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Background
William Shakespeare is one of the most well-known and well-regarded writers in the English language. He’s the author of 154 sonnets and approximately 38 plays, which are responsible for turns of phrase and tropes still used today.
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1564 and died in 1616 (see timeline). He’s commonly referred to as “the Bard” or “the Poet,” titles that speaks to his stature in English literature.
Writing Career
After finishing school and marrying his wife, Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare moved to London to pursue a career in the theater. By 1592, he was working as an actor and writing plays, leading to a notorious criticism by another writer who believed actors were not intellectual enough to write for the stage.
Only a few years later, Shakespeare’s dramatic work—which included comedies, tragedies, and history plays—was regularly being published and staged in London.
In 1599, Shakespeare’s theater troupe moved into the Globe Theatre. The artistic home led to an illustrious decade for Shakespeare, who would go on to write some of his most well-known tragedies, including “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth.”
In addition to his plays, Shakespeare was a prolific poet. Although he was primarily known for his love sonnets, he also composed a handful of other poems, including two long narratives based on works by the Roman poet Ovid (see an overview).
Style
Contemporary readers often mistakenly assume Shakespeare’s works are written in Old English, though the language found in Shakespeare’s plays and poems is actually a form of Modern English.
His plays were mostly composed in blank verse, an unrhymed poetic style that almost always uses iambic pentameter, which features five unstressed and five stressed syllables per line. Lines of prose do occasionally appear in Shakespeare’s dramas, however, and scholars say this is an intentional choice that signifies characters’ feelings.
Outside of drama, Shakespeare mainly wrote sonnets. The 14-line form can be traced back to the early Italian Renaissance, but Shakespeare altered it by changing the rhyme scheme and organization, creating a variant that would come to be known as the “Shakespearean sonnet.”
While some have questioned the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, professors and linguists have refuted the theory, using both historical documents and analyses of his writing style to prove their point.
Legacy
The first collection of Shakespeare’s works, called “The First Folio,” was published by his actors after his death. It became a definitive text for Shakespeare scholars and publishers and is still used in productions and classrooms today.
Thanks to “The First Folio,” Shakespeare’s works are still taught and staged around the world. Although he has been dead for more than four centuries, his influence can still be felt through what scholars say is a lasting impact on the ways we understand ourselves and our history.
Shakespeare’s work is still present in our contemporary language, too: His narrative structures and complex characters are often cited as the inspiration for pop culture behemoths (including “The Lion King” and “Succession”) and his words still appear in everyday speech, thanks to his tendency to coin new turns of phrase in his plays.
