(Stratford on Avon, United Kingdom, 1564 - id., 1616) English playwright and poet. With his verses alone he would have gone down in literary history; for his theatrical genius, and especially for the impressive portrayal of the human condition in his great tragedies, Shakespeare is considered the greatest playwright of all time.

The third of eight children of John Shakespeare, a wealthy merchant and local politician, and Mary Arden, whose family had suffered religious persecution as a result of their Catholic confession, little or nothing is known of William Shakespeare's childhood and adolescence. It seems likely that he studied at the Grammar School in his native town, although it is not known for how many years and under what circumstances. According to the playwright Ben Jonson, a contemporary of his, William Shakespeare learned "little Latin and less Greek", and in any case it also seems likely that he left school at an early age due to the difficulties his father was going through, whether they were economic or derived from his political career.

Be that as it may, Shakespeare has always been considered a cultured person, but not excessively so, and this has made possible the birth of theories according to which he would have been only the straw man of someone who wished to remain in literary anonymity. This has also contributed to the fact that there are absolutely no personal writings or letters of the author, who seems to have only written, apart from his poetic production, plays for the stage.

Shakespeare's career as a playwright began after his move to London, where he quickly gained fame and popularity in his work for the company Chaberlain's Men, later known as King's Men, owner of two theaters, The Globe and Blackfriars. He also performed, with success, at court. His beginnings were, however, humble, and according to the sources he worked in the most varied trades, although it seems reasonable to assume that he was related to the theater from the beginning, since before becoming an author he was already known as an actor.

His stay in the British capital is dated, approximately, between 1590 and 1613, the latter year in which he stopped writing and retired to his native town, where he bought a house known as New Place, while he invested in London real estate the fortune he had managed to amass.

Shakespeare's work

The publication, in 1593, of his poem Venus and Adonis, very well received in London's literary circles, was one of his first successes. His later poetic production included The Rape of Lucretia (1594) and the Sonnets (1609), with a love theme, which alone would place him among the greats of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

However, it was his activity as a playwright that made Shakespeare famous at the time. His work, a total of fourteen comedies, ten tragedies and ten historical dramas, is an exquisite compendium of the feelings, pain and ambitions of the human soul. After some first attempts, in which the influence of Christopher Marlowe is transparent, most of his "merry comedies" and some of his dramas based on the history of England appeared before 1600. The fantasy and poetic sense of the comedies of this period stand out above all, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the author's prodigious mastery of versification allowed him to distinguish the characters by the way they spoke, as well as endowing his language with an almost colloquial naturalness.

From 1600 onwards, Shakespeare published the great tragedies and the so-called "dark comedies". The great themes are treated in the plays of this period with the most ambitious accents, and yet the tragic always arises from the realistic detail or the penetrating psychological treatment of the character, which induces the spectator to identify with him: thus, Hamlet reflects the inability to act before the moral dilemma between revenge and forgiveness; Othello, the gratuitous cruelty of jealousy; and Macbeth, the cruel temptation of power. Similar to this group, despite its "Roman" theme, is Antony and Cleopatra, a depiction of the unbridled passion between the general Mark Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra.

In his last works, from 1608 onwards, he changed register and entered the genre of tragicomedy, often with a happy ending in which the possibility of reconciliation is glimpsed, as in Pericles; this new orientation culminated in his last play, The Tempest, whose premiere in 1611 brought his career to an end. Perhaps tired and ill, two years later he retired to his home in Stratford, where he died on April 23, 1616 of the old Julian calendar, used at that time in England. Another great genius in the history of world literature, Miguel de Cervantes, died on the same date of the current Gregorian calendar, already adopted at that time in Spain.

Shakespeare published in his lifetime only sixteen of the plays attributed to him; therefore, some of them would possibly have been lost if the Folio, a compilation volume that would serve as the basis for all subsequent editions, had not been published (a few years after the poet's death).

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