Ulla friis biography of william shakespeare
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Some evidence points to possible Roman Catholic sympathies on both sides of the family—a danger under Elizabeth’s protestant rule.
Growing Up
William Shakespeare probably attended the Stratford Grammar School in central Stratford, which likely provided an intensive education in Latin grammar, and translating such authors as Cicero, Virgil, and Shakespeare’s beloved Ovid.
This made him an entrepreneur as well as an artist, and scholars believe these investments gave him uninterrupted time to write his plays. To his surviving daughter Judith, he left £300, and to his wife Anne left "my second best bed." William Shakespeare allegedly died on his birthday, April 23, 1616. Located about 100 miles northwest of London, Stratford-upon-Avon was a bustling market town along the River Avon and bisected by a country road during Shakespeare’s time.
It is because of the First Folio that we know about 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Julius Caesar. While records do not specify his exact cause of death, scholars believe Hamnet may have died from the bubonic plague, which was rampant at the time. The story reimagines how the death of Shakespeare’s young son may have shaped the playwright’s later work and emotional world.
Family Life
A year after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford, called New Place, for his family in May 1597.
Even in death, he leaves a final piece of verse as his epitaph:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Biographical Links
- Mrs. John Heminge and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors in the King’s Men, created the 36-play collection, which celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2023.
Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the circumstances. On Shakespeare’s assurances, the couple married. What was life like in Stratford-upon-Avon and London when he was alive? 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.”
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.
Poems and Sonnets
Early in his career, Shakespeare was able to attract the attention and patronage 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).
Evidently Shakespeare garnered some envy early on, as related by the critical attack of Robert Greene, a London playwright, in 1592: "...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 fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."
Greene's bombast notwithstanding, Shakespeare must have shown considerable promise.
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. 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.
But only two of their three children lived to adulthood. He was buried that August, but it is unclear whether or not Shakespeare was home to attend the boy's funeral. April 23, 1564
DIED: c. Official records from the Holy Trinity Church and the Stratford government record the existence of 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.