Greatest of Them All - Part 1

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 The Greatest of Them All - Part 1

Now when I first decided to have a series of podcast episodes dealing with what I believe are the 25 most influential writers, it seemed easiest and most effective to have one episode for each writer. But I soon found that William Shakespeare easily deserved several episodes - so I'm going to devote two episodes to Shakespeare because of his importance to the English language and creativity -still fully realizing that's not enough.

Anyway, If you visit Stratford-upon-Avon today, the first thing you’ll hear is that William Shakespeare was born in 1564. We don’t actually know the exact day, but we do know he was baptized on April 26th at Holy Trinity Church. Since baptisms usually happened a few days after birth, tradition has settled on April 23rd — St. George’s Day — as Shakespeare’s birthday. A fitting coincidence, since St. George is England’s patron saint and Shakespeare would become its greatest poet.

He was the son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker and part-time wool dealer who rose to become an alderman in the town, and Mary Arden, who came from a well-off farming family. That gave young Will a household connected both to trade and to old Warwickshire landowners.

Like many boys of his station, he probably attended the King’s New School in Stratford. The curriculum would have been heavy on Latin, rhetoric, and the classics. Day after day, he would have been drilled in the works of Ovid, Seneca, and Plautus. Later, echoes of those schoolroom authors would resurface in his plays — Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Roman senators in Julius Caesar.

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