Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies. If we take into account the fact that Shakespeare was a wealthy man by the end of his life, this is a relatively young age for him to die. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. It was unusual for anyone to be buried inside the church (rather than in the surrounding graveyard), and Shakespeare managed this by buying a tithe deed for £440 which gave him the right to have a grave in the chancel of the church, to have his final resting place alongside other family members. © 2004 – 2020 No Sweat Digital Ltd. All rights reserved. William Shakespeare, in his many plays, and in his sonnets, produced a vast number of quotes on the subject of death. Upon the sightless couriers of the air."[196]. It was a loving gesture because it was the custom to reserve the best bed for guests and to sleep in the second-best bed. [124][125] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,[126] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies. William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, his 52nd birthday. A euphemism is typically used to avoid offending or upsetting someone, or to avoid talking directly about an uncomfortable topic. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question". Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room. [14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. Was he murdered? [60] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth containing his Death: and the Coronation of King Henry the Fift, Thomas of Woodstock/Richard the Second, Part One, The Tragical History of King Richard the Third, Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinall, his Lyffe and Deathe, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight, Cultural depictions of Henry VIII of England, Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Shakespeare&oldid=982277448, 16th-century English dramatists and playwrights, 17th-century English dramatists and playwrights, People educated at King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon, Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with Encyclopædia Britannica links, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with TePapa identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March (conflation of, This page was last edited on 7 October 2020, at 05:15. [200] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow.