~ Personalitatea zilei – Today’s Personality ~

”Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”

William Shakespeare

Probably born in 23 April (baptised April 26) 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon – 23 April 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, often considered the greatest writer in world literature. He spent his early life in Stratford-upon-Avon, receiving at most a grammar-school education, and at age 18 he married a local woman, Anne Hathaway. By 1594 he was apparently a rising playwright in London and an actor in a leading theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later King’s Men).

The order in which his plays were written and performed is highly uncertain. His earliest plays seem to date from the late 1580s to the mid-1590s and include the comedies Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; history plays based on the lives of the English kings, including Henry VI (parts 1, 2, and 3), Richard III and Richard II and the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The plays apparently written between 1596 and 1600 are mostly comedies, including The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It and histories, including Henry IV (parts 1 and 2), Henry V and Julius Caesar. Approximately between 1600 and 1607 he wrote the comedies Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, as well as the great tragedies Hamlet (probably begun in 1599), Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, which mark the summit of his art.

King Lear BBC 3 Radio, 1994

Among his later works (about 1607 to 1614) are the tragedies Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, as well as the fantastical romances The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. He probably also collaborated on the plays Edward III and The Two Noble Kinsmen. In 2010 a case was made for Shakespeare as the coauthor (with John Fletcher) of Double Falsehood.

Shakespeare’s plays, all of them written largely in iambic pentameter verse, are marked by extraordinary poetry; vivid, subtle, and complex characterizations; and a highly inventive use of English. His 154 sonnets, published in 1609 but apparently written mostly in the 1590s, often express strong feeling within an exquisitely controlled form. Shakespeare retired to Stratford before 1610 and lived as a country gentleman until his death. The first collected edition of his plays, or First Folio, was published in 1623. As with most writers of the time, little is known about his life and work, and other writers, particularly the 17th earl of Oxford, have frequently been proposed as the actual authors of his plays and poems.

More on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet (1968) – What Is A Youth

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