Folger Shakespeare Library: Happy birthday month to William Shakespeare! Shakespeare was probably born on April 23, 1564, but we don’t know for sure. The earliest reference to him appears in the parish register for Holy Trinity Church in an entry for his baptism on April 26, 1564. Tradition celebrates his birthday three days before his baptism. In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, here are five things we do know about his life.
5 comments:
I think that this little article is really cute and I find it really interesting as a person who loves theater and performing and who obviously knows about Shakespeare but never really learned his entire backstory or really much about him as a person and not just studying his works so I think this is quite interesting to read about. What I find most interesting is the facts that are about his wife as that is a big plot point in the musical & Juliet right now on Broadway, and that show really portrays the separation he had from his wife and how he was really never around and it plays in the question did he really write his plays alone or did he have help so these actual facts are really fun to compare to the comedy musical & Juliet. Something that kind of shocked me is the fact that he has no descendants which is kind of sad to hear but also in a beautiful way his work did live on and is continuing to grow still to this day and I think that's kind of beautiful.
The history of William Shakespeare is always so interesting to me because people have so many different theories on who they think Shakespeare really was… I've heard many theories about how people think he was actually a woman or his wife or Shakespeare was making his daughter. Write his stories OR he was a gay man because no straight man could ever write like he did… I just find his history of Shakespeare so funny because nobody will ever truly know what went on inside his mind and what history truly went down. This article was really funny though, because I think it encapsulated the things people do know very well, which is kind of nothing. The majority of the facts in this article are just his roots but not much about him as a person or his life. I wish I could time travel and talk to him because he is one of the most well-known yet mysterious writers of all time I'd love to know inside his brain.
I was having a conversation the other day with a drama professor about the prevalence of Shakespeare historically compared to modern works today. The most interesting point that came out of that conversation was comparing the dominance of film to theatre, and speculating whether film could have the same historical prevalence or impact as theatre. The prime example as supporting evidence for that was how Shakespeare has prospered for over 500 years, continuously being reinterpretted and integrated into modern storytelling and our understanding of theatre as a whole. Putting aside the nuance that comes from idealizing William Shakespeare himself as a historical figure and artist, it really made me ponder about the nature film has had over the years and whether or not it could ever reach the same heights as live theatre has. When you watch a play, though the script may remain the same, everything, even the same production itself from show to show, will vary for every performance simply due to the nature of it being live. While film can be interpreted very differently by different people in different environments, ultimately it has the control of remaining exactly the same as a product in each viewing experience. With someone as notorious as Shakespeare in the prevalence of his work, I wonder what the legacy of film will look like in 500 years, and whether or not any filmmaking figures will become as notorious as Shakespeare due to our preservative efforts.
I think Shakespeare's life is so interesting because of the lack of information we have about it. A few years ago, I visited Stratford-upon-Avon and went to his house to learn about him, and there are just so many things that were left unknown in his life, which kind of leaves a lot to the imagination or whatever people want to sort of say or make up about his life. I knew he had twins, and I didn't know he got married so young, so that was really interesting, but I just wonder so much about his theatrical involvement and like what inspired his works, and in the mid 1500s, what does one look to for inspiration when writing some of the greatest plays known to humankind? I wish I could sort of go back to the 1500s for a day and like live the life he lived or like live beside him, so I knew more about him.
I'm a Shakespeare nerd. I love him to death. I think this article was really cute, and it talked about some of the stuff I talked about in my Shakespeare class in high school. The class was about not just him, but his tie to the wild and how that was reflected in his texts. We talked about the coat of arms a lot. A coat of arms was something that indicated that you had land and wealth, and although he himself did not have that, his family line did. He wrote about this much in his plays. I think Shakespeare is a really fascinating guy, and especially since he did very little journaling, there was no real historical writing that showed he existed. For such a cool guy, with so much acclaim, we really don't know that much about him, or that he even wrote his plays on his own!
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