Shakespeare, William （1564 – 1616 ）

Key words: playwright poet.

Born in 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (historians believe Shakespeare was born on April 23, the same day he died in 1616). The son of John Shakespeare, a glover, and Mary Arden, of farming stock. Much uncertainty surrounds Shakespeare's early life. He was the eldest of three sons, and there were four daughters. He was educated at the local grammar school, and married Anne Hathaway, from a local farming family, in 1582. She bore him a daughter, Susanna, in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585.

Shakespeare moved to London, possibly in 1591, and became an actor. From 1592 to 1594, when the theatres were closed for the plague, he wrote his poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece." His sonnets, known by 1598, though not published until 1609, fall into two groups: 1 to 126 are addressed to a fair young man, and 127 to 154 to a "dark lady" who holds both the young man and the poet in thrall. Who these people are has provided an exercise in detection for numerous critics. The first evidence of his association with the stage is in 1594, when he was acting with the Lord Chamberlain's company of players, later "the King's Men'. When the company built the Globe Theatre south of the Thames in 1597, he became a partner, living modestly at a house in Silver Street until c.1606, then moving near the Globe. He returned to Stratford c.1610, living as a country gentleman at his house, New Place. His will was made in March 1616, a few months before he died, and he was buried at Stratford.

The modern era of Shakespeare scholarship has been marked by an enormous amount of investigation into the authorship, text, and chronology of the plays, including detailed studies of the age in which he lived, and of the Elizabethan stage. Authorship is still a controversial subject for certain plays, such as Titus Andronicus, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VI, part I. This has involved detailed studies of the various editions of the plays, in particular the different quarto editions, and the first collected works, The First Folio of 1623. It is conventional to group the plays into early, middle, and late periods, and to distinguish comedies, tragedies, and histories, recognizing other groups that do not fall neatly into these categories.

莎士比亚

(1564～1616) 英国著名戏剧家和诗人。出生于沃里克郡斯特拉特福镇的一个富裕市民家庭，曾在当地文法学校学习。13 岁时家道中落辍学经商，约1586 年前往伦敦。先在剧院门前为贵族顾客看马，后逐渐成为剧院的杂役、演员、剧作家和股东。1597 年在家乡购置了房产，一生的最后几年在家乡度过。

莎士比亚是16 世纪后半叶到17 世纪初英国最著名的作家(本·琼斯称他为“时代的灵魂”)，也是欧洲文艺复兴时期人文主义文学的集大成者。他共写有37 部戏剧，154 首14 行诗，两首长诗和其他诗歌。长诗《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》(1592～1593)和《鲁克丽丝受辱记》(1593～1594)均取材于罗马诗人维奥维德吉尔的著作，主题是描写爱情不可抗拒以及谴责违背“荣誉”观念的兽行。14 行诗(1592～1598)多采用连续性的组诗形式，主题是歌颂友谊和爱情。