Who Was Shakespeare?

Bringing up the very name Shakespeare to any high school student, will no doubt get you ostracized from any group of friends because of the negative connotations that are associated with his writings. The negative connotations are not that his writings are provocative or immoral, but that they are hard to understand, and for a slovenly high school student, this is the worst possible thing.

According to Wikipedia, there is no official date on his birth, but biographers like to believe that it is twenty-third of April 1564. Ironically, this is also the same day that he died in 1616. Hamlet grew up with a normal education in grammar school. He married in his twenties to a Miss Anne Hathaway, where they had a daughter and twins. Not much information is known on his early life. It is hard to tell when he first started writing, but some of his play appeared on stage in 1592. After his son's death in 1596 he continued to write. In his later life he enjoyed great wealth and relaxation till he died.

Shakespeare is like translating another language, the more you read it, the more you understand. As I've been reading Hamlet and continuing my studies in it, it has become easy to read and understand it. Often before, I would have to reread passages repeatedly to understand what Shakespeare meant. But now I can easily read through with a fairly good understand of each line and word. But every now and then I do struggle with a passage, only because of a reference that I was ignorant to.