William Shakespeare

A little while ago I got the chance of a lifetime to go and see William Shakespeare’s home town, Stratford Upon Avon, take a few tours of the town, and see a few of William Shakespeare’s plays!  William Shakespeare is a very famous play writer who lived from 1564 to 1616 in Stratford Upon Avon.  Nobody knows the exact date of William Shakespeare’s birth but they do know when he was baptized.  William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26 which is why they think he was born April 23 because babies usually are baptized three days after they were born.

William’s mother was Mary Arden.  William was one of eight children.  Only five of the eight children survived until adulthood.  By the age of four or five William was enrolled at a grammar school called The Kings New School in Stratford where he learned many of the things that helped him become a great author.  His school lasted 9 hours each day.  William was taken out of The Kings New School at the age of 16 because of his dad’s financial and social problems.  Nobody really knows what happened or what William Shakespeare did between the time when William was pulled out of school and when he became a play writer.  There are many theories but none of them have ever been proven.  What they do know is that on November 28, 1582 William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway.  William was 18 and Anne was 26 and pregnant.  They also know that one year after they got married, they had a baby girl named Susanna and two years after that they had twins named Judith and Hamnet.  Hamnet died at age 11.

Seven years after William Shakespeare had Judith and Hamnet, William was recognized as an actor, poet, and play writer.  His recognition occurred when another play writer referred to him as “an upstart crow” in A Goatsworth of Wit.  A few years later Shakespeare joined up with one of the most successful acting troupes in London, “The Lord’s Chamberlain’s Men”.  In 1599 the troupe lost the lease of the theater they performed in.  Luckily, they were wealthy enough to build their own theater across the Thames, south of London, which they called “The Globe”.  The Globe opened in July of 1599.  When King James I came to the throne in 1603, the troupe was designated by the new king as the King’s Company. 

Shakespeare entertained the people of England for another ten years until June 19, 1613, when a canon fired from the roof of the theatre for a performance of Henry VIII set fire to the thatch roof and burned the theater to the ground.  The next spring the theatre was rebuilt in a more modern and fairer way than before.  Even though Shakespeare had invested in the rebuilding of the theatre, he retired to the Great House of New Place in Stratford that he had purchased in 1597, where he continued to write plays until he died in 1616 on his 52^nd birthday.  

In his lifetime, William Shakespeare’s wrote 37 plays.  Even if you've never read any of Shakespeare's plays, you've definitely used words or phrases that he created.  Some of these words include:  watchdog, eyeball, puking, skim milk, aligator, bump, zany, rant, gloomy, gossip, caked, buzzer, critic, outbreak, hurried, and so on.  Some familiar phrases are:  all's well that ends well, break the ice, dead as a doornail, a dish fit for the gods, elbow room, faint hearted, for goodness' sake, knock knock!  Who's their?, and so on.  Shakespeare invented these words and phrases for his play when he could not find descriptive words good enough to get the the point across to the audience.  In his lifetime, Shakespeare invented over 1700 words and phrases that we commonly use today.

So far I have seen three of Shakespeare's plays!  The plays I saw were all very well done and fun to watch!  I can’t decide which one is my favorite because they all had something different that I liked!  In A Comedy of Errors, the cast had set it in modern time and it was very funny!   Much Ado About Nothing was also set in modern time but they were interactive with the crowd, which made it very fun!  The final play I saw I actually got to see in The Globe Theater while standing up because that’s what people who were watching the play did when William Shakespeare was alive.  This play was called As you Like it.  I liked this play because It was very funny and the actors were great because there were a couple of times when really loud air plans would go by and the actors would stop everything and look up at the sky at the exact same time because in Shakespeare’s time they didn’t have air planes.  They also did this with pigeons because they would keep landing on the stage so the actors would scare the pigeons off by jumping next to them or sometimes even calling them names.

 This is a picture of me in The Globe Theater.  As you can see there are lot's of people standing on the ground getting ready to watch the play.

As this plaque says, this is the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

  This is William Shakespeare's grave.  William Shakespeare wanted to be buried under the church because in William Shakespeare's time, people would sometimes dig up graves to get any valuables that might have been buried with the person.