SHAKESPEARE

The 23rd April is World Book Day, but did you know that it is also Shakespeare's Day?
Everybody has heard of Shakespeare, but do you know how many plays he wrote? Have you heard of any of his sonnets?

William Shakespeare ( April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616) was a poet and a playwright and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/

Place of birth and death: Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom
Nickname: "Bard of Avon"; "Swan of Avon", "The Bard"

William Shakespeare, often called the English national poet, is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all time. William Shakespeare was a professional actor and playwright from Stratford-Upon-Avon. He worked in London, writing on average three plays a year for the acting company the Lord Chamberlain’s - later King’s Men, whilst sustaining his family in Stratford. Whatever we think about him as a writer, he was principally a man of the theatre: he worked collaboratively and knew his playhouses intimately. He acted in plays by other playwrights and, as a shareholder in the Globe he profited from every aspect of the playmaking business. This made him rich, and he is recorded as being a careful investor.

William Shakespeare's birthplace
in Stratford-upon-Avon

His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. https://attachments.convertkitcdnm.com/33224/a40a30f3-d5ba-4cc4-8783-ff345a92b5b5/Shakespeare%20Timeline.pdf

Main works
Tragedies:Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth
Comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.
Histories: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V Henry VI, Richard III, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra

Watch the story and play the game: https://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/short-stories/william-shakespeare

Changes in English grammar since Shakespeare’s times
In order to read and understand Shakespeare, it is important to know that certain aspects of English grammar have changed since Shakespeare’s time. Probably the most important change is that English no longer has two ‘you’ forms. In Shakespeare’s time, ‘you’ was used as a more polite form, and ‘thou’ as a more familiar form. ‘You’ was also used for addressing more than one person and ‘thou’ to address one person. ‘Thou’ also had different verb conjugations to ‘you’, so Shakespeare would have said ‘you are’, but ’thou art', ‘you have’ but ‘thou hast’. The third person (he, she, it) also had different verb conjugations, with, for example, ‘hath’, ‘doth’ and ‘seeth’ instead of the modern ‘has’, ‘does’ and ‘sees’.

William Shakespeare used more than 20,000 words in his plays and poems, and his works provide the first recorded use of over 1,700 words in the English language. It is believed that he may have invented or introduced many of these words himself, often by combining words, changing nouns into verbs, adding prefixes or suffixes, and so on. Some words stuck around and some didn't.

SONNET 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05waZXoMUcg