Bard Of Avon Quotes

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

The difference becomes clear if we consider Herman Melville’s distinction between a thoughtful response to Shakespeare and that of the mere thrill seeker. Melville contrasted “those mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers,” with the contemplative reader, who was unconcerned with “blood-besmeared tragedy” for its own sake and attended instead to “those deep far-away things” in the Bard of Avon, “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality . . . that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Though Shakespeare and his writings did not get much value during his age, ‘time’ has aptly given him his due respect later!

Anne Hathaway's Garden by Stewart Stafford In Stratford, lies a garden's tended hair, Two lovebirds, Avon swans, nested there. Anne kept counsel as Shakespeare's bride, United home and clan over distance wide. Pestilence, flood and war roared with fright, This English idyll thrived in the pastoral light, Rose, rosemary pruned with nurturing care, Floral Tudor fireworks, exploding fragrant air. The Bard, swansong past, returned to her, Wooed Anne with words, the heartbeat spur, To walk and reminisce among the green, Sparked a fire that life apart rendered lean. Anne Hathaway's garden outlived them all, Paralleled words, evergreen, as in virgin scrawl. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

It is immoral to question history and to take credit away from William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.” Immoral to question history—when inquiry is the very basis of the historical discipline!

There have been many kinds of suitors: the early scholars who pored through the archives, searching for records that would illuminate his life; the founding fathers and men of letters who made pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon, slicing “relics” from his chair and falling on their knees to kiss the sacred ground; in later centuries, Stratfordians who wrote biographies, trying to solve the mystery of how he did it, and anti-Stratfordians who saw still different authors by different names.

In 1612 he testified as a witness in a lawsuit in London, where he was identified not as the famous writer but merely as a “gentleman” of Stratford-upon-Avon.

there was no recorded notice of the celebrated writer’s passing. No elegies. No great London funeral. No burial at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Britain’s other literary dead. On April 25, he was buried quietly at the local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The only trace of this event is the church’s burial register, which reads simply, “Will Shakspere gent.

between 1586 and 1607, the historian William Camden wrote that the “small market-town” of Stratford-upon-Avon owed “all its consequences to two natives of it. They are John de Stratford, later archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, later mayor of London, who built the Clopton Bridge across the Avon.” Camden was clearly aware of the poet Shakespeare—he referred to him elsewhere as one of “the most pregnant wits of our time”—but he apparently did not regard Stratford as the poet’s origin.

Harvey referred to the new “Venus in print” armed by the “bravest Minerva,” did he mean the new poem by Shakespeare? Noticeably, Harvey never says it is by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. He does not mention the author’s name at all. Instead, he says that the poem is “armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva.” Protected, shielded, equipped with a weapon. His language emphasizes Minerva’s protective qualities—the complete military “harness”—and implies, perhaps, that the name “Shakespeare” itself is the armor, the shield.

Books and poems of the period are strewn with many more allusions, but amongst these allusions to the poet in his lifetime, “there is none,” to quote Professor Wells, “that explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies him with Stratford-upon-Avon.

But, frustratingly, this clarity dissipates on closer consideration. There are nine Avon rivers in Britain. Another problem: monarchs did not attend plays in the public theaters. The “flights upon the Thames / That so did take Eliza and our James” cannot refer to performances at the Globe, Rose, or other theaters on the Thames. Elizabeth and James enjoyed their entertainment at court, where Shakespeare’s plays were often staged. (“ These dramas, the most treasured jewels of our literary heritage, were not composed for the gawkish groundlings of the Globe,” writes the scholar Richard Levin, “but for theatres and audiences far more worthy of them.”)

Alexander Waugh suggests that “Sweet Swan of Avon” was purposefully ambiguous: “Jonson was allowing, and probably expecting, some of his readers—those of ‘seeliest Ignorance’—to think of Stratford-upon-Avon, home to the late Mr. Will. Shakspere.” Others—the discriminating few—would know better.

A monument to Shakespeare sits on the wall of the local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is not known with any certainty who erected it or when, but some version of it must have existed by 1623. It features a bust of a mustachioed man, with an inscription below exhorting passersby to slow down and “read if thou canst”; that is, to figure out its meaning. The inscription proceeds in two parts—a Latin couplet, followed by English verse—but it is notoriously opaque: IUDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM, TERRA TEGIT, POPVLUS MæRET, OLYMPVS HABET STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST, READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST, WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME, QVICK NATURE DIDE WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK TH[ I] S TOMBE, FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL TH[ A] T HE HATH WRITT, LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

In 1843 the publisher Charles Knight provided the nation with the first book-length biography of the national poet, William Shakspere: A Biography. (Nineteenth-century biographers tended to use “Shakspere,” consistent with the spelling on his baptismal and burial records.) The book was an extended Victorian fantasy—a “descriptive reverie,” as one critic at the time put it—freely fictionalizing Shakespeare’s life, blissfully untethered from scholarly citation or historical fact. Since Shakespeare could not be known through letters, journals, or other personal records, Knight found him in Stratford-upon-Avon—in the streets and village life, the surrounding fields and forests, and in the Birthplace itself. Stratford filled in the gaps—indeed, became Shakespeare’s biography. The Warwickshire countryside elucidated his love of nature; the half-timbered house on Henley Street, his idyllic childhood.

As legends and jokes circulated, devotees began making pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon to pay homage to the divine poet. Hoping to find “relics,” they flocked to Shakespeare’s large house on Chapel Street. They were particularly drawn to the mulberry tree in the garden, said to have been planted by the poet himself. In 1756 the home’s current owner, annoyed by the constant visitors snooping around his property, had the tree cut down. A local tradesman bought the logs and grew rich selling carvings from the tree, like pieces of the true cross.

In 1543 the historian John Leland wrote, for example: A Stately place for rare and glorious shew There is, which Tamis with wandring stream doth dowse; Times past, by name of Avon men it knew: Here Henrie, the Eighth of that name, built a house So sumptuous, as that on such an one (Seeke through the world) the bright Sunne never shone. Leland’s words were quoted in the exhaustive history of Britain published by William Camden, Ben Jonson’s tutor. So the description would certainly have been known to Jonson. In another work, Leland explained that “Avon” was a shortening of the Celtic-Roman name “Avondunum,” meaning a fortified place (dunum) by a river (avon), which “the common people by corruption called Hampton.” Raphael Holinshed similarly wrote in his sprawling 1577 book of British history, Chronicles, that “we now pronounce Hampton for Avondune.” William Lambarde in his Topographical and Historical Dictionary of England affirmed that Hampton Court is “corruptly called Hampton for Avondun or Avon, an usual

Sir Stanley Wells. Wells is Britain’s leading Shakespeare authority, the one who declared it “immoral” to question history and “take credit away” from Shakespeare. For many years, he was professor of Shakespeare studies and director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the organization that oversees the Birthplace.