In his letter mentioning Shakespeare on January 24, 1597/8, Sturley asked Quiney especially that `` theare might ( be ) bi Sir Ed. Grev. some meanes made to the Knightes of the Parliament for an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsedies wherewith our towne is like to be charged, and I assure u I am in great feare and doubte bi no meanes hable to paie.

As well as stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she grew up with Aesop ’ s Fables, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, the folk tales and mythology of Scotland, the German Romantics, Shakespeare, and the romances of Sir Walter Scott.

Elizabeth's reign is known as the Elizabethan era, famous above all for the flourishing of English drama, led by playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and for the seafaring prowess of English adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake.

Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare.

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Sir Francis Bacon wrote some or all the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, in opposition to the scholarly consensus that William Shakespeare of Stratford was the author.

Shakespeare experts Sir John Gielgud and Kenneth Branagh consider the definitive rendition of the Bard's tragic tale to be the 1964 Russian film Gamlet () based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and directed by Grigori Kozintsev, with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich.

She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.

In 1921, Sir George Greenwood, Looney, and others founded The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization originally dedicated to the discussion and promotion of ecumenical anti-Stratfordian views, but which later became devoted to promoting Oxford as the true Shakespeare.

More was portrayed as a wise and honest statesman in the 1592 play Sir Thomas More, which was probably written in collaboration by Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare, and others, and which survives only in fragmentary form after being censored by Edmund Tylney, Master of the Revels in the government of Queen Elizabeth I ( any direct reference to the Act of Supremacy was censored out ).

Cymbeline was also performed in Cambridge in October 2007 in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, who sought to re-capture the essence of the play as a story narrative, and in November 2007 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

and Francis Beaumont were among the members ( although it is often asserted that William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh were members of this club, there is no documented evidence to support this claim ).

In Puck, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, the once-dangerous figure is rendered harmless

Other possible sources are the anonymous play King Leir ( published in 1605 ); A Mirror for Magistrates ( 1574 ), by John Higgins ; The Malcontent ( 1604 ), by John Marston ; The London Prodigal ( 1605 ); Arcadia ( 1580 – 1590 ), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot ; Montaigne's Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603 ; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison ; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden ( 1606 ); Albion's England, by William Warner, ( 1589 ); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett ( 1603 ), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness.

The source used by Shakespeare was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Brutus and Life of Caesar

Sir Peter Hall was appointed artistic director ( designate ) in 1959, and formed the Royal Shakespeare Company ( RSC ) in 1961.

The Shrieves House is one of the oldest still lived in houses in the town and Shakespeare is said to have based his character of Sir John Falstaff on one of the residents, his godson's uncle.

Highlights of his career in modern theatre include the roles of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons ( 1960 ), Charles Dyer in Dyer's play Staircase, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, the definitive Laurie in John Osborne's A Hotel in Amsterdam ( 1968 ), and Antonio Salieri in the original stage production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus ( 1979 ).

He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt were the first English poets to write in the sonnet form that Shakespeare later used, and Surrey was the first English poet to publish blank verse in his translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid.

The Brief Lives includes biographies of such figures as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and William Shakespeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare helped popularize the sonnet.

During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night ( in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch ), and Macbeth.

Notable later 20th century productions include the Hilton Edwards ' 1959 production at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, starring Milo O ' Shea and Anna Manahan ; John Barton's 1960 Royal Shakespeare Company ( RSC ) production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, starring Peter O ' Toole and Peggy Ashcroft, and which included both the complete Induction and the epilogue from A Shrew ; Maurice Daniels's 1961 RSC production at the Aldwych Theatre, starring Derek Godfrey and Vanessa Redgrave ; Trevor Nunn's 1969 RSC production also at the Aldwych, starring Michael Williams and Janet Suzman ; Clifford Williams ' 1973 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, starring Alan Bates and Susan Fleetwood ; William Ball's 1976 commedia dell ' arte-style production at the American Conservatory Theater ; Wilford Leach's 1978 production at the Delacorte Theater, starring Raúl Juliá and Meryl Streep ; Barry Kyle's 1982 RSC production at the Barbican Centre, starring Alun Armstrong and Sinéad Cusack ; Toby Robertson's 1986 production at the Clwyd Theatr Cymru, starring Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave ; Jonathan Miller's 1987 RSC production at the Barbican, starring Brian Cox and Fiona Shaw ; A. J.

* The RSC's Hamlet ( 23 November – 11 December 2004 ) by William Shakespeare, starring Toby Stephens

This version was part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series and featured Felicity Kendal in the role of Viola, Sinéad Cusack as Olivia, Alec McCowen as Malvolio and Robert Hardy as Sir Toby Belch.

In 2011, Dennehy has returned to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in the role of Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

In 1925, Baylis began a campaign to re-open the derelict Sadler's Wells Theatre, something she finally achieved with a gala opening, on 6 January 1931, of a production of Shakespeare ’ s Twelfth Night starring John Gielgud as Malvolio and Ralph Richardson as Toby Belch.

Harris J. Griston, in Shaking The Dust From Shakespeare ( 216 ), writes: `` There is not a word spoken by Shylock which one would expect from a real Jew ''.

* Titus Andronicus, main character in the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, possibly named after one of the above-listed emperors

" The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: " With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly.

For example, the complete works of Shakespeare, about 1250 pages in print, can be stored in about five megabytes ( forty million bits ) with one byte per character.

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the owners of Shrieves House, the former Three Tunns Tavern and now a museum, claim William Shakespeare based the character Falstaff on William Rogers, one of the Sargeants of the mace and close friend of the Shakespeares.

" The play was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime and still ranks among his most-performed, topping the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance list since 1879.

Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

About the Fiennes Hamlet Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that it was "... not one for literary sleuths and Shakespeare scholars.

Macbeth is Shakespeare ’ s shortest and bloodiest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland.

Shakespeare may allude to the image when Lady Macbeth says to her husband, " Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't " ( 1. 5. 74-5 ).. And the Porter's speech ( 1. 3. 1 – 21 ), in particular, may allude to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606 ; " equivocator " ( line 8 ) may refer to Garnet's defence of " equivocation ", and " farmer " ( 4 ) to one of Garnet's aliases.

The painting, long claimed to be one of the portraits of Shakespeare, but considered by Barrell to be an overpaint of a portrait of the Earl of Oxford, turned out to represent neither, but rather depicted Hugh Hamersley.

In 1985 he published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, and by framing the issue as one of fairness in the atmosphere of conspiracy that permeated America after Watergate, he used the media to circumnavigate academia and appeal directly to the public.

Although Shakespearean experts disparaged Ogburn's methodology and his conclusions, one reviewer, Richmond Crinkley, the Folger Shakespeare Library's former director of educational programs, acknowledged the appeal of Ogburn's approach, writing that the doubts over Shakespeare, " arising early and growing rapidly ", have a " simple, direct plausibility ", and the dismissive attitude of established scholars only worked to encourage such doubts.

Though Crinkley rejected Ogburn's thesis, he believed that one merit of the book lay in the way it focused attention on what is not known of Shakespeare.

In The Shakespeare Claimants, a 1962 examination of the authorship question, H. N. Gibson concluded that "... on analysis the Oxfordian case appears to me a very weak one ".

Shakespeare's native Avon and Stratford are referred to in two prefatory poems in the 1623 First Folio, one of which refers to Shakespeare as " Swan of Avon " and another to the author's " Stratford monument ".

Claiming that Meres was obsessed with numerology, they propose that the numbers should be symmetrical, and that careful readers are meant to infer that Meres knew two of the English poets ( viz., Oxford and Shakespeare ) to actually be one and the same.

Shakespeare often includes foils for his characters to have one set off the other.

By writing his comedies in a combination of Elizabethan and Plautine styles, Shakespeare helps to create his own brand of comedy, one that uses both styles.

William Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was one such inspector.

Shakespeare also names one of the main characters of his play The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus.

William Shakespeare makes reference to Robin Hood in his late-16th-century play The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of his earliest.

The film was later nominated for eleven Academy Awards, with wins for Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Film Editing, and Best Director for Spielberg, but lost the Best Picture award to Shakespeare in Love, being one of a few that have won the Best Director award without also winning Best Picture.