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

Judith. Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died two years later.

Some time after the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left
Stratford for London. There's a tradition that he was forced to
leave Stratford because he was caught poaching (illegally
hunting) deer on a local aristocrat's land, but there's no firm
evidence to verify this. According to another tradition, he
became a country schoolteacher; some people have suggested that
he worked as a traveling actor. It was time when country towns
like Stratford were declining in prosperity. London was the
main center of opportunity for ambitious young men and women, so
it's not surprising that Shakespeare went there to seek his
fortune.

Nobody knows when or how Shakespeare became involved in the
theater, but he made a name for himself in a relatively brief
time. By 1592, when he was just twenty-eight, he was attacked
by a rival playwright, Robert Greene. Greene wrote a pamphlet
in which he sneered at Shakespeare as an "upstart crow," a mere
actor who, with no university education, had the nerve to think
he could write plays. (Attacks on Shakespeare's education would
continue to plague him. Even several years after his death, his
great contemporary Ben Jonson could accuse him, in a poem that's
otherwise complimentary, of having "small Latin, and less
Greek." Study of the plays, however, proves that this wasn't
altogether just.) Shakespeare must have been quite popular by
the time of Greene's attack, because it drew complaints, and
Greene's editor apologized to Shakespeare in Greene's next
pamphlet.

During his career as a playwright, Shakespeare continued to
act as well, though the profession was considered slightly
beneath anything a real gentleman might undertake. He was
listed in a document in 1598 as a "principal comedian," and in
1603 as a "principal tragedian." In 1594 he became one of the
founders of a company called the Chamberlain's Men, which he
remained with for the rest of his career. When James I took the
throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company
became the King's Men. The name change indicated royal support:
from then on, they enjoyed the official status of servants of
the King.

All this meant profits for Shakespeare. He earned one tenth
of the take at the Globe Theatre, where the Chamberlain's Men
performed. (He was the only London dramatist who held a share
in a theater.) He bought real estate in Stratford, where he had
become a famous native son. In 1597 he purchased a fine house
in the town--the house to which he retired not long after he
wrote The Tempest.