Where Did William Shakespear Become Famous

How did William Shakespeare become famous?

To the OP, welcome to Quora, and thanks for your first Question on here!I think you need to remember how very different the world was, 400 years ago. Shakespeare would have been almost unknown outside London; there was no radio, television, cinema or internet, there were no newspapers, and indeed no purpose-built theatres outside London. Shakespeare and his company of actors didn't tour outside the capital; they played at Court for Queen Elizabeth I and later for James I, or in their theatre. That was it!But within that small circle, yes, his plays were clearly very popular. London was the biggest city in England, with a population of about 200,000 by around 1600, and entertainment was very limited; as I said before, no radio, television and so on. There was bear-baiting and cock-fighting, there was drinking, and increasingly there were books to read, but other than that, not a lot. So the new theatres (because until Shakespeare's time there hadn't even been any of those) were enormously popular! People flocked to them. They weren't even prohibitively expensive; richer people could pay for a seat, and even hire a cushion, just as you can at the modern replica Globe theatre in London, but ordinary people could pay just a penny and go in as groundlings, standing in the open space next to the stage. No seats, and if it rained they got wet, because there was no roof either, but it was cheap.And they went in large and profitable numbers. Shakespeare (and presumably his company) made money. We can be sure of this because of surviving legal documents which prove that he owned quite a lot of property by the end of his time in London. He sold this, and retired back to Stratford on Avon, where he bought a big, modern house, and lived there until he died.So yes. He was pretty popular in his day, even if most of the country had never heard of him.

Who was William Shakespeare and what did he do to become famous?

He was a playwright during Queen Elizabeth's reign. He coined an insane number of words and phrases that hadn't been previously recorded. He repurposed several stories, derived from both history and from mythology. He also simply repurposed the English Language in whatever way he chose. This is what most of us consider “Shakespearean” English.

How did William Shakespeare become an actor?

Nobody really knows how or why, or even when he began acting.One theory is that he was a tutor to a noble household, and, as part of his duties, acted and/or wrote in some sort of household entertainment (no TV in those days, so people made their own entertainments) which was partly staged by a group of travelling players. Thus, having made contact with an acting troupe, he being impressed with the life, and they being impressed with his writing, when his term of service with the household was up, he went to London and joined with said acting troupe. (In those days, acting groups would often be based in London for part of the year, and spend several months on the road; or if the playhouses in London were closed due to plague, then the acting companies would again, hit the road.)But it needs to emphasized that nobody really knows. There is about a 10-year period in Shakespeare’s life, where he was establishing himself in his profession, for which we have basically zero documentation. All we know is that, a certain point in the 1580s, he shows up in London, already acting and writing with a troupe of actors. For the rest of his life, the documentation, while not extensive, is at least present, and we can make reasonably accurate statements about, say, when a particular play was written, how well it did at the box office, where Shakespeare was living in London, how much money he was paid for court appearances, and so on and so forth. But for that early decade, the record is virtually non-existent.

What was William Shakespeare best known for?

Well, he is famous because he is “ William Shakespeare”.His fame and handsomeness as an author, specially, as a dramatist, is accepted worldwide. He was a master of human mind.His characters represent witty,kind,mad, suspicious, ambitious, adamant, indecisive human nature in its most straightforward and convincing way. The shades of human nature he portrayed in 16 the century are still applicable to 21 century. The beauty of his feelings can be seen in his ‘Sonnets’, the height of his wit can be measured with his 'Romanatic Comedies', and the depth and understanding of his thoughts can be accepted with his famous ‘Tragedies’. Shakespeare was a master of characterization.This feature of his writing is most unique and so, universally acclaimed. His works have a strong ability to connect globally.This is the reason , Shakespeare is so famous.He is and will always be on minds of all sensible literature lovers.

What did William Shakespeare do to become influential?

He wrote the best plays and the greatest sonnet sequence in the English language, and he had the good fortune, over the centuries, to be recognized for it. His friends and colleagues published his plays — plays were considered a “low” form of entertainment generally, and disposable — as a folio volume in 1623, urging people to “read” the plays as literature. Ben Jonson and John Milton contributed dedicatory poems.What is more, it is worth pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays avoid overt engagement, for the most part, with specific donnybrooks of the day: e.g., his representation of religion is usually neither pro- or anti-Reformation, but distinctively pre-Reformation; he seems to represent Christianity as a kind of whole, despite the fractiousness of his time. This, along with his remarkable ability to individuate characters and voices, and his refusal to give characters timebound names like “Sir Politic Would-be” (a Jonson character), gave his plays the opportunity to speak across time. This is one of the things Jonson’s dedicatory poem indicates with the remark that Shakespeare “wrote not for an age, but for all time.”It’s a mixture of quality and psychological depth, a kind of temporal non-specificity that has made transhistorical transmission possible — allowing subsequent eras each to develop “their own Shakespeare” who speaks to them where and when they live — and the curation of admiring editors and critics. The cumulative effect of these things placed Shakespeare squarely at the heart of the English language’s literary canon. And there he stayed. Will he survive the present evacuation of humane culture? Let’s hope so. (Looking at you, Dave!)

How did Shakespeare become so skilled?

Bach once explained his accomplishments by saying that he "was obliged to work hard. Whoever is equally industrious will have similar success." He wasn't lying about the work. He worked like a dog. And so did Shakespeare. Shakespeare doesn't emerge from the chrysalis a master, as Michelangelo did (Domenico Ghirlandaio, a Renaissance master, actually paid Ludovico Buonarroti for the pleasure of teaching his young son). Shakespeare's earliest plays are full of promise, and some are pretty terrific -- Titus Andronicus is ghoulish Marlovian fun, and not without its poetic merits. But 1-3 Henry VI do not add up to Hamlet and King Lear or The Tempest. Shakespeare busted his ass, pumping out plays every year of his working life. And as he practiced, his language went through a number of developmental phases. The later stages of this development are traced with remarkable acuity by the late, great Frank Kermode in his book Shakespeare's Language.But the elephant in the room is the very real thing called genius. There were lots of writers in Shakespeare's day. Some of them were very talented, all of them at least workmanlike, some of them more rigorously educated than Shakespeare: Marston, Dekker, Kyd, Jonson, Chapman, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, et al. So why don't they evince the same level of achievement? Because they don't have it, whatever it is that Bach and Shakespeare and Michelangelo ultimately had. That's the dark matter -- genius. How does that work? I have no idea. I am utterly bereft of it.

How did Shakespeare become the great bard?

In the First Folio (1623) of Shakespeare’s plays (see First Folio - Wikipedia) Ben Jonson refers to Shakespeare as the Swan of Avon, “swan” being a literary epithet often applied to authors associated with a riverine location. As the First Folio was published after Shakespeare’s death, the epithet may refer to the classical myth that swans are mute during life but sing sweetly just before death—thus the First Folio is literally Shakespeare’s swansong. The epithet “Bard of Avon” is much more an 18th-century term (see Bardolatry - Wikipedia) associated with the “re-discovery” of Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson and David Garrick, especially around the period of the bicentenary (1769) of Shakespeare’s birth.Why “bard”? Because English 18th-century poetry was starting to feel over-civilised and bland, and English literary cool-hunters started to look for more “natural” predecessors on the model of medieval native Welsh and Irish court poet-singers fancifully regarded as local literary descendants of the greatest bard of all, Homer himself. In fact they were so keen to unearth genuine native bards that a hoaxer even invented one, see Ossian - Wikipedia.Shakespeare, described by Milton in 1645 as warbling “his native woodnotes wild”— ie some kind of a rustic self-taught genius — fitted into this presumed organic tradition. (Incidentally, for those who madly claim that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, there are a number of clear references to him and his works in the contemporary Parnassus Plays, see Parnassus plays - Wikipedia.)In this context, it’s fair to say that “bard” is a ridiculously patronising view of Shakespeare as a local Warwickshire lad inexplicably visited by the muses, rather like so-called (and cruelly so) “idiot savants”, severely autistic individuals able to perform prodigies of music, art or mathematics. The fact is that as the author of at least 38 plays and 150 poems, many regarded as the finest in the English language, Shakespeare is not only a true giant of English literature, but one of the very greatest literary figures of the Renaissance.