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Thanks Morgan!

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Interesting information about the Globe Theatre Female Roles during the life and times
of William Shakespeare and Elizabethan London, England

Globe Theatre Female Roles
Women were forbidden, by law, to perform in the Elizabethan theatre, therefore there were no actresses at the Globe Theatre. The acting profession was not a credible one and it was unthinkable that any woman would appear in a play. The parts of female characters were played by young boys. These boy actors were usually aged between 13 and 19 years of age when their voices were still high and muscles had not fully developed. The voices of Elizabethan boys were believed to break much later than the modern day due to differences in diet and lifestyle which made it possible for boy actors to play women's parts convincingly until they entered their late teens

Globe Theatre Female Roles - The women's costumes and make-up
Women were allowed to act in the theatre until 1660 as it was judged to be unseemly for a woman to undertake such a profession. Young boys were therefore hired to act in the female roles. The costumes used for the female characters were extremely elaborate, reflecting the clothes worn during the Elizabethan era. The women's costumes worn by the boy actors were constructed with many layers of clothing. It would have therefore taken some considerable time, and the help of a dresser, to dress a boy actor in the costume of a female. Wigs, or periwigs as they were called, were readily available as they were in fashion at the time so this was not a costuming problem. However, the make up used by Elizabethan women, and therefore the boy actors, was! The white make-up was lead based and highly poisonous! The young boy actors were therefore very unhealthy, had unpleasant facial skin diseases and a high proportion actually died of lead poisoning. The boy actors who took the female roles were also paid the least of all actors. The Admiral's Men paid boy players three shillings a week. The boys were apprenticed to adult actors and their wages were paid to their masters. In return the masters gave them board and lodging and a small allowance to spend on themselves.

Globe Theatre Female Roles - Character recognition
Nearly every color of clothing had its own meaning in relation to status and rank during the Elizabethan era. And these meanings were totally understood by the audience. The colors, materials and styles of the Globe Theatre Female Roles therefore conveyed an enormous amount of information as soon as the boy actors walked on stage. As soon as a character walked on the stage the fabric and color of his clothing would indicate the role of the character he was playing. The character and rank of an actor wearing a Globe Theatre costume made of velvets, furs, silks or lace would be instantly recognised as a member of the Upper Class. Cottons and taffeta would indicate a much lower status.

Globe Theatre Female Roles - The Masque and Class differences
A great deal of attention is paid the the fact that Lower Class Elizabethan women were not allowed to perform on the Elizabethan stage as it would have been considered to be lewd and highly immoral. This view was not taken regarding the appearance of Upper Class Elizabethan women who appeared in court masques! The mother of Queen Elizabeth certainly performed in masques! The first recorded appearance of Anne Boleyn at the Tudor Court was on March 1, 1522 was as a performer in a masque! Perhaps the element of disguise allowed for this as vizards, or masks, were always worn by the performers. But the more probable explanation was that these wealthy women of the court wanted to be included in performing in such an exciting diversion as a masque.

Globe Theatre Female Roles Interesting Facts and information about the Globe Theatre Female Roles. Additional details, facts and information about the Globe Theatre can be accessed via the Globe Theatre Sitemap.

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Interesting information about the Globe Theatre Female Roles during the life and timesof William Shakespeare and Elizabethan London, England Globe Theatre Female Roles Women were forbidden, by law, to perform in the Elizabethan theatre, therefore there were no actresses at the Globe Theatre.

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Specific Info on Queen Elizabeth

Thanks Sam!

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patrons theatre shakespeare england shakespeare's queen elizabeth bad manners daily life london

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shakespeare education in elizabethan london

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Exploring Shakespeare's relationship with Queen Elizabeth.

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Thanks Darien!

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NoSweatShakespeare - Making Shakespeare Easy For All!

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NoSweatShakespeare is the home of Shakespeare resources. Read Shakespeare's plays, quotes, poems & sonnets translated into modern English. Fantastic facts

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Thanks Gabs!

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globe theatre globe theater rebuilt globe theatre london globe theater

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Globe Theatre: Information on the outside and inside of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

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An in-depth look at Shakespeare's theater, the Globe, including a description of what the inside would have looked like.

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Words and Definitions

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ABATE, v. t. to deduct, except, to blunt, take the edge off, to deprive ABHOR, v. t. to reject ABJECTS, sub. servile persons ABLE, v. t. to warrant ABODE, v. t. to forebode ABODEMENTS, sub. evil omens ABRAM, adj, auburn ABRIDGMENT, sub. a short entertainment ABSEY-BOOK, sub.

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Elizabethan Societal Classes

The events depicted in The Lost Colony took place during the Elizabethan era in England. The term, "Elizabethan Era" refers to the English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history and it's been widely romanticized in books, movies, plays, and TV series. The Elizabethan age is considered to be a time of English renaissance that inspired national pride through classical ideals, international expansion, and naval triumph.

This English Renaissance saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature. The era is most famous for theatre, as William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that we still read and watch today. It was also an age of exploration and expansion abroad to establish colonies under English rule across the globe, including in The New World, to further England's empire.

The era called the Elizabethan England was a time of many changes and developments and was also considered as the Golden Age in English history. This era was led by Queen Elizabeth I, the sixth and last ruler of Tudor. Queen Elizabeth I was considered by many to be England's best monarch. She was wise and a just Queen and chose the right advisers and was not dominated by them. She ruled the Elizabethan era for 45 years and during this time was the height of the English Renaissance and the time of the development of English poetry and literature.

The Lost Colony Western Europe Map Society began to form along new lines during the Tudor years and it was an age of individuality. Nobility and knights were still at the top of the social ladder. These men were rich and powerful, and they have large households. The real growth in society was in the merchant class. Within the nobility class there was a distinction between old families and new. Most of the old families were Catholic, and the new families were Protestant. During Shakespeare's time there were only about 55 noble families in England. At the head of each noble family is a duke, a baron or an earl. This class is the lords and ladies of the land. A person becomes a member of nobility by birth, or by a grant from the queen or king. Noble titles were hereditary, passing from father to oldest son. It took a crime such as treason for a nobleman to lose his title. Many nobles died during the War of the Roses, a series of civil wars fought during the 15th century. The Tudor monarchy, Elizabeth, her father Henry VIII, and her grandfather Henry VII rarely appointed new nobles to replace those who died. They viewed the nobility class as a threat to their power and preferred to keep the number of them small. Being a member of the nobility class often brought debt rather than profit. The expectations of the class and the non paying honorific offices could bring terrible financial burdens. They maintained huge households, and conspicuous consumption and lavish entertainment was expected. Visiting nobles to England were the responsibility of the English nobility to house and entertain at their own expense. Appointment to a post as a foreign ambassador required the ambassador to maintain a household of as many 100 attendants. Most of Queen Elizabeth's council, chief officers in the counties came from the noble families. They were expected to serve in an office, such as being an ambassador to a foreign country, at their own expense of course.

The Gentry class included knights, squires, gentlemen, and gentlewomen who did not work with their hands for a living. Their numbers grew during Queen Elizabeth's reign and became the most important social class in England. Wealth was the key to becoming a part of the gentry class. This class was made of people not born of noble birth who by acquiring large amounts of property became wealthy landowners. The rise of the gentry was the dominant feature of Elizabethan society. They essentially changed things, which launched out new paths whether at home or overseas, provided leadership and spirit of the age, who gave it character and did its work during this era. The gentry were the solid citizens of Elizabethan England. Francis Drake, the famous explorer and Sir Walter Raleigh, who led the way to the English colonization of America were of the gentry class. Two of the queen's chief ministers, Burgley and Walsingham were products of the gentry. Francis Bacon, the great essayer and philosopher also came from this class. The gentry were the backbone of Elizabethan England. They went to Parliament and served as justices of the Peace. They combined the wealth of the nobility with the energy of the sturdy peasants from whom they had sprung.

The Tudor era saw the rise of modern commerce with cloth and weaving leading the way. The prosperous merchant class emerged from the ashes of the Wars of the Roses. The prosperity of the wool trade led to a surge in building and the importance cannot be overstated. Shipping products from England to various ports in Europe and to the New World also became a profitable business for the merchants. Prices for everyday food and household items that came from other countries increased as the merchants gained a monopoly on the sales of all goods under the pretence it would benefit the country where it really benefited the pocket of the merchants.

This was the "middling" class who saved enough to live comfortably but who at any moment, through illness or bad luck be plunged into poverty. This class included the farmers, tradesmen and craft workers. They took their religion very seriously and could read and write. This class of people was prosperous and sometimes their wealth could exceed those of the gentry, but the difference was how they spent their wealth. The yeoman's were content to live more simply, using their wealth to improve their land and expand it.

The last class of Elizabethan England was the day laborers, poor husbandmen, and some retailers who did not own their own land. Artisans, shoemakers, carpenters, brick masons and all those who worked with their hands belonged to this class of society. In this class we can also put our great swarms of idle serving-men and beggars. Under Queen Elizabeth I, the government undertook the job of assisting the laborers class and the result was the famous Elizabethan Poor Laws which resulted in one of the world's first government sponsored welfare programs. This era was generally peaceful as the battles between the Protestants and the Catholics and those between the Parliament and the Monarchy had subsided.

Historical Figures featured in The Lost Colony

Queen Elizabeth was probably England's most popular sovereign. In March 1584 she granted Sir Walter Raleigh a patent entitling him to occupy such lands as he may discover in the name of the crown of England. As a result of this patent, she was the benefactor of Virgina. In honor of her, the "Virgin Queen," the name Virginia was given to the territory claimed by Raleigh's men in the New World. Elizabeth I has been credited with the devotion to duty and love of her country that has made "England" stand forever.

An English navigator was sent by Walter Raleigh to explore the North American coast of the New World. On April 27, 1584, he and Captain Arthur Barlowe set sail and commanded one of the two barks that made the first English voyage to Roanoke Island. He was trained in navigation by Thomas Harriott, English scientist and mathematician. Amadas returned to Roanoke Island in 1585 as "Admiral of Virginia." His reports to Walter Raleigh provided "glowing accounts" of new found land in the New World.

An English navigator also trained by Thomas Harriott, sent by Walter Raleigh to explore the North American coast of the New World. He was second captain to Amadas on the 1584 voyage to the North American coast. He accompanied Amadas on the visit to Chief Wingina village on Roanoke Island. On their return back to England in September 1584, they took back with them two Indians, Wanchese and Manteo, who were taught English and served as propaganda for the second voyage back to the New World. Barlowe is also known for his entertaining report to Walter Raleigh describing their discoveries and experiences of the 1584 Virginia voyage.

An English tiler and bricklayer, was the father of Virginia Dare, the first English child born on Roanoke Island. He was married to Eleanor White and was the son in law of Governor John White, who was appointed by Sir Walter Raleigh to lead his Roanoke colony. His name was third on the list of thirteen men to whom Sir Walter Raleigh granted certain privileges for establishing a colony in Virginia. Dare was also the first scientific illustrator appointed by Queen Elizabeth to illustrate everything in particular that he observed that was different from English eyes. It is believed that Ananias Dare lost his life while defending the fort on Roanoke Island from the local Native Americans.

One of the sixteen women who left England in 1587 as part of the Roanoke expedition. She was the daughter of Governor John White and wife of Ananias Dare. Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born on August 18, 1587 in North America shortly after their arrival from England. She disappeared with the colony while her father Governor White returned to England for supplies.

The first child to be born in America of English parents on August 18, 1587. The infant, Virginia Dare vanished along with all of the other Roanoke colonists while awaiting supplies ships from England who was in the middle of the Spanish Armada. It is believed that what survivors of the "Lost Colony" there may have been were absorbed into the Croatan tribe.

Simon Fernandez was a Portuguese navigator from Azores Island. He piloted the Roanoke Voyages from 1584 to 1587. Fernandez was by trade a privateer in the escalating war between England and Spain. The Chesapeake Bay area was originally the decided area for the 1587 voyage with Governor White and his colonists. By the time the caravan arrived at Roanoke Island to check on the fifteen men that were left a year earlier, he had grown inpatient with Governor White and anxious to resume the hunt for Spanish trading. He ordered the colonists ashore on Roanoke Island and abandoned the idea of taking the colonists to the Chesapeake Bay area. Ten days later, Fernandez departed for England taking along the anxious John White, who reluctantly decided to return to England for supplies.

From Northampton, Ralph Lane may have served in the Parliament before engaging in various maritime activities and in the struggle against Spain. He was Governor for Sir Walter Raleigh's first Roanoke colony in 1585 which consists of 107 military men which last approximately ten months from August 17, 1585 to June 18, 1586. Lane was knighted in 1593 and is buried in Dublin where he died.

Manteo was the Chief of a local Native American tribe that befriended the Ralph Lane colony that arrived on Roanoke Island in 1585. Arriving too late in the year to plant crops and harvest for food, Manteo helped the colonists to avoid starvation until they were able to provide food for themselves. He made two trips to England and was listed among those sailing for the New World in 1587 with Governor White and his colonists. By the command of Sir Walter Raleigh, Manteo was christened on Roanoke Island and invested with the title of a feudal baron, Lord of Roanoke and Dasamonqueponke on Sunday, August 13, 1587. This was the first peerage elected by the English in America. Manteo was also the first Native American to be received into the Church of England. It was Manteo and his people at Croatoan that the colonists expected to turn to in case of need until Governor White returned from England with supplies.

Born to a protestant family in Devon he is one of the most colorful characters in English history. Navigator, historian, soldier, poet and explorer, he initiated the Roanoke voyages and English colonization of the New World. Raleigh never visited the New World. He is credited with having introduced both the potato and tobacco to England from America. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1585. It is historically true that the episode of the cloak thrown in the puddle for Queen Elizabeth I did indeed happen. It was from this incident that Raleigh's favor with the Queen grew.

Wanchese was a Native American chief of Roanoke Island and probably a member of the eastern division of the Algonquian tribe. He returned to England with Captain's Amadas and Barlowe's expedition and became bitter towards the English.

English artist and one of several early English colonists who sailed with Sir Richard Grenville's expedition in 1585. During his time at Roanoke Island he made numerous famous drawings with watercolors of the landscapes and native people. His superb watercolors of native plants, animals and Indian life, give us an insight into what the English found during their explorations. White was described as a "Gentleman of London" became Governor of the second Roanoke colony in 1587. He led a band of settlers sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh under the authority of the Virginia Company. He was the father of Eleanor Dare and grandfather of Virginia Dare, the first English born child in the New World. He returned back to England for much needed supplies and was not able to return in 1590 finding the colony empty. He spent the remainder of his life in England and Ireland.

Very little is known about the vast majority of the colonists explorers who were not leaders. What little is known is interesting simply because it is a first step toward understanding who the colonists might have been and in trying to guess why they wanted to come to the New World.

Mark Bennett and William Berde both "Lost Colonists" are described quite simply as husbandman and a yeoman. Richard Berry, also a member of John Whites colonists was described as a "gentleman" and was a muster captain in 1572. Anthony Cage, another 1587 colonist, had been sheriff of Huntington in 1585. Two other "Lost Colonists," James Hynde and William Clement, had been in prison together in Colchester Castle for stealing.

Thomas Ellis of the "Lost Colony" was at the other end of the social ladder. Before leaving home in Exeter, he had been a member of the vestry of his parish church, St. Petrock, which still stands today on the main business street of Exeter. It is believed that John Hewet was the "Lost Colonist" lawyer. He held a bachelor of civil law from Oxford. John Spendlove, later a "Lost Colonists" was described on a 1585 muster list as a "gentleman" and reported present with his horse.

It is also believed that there were three men who returned with Governor John White in search of the "Lost Colonists" who had the same or similar surnames as some of the members of the vanished expeditions. Robert Coleman, Henry Millett, John Taylor were in search of Thomas Colman and his wife, Michael Mylett and Clement and Hugh Taylor.

Economic and Social Class Availability of Food

The availability of food during the Elizabethan Era was based on economic and social class standing. Home grown produce was used to feed the majority of the English. Poor harvests which occurred during the 1590's, had a bad effect on the economy and led to starvation in some areas. The booming wool trade changed the face of agriculture and the land enclosures led to and increase of the number of people living in poverty and the introduction of the 1601 Poor Law.

Social class played a very important role in Elizabethan England in almost every aspect of life. Food and drink were no exception to this rule; it varied according to status and wealth. The availability of food to the people of England also depended on the social classes. The food available to the Upper Class differed considerable to the food available to the lower class. The Upper Class also enjoyed various spices imported from abroad.

Presentation of food was also important during the Elizabethan era especially for the nobility. It was important that their feasts and banquets had a great visual effect. Colors, different serving methods, and various "props" also used to enhance the presentation of a meal. Peacocks were not raised just for the meat of the poultry but also for its feathers. The feathers were used to decorate the foods that were served during the banquets. Any imported foods were expensive and out of the reach of Lower classes and used primarily by the monarch and nobility classes.

Meat was the primary food consumed by the wealthy and privileged class. It was the most popular food and usually sold a large livestock markets. The rich of Elizabethan England ate well. Meats such as lamb, beef, mutton, pork, goat, bacon, veal, rabbit, and fowl such as peacocks, swans, herons, and goose were served. Chicken were believed to be introduced to England by the Romans. Only Lords and Nobles were allowed to hunt deer, boar, hares and rabbits. They also ate different kinds of freshwater and ocean fish such as herring, salmon, eel, whiting, cod, trout and pike. Shell fish including crab, oysters, mussels and cockles were also featured in Elizabethan recipes.

Meat, fishes and poultry were cooked in varied ways as well. Some of the more common methods were spit, roasting, baking, boiling, smoking, salting and frying. Smoking of the meat was very popular and was intended to preserve the food. The people during this era mostly preferred cooking that done over an open flame. Meat was cooked on a spit which was sometimes turned by a dog running on a circular treadmill attached to the end of the spit. Other useful cooking utensils for cooking over an open flame were pots, pans, skillets and cauldrons. Food preparation was made possible with the use of ladles, knives, meat forks, and scissors. Baking trays made from hardened pastry called a "coffin" was used for baking. Baking was also done in iron boxes laid on the fire or in a brick oven that was set into the side of a fireplace. The mortar and pestle were essential in grinding nuts and spices for the Elizabethan recipes that was kept in a book by each cook. In the Upper Classes, the kitchens were in large houses or castles some distance from the main house and food was generally served cold.

Improved agriculture techniques and inventions gave way to an increase in herbs, vegetables, and fruits such as turnips, parsnips, carrots, onions, leeks, garlic and radishes, apples, pears, plums, cherries and woodland strawberries. It was common to prepare these by roasting or boiling and serving with bread.

Sugar, honey, and marzipan became popular during this era as the Tudors were very fond of desserts. Sugar was imported to England, having been obtained from sugar cane. They enjoyed pastries, tarts, cakes, cream, custard, and crystallized fruit and syrup. On special occasions such as banquets, all kinds of specialties would be made out of sugar and marzipan such as animals, birds, fruits or baskets. Sometimes wine glasses, dishes would be made out of crisp molded sugar called sugar-plate which would be elaborately decorated.

Food items were generally purchased from small markets and from fairs. In larger cities there were specific markets which sold fish, dairy products, fruits and vegetables. The term "vegetable" was rarely used to describe what we call vegetables today. Instead the term "herb" was used for all green plants, roots, and herbs. Food items that came from the ground were only good enough for the lower classes. Only vegetables such as rape, onions, garlic and leeks were set on a Noble's table.

Food began changing over the course of the Tudor period. More and more foods were being introduced into society as they were discovered in the New World. Tomatoes or "love apples" from Mexico, Turkey from Central America, Kidney Beans from Peru and of course the famous potatoes brought to England by Sir Walter Raleigh. Chili peppers, including red peppers, cayenne, and paprika were also imported from the New World. One of the most sought after spices was pepper. The discovery of Chili peppers in the New World was very encouraging to the Elizabethan explorers. Vanilla, pineapples, lima beans, peanuts, tapioca, pumpkins, corn, avocado, pecans, cashews, squash, coffee, maize, chocolate and tea were also introduced during the Elizabethan era.

The Early Crusaders had brought back to England the element of eastern cooking with spices such as pepper, cinnamon, mace, ginger, cloves, raisins, saffron and sugar. These Medieval recipes were passed down to Elizabethan recipes. Spices were welcomed in the preparation of a meal as their distinctive flavors disguised the strong and dominate taste of salt which was used to preserve the meat. Spices were very expensive and used in these cooking recipes for the Upper Class. It became a matter of both social fashion and prestige and a sign of wealth and high social status. The Oriental Spice Trade was very important and the most profitable in European trade. The drive for profit through new spices as well as the quest for gold and silver was what encouraged the explorations of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Water was not clean during the Elizabethan Era, and thus people drank ale and wine. The Upper Classes drank both and the Lower Classes just drank ale. Honey was used to make a sweet alcoholic drink called mead which was drunk by all classes. Wine was imported, although there were a few fruit wines produced in England. Most of the wines were sweet and rather heavy. They probably had to be strained before they could be drunk, and could still have solid matter floating in them. "Apple-wine", a form of cider was also produced during the Elizabethan era. Ales were brewed with malt and water and were relatively flat, while beer contained hops of a bitter flavor. Bayberries, orris, and long pepper were flavors that could be added to ales and beers for a variety of tastes. It was estimated that a person would consume about a gallon a day of weak low alcohol drinks during the Elizabethan era.

The main parts of the basic diet during Elizabethan times were bread, meat, and fish. Bread was the most important component of the diet. The Upper Classes ate Manchet, a bread loaf made of wheat flour. The Lower Classes ate bread loaves of rye and barley.

Dairy products produced during Elizabethan England included milk, cream, butter and cheese. Milk was used as a beverage, and cream, curds, whey, butter and cheese was a by-product of this commodity. Strawberries and cream was a delightful treat and eggs were abundantly consumed. Several types of cheeses were available during this era.

Hard cheeses were made from skimmed milk, and soft cheeses were made from whole milk. Butter was stored in wooden barrels called firkins and was only used by the Upper Class for cooking food as all dairy products were determined inferior foods and only to be eaten by the poor.

Biscuits, invented by the Crusaders were considered a convenience food during the Elizabethan era. The "Ploughman's Lunch" consisting of cheese and bread was a staple diet of the Lower Class workers. Communal ovens were also available in villages for baking pastries and pies with cooked roasted meat which were sold on the street to the villagers during an outing to the Theatre or a fair.

How many times a day you ate and what you ate with depended on your social class. Upper classes and nobility would eat three meals a day using glass, delft from Holland and silverware. China ware was unknown at this time. Lower classes would eat two to three meals a day using wooden or horn dishes and pewter. Everyone used their own knife, and spoons were rarely used as soup and liquids were drunk from a cup. Forks had just been introduced in the late 14th century and were still evolving around the country.

The Upper Classes would usually eat breakfast consisting of food and drink between 6-7 am. Dinner was the midday meal of food and drink served between noon and 2 pm. Supper was a substantial meal of food and drink served between 6-7 pm along with various forms of entertainment. The Lower Classes meals were far less elaborate than the Upper Classes and did not include entertainment during supper. The average Lower Class citizen consumed at least ½ lb of bread, 1 pint of beer, 1 pint of porridge and ¼ lb of meat daily. This could be supplemented by some dairy products, and vegetables were the main ingredient of their soups. Food for a Tudor soldier would consists of 2 lb. of beef or mutton accompanied with 1 lb. of cheese, ½ lb of butter, 1 ½ lb of bread, and almost a gallon of beer. Beer in the Elizabethan era had a very low content of alcohol. The quantity and content of the food eaten by the Upper Class was considerably different form the diet of the Lower Classes. The number of courses and variety of the foods consumed by the Upper Class included expensive spices and ingredients and exotic recipes.

Food varied according to season as there were no methods of freezing foods in Elizabethan England. For economic reasons, animals were slaughtered in the fall of the year as to not have to feed them during the winter. Salt was used to preserve the meats and thus the food always had a salty taste. Methods were introduced to disguise the salty taste. Spices, including pepper, mustard, saffron, cloves, cardimon and cinnamon were added to recipes and a variety of sauces were used to disguise the salty taste. Stews and potages formed an important element in the diet of Middle and Lower Classes. The introduction of food processing was used to soften meat and vegetables. Soaking roots, leaves, seeds, nuts and berries in cold water for several hours made the food easier to digest. Salted meats and fish were rinsed in several changes of liquid before cooking to weaken the salty taste. Pickling and smoking were also used as methods of preservation.

Fresh flowers and herbs were preserved to use in flavoring winter dishes. The preparation of preserved food took place in the Stillroom. This is where distillations, preserves and delicate floral syrups were prepared. The Stillroom was also used to prepare medicinal tinctures and herbal potions. The most important use if the Stillroom was to produce alcoholic beverages.

The Upper Class could afford to expand the use of sugar and honey as a sweetener in many Elizabethan recipes. Jams, marmalades and curds were made from a variety of fruits.

Elizabethan food and drink did not constitute a good balanced diet. The rich ate few fresh vegetables and little fresh fruit. Fruit was usually served in pies or preserved in honey. Vegetables and fresh fruit were eaten by the poor, usually in some form of stew, soup or porridge. Food items which came from the ground and dairy products were considered only fit for the poor.

The diet of the poor and Lower Classes was better than those of the Nobles and Upper Class. Because of the snobbery of eating fresh vegetables, fruits and dairy products the Upper Classes suffered from lack of Vitamin C, calcium and fiber in their diet. This led to an assortment of health problems for those running the country. Bad teeth, skin diseases, scurvy, and rickets were just a few health problems the rich encountered. Sugar, only affordable to the rich was known to blacken teeth. It became fashionable to have your teeth blackened by applying cosmetics to get this effect if enough quantities of sugar were not available to you.

Religion played an important part in the diet of the Elizabethan people. There were certain times the eating of meat was banned. Certain religious observances banned the eating of meat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Meat was also banned during the religious seasons of Lent and Advent and on the eves of many religious holidays. Fasting and abstaining from meat was observed for over half the days of the year.

The Elizabethan Royalty, Nobility and Upper Classes were known throughout the country for their lavish and sumptuous banquets and feasts. New foods and spices arriving daily from the New World inspired new recipes using the finest foods and ingredients. The Royal banquets of the Elizabethan Era were the most magnificent. The Tudor Dynasty, especially the father of Queen Elizabeth, King Henry VIII was always in competition with the French King.

Cooks employed by Nobles during the Elizabethan era would endeavor to provide Queen Elizabeth with a feast or banquet of a similar standard and content set by the high standards set by the French. An example of an Elizabethan Banquet is outlined:

Elizabethan Government

The monarch of England during the Elizabethan era was Queen Elizabeth I. The government of Elizabethan England was centralized, well organized and very efficient. It was very much a personal monarch with ministers. Queen Elizabeth's personality determined the style, intensity and efficiency. She ruled and led her people for 45 years, and produced great developments and advancements for England. During her time, monarchs were rulers and not just figureheads. She was the ultimate decider and was able to determine issues of her nation's religion, when Parliament would sit and what it would discuss, when and if her country would go to war, matters of education, welfare of her citizens, what food they would eat and what clothes they could wear. She is considered to be England's best monarch. She was a wise and just Queen and chose the right advisers and never let herself get dominated by these advisers. She dealt with the stubbornly resistant members of Parliament without being tyrannous, and was cleaver at compromising in both religious and political matters. Queen Elizabeth I was the sixth and last of the Tudor dynasty.

The Divine Rights of Kings gave the monarch the image of being a Demigod. The theory of the Divine Right of Kings aimed at instilling obedience by explaining why all social ranks were religiously and morally obliged to obey their government. The strong authority made going against the monarch a sin. By not obeying the queen, you could be accused of treason and sentenced to death. The queen had the power to send one to prison and order execution. Even with all of this power, the monarch was not above the law, and she could also be brought before the court.

All laws required the queens consent in order to be passed. The queen could not write and pass laws herself. She had to draw up a Bill and put it forward to Parliament for consideration and approval. However, the queen could make Royal Proclamations without Parliament's consent.

The Privy Council was Queen Elizabeth's group of advisers and its main purpose was to give numerous different opinions to the queen and she decided on the issue at hand. Too often the advice was often ignored and the Council had to still carry out the queen's wishes. The Council took care of routine administration which involved matters of religion, military, the queen's security, economics, and the welfare of the citizens. The Council dealt with matters of national and individual interest, issued proclamations in the queen's name and supervised law and enforcement. The Council could not may any decisions, they could only advise. The members of the Council were depended on who the queen wanted there. Certain powerful noblemen were also necessary in the Council so that their and their realms' interest were represented so that a rebellion would be avoided. Queen Elizabeth believed the more members of the Council, the more opinions and problems. She dropped the number of Council members from 50 to 19 and eventually to 13. At the beginning of her reign, the Council met three times a week, by the end her reign, they met almost every day.

The Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil led the Council. He was wise, cautious, and cooperative with Queen Elizabeth and trusted by all others. He was also the queen's personal secretary and chief adviser until his death. He had the reputation of one of the greatest English statesmen. His successor, Sir Francis Walsingham, was the mastermind of the English spy network which defended Queen Elizabeth against foreign powers and plots. He was succeeded by Sir Robert Cecil.

A group of representatives called Parliament was divided into two sections. The House of Lords or the Upper House consisted of bishops and aristocrats. The House of Commons or the Lower House consisted of common people. There were no political parties or a Prime Minister associated with Parliament during the Elizabethan era.

The main function of Parliament at this time in history was to deal with financial matters such as taxation and granting the queen money. The monarch paid for daily administration with ordinary revenues from customs, feudal dues and sales of land. Parliament covered extraordinary expenditures such as war with taxation. If taxation did not supply enough funds for military expenditures, more land was sold along with illegal scheming. Parliament was also used for passing laws. During Queen Elizabeth's reign, 438 public and private laws were passed. Public laws applied to everyone, whereas, private laws only applied to certain people. Parliament could undo a law if both houses agreed three times and the queen was also in agreement. The queen could make laws by Royal Proclamation without Parliament's consent. Parliament could also advise the queen, but she was never interested in their advice.

Elections only occurred for the members of the House of Commons. These members were supported by the important local people from their locale. The members of the House of Commons only had voting power if they were male and received a certain annual income. The queen decided when Parliament would be called to session. Queen Elizabeth I only called Parliament to session 10 times during her reign.

Local governments were important to the citizens of Elizabethan England. Every county had royal representatives such as Justices of the Peace, Sheriffs, and Lords Lieutenant. They insured that the queen's command and laws were enforced and obeyed.

Regional governments were responsible for overseeing parts of England that the Privy Council could not supervise. The Council of the North, which resided in York, was responsible for Northern England, and the Council of the Marches, which resided in Ludlow, was responsible for Wales and some border counties.

Manors were run by nobility and gentry. Owning land was what made one powerful, and those with land were wealthy and masters of the tenants on his land, thus they had had a major influence. It was a position of responsibility as they were meant to aid the monarchy by governing their own land. Grievances were taken to the Lord of the manor and the tenants were loyal to him. His political views were greatly impacted on his tenants as well.

Each city and town had its own government, head by a mayor.

The judicial system of Elizabethan England was made up of several courts. The most important courts were the Great Sessions Courts or the Assizes, and the Quarter Sessions Courts which dealt with most crimes. The Great Sessions Courts were held twice a year in each county, and the Quarter Sessions Courts were held four times a year. The Assizes was famous for its power to inflict harsh punishment.

Petty Sessions Courts, Manor Courts, and town courts handled unimportant crimes. Civil cases were dealt by various courts depending on the person's monetary status. The Star Chamber, one of the highest profile courts consisting of mostly Privy Counselors tried the wealthy. The Court of Chancery judged criminal cases, and the Exchequer of Pleas handled the financial suits. The Court of Requests dealt with the poor or "poor man's causes, and the Church Courts handled religious and moral cases. Those who committed high treason and other serious crimes received the death sentence which was often handed down by the queen. Those guilty of lesser crimes were sent to prison or to the stocks.

It was an era of great economic development. Sir Thomas Gresham established the first stock exchange called the Royal Exchange in 1565. This was the first one in England and one of the first institutions in Europe. This relative peaceful and prosperous Elizabethan era was known as the "Golden Age."

Elizabethan Family Life

The people of Elizabethan times believed that families were to become the role models of the society. Families in England were regarded important in its role to society. It was a time of family rules based from Bible sections indicating the responsibility of the parents to raise their children in a proper manner. Love was not considered a reason to marry, but did recognize that love may come during married life. Arranged marriages were mostly between neighbors and friends except for noble classes. Lower social classes were freer to make their own choice in marriage matters.

Wives were regarded as "property" of their husbands and the women were expected to get married and be dependent on the male population all of their life. Men were expected to ask a woman her hand in marriage and marriage was a requirement to be able to take legal command of the household, to be able to work in a public office and to get involved in any position with civic duties. Children were also acknowledged as "property" of their parents, and were commanded to respect them. Family ties were very close knit and well respected and it was regarded that house rules were followed with proper obedience.

The Elizabethans had a high regard for family in the community. They followed a deep respect for the importance of hierarchy. Their customary rulings for the behavior of children were taken from Bible passages, which explained the duty of parents in properly raising their children and likewise explaining the responsibility of children to respect and obey their elders. The life expectancy reached until 42 years old and the richer classes lived years longer than that.

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Elizabethan Era The events depicted in The Lost Colony took place during the Elizabethan era in England. The term, "Elizabethan Era" refers to the English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history and it's been widely romanticized in books, movies, plays, and TV series.

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The age of Shakespeare was a great time in English history. The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) saw England emerge as the leading naval and commercial power of the Western world. England consolidated its position with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and Elizabeth firmly established the Church of England begun by her father, King Henry VIII (following Henry's dispute with the Pope over having his first marriage annulled).

Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world and became the most celebrated English sea captain of his generation. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh sent colonists eastward in search of profit. European wars brought an influx of continental refugees into England, exposing the Englishman to new cultures. In trade, might, and art, England established an envious preeminence.

At this time, London was the heart of England, reflecting all the vibrant qualities of the Elizabethan Age. This atmosphere made London a leading center of culture as well as commerce. Its dramatists and poets were among the leading literary artists of the day. In this heady environment, Shakespeare lived and wrote.

London in the 16th century underwent a transformation. Its population grew 400% during the 1500s, swelling to nearly 200,000 people in the city proper and outlying region by the time an immigrant from Stratford came to town. A rising merchant middle class carved out a productive livelihood, and the economy boomed.

In the 1580s, the writings of the University Wits (Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Kyd, and Peele) defined the London theatre. Though grounded in medieval and Jacobean roots, these men produced new dramas and comedies using Marlowe's styling of blank verse. Shakespeare outdid them all; he combined the best traits of Elizabethan drama with classical sources, enriching the admixture with his imagination and wit.

Shakespeare's Peers: English Renaissance Playwrights

Shakespeare was hardly the only working playwright in London back in the day. Here's a quick guide to his competition.

A Very Shakespeare Christmas

It's another holiday season of eating, gift-giving, and festivity. But how would Shakespeare and everyone else in England have celebrated Christmas back in the day?

British History Online

Digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust.

Description Of Elizabethan England, 1577

The Modern History Sourcebook presents William Harrison's contribution to Holinshed's Chronicles. Arguably one of the best contemporary accounts of life in Elizabethan England.

Elizabeth I: An Overview

The BBC presents a very good history of Elizabeth I as part of their online "Church and State" series.

Elizabeth I and Elizabethan life in England

An article on architecture, literature, and daily life in Elizabethan England. From the Britain Express site.

Elizabethan Era History

From the website of North Carolina's longest-running outdoor drama, The Lost Colony. Includes background information on the historical figures, food, government, and family life during Elizabeth's reign.

The Elizabethan's Hornbook

The Web version of Walter Nelson's fine handbook, this is a basic primer on the historical background that a participant in an Elizabethan Renaissance Faire should know or have at hand.

The Elizabethan People

The Web version of the 1910 book by Henry Thew Stephenson, available through Wikisource.

Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge:1558-1603

This is just an incredible site by Maggie Secara and Paula Kate Marmor. More information than you could wish for about everyday life in Shakespeare's time.

The Royal Encyclopædia: Elizabeth I

From the official Web site of the British monarchy. This is an excellently presented resource on the kings and queens of Britain, Scotland, and the UK from the original Anglo-Saxon kings to present day.

Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature: Background Information

Links to background information sources for studies in Renaissance English literature. Includes a lot of historical sites.

St. Ives Historical Society

This nonprofit California association has a number of good essays on Elizabethan life.

Tudor England

A fine site by Lara E. Eakins that comprehensively covers every conceivable historical aspect of Tudor/Elizabethan England.

United Kingdom National Archives

The official archive of the UK government. The National Archive's vision is to lead and transform information management, guarantee the survival of today's information for tomorrow and bring history to life for everyone.

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The age of Shakespeare was a great time in English history. The reign of Elizabeth (1558 - 1603) saw England emerge as the leading naval and commercial power of the Western world. Elizabeth I's England consolidated its position with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and firmly established the Church of England (begun by her father, Henry VIII, after a dispute with the Pope).

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Short video clips about the mystery and history of Shakespeare's death.

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Historian Dr. Helen Castor explores the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's burial place. Will the first- ever scientific investigation discover why his tombstone's only inscription is a curse against any man who 'moves my bones'?

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Portions of Shakespeare's plays brought to life.

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Resources

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the shakespeare standard | celebrating william shakespeare | shakespeare news

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The Shakespeare Standard | News about William Shakespeare online. Get the latest news and updates on scholarship, performance, education, music & language. | theshakespearestandard.com

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shakespeare online

Shakespeare on Jealousy

Jealousy and the suffering it inflicts on lovers is at the heart of Shakespeare's later romances, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Few moments in Shakespeare's plays are as intense as that in which Posthumus comes to believe that Imogen has slept with Iachimo (Cymbeline, 2.4). Although they bring us to the brink of tragedy, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale end with the defeat of jealousy, and so they are considered comedies. This is not the case with Shakespeare's best-known exploration of the "green-eyed monster" -- Othello. Read on...

Imagery of Disease in Hamlet

In Hamlet Shakespeare weaves the dominant motif of disease into every scene to illustrate the corrupt state of Denmark and Hamlet's all-consuming pessimism. Images of ulcers, pleurisy, full body pustules, apoplexy, and madness parallel the sins of drunkenness, espionage, war, adultery, and murder, to reinforce the central idea that Denmark is dying. Read on...

Shakespeare's Characters

So how do you pronounce Jaques, anyway? Here is our comprehensive list of every Shakespearean character and the play in which he or she appears. Included is our spelled pronunciation guide, essential for all drama students and teachers.

Themes in The Tempest

"The great and striking peculiarity of this play is that its action lies wholly in the ideal world. It differs, therefore, from every other work of Shakespeare in the character of its mediation. Our poet, in most of his dramas, portrays the real world, and exhibits man as acting from clear conscious motives, and not from supernatural influences. But here he completely reverses his procedure; from beginning to end the chief instrumentalities of the poem are external; its conflicts and solutions are brought about by powers seemingly beyond human might and intelligence." J. D. Snider. Read on...

Sonnet 73

An analysis of Shakespeare's inspired sonnet, hailed as one of the best in the Western canon. Included is a paraphrase of the poem in contemporary English.

Why is King Leir Important?

The story of King Lear and his three daughters is an old tale, well known in England for centuries before Shakespeare wrote the definitive play on the subject. The first English account of Lear can be found in the History of the Kings of Britain, written by Geoffrey Monmouth in 1135. However, it is clear that Shakespeare relied chiefly on King Leir, an anonymous play published twelve years before the first recorded performance of Shakespeare's King Lear. Read on to find out more about Leir and see side-by-side versions of Leir and Shakespeare's masterpiece.

What Did Shakespeare Look Like?

The Stratford Bust, located on the wall of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon, is the oldest and, along with the Droeshout Portrait, most credible of all the known images of Shakespeare. But there are many representations of the Bard that have been handed down throughout the centuries, each with its own fascinating story to tell.

Shakespeare in Print: The Perils of Publishing in Elizabethan England

During Shakespeare's lifetime Elizabethan playwrights cared little about seeing their work in print. Only the rare drama was actually intended to be read as well as performed. Writers would usually sell their plays to the theatrical company which staged the performances, and if the company committed a particular play to paper, it would create only one copy - the official copy - in the form of a prompt-book. A prompt-book was a transcript of the play used during performances, cluttered with stage directions, instructions for sound effects, and the names of the actors. If a play was printed for a reading audience, it was often without the author's consent. Unprincipled publishers would steal the prompt-book, and sell copies for about fivepence apiece. Read on...

Playing Fast and Loose with Shakespeare's Name

The Elizabethans cared as little for spelling as they did for the Spanish and nowhere is their comical disregard for simple consistency more evident than in their treatment of the surname Shakespeare. And how did Shakespeare spell his own name, anyway? Find out...

A Guide to Shakespeare's Theatres

Find essential facts fast with this handy chronological reference guide to every Elizabethan and quasi-Elizabethan playhouse from 1576 to 1663.

Richard Burbage: The Poet Maker

There are no records of any significant tributes to Shakespeare by his fellow actors and writers at the time of his death. The great eulogies praising the Sweet Swan of Avon appeared much later, in the First Folio of 1623. The situation was quite different for Shakespeare's friend and legendary actor, Richard Burbage. When he died in 1619 the nation mourned and eulogies poured forth from distraught writers whose characters would surely die with him. The shock and sadness over Burbage's passing may be the key to our understanding of why so little was written on Shakespeare's death just three years earlier. Read on...

Why Study Shakespeare?

Ben Jonson anticipated Shakespeare's dazzling future when he declared, "He was not of an age, but for all time!" in the preface to the First Folio. While most people know that Shakespeare is the most popular dramatist and poet the world has ever produced, students new to his work often wonder why this is so. The following are the top reasons why Shakespeare has stood the test of time.

School Features:
How to Analyze a Shakespearean Sonnet
Shakespearean Sonnet Basics
How to Study Shakespeare: Five steps to success reading a Shakespeare play
Shakespeare's Metaphors and Similes
Shakespeare's Influence on Other Artists
Shakespeare Study Guides and Essays
Top Questions About Shakespeare

The Fascinating Stage History of Othello

Many of Shakespeare's plays have fallen in and out of favour throughout the centuries, but Othello has remained one of his most popular. One performance of Othello, produced in 1660, starred an actress by the name of Margaret Hughes in the role of Desdemona. This production is of particular importance because it marked the first time a woman was accepted on the English stage. Before this, all the characters, whether male or female, were played exclusively by men. Read on...

Entertainment in Elizabethan England

In Elizabethan England, during the times when plays were not completely outlawed, going to the theatre was the favourite activity of the masses. When disease ravaged London, actors would travel across the English countryside, entertaining farmers. There were also many days devoted to feasting, such as Mad Day, Midsummer Day, and Ascension Day (just to name a few), when people would drink and make merry. Dances were popular, whether you lived in London or in a small town, and so was getting together at the local pub for sing-alongs. Read on...

Shakespeare's Biography

Our detailed biography of Shakespeare covering his ancestry, parents, childhood in Stratford, siblings, marriage, children, career as an actor, contemporaries, and much more!

Julius Caesar Study Questions and Answers

This selection of questions and detailed answers is part of our Julius Caesar study guide, which provides students with a general overview of the play, an introduction to its central characters, excerpts from Plutarch, a list of essay topics at both high school and college levels and much more. To the full study guide...

Elizabethan Fashion Faux Pas

We have the Elizabethans to thank for many of the jewels of Western literature. But they were also responsible for some of the worst fashion disasters the world has ever seen. With ruffs so large that ladies had to eat soup with a two foot spoon and men's hose so stuffed with bran that they popped and spilled onto the floor, the Elizabethans showed no fashion shame. Find out more about Clothing in Elizabethan England.

Shakespeare Reveals Your Fortune

It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions. (King Lear)
Have some fun while you let Shakespeare predict your future. Choose from nine questions on long life, love, prosperity and happiness and you will receive your answer from the wisdom of Shakespeare's timeless verse. Your future awaits...

Featured Quote
They say, if money go before, all ways do lie open.
The Merry Wives of Windsor, (2.2), Ford

Shakespeare acquired substantial wealth thanks to his acting and writing abilities, and his shares in London theatres. The going rate was £10 per play at the turn of the sixteenth century. So how much money did Shakespeare make? Read on...

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Director Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke are teaming up to bring us a modern-day film adaptation of Shakespeare's masterpiece, Cymbeline. Hawke will play the mischief-loving villain, Iachimo. Please click here to read more and view the trailer.

Featured Quote
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
Macbeth, (5.5), Macbeth

"There is a magic in the expression "brief candle" which I have never known any one to deny. What is the secret of it? A candle is a commonplace enough object; in itself it is not a poetical thing; it is something useful, something with regard to which the idea of use and ownership naturally arises; it stands low down, as an inanimate thing, on the scale of images which culminates in man. Yet, as Shakespeare has used it, it is a central image in a consummate bit of poetry." Arthur Fairchild. Read on...
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Word of the Week: palmy
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets
Hamlet, (1.1), Horatio

palmy ] flourishing. Invented by Shakespeare.
In classical texts the spirits of the dead were a disorganized bunch, meandering about town talking gibberish in high-pitched shrieks. Shakespeare likely would have been familiar with Homer's description of ghosts in the Odyssey. Read on...

More Hamlet Resources
Revenge in Hamlet
All About Yorick
Philological Exam Questions on Hamlet
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Featured Quote
There is no ancient
gentleman but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers:
they hold up Adam's profession.
Hamlet, (5.1), First Clown

The Clowns (also known as the Grave-diggers) express the sentiment of the common people that Ophelia has committed suicide, although the audience has only Gertrude's poetic account of the drowning, which she says was accidental. Later in this scene we see that the Priest also doubts Ophelia's death was an accident Read on...
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shakespeare online Shakespeare on Jealousy Jealousy and the suffering it inflicts on lovers is at the heart of Shakespeare's later romances, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale . Few moments in Shakespeare's plays are as intense as that in which Posthumus comes to believe that Imogen has slept with Iachimo (Cymbeline, 2.4).

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Glossary and Language Companion

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Folger Digital Texts

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Folger Digital Texts - your source for reliable, expertly edited and encoded Shakespeare texts

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An entire list of other websites for you to explore!

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A fun translator!

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English to Shakespearean Translator ― LingoJam

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Shakespeare is well known for having introduced hundreds of new words to the the English vocabulary, many of which are still used today. Of his roughly 17,000 words used across his works, as many as 1,700 were devised by himself [1].

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audiotapes of debates on  who was shakespeare

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The Shakespeare Mystery | FRONTLINE | PBS

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word search mask definition crossword crossword online

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Free Crossword Assistant Online - Crossword Puzzles

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Assistant to the crossword man: search words by mask, and definition, assistant cruciverbalist, online dictionary crossword. Free crosswords puzzles.

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Who Was William Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era. He was an important member of the King's Men company of theatrical players from roughly 1594 onward.

Known throughout the world, Shakespeare's writings capture the range of human emotion and conflict and have been celebrated for more than 400 years. And yet, the personal life of William Shakespeare is somewhat a mystery.

There are two primary sources that provide historians with an outline of his life. One is his work - the plays, poems and sonnets - and the other is official documentation such as church and court records. However, these provide only brief sketches of specific events in his life and yield little insight into the man himself.

When Was Shakespeare Born?

No birth records exist, but an old church record indicates that a William Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. From this, it is believed he was born on or near April 23, 1564, and this is the date scholars acknowledge as Shakespeare's birthday.

Located about 100 miles northwest of London, during Shakespeare's time Stratford-upon-Avon was a bustling market town along the River Avon and bisected by a country road.

Family

Shakespeare was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local landed heiress. Shakespeare had two older sisters, Joan and Judith, and three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund.

Before Shakespeare's birth, his father became a successful merchant and held official positions as alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor. However, records indicate John's fortunes declined sometime in the late 1570s.

Childhood and Education

Scant records exist of Shakespeare's childhood and virtually none regarding his education. Scholars have surmised that he most likely attended the King's New School, in Stratford, which taught reading, writing and the classics.

Being a public official's child, Shakespeare would have undoubtedly qualified for free tuition. But this uncertainty regarding his education has led some to raise questions about the authorship of his work (and even about whether or not Shakespeare really existed).

Wife and Children

Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582, in Worcester, in Canterbury Province. Hathaway was from Shottery, a small village a mile west of Stratford. Shakespeare was 18 and Anne was 26, and, as it turns out, pregnant.

Their first child, a daughter they named Susanna, was born on May 26, 1583. Two years later, on February 2, 1585, twins Hamnet and Judith were born. Hamnet later died of unknown causes at age 11.

Shakespeare's Lost Years

There are seven years of Shakespeare's life where no records exist after the birth of his twins in 1585. Scholars call this period the "lost years," and there is wide speculation on what he was doing during this period.

One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from the local landlord, Sir Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant schoolmaster in Lancashire.

It's generally believed he arrived in London in the mid- to late 1580s and may have found work as a horse attendant at some of London's finer theaters, a scenario updated centuries later by the countless aspiring actors and playwrights in Hollywood and Broadway.

The King's Men

By the early 1590s, documents show Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, an acting company in London with which he was connected for most of his career.

Considered the most important troupe of its time, the company changed its name to the King's Men following the crowning of King James I in 1603. From all accounts, the King's Men company was very popular. Records show that Shakespeare had works published and sold as popular literature.

Although the theater culture in 16th century England was not highly admired by people of high rank, some of the nobility were good patrons of the performing arts and friends of the actors.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE FACT CARD

Actor and Playwright

By 1592, there is evidence Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in London and possibly had several plays produced.

The September 20, 1592 edition of the Stationers' Register (a guild publication) includes an article by London playwright Robert Greene that takes a few jabs at Shakespeare: "...There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country," Greene wrote of Shakespeare.

Scholars differ on the interpretation of this criticism, but most agree that it was Greene's way of saying Shakespeare was reaching above his rank, trying to match better known and educated playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe or Greene himself.

Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his first and second published poems: "Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lucrece" (1594).

By 1597, Shakespeare had already written and published 15 of his 37 plays. Civil records show that at this time he purchased the second-largest house in Stratford, called New House, for his family.

It was a four-day ride by horse from Stratford to London, so it's believed that Shakespeare spent most of his time in the city writing and acting and came home once a year during the 40-day Lenten period, when the theaters were closed.

Globe Theater

By 1599, Shakespeare and his business partners built their own theater on the south bank of the Thames River, which they called the Globe Theater.

In 1605, Shakespeare purchased leases of real estate near Stratford for 440 pounds, which doubled in value and earned him 60 pounds a year. This made him an entrepreneur as well as an artist, and scholars believe these investments gave him the time to write his plays uninterrupted.

Shakespeare's Writing Style

Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the story's plot or characters.

However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words.

With only small degrees of variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose.

William Shakespeare's Plays

While it's difficult to determine the exact chronology of Shakespeare's plays, over the course of two decades, from about 1590 to 1613, he wrote a total of 37 plays revolving around several main themes: histories, tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies.

Early Works: Histories and Comedies

With the exception of the tragic love story Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's first plays were mostly histories. Henry VI (Parts I, II and III), Richard II and Henry V dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt rulers and have been interpreted by drama historians as Shakespeare's way of justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty.

Julius Caesar portrays upheaval in Roman politics that may have resonated with viewers at a time when England's aging monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, had no legitimate heir, thus creating the potential for future power struggles.

Shakespeare also wrote several comedies during his early period: the whimsical A Midsummer Night's Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice, the wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing and the charming As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Other plays written before 1600 include Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V.

Works after 1600: Tragedies and Tragicomedies

It was in Shakespeare's later period, after 1600, that he wrote the tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. In these, Shakespeare's characters present vivid impressions of human temperament that are timeless and universal.

Possibly the best known of these plays is Hamlet, which explores betrayal, retribution, incest and moral failure. These moral failures often drive the twists and turns of Shakespeare's plots, destroying the hero and those he loves.

In Shakespeare's final period, he wrote several tragicomedies. Among these are Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Though graver in tone than the comedies, they are not the dark tragedies of King Lear or Macbeth because they end with reconciliation and forgiveness.

Other plays written during this period include All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Pericles and Henry VIII.

When Did Shakespeare Die?

Tradition holds that Shakespeare died on his 52nd birthday, April 23, 1616, but some scholars believe this is a myth. Church records show he was interred at Trinity Church on April 25, 1616.

The exact cause of Shakespeare's death is unknown, though many believe he died following a brief illness.

In his will, he left the bulk of his possessions to his eldest daughter, Susanna. Though entitled to a third of his estate, little seems to have gone to his wife, Anne, whom he bequeathed his "second-best bed." This has drawn speculation that she had fallen out of favor, or that the couple was not close.

However, there is very little evidence the two had a difficult marriage. Other scholars note that the term "second-best bed" often refers to the bed belonging to the household's master and mistress - the marital bed - and the "first-best bed" was reserved for guests.

Did Shakespeare Write His Own Plays?

About 150 years after his death, questions arose about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Scholars and literary critics began to float names like Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere and Francis Bacon - men of more known backgrounds, literary accreditation, or inspiration - as the true authors of the plays.

Much of this stemmed from the sketchy details of Shakespeare's life and the dearth of contemporary primary sources. Official records from the Holy Trinity Church and the Stratford government record the existence of a Shakespeare, but none of these attest to him being an actor or playwright.

Skeptics also questioned how anyone of such modest education could write with the intellectual perceptiveness and poetic power that is displayed in Shakespeare's works. Over the centuries, several groups have emerged that question the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.

The most serious and intense skepticism began in the 19th century when adoration for Shakespeare was at its highest. The detractors believed that the only hard evidence surrounding Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon described a man from modest beginnings who married young and became successful in real estate.

Members of the Shakespeare Oxford Society (founded in 1957) put forth arguments that English aristocrat and poet Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the poems and plays of "William Shakespeare."

The Oxfordians cite de Vere's extensive knowledge of aristocratic society, his education, and the structural similarities between his poetry and that found in the works attributed to Shakespeare. They contend that Shakespeare had neither the education nor the literary training to write such eloquent prose and create such rich characters.

However, the vast majority of Shakespearean scholars contend that Shakespeare wrote all his own plays. They point out that other playwrights of the time also had sketchy histories and came from modest backgrounds.

They contend that Stratford's New Grammar School curriculum of Latin and the classics could have provided a good foundation for literary writers. Supporters of Shakespeare's authorship argue that the lack of evidence about Shakespeare's life doesn't mean his life didn't exist. They point to evidence that displays his name on the title pages of published poems and plays.

Examples exist of authors and critics of the time acknowledging Shakespeare as the author of plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and King John.

Royal records from 1601 show that Shakespeare was recognized as a member of the King's Men theater company and a Groom of the Chamber by the court of King James I, where the company performed seven of Shakespeare's plays.

There is also strong circumstantial evidence of personal relationships by contemporaries who interacted with Shakespeare as an actor and a playwright.

Literary Legacy

What seems to be true is that Shakespeare was a respected man of the dramatic arts who wrote plays and acted in some in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But his reputation as a dramatic genius wasn't recognized until the 19th century.

Beginning with the Romantic period of the early 1800s and continuing through the Victorian period, acclaim and reverence for Shakespeare and his work reached its height. In the 20th century, new movements in scholarship and performance have rediscovered and adopted his works.

Today, his plays are highly popular and constantly studied and reinterpreted in performances with diverse cultural and political contexts. The genius of Shakespeare's characters and plots are that they present real human beings in a wide range of emotions and conflicts that transcend their origins in Elizabethan England.

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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era. He was an important member of the King's Men company of theatrical players from roughly 1594 onward. Known throughout the world, Shakespeare's writings capture the range of human emotion and conflict and have been celebrated for more than 400 years.

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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Welcome to the Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.

For other Shakespeare resources, visit the Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet Web site.

The original electronic source for this server was the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare. The HTML versions of the plays provided here are placed in the public domain.

5/10/23: Current copy taken from https://github.com/TheMITTech/shakespeare/ and hosted by MIT IS&T in a static location.

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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Welcome to the Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993. For other Shakespeare resources, visit the Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet Web site.

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ShakespeareHigh
Words, plays, sonnets...

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Welcome to Shakespeare High: Your Shakespeare Classroom on the Internet!

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Shakespeare High: Your Shakespeare Classroom on the Internet!

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Other Websites

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The most striking feature of Shakespeare is his command of language. It is all the more astounding when one not only considers Shakespeare's sparse formal education but the curriculum of the day. There were no dictionaries; the first such lexical work for speakers of English was compiled by schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey as A Table Alphabeticall in 1604. Although certain grammatical treatises were published in Shakespeare's day, organized grammar texts would not appear until the 1700s. Shakespeare as a youth would have no more systematically studied his own language than any educated man of the period.

Despite this, Shakespeare is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with the introduction of nearly 3,000 words into the language. His vocabulary, as culled from his works, numbers upward of 17,000 words (quadruple that of an average, well-educated conversationalist in the language). In the words of Louis Marder, "Shakespeare was so facile in employing words that he was able to use over 7,000 of them—more than occur in the whole King James version of the Bible—only once and never again."

Shakespeare's English, despite the harrowing cries of high school students everywhere, is only one linguistic generation removed from that which we speak today. The following table illustrates the time periods and differences between Old, Middle, and Early Modern, and Modern English:

Old English

450-1066

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; Si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

Middle English

1066-1450

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyndoom come to; be thi wille don in erthe as in heuene.

Early Modern English

1450-1690

Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen.

Modern English

1690-Present

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.

Although the Elizabethan dialect differs slightly from Modern English, the principles are generally the same. There are some (present day) anomalies with prepositional usage and verb agreement, and certainly a number of Shakespeare's words have shifted meanings or dropped, with age, from the present vocabulary. Word order, as the language shifted from Middle to Early Modern English, was still a bit more flexible, and Shakespeare wrote dramatic poetry, not standard prose, which gave some greater license in expression. However, Elizabethan remains a sibling of our own tongue, and hence, accessible.

This facility with language, and the art with which he employed it, is why Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was in his own time.

A Quick Guide to Reading Shakespeare

Shakespeare's works are remarkably accessible once you know what to expect when reading them. This quick guide can help you make a little more sense of what his characters are saying.

Shakespeare's Grammar

In the England of Shakespeare's time, English was a lot more flexible as a language. By taking a closer look at usage, shifts in meaning, syntax, and rhetoric, we can more easily understand the Bard's English.

Speech Analysis: Selected Readings

It's understandable why people sometimes get a little overwhelmed when reading Shakespeare. These analyses are designed to help you-not to give you all the answers, but simply to demonstrate a method you can use for yourself.

CliffsNotes—Shakespeare Glossary

A glossary of Shakespearean terms from the people who have made a living out of students who don't want to read the plays for themselves.

Elizabethan English

Topics include sounds and sentences, puns and word-play, Shakespeare's pronunciation, and prose and verse.

Elizabethan English as a literary medium

From Bartleby.com. A look at the literary use of Elizabethan English.

Elizabethan English Pronunciation

Ben and David Crystal explain and demonstrate Original Pronunciation (OP) in use during Shakespeare's time.

History of the English Language

A (very) brief history of the English language from EnglishClub.com.

How to Understand Shakespeare's Language: Strategies for Reading the Bard

A concise study guide from the folks at enotes.com.

Proper Elizabethan Accents

A brief introduction to how people's speech in Elizabethan England actually sounded, their vocabulary, and grammar. Includes a table for constructing Shakespearean insults.

Shakespeare 101

Amy Ulen has a guide meant to help Shakespeare newbies with the language of the Bard. Includes a mini-glossary.

Shakespeare and the Development Of Modern English

This article from No Sweat Shakespeare discusses the shift from Middle to Early Modern English.

Shakespeare Concordance

Type in a word, and this search engine will find all the instances of that word in Shakespeare's works.

Shakespeare Dictionary

A selective dictionary of Shakepearean words that have fallen out of use, or whose meanings have changed over the centuries.

A Shakespeare Glossary

The Perseus Digital Library presents this classic reference work by C.T. Onions in a searchable database.

Shakespeare Lexicon

Alexander Schmidt's Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary is a painstakingly compiled glossary of every word in the Shakespeare corpus and an exhaustive collection of quotations. It has long been a standard reference work.

Shakespeare's Language (Royal Shakespeare Company)

One of the many fine educational resources from the RSC website.

Shakespeare's Words

Shakespeare's Words is the companion website to the book by David and Ben Crystal. It includes a glossary and fully searchable texts of the plays and poems.

A Shakespearian Grammar

A great Internet edition of a classic work by Edwin Abbott, a Headmaster of the City of London School. Although first published in 1879, this is still a very good (if highly academic) comparative study of Elizabethan syntax versus Modern English.

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Shakespeare Resource Center - The Language of Shakespeare

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The most striking feature of Shakespeare is his command of language. It is all the more astounding when one not only considers Shakespeare's sparse formal education but the curriculum of the day. Although certain grammatical treatises were published in Shakespeare's day, organized grammar texts would not appear until the 1700's.

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william shakespeare shakespeare's globe theatre theater playhouse history tudor london elizabethan puritan performance jacobean elizabeth i james i

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Shakespeare's Globe: About Us - Original Globe / Shakespeare's Globe

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A brief account of the original Globe Theatre.

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Not accessible through HCSD internet server - accessible elsewhere

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Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge

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Everyday life in Tudor England - food, occupations, games, pastimes, religion, fashion, manners, and education in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.

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Push It

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BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare

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Shakespeare 's Secret Messiah & Vengeance

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In Search of Shakespeare Part 5 Bonus Episode

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Uploaded by Malcolm Hudson on 2015-05-09.

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BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare

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Shakespeare 's Secret Messiah & Vengeance

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In Search of Shakespeare Part 5 Bonus Episode

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Uploaded by Malcolm Hudson on 2015-05-09.

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BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare

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BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare 3 of 4 The Duty Of Poets 2005 REPOST DVDRip XviD

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Uploaded by Kevin Woodsend on 2016-05-10.

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The influence of Shakespeare on everyday English

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Understanding Shakespeare's Language: Part 1

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BBC Michael Wood In Search Of Shakespeare

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Mysteries of Shakespeare's tomb: what the investigation revealed

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"Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he who moves my bones." The interdict inscribed on William Shakespeare's grave in Stratford-upon-Avon has acted as a fearsome deterrent for centuries. But technology, and the rise of female scholars, gave Ren0aissance historian Helen Castor the opportunity for a spot of semantic casuistry in Shakespeare's Tomb.

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Educational Videos for Students (Cartoons on Bullying, Leadership & More)

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William Shakespeare for Kids (Fun Facts about William Shakespeare Cartoon)

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SHAKESPEARE UNCOVERED | Hugh Bonneville and Ralph Fiennes on Performing Shakespeare | PBS

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Watch the full-length episode at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365400058/?Utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=shau_covefullprogram (US Only) Bonneville started his career at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, understudying Ralph Fiennes as Lysander, one of the four lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He and Fiennes meet up again to try to untangle the extraordinary plot of one of Shakespeare's most enduringly popular plays, a great comedy of love and enchantment.

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While William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare's activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare's exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother's third child, but the first to survive infancy. This has led scholars to conjecture that he was born on April 23rd, given the era's convention of baptizing newborns on their third day. Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, moved to Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a prominent figure in the town's business and politics. He rose to be bailiff, the highest official in the town, but then in about 1575-1576 his prosperity declined markedly and he withdrew from public life. In 1596, thanks to his son's success and persistence, he was granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms, and the family moved into New Place, the grandest house in Stratford.

Speculation that William Shakespeare traveled, worked as a schoolmaster in the country, was a soldier and a law clerk, or embraced or left the Roman Catholic Church continues to fill the gaps left in the sparse records of the so-called lost years. It is conventionally assumed (though attendance registers do not survive) that Shakespeare attended the King's New School in Stratford, along with others of his social class. At the age of 18, in November 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. She was pregnant with Susanna Shakespeare, who was baptized on May 26, 1583. The twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptized on February 2, 1585. There were no further children from the union.

William Shakespeare had probably been working as an actor and writer on the professional stage in London for four or five years when the London theaters were closed by order of the Privy Council on June 23, 1592. The authorities were concerned about a severe outbreak of the plague and alarmed at the possibility of civil unrest (Privy Council minutes refer to "a great disorder and tumult" in Southwark). The initial order suspended playing until Michaelmas and was renewed several times. When the theaters reopened in June 1594, the theatrical companies had been reorganized, and Shakespeare's career was wholly committed to the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men until 1603, when they were reconstituted as the King's Men.

By 1592 Shakespeare already enjoyed sufficient prominence as an author of dramatic scripts to have been the subject of Robert Greene's attack on the "upstart crow" in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. Such renown as he enjoyed, however, was as transitory as the dramatic form. Play scripts, and their authors, were accorded a lowly status in the literary system, and when scripts were published, their link to the theatrical company (rather than to the scriptwriter) was publicized. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare's name first appeared on the title page of his plays- Richard II and a revised edition of Romeo and Juliet.

While the London theaters were closed, some actors tried to make a living by touring outside the capital. Shakespeare turned from the business of scriptwriting to the pursuit of art and patronage; unable to pursue his career in the theatrical marketplace, he adopted a more conventional course. Shakespeare's first publication, Venus and Adonis (1593), was dedicated to the 18-year-old Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The dedication reveals a frank appeal for patronage, couched in the normal terms of such requests. Shakespeare received the Earl's patronage and went on to dedicate his next dramatic poem, Lucrece, to the young lord as well. Venus and Adonis was printed by Richard Field, a professionally accomplished printer who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare's choice of printer indicates an ambition to associate himself with unambiguously high-art productions, as does the quotation from Ovid's Amores on the title page: "Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret acqua" (Let worthless stuff excite the admiration of the crowd: as for me, let golden Apollo ply me with full cups from the Castalian spring, that is, the spring of the Muses). Such lofty repudiation of the vulgar was calculated to appeal to the teenage Southampton. It also appealed to a sizable slice of the reading public. In the midst of horror, disease, and death, Shakespeare was offering access to a golden world, showing the delights of applying learning for pleasure rather than pointing out the obvious morals to be drawn from classical authors when faced with awful catastrophe.

With Venus and Adonis Shakespeare sought direct aristocratic patronage, but he also entered the marketplace as a professional author. He seems to have enjoyed a degree of success in the first of these objectives, given the more intimate tone of the dedication of Lucrece to Southampton in the following year. In the second objective, his triumph must have outstripped all expectation. Venus and Adonis went though 15 editions before 1640; if was first entered in the Stationers' Register on April 18, 1593. It is a fine and elegantly printed book, consisting of 1,194 lines in 199 six-line stanzas rhymed ababcc. The verse form was a token of social and literary ambition on Shakespeare's part. Its aristocratic cachet derived from its popularity at court, being favored by several courtier poets, such as Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Arthur Gorges, and Sir Edward Dyer. Venus and Adonis is unquestionably a work of its age. In it a young writer courts respectability and patronage. At one level, of course, the poem is a traditional Ovidian fable, locating the origin of the inseparability of love and sorrow in Venus's reaction to the death of Adonis: "lo here I prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend /... all love's pleasure shall not match his woe." It invokes a mythic past that explains a painful present. Like so many texts of the 1590s, it features an innocent hero, Adonis, who encounters a world in which the precepts he has acquired from his education are tested in the surprising school of experience. His knowledge of love, inevitably, is not firsthand ("I have heard it is a life in death, / That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath"). There is a staidly academic quality to his repudiation of Venus's "treatise," her "idle over-handled theme.

Shakespeare's literary and social aspirations are revealed at every turn. In his Petrarchism, for example, he adopts a mode that had become a staple of courtly discourse. Elizabethan politicians figured themselves and their personal and political conditions in Petrarchan terms. The inescapable and enduring frustrations of the courtier's life were habitually figured via the analogy of the frustrated, confused, but devoted Petrarchan lover. Yet Shakespeare's approach to this convention typifies the 1590s younger generation's sense of its incongruity. Lines such as "the love-sick queen began to sweat" are understandably rare in Elizabethan courtly discourse. Power relations expressed through the gendered language of Elizabeth's eroticized politics are reversed: "Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing / ... Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdain'd the wooing." It is Venus who deploys the conventional carpe diem arguments: "Make use of time / ... Fair flowers that are not gath'red in their prime, / Rot, and consume themselves in little time"; she even provides a blason of her own charms: "Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow, / Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in turning."

Like most Elizabethan treatments of love, Shakespeare's work is characterized by paradox ("She's love, she loves, and yet she is not lov'd"), by narrative and thematic diversity, and by attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, exploring the psychology of perception ("Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled"). The poem addresses such artistic preoccupations of the 1590s as the relation of poetry to painting and the possibility of literary immortality, as well as social concerns such as the phenomenon of "masterless women," and the (to men) alarming and unknowable forces unleashed by female desire, an issue that for a host of reasons fascinated Elizabeth's subjects. Indeed, Venus and Adonis flirts with taboos, as do other successful works of the 1590s, offering readers living in a paranoid, plague-ridden city a fantasy of passionate and fatal physical desire, with Venus leading Adonis "prisoner in a red-rose chain." In its day it was appreciated as an erotic fantasy glorying in the inversion of established categories and values, with a veneer of learning and the snob appeal of association with a celebrated aristocrat.

Since the Romantic period the frank sexuality of Shakespeare's Venus has held less appeal for literary critics and scholars than it had to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers. C.S. Lewis concludes in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) that "if the poem is not meant to arouse disgust it was very foolishly written." In more recent years a combination of feminism, cultural studies, renewed interest in rhetoric, and a return to traditional archival research has begun to reclaim Venus and Adonis from such prejudice.

The elevated subject of Shakespeare's next publication, Lucrece, suggests that Venus and Adonis had been well received, Lucrece comprises 1,855 lines, in 265 stanzas. The stanza (as in Complaint of Rosamund) is the seven-line rhyme royal ( ababbcc) immortalized in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) and thereafter considered especially appropriate for tragedy, complaint, and philosophical reflection. In places the narrator explicitly highlights the various rhetorical set pieces ("Here she exclaims against repose and rest"). Lucrece herself comments on her performance after the apostrophes to "comfort-killing Night, image of Hell," Opportunity, and Time. Elizabethan readers would have appreciated much about the poem, from its plentiful wordplay ("to shun the blot, she would not blot the letter"; "Ere she with blood had stain'd her stain'd excuse") and verbal dexterity, to the inner debate raging inside Tarquin. Though an exemplary tyrant from ancient history, he also exemplifies the conventional 1590s conflict between willful youthful prodigality and sententious experience ("My part is youth, and beats these from the stage"). The arguments in his "disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will" are those of the Petrarchan lover: "nothing can affection's course control," and "Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy." But the context of this rhetorical performance is crucial throughout. Unlike Venus and Adonis, Lucrece is not set in a mythical golden age, but in a fallen, violent world. This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and ultimately physical competition of their debate--contrasting Tarquin's speeches with Lucrece's eloquent appeals to his better nature.

The combination of ancient and contemporary strengthens the political elements in the poem. It demonstrates tyranny in its most intimate form, committing a private outrage that is inescapably public; hence the rape is figured in terms both domestic (as a burglary) and public (as a hunt, a war, a siege). It also reveals the essential violence of many conventional erotic metaphors. Shakespeare draws on the powerful Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman: although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece's chamber connects the two assaults. His attack figures a society at war with itself, and he himself is shown to be self-divided." Tyranny, lust, and greed translate the metaphors of Petrarchism into the actuality of rape, which is figured by gradatio, or climax: "What could he see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?"

The historically validated interpretation-for Shakespeare's readers, descendants of Brutus in New Troy-is figured by Brutus, who "pluck'd the knife from Lucrece's side." He steps forward, casting off his reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at Lucrece's death into a determination to "publish Tarquin's foul offense" and change the political system. Brutus emerges from the shadows, reminding the reader that the poem, notwithstanding its powerful speeches and harrowing images, is also remarkable for what is unshown, untold, implicit. Until recently few commentators have taken up the interpretative challenge posed by Brutus. Traditionally Lucrece has been dismissed as a bookish, pedantic dry run for Shakespeare's tragedies, in William Empson's phrase, "the Bard doing five-finger exercises," containing what F.T. Prince in his 1960 edition of the poems dismisses as defective rhetoric in the treatment of an uninteresting story. Many critics have sought to define the poem's genre, which combines political fable, female complaint, and tragedy within a milieu of self-conscious antiquity. But perhaps the most significant recent developments have been the feminist treatments of the poem, the reawakening interest in rhetoric, and a dawning awareness of the work's political engagement. Lucrece, like so many of Shakespeare's historical tragedies, problematizes the categories of history and myth, of public and private, and exemplifies the bewildering nature of historical parallels. The self-conscious rhetorical display and the examination of representation is daringly politicized, explicitly, if inconclusively, connecting the aesthetic and the erotic with politics both sexual and state. At the time of its publication, Lucrece was Shakespeare's most profound meditation on history, particularly on the relations between public role and private morality and on the conjunction of forces-personal, political, social-that creates turning points in human history. In it he indirectly articulates the concerns of his generation and also, perhaps, of his young patron, who was already closely associated with the doomed earl of Essex.

In 1598 or 1599 the printer William Jaggard brought out an anthology of 20 miscellaneous poems, which he eventually attributed to Shakespeare, though the authorship of all 20 is still disputed. At least five are demonstrably Shakespearean. Poem 1 is a version of Sonnet 138 ("When My Love Swears that She Is Made of Truth"), poem 2 of Sonnet 144 ("Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair"), and the rest are sonnets that appear in act 4 of Love's Labor's Lost (1598). Investigation of Jaggard's volume, called The Passionate Pilgrime, has yielded and will continue to yield insight into such matters as the relationship of manuscript to print culture in the 1590s, the changing nature of the literary profession, and the evolving status of the author. It may also, as with The Phoenix and Turtle (1601), lead to increased knowledge of the chronology and circumstances of Shakespeare's literary career, as well as affording some glimpses of his revisions of his texts.

"With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart," wrote William Wordsworthin " Scorn not the Sonnet" (1827) of the Sonnets. "If so," replied Robert Browning in his poem "House" (1876), "the less Shakespeare he." None of Shakespeare's works has been so tirelessly ransacked for biographical clues as the 154 sonnets, published with A Lover's Complaint by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Unlike the narrative poems, they enjoyed only limited commercial success during Shakespeare's lifetime, and no further edition appeared until Benson's in 1640. The title page, like Jaggard's of The Passionate Pilgrim, relies upon the drawing power of the author's name and promises "SHAKE-SPEARES / SONNETS / Never before Imprinted."

The 154 sonnets are conventionally divided between the "young man" sonnets (1-126) and the "dark lady" sonnets (127-152), with the final pair often seen as an envoy or coda to the collection. There is no evidence that such a division has chronological implications, though the volume is usually read in such a way. Shakespeare employs the conventional English sonnet form: three quatrains capped with a couplet. Drama is conjured within individual poems, as the speaker wrestles with some problem or situation; it is generated by the juxtaposition of poems, with instant switches of tone, mood, and style; it is implied by cross-references and interrelationships within the sequence as a whole.

There remains a question, however, of how closely Shakespeare was involved in preparing the text of the sonnets for publication. Some commentators have advocated skepticism about all attempts to recover Shakespeare's intention. Others have looked more closely at Thorpe, at Benson, and at the circulation of Shakespeare's verse in the manuscript culture: these investigations have led to a reexamination of the ideas of authorship and authority in the period. Although scholarly opinion is still divided, several influential studies and editions in recent years have argued, on a variety of grounds, for the authority, integrity, and coherence of Thorpe's text, an integrity now regarded as including A Lover's Complaint.

The subsequent history of the text of the sonnets is inseparable from the history of Shakespeare's reputation. John Benson's Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (1640) was part of an attempt to "canonize" Shakespeare, collecting verses into a handsome quarto that could be sold as a companion to the dramatic folio texts ("to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his poems"). Benson dropped a few sonnets, added other poems, provided titles for individual pieces, changed Thorpe's order, conflated sonnets, and modified some of the male pronouns, thereby making the sequence seem more unambiguously heterosexual in its orientation. In recent years there has been increasing study of Benson's edition as a distinct literary production in its own right.

The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to tell their story more clearly. It also led to attempts to relate them to what was known or could be surmised about Shakespeare's life. Some commentators speculated that the publication of the sonnets was the result of a conspiracy by Shakespeare's rivals or enemies, seeking to embarrass him by publishing love poems apparently addressed to a man rather than to the conventional sonnet-mistress. The five appendices to Hyder Edward Rollins's Variorum edition document the first century of such endeavors. Attention was directed toward "problems" such as the identity of Master W. H., of the young man, of the rival poet, and of the dark lady (a phrase, incidentally, never used by Shakespeare in the sonnets). The disappearance of the sonnets from the canon coincided with the time when Shakespeare's standing as the nation's bard was being established. The critics' current fascination is just as significant for what it reveals about contemporary culture, as the "Shakespeare myth" comes under attack from various directions.

The sonnets were apparently composed during a period of ten or a dozen years starting in about 1592-1593. In Palladis Tamia Meres refers to the existence of "sugared sonnets" circulating among Shakespeare's "private friends," some which were published in The Passionate Pilgrim. The fact of prior circulation has important implications for the sonnets. The particular poems that were in circulation suggest that the general shape and themes of the Sonnets were established from the earliest stages. Evidence suggesting a lengthy period of composition is inconvenient for commentators seeking to unlock the autobiographical secret of the sonnets. An early date (1592-1594) argues for Southampton as the boy and Christopher Marlowe as the rival poet; a date a decade later brings George Herbert and George Chapman into the frame. There are likewise early dark ladies (Lucy Negro, before she took charge of a brothel) and late (Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton). There may, of course, have been more than one young man, rival, and dark lady, or in fact the sequence may not be autobiographical at all.

No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse. Shakespeare's is no exception. Yet neither are the Sonnets a random anthology, a loose gathering of scattered rhymes. While groups of sonnets are obviously linked thematically, such as the opening sequence urging the young man to marry (1-17), and the dark lady sequence (127-152), the ordering within those groups is not that of continuous narrative. There are many smaller units, with poems recording that the friend has become the lover of the poet's mistress (40-42), or expressing jealousy of the young man's friendship with a rival poet (78-86). Sonnet 44 ends with a reference to two of the four elements "so much of earth and water wrought," and 45 starts with "The other two, slight air and purging fire." Similarly indivisible are the two "horse" sonnets 50 and 51, the "Will" sonnets 135 and 136, and 67 and 68. Sonnets 20 and 87 are connected as much by their telling use of feminine rhyme as by shared themes. Dispersed among the poems are pairs and groups that amplify or comment on each other, such as those dealing with absence (43-45, 47-48, 50-52, and 97-98).

"My name is Will," declares the speaker of 136. Sonnet 145 apparently puns on Anne Hathaway's name ("I hate, from hate away she threw"). Elizabethan sonneteers, following Sir Philip Sidney, conventionally teased their readers with hints of an actuality behind the poems. Sidney had given Astrophil his own coat of arms, had quibbled with the married name of the supposed original for Stella (Penelope Rich) and with the Greek etymology of his own name (Philip, "lover of horses") in Astrophil and Stella sonnets 41, 49, and 53. Shakespeare's speaker descends as much from Astrophil as from Daniel's more enigmatic persona, most obviously in the deployment of the multiple sense of will in 135 and 136. Yet Shakespeare's sequence is unusual in including sexual consummation (Spenser's Amoretti led to the celebration of marriage in Epithalamion, 1595) and unique in its persuasion to marry. There is evidence that some contemporary readers were disturbed by the transgressive and experimental features of 1590s erotic writing. Works by Marston and Marlowe were among those banned in 1599 along with satires and other more conventional kindling. Benson's much-discussed modification of the text of the Sonnets indicates at least a certain level of anxiety about the gender of the characters in the poems. Benson retained Sonnet 20 but dropped 126 ("O Thou My Lovely Boy") and changed the direct address of 108 ("Nothing, Sweet Boy") to the neutral "Nothing, Sweet Love."

The speaker sums up his predicament in 144, one of the Passionate Pilgrim poems:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman color'd ill.

The speaker's attraction to the "worser spirit" is figured in harsh language throughout the sequence: in fact, the brutal juxtaposition of lyricism and lust is characteristic of the collection as a whole. The consequent disjointedness expresses a form of psychological verisimilitude by the standards of Shakespeare's day, where discontinuity and repetition were held to reveal the inner state of a speaker.

The anachronism of applying modern attitudes toward homosexuality to early modern culture is self-evident. Where Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew their boundaries cannot be fully determined, but they were fascinated by the Platonic concept of androgyny, a concept drawn on by the queen herself almost from the moment of her accession. Sonnet 53 is addressed to an inexpressible lover, who resembles both Adonis and Helen. Androgyny is only part of the exploration of sexuality in the sonnets, however. A humanist education could open windows onto a world very different from post-Reformation England. Plato's praise of love between men was in marked contrast to the establishment of capital punishment as the prescribed penalty for sodomy in 1533.

In the Sonnets the relationship between the speaker and the young man both invites and resists definition, and it is clearly presented as a challenge to orthodoxy. If at times it seems to correspond to the many Elizabethan celebrations of male friendship, at others it has a raw physicality that resists such polite categorization. Even in sonnet 20, where sexual intimacy seems to be explicitly denied, the speaker's mind runs to bawdy puns. The speaker refers to the friend as "rose," "my love," "lover," and "sweet love," and many commentators have demonstrated the repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). On the other hand, the acceptance of the traditional distinction between the young man and the dark lady sonnets obscures the fact that Shakespeare seems deliberately to render the gender of his subject uncertain in the vast majority of cases.

For some commentators the sequence also participates in the so-called birth of the author, a crucial feature of early modern writing: the liberation of the writer from the shackles of patronage. In Joel Fineman's analysis, Shakespeare creates a radical internalization of Petrarchism, reordering its dynamic by directing his attention to the speaker's subjectivity rather than to the ostensible object of the speaker's devotion: the poetry of praise becomes poetry of self-discovery.

Sidney's Astrophil had inhabited a world of court intrigue, chivalry, and international politics, exemplifying the overlap between political and erotic discourse in Elizabethan England. The circumstances of Shakespeare's speaker, in contrast, are not those of a courtier but of a male of the upwardly mobile "middling sort." Especially in the young man sonnets, there is a marked class anxiety, as the speaker seeks to define his role, whether as a friend, a tutor, a counselor, an employee, or a sexual rival. Not only are comparisons drawn from the world of the professional theater ("As an unperfect actor on the stage" in sonnet 23), but also from the world of business: compared to the prodigal "Unthrifty loveliness" of the youth (sonnet 4), "Making a famine where abundance lies" (1), the speaker inhabits a bourgeois world of debts, loans, repayment, and usury, speaking in similar language to the Dark Lady: "I myself am mortgaged to thy will" (134).

Yet Shakespeare's linguistic performance extends beyond the "middling sort." He was a great popularizer, translating court art and high art-John Lyly, Sidney, Edmund Spenser -into palatable and sentimental commercial forms. His sequence is remarkable for its thematic and verbal richness, for its extraordinary range of nuances and ambiguities. He often employs words in multiple senses (as in the seemingly willfully indecipherable resonance, punning, polysemy, implication, and nuance of sonnet 94). Shakespeare's celebrated verbal playfulness, the polysemy of his language, is a function of publication, whether by circulation or printing. His words acquire currency beyond himself and become the subject of reading and interpretation.

This linguistic richness can also be seen as an act of social aspiration: as the appropriation of the ambiguity axiomatically inherent in courtly speech. The sequence continues the process of dismantling traditional distinctions among rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry begun in the poems of 1593-1594. The poems had dealt in reversal and inversion and had combined elements of narrative and drama. The Sonnets occupy a distinct, marginal space between social classes, between public and private, narrative and dramatic, and they proceed not through inverting categories but rather through interrogating them. Variations are played on Elizabethan conventions of erotic discourse: love without sex, sex without love, a "master-mistress" who is "prick'd ... out for women's pleasure" as the ultimate in unattainable ("to my purpose nothing," 20) adoration. Like Spenser's Amoretti, Shakespeare's collection meditates on the relationships among love, art, time, and immortality. It remains a meditation, however, even when it seems most decided.

The consequences of love, the pain of rejection, desertion, and loss of reputation are powerful elements in the poem that follows the sequence. Despite Thorpe's unambiguous attribution of the piece to Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint was rejected from the canon, on distinctly flimsy grounds, until quite recently. It has been much investigated to establish its authenticity and its date. It is now generally accepted as Shakespearean and dated at some point between 1600 and 1609, possibly revised from a 1600 first version for publication in Thorpe's volume. The poem comprises 329 lines, disposed into 47 seven-line rhyme-royal stanzas. It draws heavily on Spenser and Daniel and is the complaint of a wronged woman about the duplicity of a man. It is in some sense a companion to Lucrece and to All's Well That Ends Well (circa 1602-1603) as much as to the sonnets. Its connections with the narrative poems, with the plays, and with the genre of female complaint have been thoroughly explored. The woman is a city besieged by an eloquent wooer ("how deceits were gilded in his smiling"), whose essence is dissimulation ("his passion, but an art of craft"). There has been a growing tendency to relate the poem to its immediate context in Thorpe's Sonnets volume and to find it a reflection or gloss or critique of the preceding sequence.

Interest in Shakespeare's nondramatic writings has increased markedly in recent years. They are no longer so easily marginalized or dismissed as conventional, and they contribute in powerful ways to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's oeuvre and the Elizabethan era in which he lived and wrote.

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, on what may have been his 52nd birthday.

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While William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been...

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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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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.

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The original Globe was an Elizabethan theatre which opened in Autumn 1599 in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, in an area now known as Bankside. It was one of several major theatres that were located in the area, the others being the Swan, the Rose and The Hope. The Globe was the principal playhouse of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (who would become the King's Men in 1603). Most of Shakespeare's post-1599 plays were staged at the Globe, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Hamlet.

The Globe was owned by many actors, who (except for one) were also shareholders in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Two of the six Globe shareholders, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert Burbage, owned double shares of the whole, or 25% each; the other four men, Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and Thomas Pope, owned a single share, or 12.5%. (Originally William Kempe was intended to be the seventh partner, but he sold out his share to the four minority sharers, leaving them with more than the originally planned 10%). These initial proportions changed over time, as new sharers were added. Shakespeare's share diminished from 1/8 to 1/14, or roughly 7%, over the course of his career.

The Globe was built in 1599 using timber from an earlier theatre, The Theatre, that had been built by Richard Burbage's father, James Burbage, in Shoreditch in 1576. The Burbages originally had a 20-year lease of the site on which the Theatre was built. When the lease ran out, they dismantled The Theatre beam by beam and transported it over the Thames to reconstruct it as The Globe.

On June 29, 1613, the Globe Theatre went up in flames during a performance of Henry the Eighth. A theatrical cannon, set off during the performance, misfired, igniting the wooden beams and thatching. According to one of the few surviving documents of the event, no one was hurt except a man who put out his burning breeches with a bottle of ale.

Like all the other theatres in London, the Globe was closed down by the Puritans in 1642. It was destroyed in 1644 to make room for tenements. Its exact location remained unknown until remnants of its foundations were discovered in 1989 beneath the car park of Anchor Terrace on Park Street (the shape of the foundations are replicated in the surface of the car park). There may be further remains beneath Anchor Terrace, but the 18th century terrace is listed and therefore cannot be disturbed by archaeologists.

Layout of the Globe
The Globe's actual dimensions are unknown, but its shape and size can be approximated from scholarly inquiry over the last two centuries. The evidence suggests that it was a three-story, open-air amphitheatre between 97 and 102 feet (29.6 - 31.1M) in diameter that could house up to 3,000 spectators. The Globe is shown as round on Wenceslas Hollar's sketch of the building, later incorporated into his engraved "Long View" of London in 1647. However, in 1997-98, the uncovering of a small part of the Globe's foundation suggested that it was a polygon of 20 (or possibly 18) sides.

At the base of the stage, there was an area called the pit, (or, harking back to the old inn-yards, yard) where, for a penny, people (the "groundlings") would stand to watch the performance. Groundlings would eat hazelnuts during performances - during the excavation of the Globe nutshells were found preserved in the dirt - or oranges. Around the yard were three levels of stadium-style seats, which were more expensive than standing room

A rectangular stage platform, also known as an 'apron stage', thrust out into the middle of the open-air yard. The stage measured approximately 43 feet (13.1m) in width, 27 feet (8.2m) in depth and was raised about 5 feet (1.52m) off the ground. On this stage, there was a trap door for use by performers to enter from the "cellarage" area beneath the stage. There may have been other trap doors around the stage.

Large columns on either side of the stage supported a roof over the rear portion of the stage. The ceiling under this roof was called the "heavens," and may have been painted with clouds and the sky.[citation needed] A trap door in the heavens enabled performers to descend using some form of rope and harness.

The back wall of the stage had two or three doors on the main level, with a curtained inner stage in the center and a balcony above it. The doors entered into the "tiring house" (backstage area) where the actors dressed and awaited their entrances. The balcony housed the musicians and could also be used for scenes requiring an upper space, such as the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

The modern Globe
At the instigation of American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, a new Globe theatre was built according to an Elizabethan plan. The design team comprised Theo Crosby of Pentagram as the architect, Buro Happold as structural and services engineers and Boyden & Co as quantity surveyors. It opened in 1997 under the name "Shakespeare's Globe Theatre" and now stages plays every summer (May to October). Mark Rylance was appointed as the first artistic director of the modern Globe in 1995. In 2006, Dominic Dromgoole took over.

The new theatre on Bankside is approximately 225 yards (205m) from the original site, centre to centre, and was the first thatched roof building permitted in London since the Great Fire of London in 1666.

As in the original Globe, the theatre is open to the sky and has a thrust stage that projects into a large circular yard surrounded by three tiers of steeply raked seating. 700 tickets to stand (and you must stand, no sitting allowed) in the yard are available for every performance at 5 pounds each. The only covered parts of the amphitheatre are the stage and the (more expensive) seated areas. Plays are put on during the summer, usually between May and the first week of October. In the winter the theatre is used for educational purposes. Tours are available all year round.

The reconstruction was carefully researched so that the new building would be as faithful a replica as possible. This was aided by the discovery as final plans were being made of the site of the original Globe itself. Modernisations include the addition of sprinklers on the roof to protect against fire, and the fact that the theatre is partly joined onto a modern lobby, visitors centre and additional backstage support areas. Due to modern Health and Safety regulations 1,300 people can be housed during a show, under half the estimated 3,000 of Shakespeare's time.

Replicas

Globe-Theater, Schwäbisch Hall, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
A number of conjectural replicas or free interpretations of the Globe have been built around the world:
U.S.A.
OSF Elizabethan Theatre, Ashland, Oregon, built in 1935, rebuilt 1947 and 1959
San Diego, Old Globe Theatre, built in 1935[16]
Cedar City, Utah, Adams Shakespearean Theatre
Chicago, Illinois, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre on Navy Pier, built 1999[17]
Dallas, Texas, Old Globe Theatre, built 1936[18]
Odessa, Texas, The Globe Theatre Of The Great Southwest
Williamsburg, Virginia, Globe Theatre, built 1975 in the Banbury Cross section of Busch Gardens Europe [3]
Germany
Neuss am Rhein, Globe Neuss, built 1991
Rust, Baden, Germany (in German), Europa-Park (in German), built 2000
Schwäbisch Hall, Baden-Württemberg
Italy
Rome,[19], built 2003
Czech Republic
Prague, built 1999, burned down in 2005[20]
Japan
Tokyo, Isozakia Arata's Panasonic Globe Theatre in Tokyo, built 1988
Replica of similar Elizabethan theatre:
Waseda University Tsubouchi Shoyo Memorial Library Theatre (a replica of The Fortune Theatre), built early 1900s

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The original Globe was an Elizabethan theatre which opened in Autumn 1599 in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, in an area now known as Bankside. It was one of several major theatres that were located in the area, the others being the Swan, the Rose and The Hope.

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