There are no definitive records of Shakespeare's life between the birth of his twins in and reference to his stage success, noted in a letter dated , but it is thought that he went to London sometime around or Records indicate that Shakespeare appeared as an actor and as a playwright. He also made money as shareholder in an acting company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and as such, he would have received a share of the gate receipts.
But most actors and playwrights depended on patronage for their survival, and this was also true for Shakespeare.
Eventually, Shakespeare became one of the owners of the Globe Theatre, which was built in He later also became an investor in the Blackfriars Theatre, which opened in Shakespeare wrote many of his plays specifically for performance in these two theatres. Shakespeare was very casual about the publication of his works, apparently having little interest in saving his writings. The Folio contains most of Shakespeare's plays, but they were not published in chronological order and do not include the dates of their original composition.
Instead, the best scholars can do is examine the quarto editions, published during Shakespeare's life, or references from contemporary letters or diaries and try to determine from those dates the possible timeframe for a play's first performance.
After careful research, scholars have assigned probable dates of composition to Shakespeare's work, and those dates, used by the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare and adopted by other editors, including the editors of the Norton Shakespeare , will be used in the following discussion of the texts' probable dates of composition.
In general, the plays before were histories and romantic comedies. After , tragedies became the focus of Shakespeare's work, while the problem comedies, such as The Tempest , were darker in content, exploring serious social and moral problems. Two Gentlemen of Verona is thought to be the first play written by Shakespeare. It was first published in the Folio but thought to have been composed in The Taming of the Shrew may have been written in or earlier, but it was also first published in the Folio.
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third , with a first printing in , was probably first performed in The Comedy of Errors, although not published until , was presumably written much earlier and was first performed in Titus Andronicus , the first of Shakespeare's Latin plays, the revenge tragedy, was printed in Stratford Grammar School had some very good masters, Oxford graduates, we know that, we know the names of some of them.
We also know the sort of things that would have been on the curriculum, it would have offered a humanist education, that is to say an education in Latin mostly, the boys would have had to speak Latin as well as to read it, even in the playground they were expected to speak Latin.
But what would the school day have been like? It was only seeing the words represented as written language that he was already very familiar with from the spoken language that he would have heard around him and at church. So you can see how his knowledge of say, traditional Roman and Greek stories plus rhetoric, the art of persuasion, primed him to be a pretty good playwright.
There was no sense that education was fun or participatory, you basically learnt things by rote and were tested by either an older boy or the master. However, some schools did do what we would consider now to be drama because that was part of learning Latin, so they would have put on productions of well-known Latin plays.
REID: When I spoke to Professor Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, also here in Stratford, he had an interesting point to make about how this sort of education would have benefited an aspiring playwright.
DOBSON : The main emphasis in Elizabethan grammar schools is on remembering texts and being able to recombine phrases from them in compositions of your own, and indeed, being able to compose Latin orations in imaginary characters sometimes. I mean something that Elizabethan schoolboys were quite often asked to do would be to write a big speech in Latin imagining you were the dying Cleopatra or some other suffering heroine from Roman mythology.
Another master, William Smyth, founded Brasenose College. These references made it clear that the childhood of William Shakespeare and the Elizabethan education that he received at The King Edward VI Stratford Grammar school was of a high quality.
During summer school for William Shakespeare started at six o'clock in the morning and finished at five o'clock in the evening. There was a two hour break at midday. Because of the dark nights the hours changed during the winter start at seven and finished earlier at four o'clock. Elizabethan education and School for William Shakespeare consisted of a five full days and a half-day on Thursday for 40 to 44 weeks of the year.
Elizabethan education, including that of William Shakespeare, was based on repetition and constant examinations. The boys, including William Shakespeare, were expected to converse in Latin at all times in order to improve their spoken fluency in the language and any boy caught speaking English at school was punished.
The punishments were carried out on Fridays so this, along with the examinations, must have been the worst day of the week for the schoolboys. Punishments were fierce and fifty strokes of the cane was not an uncommon occurrence.
End of Term brought some change to the normal routine when the senior boys were encouraged to perform some classical drama. This is therefore where William Shakespeare probably obtained his taste for acting, along with the many touring troupes of actors who visited Stratford!
The first plays performed in by William Shakespeare the actor must have included the Greek and Latin classics! Oxford University or Cambridge University were of course the most popular choices. William Shakespeare, however, was withdrawn from school and education at the age of fourteen in due to the financial problems being experienced by his father.
His father was in debt, his religious beliefs Catholic were in question and he had fallen from being a pillar of the community to a fallen man. It is quite possible that the privilege of granting free Elizabethan education for his children was removed by the Board of Alderman at this time. At this point the childhood and education of William Shakespeare came to an abrupt end. William Shakespeare, the great literary genius did not receive an Elizabethan university education.
Teachings from various faculties were available to University students. Then create your own dramatic interpretation of that scene. You can do this as a quick improv based on what you know already, or you can do some in depth research to create your scene! Uses In Plays. But Shakespeare did reference his grammar school education extensively. Some playwrights at the time, like Christopher Marlowe, did attend university, but other contemporaries like Ben Jonson did not.
Shakespeare must have been a voracious reader, because he based his plays on a variety of popular writings from the time. For example, Romeo and Juliet was based on an epic poem, and Hamlet was based on a history of a character called Amleth written around Sometimes Shakespeare would pick topics that he thought would appeal to those in political power.
There is even a suggestion that King James traced his ancestry back to Banquo. What happens in the play that makes this important? Most of the sources are freely available online on sites like Project Gutenberg, so they are easy to find from home!
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