FAMOUS WRITER AND ACTOR - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare's drama is the climax of the Elizabethan Age. We can find the compendium of all the problems and the creative potentialities of the whole English Renaissance.

His scholastic instruction was quite incomplete, but William's spirit of observation and his intellectual curiosity opened to his works the horizons of a cognitive and creative process typical of a great artist. In 1582, when he was eighteen years old, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman who was eight years older than him, but, in spite of the birth of three children, the marriage, according to the allusions leaking out from his plays, was not a happy one. For this reason in 1592 Shakespeare was in London, working both as an actor and as a writer. There is no information about Shakespeare's qualities as an actor.

In 1594, one of his plays was send to press for the first time, Titus Andronicus, which was published anonymously. From then on, others of his works were published, but when Shakespeare died, a little number of his plays had been printed in the shape of book and he had taken care of the edition of none of them. This variety reveals the author's commercial and experimental purposes, but it is also indicative of the nature of his genius, capable to draw on every kind of source and to transform the inspiring models while preserving the stylistic distinctions. On the stylistic level, there are many echoes of his contemporaries and predecessors.

It has been proved that the popular Elizabethan theatre often was the result of collaborations, so it is possible that some works signed with the name of William Shakespeare had been written by more than only one author. Shakespeare demonstrates his genius in putting in the mouth of the characters the significant and enlightening cue, besides his capability in the contamination of the genres, a technique which enriches their human meaning and brings to very original results.

The ironic bitterness was then ransomed by the tragic plays by Othello, Macbeth, King Lear (written between 1604 and 1606) are no longer tragedies caused by fate, like Romeo and Juliet, or by a will of revenge, as it happens in Titus Andronicus or in Hamlet; they are more likely explorations of the original faults of the human nature and of the experiences that these faults can redeem.

A bitter background remained in the style of Shakespeare, maybe because of the negative attitude reflected in it. The other “roman plays” composed during those years, limited the range of the themes, as the first one was an inquiry about love and the second about the concept of nobility.

In my opinion, in this early age he faced a lot of consequences and the experience makes him a good writer and in order reaching these popular success.