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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 121 | Shakespeare and the Stage | Professor Tiffany Stern gives a talk on William Shakespeare and how his plays were performed in… | Tiffany Stern |
| 122 | Shakespeare and the Stage | Professor Tiffany Stern gives a talk on William Shakespeare and how his plays were performed in… | Tiffany Stern |
| 123 | Pericles, Prince of Tyre | Pericles has been on the margins of the Shakespearean canon: this fourteenth lecture in the… | Emma Smith |
| 124 | Richard III | In this thirteenth lecture in the Approaching Shakespeare series the focus is on the inevitability… | Emma Smith |
| 125 | The Comedy of Errors | Lecture 12 in the Approaching Shakespeare series asks how seriously we can take the farcical… | Emma Smith |
| 126 | Henry IV part 1 | Like generations of theatre-goers, this lecture concentrates on the (large) figure of Sir John… | Emma Smith |
| 127 | The Tempest | That the character of Prospero is a Shakespearean self-portrait is a common reading of The Tempest… | Emma Smith |
| 128 | Antony and Cleopatra | What kind of tragedy is this play, with its two central figures rather than a singular hero? The… | Emma Smith |
| 129 | Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) | Professor Charlotte Brewer introduces the methodology behind the creation of the OED and how… | Charlotte Brewer |
| 130 | Richard II | Lecture eight in the Approaching Shakespeare series asks the question that structures Richard II:… | Emma Smith |