William Shakespeare was born on 26th April, 1564 and died on 23rd April, 1616. He was an English poet, playwright and actor. His works consist of about 39 plays, 154 sonnets, 3 long narrative poems and a few other verses. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist. He is also England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon” (or simply “the Bard”). But what made Shakespeare so remarkable?
Shakespeare lived in an era where the light bulb was far from being invented. He had to rely on natural light during the day and wrote with a quill. Fun Fact: During Shakespeare’s time, clean freshwater was rare, so people drank beer to keep themselves hydrated. Despite all of this, he became one of the world’s greatest artists.
Shakespeare’s greatest contribution to literature would probably be the variety of material that he produced during his lifetime. He wrote histories, such as Julius Caesar. He wrote love stories, most famously Romeo and Juliet. He wrote comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew and wrote on a variety of different topics such as life, death, revenge, grief, jealousy, murder, magic and mystery. Shakespeare was supremely gifted at selecting the right words and arranging them into convincing representations of reality in all its forms, material and immaterial. Shakespeare also used very rich vocabulary in his writings and invented words such as bandit, critic, dauntless and many more. He used lots of literary and poetic devices including lots of allusion (referring to another person, place or thing without explicit identification), irony, monologue, symbolism and a lot more.
On top of that, Shakespeare was also a dramatist and actor. He also acted in some of his own plays but never took the major roles. The plays he wrote were so good and were performed for many years at various theatres, and some of them are still performed today!
All these factors made Shakespeare one of the greatest English writers to have ever lived.
– Ronak Mathrani, 10G