Novel Analysis
As You like it by William
Shakespeare
INTRODUCTION
The most influential
writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a
successful middle-class Glover in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare
attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582
he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her.
Around 1590, he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an
actor and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and
part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I
(ruled 1558–1603) and James I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite of both
monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible
compliment by bestowing upon its members the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and
renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of
fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as Ben
Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works
were collected and printed in various -editions in the century following his
death, and by the early eighteenth century, his reputation as the greatest poet
ever to write in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration
garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but
the dearth of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact
and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s plays were actually
written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most
popular candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly
circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.