Are You Smarter Than A Renaissance Fifth-Grader?

William shakespeare William shakespeare was born on the 23rd of april ,1564 in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a small English market town located 100 miles northwest of london along the river of avon.William's father, John Shakespeare, was a prominent local citizen who served as an alderman and bailiff. His mother was Mary Arden Shakespeare, after whom Shakespeare named the Forest of Arden in the great play As You Like It. William was the fourth of the Shakespeare's they had eight children, only five of whom survived to adulthood. Though some ill-informed biographers have depicted Shakespeare as poor and uneducated that wasn't really the case. By the age of four or five, young William Shakespeare was enrolled at the King's

Boys studied the alphabet, moved on to the Book of Common Prayer, and by the ripe old age of seven began instruction in Latin. "They began with what was considered the relatively easy Latin of Aesop's Fables (translated from Greek), then Caesar, and then moved on to Cicero, Virgil, Ovid , Horace, Suetonius, Livy, and, notably for a dramatist, Seneca, Terence and (perhaps) Plautus,"3 wrote Shakespeare expert Terry A. Gray. Are you smarter than a Renaissance fifth-grader? Maybe, but it's certainly possible that you're not nearly as well-read! It's impossible to overstate how important this classical education was to Shakespeare's development as an author—and indeed, how important literature in general was to the development of Renaissance England. In continental Europe (particularly Italy), the Renaissance was a triumph of the visual arts—think of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo or Raphael or Donatello England's Renaissance, however, was one of words. The advent of the printing press meant that more people had access to books than ever before. Classical texts were being translated and distributed at an unprecedented rate. Queen Elizabeth I and her successor, King James I,

Other theories hold that he was employed as a butcher, a teacher, or a clerk in a local attorney's office. How did he become involved the theater world? When did he leave Stratford and set out for London? We don't know. All we know for sure is that by 1592, Shakespeare had become popular enough to be