About Arlene Schulman Expertise I have loved Shakespeare all my life, and as a Stage Director and Actor for over twenty-five years I have had the opportunity to study his work in intimate detail. I would be happy to share my knowledge of his plays. I can also help with acting Shakespeare, working with blank verse, character development, script analysis and interpretation. I don`t have as much knowledge in the area of his sonnets, but I can help to understand their meaning and language. I also have some knowledge of his life and of the Globe theatre where he performed his plays, as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company and his birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, and can point you in the direction of some wonderful websites on the subjects as well.
Experience
Organizations SSDC - associate member The Shakespeare Institute (MA Candidate - "Shakespeare & Theatre)
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas
The Shakespeare Association of America
Question What was his major themes and did his life affect his writing? how did it affect it?
Answer Hi Maria,
I wish I could answer your questions more effectively than I can, but your questions make that difficult.
If you had asked about one specific play, I might be able to address specific themes, but you seem to be asking about his works as a whole. Shakespeare didn't have "major themes" that he wrote about. In his 37/8 plays, 154 sonnets and several longer poems Shakespeare addressed almost every theme there is - love, passion, hate, politics, jealousy, madness, prejudice, revenge, ambition, betrayal, murder, greed, lust, witchcraft, the supernatural, conspiracies, the crown, succession, war, death, father and son, father and daughter, mother and son, and much more. Each play has its own themes, but his work is so extensive that trying to assign "major themes" to his work as a whole is pretty much impossible except to say that he consistently explores human relationships and the human condition.
As for whether his life affected his writing and, if so, how, that's another question that we really can't answer with any specificity. The fact is that we know very little about Shakespeare's life other than a few basic facts - his date of baptism (April 26, 1564 leading us to speculate that he was born on April 23), his parents (John Shakespeare and Mary Arden), where he lived and grew up (Stratford-upon-Avon, UK), his marriage to Anne Hathaway, the birth of his children (Susanna, Judith and Hamnet), his death (April 23, 1616), and some we have learned from a few extant legal documents such has homes he bought, some places he lived in London, his being a shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain's Company and of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres and a few other specifics. We can speculate about many things based on what we know of life in Elizabethan England, the theatre during that time, and some minor references in correspondence of those time, as well as the contents of his plays and poems. But since Shakespeare himself left us no letters, diaries, or personal papers of any kind, we have no way of knowing what is personal life was like at all. We know nothing of how he felt growing up, when he started writing, who his friends were, what his schooling was like (other than that he attended grammar school, for which there are no records but which we assume since he was the "mayor's" son and all young men attended grammar school at that time), or what other aspects of his life might have affected his writing.
We know that author's own lives always affect their writing, but we can only speculate on what those influences were for Shakespeare. We can guess, based on what we do know of his life and what we find in his plays. He often wrote of flora and fauna that would have been found in the area around Stratford-upon-Avon. He often referred to aspects of the glove trade (his father's profession) and the related butcher's and leather trade. In "The Merry Wives of Windsor" he included a delightful scene between a schoolboy and teacher that most likely was reminiscent of his early schooling. He wrote of areas all around the world and people of varying levels of society - attesting to his own experiences in the eclectic world of London and his own apparently vast reading (he is thought to have spent much time in the London book stalls and publishers). Other than that we can only guess.
