William Shakespeare [antikvár]

Shakespeare's Life In April 1564 a son was born to John and Mary Shakespeare at Henley Street, Stratford-on-Avon. His mother was the daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmcote, a considerable landowner in the county of Warwickshire; his father a prosperous citizen. Neither could possibly have guessed, as they looked at the infant lying there in a wooden cradle on rockers, that he was to make such a tremendous gift to English poetry and drama, and that the plays he was to write would still be acted four hundred years later, not only in England, but all over the world. In those days many babies died in infancy (as indeed Shakespeare's two elder sisters did) but young William seems to have flourished in spite of a severe outbreak of the Plague in the year of his birth. In the play As You Like It, one of the characters, Jaques, talks about 'the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school'. Shakespeare was probably thinking of himself on his way to the Grammar School at Stratford when he wrote those words. True, no record of his attendance there survives, and you wouldn't find the initials W.S. carved on the lid of a desk, but it is as certain as can be that as the son of an important Stratford citizen he would have gone there and received a sound grounding in the classics. His friend Ben Jonson, another famous playwright, who admired him tremendously, says, however, he had 'small Latin and less Greek'.