Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. His late plays, often known as the Romances, date from 1608 onwards and include The Tempest. Some of his most famous tragedies were written in the early 1600s these include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Richard II all date from the mid to late 1590s. His earliest plays include Henry VI and Titus Andronicus. Records of Shakespeare’s plays begin to appear in 1594, and he produced roughly two a year until around 1611. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were probably written at this time as well. Shakespeare’s poetry was published before his plays, with two poems appearing in 15, dedicated to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. The Company acquired interests in two theatres in the Southwark area of London, near the banks of the Thames - the Globe and the Blackfriars.

We do know that he was part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which was renamed the King’s Company in 1603 when James I succeeded to the throne. Shakespeare’s theatrical life seems to have commenced around 1590.

In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had a daughter the following year and twins in 1585. Shakespeare was probably educated in Stratford’s grammar school. His father was a glove maker and wool merchant and his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a well-to-do local land owner. In a canny act of marketing, while they presume that boys will be “permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are,” they request boys’ “kind assistance…in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest.” They urge them then to select the Shakespearean originals their sisters like most and, “carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear,” read it aloud.William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, and was baptised on 26 April 1564. In their Preface, the Lambs also indicate that their adaptation might be especially useful for girls, whom they assume must wait until they are older to read Shakespeare in the original. The Lambs write that they hope their Tales will stimulate an appetite for Shakespeare in children, which children may gratify more fully as they mature: the Tales offer “little foretastes of the great pleasure which awaits them in their elder years.” The prose versions are also far shorter than the Shakespearean originals, and the plots and dialogue are therefore stripped down.

Their retellings make substantial alterations, however, in framing Shakespeare’s plots with narrative explanation and moral interpretation. The Lambs’ adaptations include many direct quotations from Shakespeare, incorporated into dialogue in the tales or into narrative description.

Lamb shakespeare