2 - How Did Shakespeare Write a Play?

Summary

Shakespeare was both a non-dramatic poet and a playwright. It’s not too difficult to understand how he became a poet. The King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon provided its pupils with a primarily literary education and Shakespeare may have started writing poems when he was still at school. The two sonnets printed last in the collection published in 1609 are translations of a poem originally written by the fifth-century ad Greek poet Marianus Scolasticus and may have been originally written as schoolboy exercises. The sonnet numbered 153 appears to be a revision of No. 154, as if perhaps the schoolmaster had made criticisms of the boy’s first shot at it. And it is generally agreed that Sonnet 145, which ends with a pun on the name of Anne Hathaway – ‘“I hate” from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying, “not you”’ – is a teenage effusion, a wooing poem written, if not while Shakespeare was still at school, at any rate not long after he left.