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Fact Box Level: 6.759 Tokens: 357 Types: 183 TTR: 0.513 |
Shakespeare
Shakespeare, more perhaps than any other writer, made full use of the greatest resources of the English language. Most of us use about five thousand words in our normal employment of English; Shakespeare in his works used about twenty-five thousand! There is probably no better way for a foreigner to appreciate the richness and variety of the English language than by studying the various ways in which Shakespeare used it. Such a study is well worth the effort, even though some aspects of English usage, and the meaning of many words, have changed since Shakespeare's day. However, it is surprising that we should know comparatively little about the life of the greatest English author. We know that Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford on Avon, and that he died there in 1616. He almost certainly attended the Grammar School in the town, but of this we cannot be sure. We know he was married there in 1582 to Anne Hathaway and that he had three children. We know that he spent much of his life in London writing his masterpieces. But this is almost all that we do know. However, what is important about Shakespeare's life is not its incidental details but its products, the plays and the poems. For many years scholars have been trying to add a few facts about Shakespeare's life to the small number we already possess and for an equally long time critics have been theorizing about the plays. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that the poetry of Shakespeare will disappear under the great mass of comment that has been written upon it. Fortunately this is not likely to happen. Shakespeare's people have long delighted not just the English but lovers of literature everywhere, and will continue to do so after the scholars and critics and all their works have been forgotten.
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