Dr. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta's

World Literature Website

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Biographical Information

Main Works

Featured Work: Hamlet

Contexts

Selected Quotations

Links

Biographical Information

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), born at Stratford-on-Avon

married Anne Hathaway, children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith

playwright in London, 1592

shareholder in players company patronized by the Lord Chamberlain, 1594; company eventually became the King's Men under James I (1566-1625)

Globe Theatre, 1598

Main Works

Taming of the Shrew (1593-94)

Romeo and Juliet (1594-95)

Julius Caesar (1599-1600)

Hamlet (1601)

Othello (1603-4)

King Lear (1605)

Macbeth (1606)

Sonnets (1609)

The Tempest (1611)

Contexts

Rule of Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) and subsequent Elizabethan Era, under Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603); Jacobean Era, under James I (r. 1603-1625)

Martin Luther's attack against the corruption of the Catholic Church; theses of the Reformation posted by Luther on the doors of the Church of All Saints at Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517.

Context of intrigue, spying and treachery at the royal courts; the life of courtiers always in danger and subject to the fickleness of royal favor and the machinations of rival courtiers.

Execution of Sir Thomas More ordered by Henry VIII (1535) due to More's disapproval of Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his refusal to acknowledge Henry's role as head of the English Church.

Influence of Renaissance Humanism's critique of the inconsistencies and contradictions of supposed Christians living lives of ambition, pride, greed, envy, hate, murder, and plotting and scheming against others. The ideas of the main figures in European Humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More, influenced the works of Shakespeare.

Selected Quotations

to come

Links

to come

© 2001, 2002 by Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, all rights reserved

last updated: 11/15/2005