Bővebb ismertető
INTRODUCTION
1. LIFE
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was bom at Stratford-on-Avon on April 23, 1564. His father was a prosperous tradesman there and a person of some importance in municipal affairs: but about 1572, when his eldest son, William, was eight years old, he fell into financial difficulties that withdrew him gradually from public life. This would not prevent his son from obtaining a sound elementary education at the free grammar school of Stratford, from which he problably carried away a working knowledge of at least the Latin language. His father's reverses seem to have occasioned his removal from school about his thirteenth or fourteenth year, and his apprenticeship to some trade. When we next hear of him we find him married, at eighteen, to a wife eight years his senior; and a year or two later, if we may believe a likely enough story, prosecuted by a neighbouring landowner and magistrate for poaching on his estate. His position was scarcely enviable. There was little prospect of a livelihood in Stratford; his father, far from being able to help him, could not help himself; and he had a wife and three children to provide for. It was probably at this time, towards the end of 1585, that he left Stratford and set out for London to try his fortunes.
At the time when Shakespeare was born, what we call the Elizabethan drama had not begun. It was not till 1584, when Shakespeare was twenty years old, that John Lyly began to produce those plays that first pointed the way to the new Romantic Comedy; and Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which fixed