Book contents
- What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
- What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 What Manner of Man Was He?
- 2 How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?
- 3 What Do the Sonnets Tell Us about Their Author?
- 4 What Made Shakespeare Laugh?
- Epilogue: Eight Decades with Shakespeare – and More
- Book List
- Index
2 - How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2023
- What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
- What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 What Manner of Man Was He?
- 2 How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?
- 3 What Do the Sonnets Tell Us about Their Author?
- 4 What Made Shakespeare Laugh?
- Epilogue: Eight Decades with Shakespeare – and More
- Book List
- Index
Summary
Shakespeare was both a non-dramatic poet and a playwright. It’s not too difficult to understand how he became a poet. The King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon provided its pupils with a primarily literary education and Shakespeare may have started writing poems when he was still at school. The two sonnets printed last in the collection published in 1609 are translations of a poem originally written by the fifth-century ad Greek poet Marianus Scolasticus and may have been originally written as schoolboy exercises. The sonnet numbered 153 appears to be a revision of No. 154, as if perhaps the schoolmaster had made criticisms of the boy’s first shot at it. And it is generally agreed that Sonnet 145, which ends with a pun on the name of Anne Hathaway – ‘“I hate” from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying, “not you”’ – is a teenage effusion, a wooing poem written, if not while Shakespeare was still at school, at any rate not long after he left.
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- What Was Shakespeare Really Like? , pp. 38 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023