Life of William Shakespeare

Stephan Doeve

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783734728556
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This biography of William Shakespeare is by Frederic W. Moorman. 1872 -1918. Assistant Professor in the University of Leeds.

Life of William Shakespeare

This biography of William Shakespeare is by Frederic W. Moorman. (1872–1918). Assistant Professor in the University of Leeds.

The painstaking research of two centuries has not yet succeeded in removing all the difficulties which the student encounters in attempting to decipher the life of Shakespeare. We know more of Chaucer, who died more than a hundred and fifty years before Shakespeare was born, and infinitely more of Milton, who was eight years old at thetime of Shakespeare’s death. This comparative lack of knowledge as to the life and character of the great dramatist is, to some extent at least, explicable. The social status of an Elizabethan dramatist was by no means a high one, and compares, indeed, very unfavourably with that of a poet of the same period. The playwright, like the actor, could never wholly remove the odour of ill-fame which clung to his calling in a country where Puritanism was an ever-growing force. Had Shakespeare been primarily a poet, and had he remained content to produce poems after the fashion Venus and Adonis instead of plays like Hamlet, his reputation in his own day would certainly have been greater among those of his countrymen with whom reputation was in safe keeping, and a more exact knowledge of the events of his life would have been transmitted to posterity. As it was, he had to wait until the year 1709 for his first biographer. Where exact knowledge has been wanting, conjecture has been rife; and the first task of the sober modern biographer of Shakespeare is to remove the many guesses after truth and the after-math of dubious aneedotage which, so far from bringin...

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