William of rubruck biography of william shakespeare

A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare's life is lacking; much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. His day of birth is traditionally held to be April 23; it is known he was baptized on April 24, , in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare d.

William of Rubruck was a Franciscan friar who wrote the first great travel book about Asia.

He was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father's shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of reverses in his father's financial situation. According to another account, he became a schoolmaster.

That Shakespeare was allowed considerable leisure time in his youth is suggested by the fact that his plays show more knowledge of hunting and hawking than do those of other contemporary dramatists. In he married Anne Hathaway ? He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy , a local justice of the peace.

Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about and by had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter, he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton The publication of Shakespeare's two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece and of his Sonnets pub. The Sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated.

The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poet's friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight. Shakespeare's modern reputation is based mainly, however, on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on.