Poets and Poems

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is widely acknowledged as the greatest dramatist of all time,
and lines from his sonnets are among the most quoted of verse.

William Shakespeare was born in 1564, the third child of John Shakespeare and his wife Mary Arden. He is thought to have been educated* at the King's New School, Stratford-on-Avon, the market town where he was born.

In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, an heiress who was eight years his senior. Their daughter Susanna was born in 1583 and their twin son and daughter, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585.

In 1597 he purchased a large desirable residence for the family in Stratford, and in 1601 acquired over one-hundred acres of arable land for twenty pounds. By 1605 he had sufficient wealth to purchase the lease of real estate for some four-hundred pounds, a lucrative investment, assuring him of a steady source of income and a reputation for business acumen.

His earliest play, Henry IV Part I, is believed to have had its first performance in 1591/2; while the first performance of the last of the thirty-seven plays he penned, Henry VIII, was in 1612/13. The plays began to be printed and sold as pamphlets as early as 1594, evidence of their popularity and that of the theatre as entertainment.

By 1594 he was an important member and the foremost playwright of a London theatrical company that later became known as 'The King's Men'. When the lease expired on their theatre in Shoreditch, the company conveyed timber from it across the river Thames and constructed a new larger one in Southwark. This 'Globe' theatre** was completed and in use by early 1599. Shakespeare took an eighth-part share in financing the venture. For more than fourteen years the company performed there, presenting many of his greatest plays.

The poet's 154 sonnets were published complete (probably without his consent) in 1609, the first having been written possibly as early as 1593. While most are about a handsome young man he admired, the last twenty-eight refer to a seductive woman***. To his distress she, like the young man, transferred her attention to others.

Apart from the sonnets, Shakespeare wrote five other poems: 'Venus and Adonis', 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'A Lover's Complaint', 'The Passionate Pilgrim' and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'.

By the time of his death on 23rd April 1616 his reputation as a playwright was secure, outshining his significant acclaim as a poet. A passionate genius, his plays explore the heights and depths of human emotion and experience. With little dispute, he remains the greatest dramatist of all time.

* Centuries later, his apparently limited education fed speculation that he was not the author of the celebrated works. Few modern scholars give it credence and his contemporaries had no doubts.
** In 1613 the Globe theatre caught fire and burnt to the ground, but was quickly rebuilt. It finally closed and was demolished in 1644 to be replaced by tenements, after the puritans suppressed all stage plays. In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened a painstakingly reconstructed Globe theatre near what archeology had identified as the original site.
*** Those sonnets that explore the poet's increasing infatuation with the young man are often couched in language that, at least to a modern ear, is clearly homoerotic; there is no ambiguity about the sexual nature of Shakespeare's relationship with the young woman.

Sonnet 116
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:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.