William Shakespeare
Writer and Poet

1. What is there about yourself that you would like to share with us?

Well, my name is William Shakespeare and I was born on April 23, 1564. I had attended Stratford Grammar School at around the age of 7 and that is where I learned how to read and write. When I was 18, I had married my wife, Anne Hathaway, who was 26 at the time. She was pregnant at the time as well with our first child Susanna. We later had twins, Hamnet and Judith. But one of the saddest moments in my life was when my so Hamnet, had died at the age of 11, from a unknown disease. I was so devastated that it had influenced my writing.

Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal;
For being not mad but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver'd of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he:
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity....
I tore them from their bonds and cried aloud
'O that these hands could so redeem my son,
As they have given these hairs their liberty!'
But now I envy at their liberty,
And will again commit them to their bonds,
Because my poor child is a prisoner.
And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again;
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud
And chase the native beauty from his cheek
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,
And so he'll die; and, rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more. (III.iv.45-91)


2. Do you feel that you sometimes put a part of you and what you feel, into your writings?

Yes I do. I out many of my beliefs into what I write and put my views on certain matters. An example would be like the character of Nick Bottom, in the play, “A Midsummer Night‘s Dream”. I had incorporated a line on what he had thought of love, “reason and love keep little company with each other nowadays”. some of my audience may notice that this remark that was made is different from his other remarks. It seems more thought out than his other lines, and I thought that it would be an excellent line to put in form my own thoughts.

3. Do your plays and sonnets represent your life in any way?

When I was writing “Romeo and Juliet”, I had thought of what it would feel like to not be able to be with the person that you love, no matter how hard you try. You can kind of say that a lot of my plays represent my life. I know how it feels to lose someone you love very deeply. And many of the other plays reflect how I had viewed love and how my views had changed over time. When I had written “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” I was trying to show my audience on how love is sometimes childlike and is triggered by an infatuation. And when I had first written my sonnets, you will notice that my first ones focus on the love and physical attraction to another person, something that does not lead to marriage (sonnets 14-27). But in my later sonnets, the usual theme focuses on the emotional love and not the physical desires.

4. What does love mean to you?

That is a hard question to answer. I think that in my younger years I had thought that love was something that could concur all and could not be defeated. I also had confused love with lust. But as I had gotten older, I had learned that love is something that you cherish not through physical desires, but with emotional bonds as well. I also had learned of the love that I had for my writing, my family, and friends as well. I think that these stages of learning are stages that everyone will eventually go through sometime in their lives.