Shakespeare 2

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You see, by 1582, when I was only eighteen, I married a lady by the name of Anne Hathaway,  Some scholars Believe that my wive's name was actually Agnes. In any case, our first daughter, Susanna, was born the following year. Twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585.  Unfortunately my dear son Hamnet later died.

 And then comes the mystery: the so-called “lost years.” Between 1585 and 1592, I completely disappear from the historical record. No plays, no mentions, no documents, but what we do know is that by 1592, I was in the city of London and making a name for myself. A rival playwright, Robert Greene, derided me in print as an “upstart crow.” For all its venom, the insult is proof that I had arrived — I was already challenging the university-trained writers and beginning my rise to the very top of the Elizabethan stage.

George
So Mr. Shakespeare, it would seem that one might say that you were fully in the London scene.

Shakespeare
Precisely! By the early 1590s, I was fully in the - as you call it - London scene — which meant two things: theater and plague. In 1592, theaters were shut down because of an outbreak, and with the stage dark, I began to write poetry. Today the public might refer to this time in my life as my side-hustle era. I published two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to a wealthy young noble, the Earl of Southampton. You flatter a patron, they fund your career. And the process worked. These poems put my name in print for the first time.

And in 1609, I published a book of sonnets that included the famous “shall I compare to a summers day”

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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