NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Shakespeare may have made his way to London with this acting troupe, eventually settling there as a playwright and theatre-owner. Allen could well have hired Shakespeare as an actor in London. Though plausible, these theories have been heavily disputed, not least because there is nothing other than the Houston will to connect Shakespeare with Lancashire. For centuries biographers have been puzzled as to how he acquired such a detailed knowledge of the law of his day, and there has been much speculation that he spent his lost years as a law student or clerk. If Shakespeare was a perambulating actor during the lost years he cannot also have readily been a law clerk, or acquired a working knowledge of court life or European politics. In 1818 Richard Phillips, writing in The Monthly Magazine, interviewed J.
M. Smith, a descendant through his mother from Shakespeare's sister Joan. Smith told Phillips that he had often heard her state that Shakespeare owed his rise in life, and his introduction to the theatre, to his accidentally holding the horse of a gentleman at the door of the theatre, on his first arriving in London. His appearance led to enquiry and subsequent patronage.
Dr Samuel Johnson (writing in 1765, ) comes into contradiction with Wells and Taylors notion when he claimed that Shakespeare began in London as the organizer of a firm that took care of the horses of theatre goers. This story perhaps deserves more credibility than most about the life of Shakespeare, since it is the only such anecdote to come from a member of his own family, albeit a very distant one. It appears, however, directly to contradict the most popular current versions of how Shakespeare came to London. In striking contrast to the obscurity of his background there is the achievement of Shakespeare the writer.
This son of an illiterate provincial butcher had the largest vocabulary of any writer in English in history, using about 37, 000 different words in his works, twice as many, for instance, as the Cambridge-educated John Milton. As it is stated in Oxford edition, Shakespeare coined hundreds of phrases (such as into thin air, time-honored, and the be-all and end-all), which are widely imagined to be proverbial. That statement represents one of the most valid arguments throughout the whole scope of the Oxfords edition of Shakespeare's Complete Plays. He apparently also coined at least 1, 500 English words, including addiction, alligator, birthplace, cold-blooded, critic, impede, and amazement.
Shakespeare was also, apparently, the first writer to use the word its' as a third person possessive. He wrote convincingly of court life, foreign intrigues, and the affairs of kings and courtiers, subjects of which he could have had no direct knowledge. As well as law, his works reveal a mastery of science, of classical and European literature, and of other specialized fields, which seem utterly incongruous- indeed, inexplicable- in a poorly educated country actor. It is this incredible incongruity which has led so many to question whether the Stratford man wrote the plays attributed to him-not, as is often alleged by orthodox scholars, snobbery on the part of proponents of other writers, who allegedly insist that only a nobleman could have been England's national poet, not a commoner of humble background. Proponents, in the face of editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, of an alternative Shakespeare do not question that Shakespeare of Stratford existed: he was baptized in April 1564, married in November 1582, and died there in April 1616. The authors of the Oxford edition on Complete Plays do not dispute that he was an actor and theatre shareholder in London, and died relatively wealthy.
But they do question whether he wrote the plays attributed to him, arguing that he acted as a front-man for the real author, that clues exist in his works to this effect, and that the autobiographical material in his works is at variance with the known facts of his life. Unlike Wells and Taylor orthodox biographers reject the question of authorship. They have a point: no one suggests that the works of any of Shakespeare's contemporaries were written by someone else. No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or for the next 200 years questioned that he wrote the plays (although this has been disputed by unorthodox biographers), and Several of his contemporaries, most clearly Ben Jonson, appear to have regarded the Stratford man as having written them.
This group attribute Shakespeare's achievement to his unique genius. But Shakespeare's skill involved the successful blending of plot, characterization, language and dramatic effect in an original way. It seems almost inconceivable that someone from an illiterate home could be a literary genius, let alone the greatest of them all. Furthermore, the previous century had been one of political, religious and economic turmoil. The fundamental aim of Stratford's local elite was to enforce intellectual, political and religious conformity by every possible means.
This appears to be at odds with Shakespeare's unprecedented ability to empathize with his characters, among them foreigners, Catholics, Jews, Moors and women, bringing them to life. Orthodox biographers surely gloss over these incongruities too readily.
Free research essays on topics related to: biographers, theatre, lost years, court life, shakespeare's
Research essay sample on Lost Years Court Life
