SPEAKER: The name William Shakespeare
is synonymous with great literature.
But it also belongs to a person who
had a life outside his famous works.
Did Shakespeare have a family?
In 1582, Shakespeare was
married to Anne Hathaway--
not that one-- the daughter
of a local landowner who
was eight years senior to the 18-year-old bard.
They were married just six months before
the birth of their first child, Susanna.
This scandalous timing, among other
evidence, has suggested to some historians
that their marriage was
provoked by the pregnancy,
not a passion fit for Shakespeare's own work.
Nevertheless, the couple had two more
children, twins Hamnet and Judith.
Sadly, Hamnet died at the age of 11 in 1596.
Whether this tragedy had an impact on
Shakespeare's most famous tragic work
Hamlet has been a matter of much debate.
Shakespeare is most famous
for his work as a playwright,
having crafted more timeless classics than
we have time to name drop in this video.
But he also wrote three
whole plays about Henry VI
that you probably weren't
assigned in high school.
How many plays did he write in all?
Believe it or not, historians aren't totally
sure how many plays Shakespeare wrote.
Scholarly consensus usually
attributes 37 plays to him,
but he's believed to have worked
on more with other writers.
And some of his work may be lost to history.
Though Shakespeare is best known as a
playwright, he wrote even more poems.
In fact, some of his most famous
turns of phrase come from his sonnets.
Just how many sonnets did he write?
In fact, Shakespeare wrote
dozens of them, 154 in all.
Some of us would have quit after nailing
it with "Sonnet 18," which begins "shall I
compare thee to a summer's day."
But Shakespeare kept writing.
By "Sonnet 130," he decided "my
mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."
So maybe poetry had lost a little
of its romance for him by then.
Though Shakespeare has been
called the immortal bard, the man
himself was as mortal as any other.
But what grim fate deprived
the world of such a talent?
How did Shakespeare die?
That answer, unfortunately, is a mystery.
The only hint we have is a journal entry
written by the vicar of a local church.
He claimed that Shakespeare, Drayton, and
Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems,
drank too hard.
For Shakespeare died of
a fever there contracted.
Some scholars have suggested this is
evidence Shakespeare died of typhus.
But as the journal entry was
written some 50 years later
and no one has been able to verify
it, we may never know the truth.
Some 400 years after his
death, Shakespeare is still
required reading in high school English classes.
What is it about the bard that
makes his work relevant today?
He may have lived nearly half a millennium
ago, but Shakespeare's plays dealt with topics
that we still struggle with today.
Themes like family, war, bigotry,
morality, and falling in love
transcend time and even language.
His characters have an emotional reality that
resonates in translations and adaptations
across the world.
