Will Fowler "Shakespeare - His Life and Plays"

 

Will Fowler

Almost everyone agrees that William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote more great plays of different kinds than anyone else in the world. But we do not know much more about his life than the information that we can find in legal documents. Most of the stories about his personal life were written long after his death and we cannot be sure that they are true. In an honest report of his life, the writer must often include the words ‘perhaps’ or ‘probably’. Unlike his friend and rival, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare did not leave a notebook or publish his opinions on art or politics or religion. His only published personal poems, his Sonnets, show us his feelings about a man and a woman, but we arc not sure who they were.

For this reason, and because Shakespeare was an actor and did not go to a university, people have tried to prove that someone else wrote the plays. But serious students agree that the opposite is true. Shakespeare became a great dramatist because he was a professional man of the theatre. He learnt to write plays by seeing and acting in plays written by others.

Shakespeare is the greatest of all dramatists because his characters seem real and he included all kinds of people. We laugh or suffer with them and leave the theatre happy or sad because of what we have learnt about life. Shakespeare’s plays are not only great literature, but are alive after more than 400 years.

 

 

  

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