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Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, these amazing plays all originated from the single
mind of William Shakespeare. The plays in which Shakespeare wrote, he wrote out
of a very small educated mind a distinct love for the bible and of course, an
imagination. The plays in which Shakespeare wrote were all written as an adult
to, leaving his past to be misled into false claims. Shakespeare never wrote and
autobiography and much is not known about his childhood sense it was never a
real corner stone for people who enjoyed his plays and poems to think about, but
as the saying goes, you can’t understand your future till you understand your
past. This strictly helps us interpret why each and every persons childhood,
famous or not, is important. Do you know what kind of childhood Shakespeare had?
Do you know where he started from? William Shakespeare was born in
Stratford-upon-Avon in the Province of Warwickshire England in 1564 to John
Shakespeare and Mary ( Arden ) Shakespeare. Stratford was a relatively
prosperous market town ( Loxton 13 ) in middle England, which had a fairly large
population. When William was three months old, the plague raged in Stratford (
Lee 10 ) and took the lives of many, and killed one out of every seven that was
living in the town at that time. Lucky William and the Shakespeare family
escaped the plague, and as from records, no one in the Shakespeare family had
contracted the awful illness. The Shakespeare family was a close-knit one, and
they had to be in those days. William Shakespeare’s family consisted of John,
the father, Mary the mother, 3 brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard, 4 sisters,
Joan, Ann, another Joan, and Margaret, along with Shakespeare’s Grandfather and
Grandmother( rarely heard of ). Although they could escape the plague they could
not escape the overwhelming commonness of the death of infants in that time (
Lee 10 ).
Mary the mother of William Shakespeare was the daughter of Robert
Arden and Had, In all, Eight Children with John Shakespeare ( Gray 3 ). The
first daughter of Mary and John was Joan, who died at birth in 1558. The second
born to the couple was the daughter Margaret, which was born in 1562 and died a
year later in 1563. The third child born to John and Mary, in 1564 finally was
William Shakespeare and as we all know lived into adulthood ( Fido 11 ). April
1564 is the month in which Shakespeare was baptized but no exact birth date was
ever given, but since he died close to his birthday which happened to fall on
the 23rd of April, the same date as St. George’s birthday, the people recognize
this as his official birth date ( Loxton 10 ). The next member of the
Shakespeare family was William’s brother was Gilbert and he also lived into
adulthood. He was born in 1566 and later died in 1612, a fairly short life but
this was common back in his time ( Kay 17 ). The next born, the second Joan in
the Shakespeare family also lived to be an adult, as she was born in 1566 and
later died in 1612. The 6th born child, who was Anne, died at age 8, when
William was only 15. The death of his sister probably caused great pain to
William and the whole family as most deaths do, and was just another loss to add
to the family at that time. She was born in 1571 and later died in 1579.
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