"Cliff Notes - Tempest, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, he was approaching the
end of a long, productive, and highly successful career in the
theater. He was respected by his fellow playwrights, and was
possibly the most popular playwright of his day though his
considerable reputation wasn't nearly as dazzling as it is now.
Today, of course, few people would argue that the world has
produced a greater writer, in any language, than William
Shakespeare. Yet when it comes to his life, we don't have a
great deal of information, and guesswork outweighs the facts.

Actually, however, we do know more facts about Shakespeare
than about most of the other dramatists of Renaissance England.
Unfortunately, those facts gleaned from some forty documents
that name Shakespeare and many more that refer to members of his
family--don't reveal much. We're not even sure of the exact
date of Shakespeare's birth--the first document that mentions
him records his baptism, on April 26, 1564, in
Stratford-on-Avon, the quiet village where he was born. We
accept April 23 as his birthdate since children were generally
baptized three days after their birth. Today Stratford has
become a literary shrine to which tourists from all over the
world travel to see performances by the Royal Shakespeare
Company. Four centuries after his birth, Shakespeare's plays
are still performed more than any other playwright's, living or
dead.

Shakespeare's father was comfortably well-off; he had married
the daughter of a wealthy land-owner, and he owned a business
that dealt in leather goods (such as gloves) and farm
commodities. John Shakespeare also dabbled in local affairs.
By 1568 he had risen to the post of high bailiff, the equivalent
of mayor; but for some reason he dropped out of politics, and
suffered some financial setbacks.

We know nothing of Shakespeare's schooling, but it's probable
that as the son of a public official he attended the town's
grammar school, where he would have received a fine education in
Latin. He would draw on his knowledge of Latin rhetoric, logic,
and literature in his later playwriting. (Prospero's farewell
to his art, for example, in Act V of The Tempest, owes something
to the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid.) In 1582
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his
senior. She was pregnant at the time of the marriage, since
Susanna Shakespeare was born six months later. It was
considered permissible, in Shakespeare's England, for engaged
couples to sleep together, so there's no reason to assume it was
a forced wedding. In 1585 the couple had twins, Hamnet and