in it, she describes Godwin as ‘her biographer and husband’ and quotes from, alludes to, and credits Godwin’s work. Although she writes anonymously, she signals her attachment to Godwin and Wollstonecraft as a pair. She writes, ‘Their acquaintance was now renewed, in consequence of a meeting at the apartments of a common friend✳, who had forwarded the interview’ which she credits as the start of ‘greater … intimacy’; the footnote indicates the friend is ‘The writer of the present narrative’. Godwin had ended his Memoir focused on his own relation to Wollstonecraft, leaving ‘to other men’ to write the ‘loss [to] the world’. Hays, by contrast, laments that ‘Her own sex have lost, in the premature fate of this extraordinary woman, an able champion’ before concluding with a surmise that her education was ‘desultory’ like that of ‘the majority of her sex’, invoking one of Wollstonecraft’s most potent feminist concerns, just before a final paragraph describing her ‘person’. 34

Eccentric Biographies title pages (1801 and 1803) expressing different perceptions of eccentric men and women. By permission of the Cushing Library of Texas A&M and the Rubenstein Library of Duke University respectively.

Continuing a trend of encyclopedic collections of female lives that Jeanne Wood articulates, Hays built upon her memoir of Wollstonecraft in producing the six volumes of Female Biography which, as Julie Murray shows, ‘positions the emancipation of women as an index of a society’s progress’. 35 Hays did not include an entry for Wollstonecraft within Female Biography , and gestures to that omission with a passing reference to the general, occasionally waived, exclusion of recent figures. Andrew McInnes, however, argues that Wollstonecraft’s influence is present throughout the work, as her more personal footnotes ‘constitute critical interventions which revivify Wollstonecraftian feminism for the post-revolutionary audience for whom Hays is writing’. 36 While Hays compiled, rather than composed, many of the roughly 300 entries, she set a noticeable precedent with the inclusion of questionable figures, such as ‘Catherine the Great, Ninon l’Enclos, Bianca Cappello and others that did not rise to the level of “women worthies” ’, a choice which, as Mary Spongberg and Gina Luria Walker note, ‘confirmed public skepticism that the author had not amended her rebellious ways’. Begoña Lasa Álvarez offers a persuasive conjecture for weak reviews: Hays distinctly addressed her female readership and sought to improve ‘women’s circumstances’, rather than writing for public opinion as a whole. 37 Examples of Hays correcting errors of fact and character appear throughout Female Biography , even with figures who straddle legend and history. In her brief entry on Dido, Hays dedicates two of her five paragraphs to attacking Virgil’s version of Dido’s story, saying his account ‘border[s] on licentiousness’ as not only did Dido live some two hundred years prior to Aeneas, but ended her days with ‘conjugal fidelity, in the temper and spirit of the times’, rather than as ‘a victim to ill-requited love’. 38 Hays’s biographical projects ended nearly two decades later with Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated in 1821; Álvarez calls this work a ‘feminisation of the genre of royal lives’, and suggests it responds to the ‘so-called Queen Caroline Affair’ of the year before (81–83).

The Ladies’ Monthly Museum had regularly published biographical sketches and in 1814 had renamed its biyearly index to lead with the genre: ‘Biography, Essays, Tales, and Anecdotes’. The magazine declared itself an ‘assemblage of whatever can tend to please the fancy, interest the mind, or exalt the character of the British Fair’; it engages, represents, and transforms British womanhood, conceptualized as a collective but proliferated through individuality. In 1824, it ran a series of five articles titled ‘Biography of Eccentric Characters’. Typically, each essay begins by connecting its main figure to their female relatives, and through them to fame and wealth. The first article is prefaced with a theorization of the proper subject of biography. It affirms that while ‘the life of an obscure and unimportant personage’ can be written successfully, it would require ‘talents’ that would ‘probably be better employed’ elsewhere; instead, the most suitable subjects of biography are ‘individuals distinguished from their fellow-creatures, by some peculiarities of sentiment, character, or conduct’. The ‘eccentric’ constitutes a middle ground between the famous and ‘anyone’ that underscores individuality as legible. The first eccentric character is Edward Wortley Montagu, son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. His eccentricity consisted in impersonating nonentities such as a chimney sweep, fish crier, and cabin boy. Eventually reclaimed by his family, he attempts a life ‘suitable to his birth and station’ resulting in ‘the most whimsical deviations from the usages and opinions of the society to which he naturally belonged’; if not extending Haysian feminism, eccentricity in the Ladies’ Monthly Museum at least stretches masculinity and patriarchy (19: 15).

Napoleonic Biography and beyond

Francis Hart details the multiple, interconnected accounts of Napoleon, identifying more than a dozen works that borrowed materials from one another, appearing in various editions, abridgements, and translations. 39 To frame Bonaparte was to frame Romantic heroism in its political and militaristic aspects. William Henry Ireland, Walter Scott, and William Hazlitt all produced multi-volume lives of Napoleon, each stemming from their distinct political and literary sensibilities, yet all seeking to define the essence of European modernity through biography. Ireland opens with a scene of conflict: ‘when the inhabitants of Corsica took up arms, in 1767’, Napoleon’s father, Carolo Bonaparte, ‘abandoned the gown for the sword’ and ‘he combated bravely, though without success, for the rights and liberties of his native island’. 40 This opening locates Napoleon’s destiny in ancestry. Beneath it, a footnote details doubts about his ancestry, Napoleon’s own reluctance to claim lineage, and the British ascribing to him ‘some low and obscure descent’ in order to ‘vilify his character’.

Scott and his publisher Archibald Constable concocted a vision of a biography of Napoleon for Constable’s ‘projected Miscellany’, a placement it quickly outgrew, appearing in nine volumes as The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Napoleon had, during the interlude of captivity between defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and death in 1821, propagandized ‘the major elements of his memoirs and Legend’, and it was, Donald Horward contends, against this autobiographical myth that Scott wrote. 41 Scott viewed his project as at once historical and biographical, and regarded Napoleon as both his subject and, at times, a competing narrator of history. Although Napoleon is largely absent from the opening volume as an actor, Scott renders the narrative of the French Revolution as a preface to his ascendency, complicating his own agency. Further, occasional notes reinforce Scott’s sense that his biography competes with Napoleon’s own myth-making. Defending Marie Antoinette against various slanders, Scott notes, ‘One of the most accredited calumnies against the unfortunate Marie Antoinette pretends, that she was on this occasion surprised in the arms of a paramour. Buonaparte is said to have mentioned this as a fact, upon the authority of Madame Campan.’ 42 Napoleon’s narrative unreliability is aligned with his errors of both military judgement and temperament.

Intending his Life of Napoleon to reflect the spirit of the age, Hazlitt published its initial two volumes in 1828 to weak reviews, and the completed four-volume set two years later. Hazlitt had partly conceptualized his biography as a defence of Napoleon against Scott’s, although the latter had been acknowledged in reviews as even-handed. In its obituary of Hazlitt, the Gentleman’s Magazine identified the biography as his ‘most elaborate performance’, and declared that though it was ‘tinged with party feeling, the writer displays much deep philosophical remark’. The Athenaeum praised Hazlitt for being ‘as impartial as any other biographer’ despite his ‘strong prejudices’. 43 Its brief review then extends its meta-biographical understanding of writers on Napoleon by asserting that the ‘life of such a man is not to be written by his contemporaries, or, if written, it must be by some dreaming philosopher who had never mingled in the strife of the fierce political discussions of the age’. This equally excluded Ireland, Scott, and Hazlitt, and moreover, looked to the future for the biography, not only of Napoleon, but of the age.

Just as ‘Biography was shaped by Romanticism’, biography was ‘the most influential transmitter of the myth of the Romantic poet’ (North, 3). Further, biography played a significant role in the Victorian formulation of the Romantic era. Through dispersals of their lives, Byron and Keats became types that inhabited both novels and conduct books. Having created himself as an autobiographical figure, the English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey wrote, starting in December 1833, a series of biographical essays in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine ; Margaret Russett, detailing his trade ‘in the lives of poets’, demonstrates how a Victorian De Quincey ‘steals Wordsworth’s personal effects by reclassifying them as the material of authorship—which always belongs to posterity’. 44 A similar reconstruction occurs with James Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen , first published in 1869 and expanded in a second edition two years later; in it, her nephew presents Austen as a quintessential aunt: ‘I now began to know, and, what was the same thing, to love her.’ This equation of knowledge and affection stitches together the biographical gaps of information, replacing it with periodizing conjecture: ‘I believe that she and her sister were generally thought to have taken to the garb of middle age earlier than their years or their looks required.’ 45 From its self-reflexive shape in the period itself to our contemporary moment, the biographical impulse traces the poles of Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes’s challenge, to ‘both de-Romanticize and re-Romanticize’ the biographical. If, as Justin Kaplan contends, by the end of the twentieth century, ‘biography has become our version of folk epic’, 46 a vital part of that emergence are the innovations of the Romantic era, when biography bridged the literary and political, the artistic and the journalistic, the individual and the collective.

1 Benjamin Disraeli , Contarini Fleming: A Psychological Auto-Biography , 4 vols (London: John Murray, 1832), i . 282, 285. The Mirror of Literature reprints the father’s words as ‘ Advice, by a Man of the World ’ (7 July 1832), 10–11.

2 [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Biography’ [Review of John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson ], Fraser’s Magazine , 5/27 (April 1832), 253–260, 254; [Thomas Carlyle], ‘Thoughts On History’, Fraser’s Magazine , 2/10 (November 1830), 413–418, 414. Carlyle returned to this theme repeatedly; see Ann Rigney , ‘The Untenanted Places of the Past: Thomas Carlyle and the Varieties of Historical Ignorance’, History and Theory , 35/3 (October 1996), 338–357 .

3 Henry Stonecastle , pseud., ‘From my House in the Minories’, Universal Spectator , 104 (3 October 1730), 115 ; Samuel Johnson, Rambler , iii. 319; ‘London Catalogue for February, 1799’, New London Review; or Monthly Report of Authors and Books , 1/2 (1799), 101 . Mark Phillips , Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 131 .

4 Julian North , Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1 ; William Epstein , ‘Introduction’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism , ed. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), 3 .

5 Reprinted in Isaac D’Israeli , Literary Miscellanies …. A New Edition, Enlarged (London: Murray and Highley, 1801), 120 .

6 Robert Folkenflik , ‘Introduction: The Institution of Autobiography’, in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation , ed. R. Folkenflik (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 5 . Annette Cafarelli regards Isaac D’Israeli’s 1793 Dissertation on Anecdotes as an earlier ‘treatise on biography’ ( Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 203n75 ).

7 James Field Stanfield , An Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography (Sutherland: G. Garbutt, 1813), 2 .

8 R. Phillips , ed., Public Characters of 1798 (London: Hurst, 1798), pp. v , iii–iv.

‘London Catalogue for February, 1799’, 191. Throughout the volume, its authors comment on the various orientations for the ‘task of the biographer’: ‘city biography’, ‘family biography’, ‘literary biography’ (105, 101).

10 Anthony Harding , ‘ “Domestick Privacies”: Biography and the Sanctifying of Privacy, from Johnson to Martineau’, Dalhousie Review , 85/3 (2005), 371–389 , 378.

11 John Gibson Lockhart , Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. , 7 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1837–1838), vii. p. viii. The second edition ran to ten volumes.

12 William Forbes , Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie , 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1806), ii . 181.

13 Tom Mole , ‘Introduction’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 , ed. Mole (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6–7 .

Michael McKeon ‘Writer as Hero: Novelistic Prefigurations and the Emergence of Literary Biography’, in Contesting the Subject , ed. William Epstein, 17.

‘Art. IX. Martha: a Memorial of an only and Beloved Sister’, Eclectic Review , 20 (July 1823), 84–93, 85; ‘Art. VII. Memoirs of Francis Burnett, the Lefevre of “No Fiction:” and a Review of the Work ’, British Critic , 20/2 (1823), 171–177; ‘Literary Chat’, Literary Guardian , 2/36 (1832), 138.

‘Biography: An Essay’, La Belle Assemblée: or Court and Fashionable Magazine , 26/170 (1822), 491–493; ‘Female Biography’, La Belle Assemblée , 28/177 (1823), 12–13.

17 [ Hannah Bloomfield and Joseph Weston , eds], The Remains of Robert Bloomfield , 2 vols (London: Baldwin, 1824) i. p. x; i. 10; Ian Haywood , ‘The Infection of Robert Bloomfield: Terrorizing The Farmer’s Boy ’, in Robert Bloomfield: The Inestimable Blessing of Letters , eds John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan ( Romantic Circles 2012) , para 1.

18 Kristin Samuelian , Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy in Print, 1780–1821 (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 27–30 ; Tom Mole , Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 25 .

19 Rebecca Bullard , ‘Introduction: Reconsidering Secret History’, in The Secret History in Literature: 1660–1820 , ed. Bullard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1 .

20 Jason Goldsmith , ‘Celebrity and the Spectacle of Nation’, in Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 , ed. Tom Mole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22 .

21 ‘Prospectus of a History of our Family’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , 45/283 (May 1839), 669–681 , 670. Eileen Curran, clarifying an earlier citation, identified the author: ‘Additions to, Corrections of, and Reflections on The Wellesley Index ’, Victorian Periodicals Review , 29/4 (Winter 1996), 288–305 , 296.

22 Nicholas Mason , Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 54 ; Gary Dyer , ‘Lord Byron’s Trademark’, ELH , 87/3 (2020), 679–705 .

‘Some Account of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Smollett’, Westminster Magazine (May 1775), 224–228, 225.

24 ‘Biography: John Gifford, Esq.’, Literary Gazette , 2/70 (1818), 332–333, 332 .

25 Richard Cronin , Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43 .

26 Jane Darcy , Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640 – 1816 (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 106 .

27 Richard Altick , Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Knopf, 1969), 80–81 .

‘Art. 32. A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns ’, Monthly Review , 80 (June 1816), 221–222, 222.

29 Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Moore’s Letters and Journals of Byron ’, Westminster Review , 12 (April 1830), 271–272; Francis Hart , ‘Boswell and the Romantics: A Chapter in the History of Biographical Theory’, ELH , 27/1 (March 1960), 44–65 , 55–56.

30 John Watkins , ‘Neglected Biography’, Monthly Magazine , 22/146 (1806), 24–27 , 24.

31 Victoria Carroll , Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences , 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2016), 20–22 .

32 Gina Luria Walker , ‘The Invention of Female Biography’, Enlightenment and Dissent , 29 (September 2014), 79–136 , 83.

33 Thomas Mathias , The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames. A Satirical Poem … (Dublin: Milliken, 1799), 48 ; Mitzi Myers , ‘Godwin’s “Memoirs” of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject’, Studies in Romanticism , 20/3 (Fall 1981), 299–316 .

34 [Mary Hays], ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Necrology: Being Memoirs of the Lives of Eminent and Extraordinary Characters , 2nd edn (London: Lackington, 1805), 411–460 , 453, 459–460; William Godwin , Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman , 2nd edn (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 199 .

35 Jeanne Wood , ‘“Alphabetically Arranged”: Mary Hays’s Female Biography and the Biographical Dictionary’, Genre , 31/2 (1998), 117–142 ; Julie Murray , ‘Mary Hays and the Forms of Life’, Studies in Romanticism , 52/1 (2013), 61–84 , 76.

36 Andrew McInnes , ‘Feminism in the Footnotes: Wollstonecraft’s Ghost in Mary Hays’ Female Biography ’, Life Writing , 8/3 (2011), 273–285 , 277–278.

37 Mary Spongberg and Gina Luria Walker , ‘Introduction’, in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism , eds Mary Spongberg and Gina Luria Walker (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2 ; Begoña Álvarez, ‘The Spanish Monarchy in Mary Hays’s Biographical Works’, in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’ , eds Spongberg and Walker, 80–98, 81.

38 Mary Hays , Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women . 1803. 3 vols (Philadelphia: Birch and Small, 1807), ii . 202–203.

39 Francis Hart , Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 136–137 .

40 William Henry Ireland , The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte , 4 vols (London: Cumberland, 1828), i . 1–4.

41 B. J. McMullin , ‘Notes on Cancellation in Scott’s Life of Napoleon ’, Studies in Bibliography , 45 (1992), 222–231 , 222–224; Donald Horward , ‘Napoleon, His Legend, and Sir Walter Scott’, Southern Humanities Review , 16/1 (1982), 1–13 , 2–3.

42 [ Walter Scott ], The Life of Napoleon Bounaparte, Emperor of the French, with a Preliminary View of the French Revolution , 9 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell; London: Longman, 1827) , i. 193n.

‘Obituary: Mr. William Hazlitt’, Gentleman’s Magazine , 100 (October 1830), 371–373, 371; [‘Review’], Athenaeum , 165 (25 December 1830), 804.

44 Margaret Russett , De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1 , 186.

45 James Edward Austen-Leigh , Memoir of Jane Austen , 2nd edn (London: Bentley, 1871), 77, 82 .

46 Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes , eds, Romantic Biography (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. xiv ; Justin Kaplan , ‘A Culture of Biography’, in The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions , ed. Dale Salwak (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 1–11 , 2.

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Short Biography William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564-1616). English poet and playwright - Shakespeare is widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 38 plays and 154 sonnets. Short bio of William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564. His father William was a successful local businessman ...
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William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England—died April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon) was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature.Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo ...
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500 Words Essay On William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare was certainly a very famous writer. The man is credited with an unbelievable thirty-eight plays, two narrative poems, several other poems and a whopping one hundred fifty-four sonnets.
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William Shakespeare, born on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, remains an iconic figure in the realm of literature. His parents, John Shakespeare, a prosperous local businessman, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a landowner, provided the backdrop for his upbringing. Widely acclaimed as the greatest writer in the English language ...
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Short Essay on William Shakespeare in 400 Words . Little is known about William Shakespeare, one of the greatest names in the British canon of dramas and poems. His biography does not much reveal about his childhood or early occupation. Yet among his contemporaries, Shakespeare is by far the best literary personality of all times and centuries.
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200 Words Essay on William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is one of the renowned names of English playwrights. He was a multi-talented man who was a writer, poet and actor. He produced about one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, two narrative poems, thirty-eight plays and a few verses. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon to a good family with ...
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An Introduction. William Shakespeare was a renowned English poet, playwright, and actor born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birthday is most commonly celebrated on 23 April (see When was Shakespeare born ), which is also believed to be the date he died in 1616. Shakespeare was a prolific writer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of ...
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 - 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor.He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long ...
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William Shakespeare is one of the most famous English playwright, poets, and actors. He is viewed as the supreme writer in English literature and the greatest dramatist of the world. He is also called as the national poet of England and the "Bard of Avon.". He has written 154 sonnets, few other verses, two long narrative poems, and 39 plays.
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Consequently, his daughters made "good matches," and married wealthy men. The same year that he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and several other plays. In 1600, he wrote two of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet and Julius Caesar.
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Name : William Shakespeare. Known as : "Bard of Avon". Date of Birth : April 23, 1564 (On assumption, as he was baptized in Holy Trinity Church on April 26) Birth Place : Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. Father : Richard Shakespeare, a dealer of agricultural product by profession. Mother : Mary Shakespeare, daughter of Robert ...
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Think on My Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. A lively and clear introduction to five major dimensions of Shakespeare's language: writing system, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and conversational style. Crystal, David. The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation.
Biography
Mark Schoenfield is a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet's Contract and of British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: 'The Literary Lower Empire', co-winner of the 2009 Colby Prize.He writes about material culture within the context of institutions and the knowledge they produce, with particular ...
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta.One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding.
Julius Caesar (play)
Within the Tent of Brutus: Enter the Ghost of Caesar, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III, Edwin Austin Abbey (1905). The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar), often abbreviated as Julius Caesar, is a history play and tragedy by William Shakespeare first performed in 1599.. In the play, Brutus joins a conspiracy led by Cassius to assassinate Julius Caesar ...
Exploring Tragedy: Shakespeare to the Absurd
Thursday, October 25 King Lear by William Shakespeare Read Act IV. ... October 30 King Lear by William Shakespeare Read Act V. Due: Short Essay #2 (2 ... genetics pre ap bio.pdf. a 879000 b 891000 c 735000 d 352208 102 What amount of interest should be. document. Project Web Scraping - Revamped Autos.docx ...
King Lear
King Lear, George Frederick Bensell. King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare.It is loosely based on the mythological Leir of Britain.King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land between his daughters Goneril and Regan, who pay homage to gain favour, feigning love.The King's third daughter, Cordelia, is offered a third of his kingdom also, but refuses to ...

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