William Shakespeare
How William Shakespeare (1564-1616), son of a provincial glover, became the world's most famous literary icon, is a story that's been told many times. Our appetite for biographies of Shakespeare is apparently insatiable: new lives of Shakespeare are always being written, as if we are still trying to find the key to understand the operation of his genius and the source of his literary immortality. This Great Writers theme focuses on the works themselves, with lectures, ebooks, and supporting material to find new angles and sources of critical analysis and enjoyment.
The biographical facts of Shakespeare's life can be easily recounted. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town in the English midlands, in 1564: his father was a glover. We know little about his education but he almost certainly attended the town grammar school where he would have learned the standard Latin literary and rhetorical curriculum: we see some Elizabethan classroom staples in The Merry Wives of Windsor. There is no record of Shakespeare having attended university. He married Anne Hathaway in 1582, and their daughter Susanna was born in 1583, followed by twins Hamnet and Judith in…
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| # | Resource Title | Description | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shakespeare & the plague | When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”, but what's the… | Emma Smith |
| 2 | Key Critical Concepts: Authorship | In this recording, Emma Smith introduces the concept of authorship as part of our series… | Emma Smith |
| 3 | Out of Silence 1: William Shakespeare | From the Silence Hub Network. Professor Alexandra Harris discusses Shakespeare's sonnet 23,… | Alexandra Harris, Kate McLoughlin |
| 4 | The Death Masks of Macbeth | In this short talk Professor Simon Palfrey explores the deathly afterlives of Shakespeare’s ‘… | Simon Palfrey |
| 5 | Shakespeare, Mind and World | Tom MacFaul discusses how Shakespeare’s age thought about thinking. In particular, he looks at the… | Tom MacFaul |
| 6 | Shakespeare's Animals | Why are animals everywhere in Shakespeare's language? Only two actual animals definitely appear in… | Tom MacFaul |
| 7 | 1594: Shakespeare's most important year | In the summer of 1594 William Shakespeare decided to invest around £50 to become a shareholder in a… | Bart van Es |
| 8 | The Magic of Shakespeare | This lecture will celebrate Shakespeare's immortality on the exact 400th anniversary of his burial… | Jonathan Bate |
| 9 | Venus and Adonis | Professor Katherine Duncan Jones, Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, gives a talk on… | Katherine Duncan-Jones |
| 10 | Memorialising Shakespeare: The First Folio and other elegies | Emma Smith (Professor of English Literature, Oxford), gives a talk on Shakespeare memorials. Ben… | Emma Smith |