William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwrighter, poet, and actor in the Elizabethan era. He has written some of the most famous plays in the world, like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, and his writing has had a major influence on both the English language and society.
Shakespeare was probably born on April 23, 1564, but we cannot be 100% sure since it has been 400 years since he was born, so information like this can be hard or impossible to come by. It is the same reason why we do not know a lot about Shakespeare’s life, only bits and pieces. We do know that he was married to Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare was eighteen years old when he married Anne, but she was twenty-six when they married. Shakespeare was not only a playwrighter, but he was also an actor and acted with his group, the Lord Chamberlain’s men (later named the King’s community), he played for both poor and rich people, and he sometimes performed for the royal family. Back in those days, women were not allowed to perform on stage, so men often had to play the role of a woman instead. That means Juliet was played by men for quite some time before women got to play the role. In 1593, a plague broke out in London, which forced theaters to close. It was only then that Shakespeare started writing poetry, and he most likely just did so for money because he could not write or perform plays during the plague. Shakespeare almost certainly went to one of Stratford’s ‘petty’ or junior schools, where he would have learned his letters with the help of a hornbook. From the age of seven or thereabouts, he would have progressed to the King’s New School, where the emphasis would have been on Latin, which was still the international language of Europe in the 1500s. Shakespeare probably left school at the age of 14 or 15. Throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime, he managed to write 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and invented over 1700 new words that are still used to this day. But why is Shakespeare still so important to this day if he was up over 400 years ago? Well, there are four main reasons:
- The themes he writes about are big and universal like love, death, life and betrayal. These are all things most people can relate to in some way.
- His characters are complex and relatable; most characters in today’s media have some sort of connection to a character from Shakespeare. For instance; Viola, Sebastian, and Duke from She’s the Man are based on characters from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night.
- Shakespeare has both created many words in the English language that have greatly helped with the evolution of the language, but he has also created many phrases that are still used to this day, like the phrases ‘all of a sudden’ or spoken about jealousy as ‘the green-eyed monster’.
- Lastly, the affect he has had on theater with his plays, his stories are still being shown and talked about to this day, and the tropes from his plays are often used in stories today.