The Life and Times of William Shakespeare: Macbeth

The golden age in English history was one of the most legendary periods, which drove English wide-reaching. English has currently been the universal language by numerous factor, such as the dominance of its’ origin country, the uses of the Bible, and so forth. Despite of that various wars had happened and it was almost disappear, it was passed down and became widespread. However, the golden age contains the escalating of England, a renowned poet, William Shakespeare, and his work, Macbeth, which all will be described in this essay.

In Elizabethan era, 1558-1603, Queen Elizabeth made it a turning point for English history. It is perceived as the golden age which England had economic expansion, the beginning of its’ domination, and English Renaissance. English voyages for exploration were to search for profitable trading routes (Sommerville, n.d). In various areas, they achieved it with a great initiative by eliminating the middlemen who derived considerably high profits from spices trade (Zins, 1972). This courageous attempt, however, reaped prosperous rewards by decreasing the income of Spain in the same time (Matley, n.d.). With its’ superiority in seamanship and shipbuilding, English also abused by pillaging, piracy, running contraband, and from the slave trade. While English and Spain started to be adversarial, Queen Elizabeth encouraged her people to defend Protestant English from Catholic Spain. In 1585, within the reign of Phillip II, Spain began to invade England with the purposes to depose the Queen then set his daughter, the Infanta Isabella, on the throne, and make English citizens turn, again, to Roman Catholic (Thomas, n.d.). The navies from Spain were sent out in May 1588. Yet, Elizabeth and her troops were waiting and prepared for the war. Having a better shipbuilding and war tactics, English notably defeated the Great Armada of Spain (Sommerville, n.d.). This manifested the rising of English domination of the ocean. The combination of this supremacy and economic expansion aboard influenced a vast progress in English culture. Renaissance literature prospered in certain fields such as English poetry, arts and science, music and the whole field of artistic movement (Zins, 1972). The word “Renaissance” was used to describe this cultural movement due to the sense of the rebirth of a flourishing literature. Before the time, England had once experienced it when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing. Nonetheless, various composed plays including William Shakespeare’s had demolished England’s old style of plays. Also, with the support by Elizabeth, those plays were traditionally made in the theaters (Elizabethan, n.d.). This culture fashion socially enabled poets to create works about humanistic in the same way as religious contents (Shakespearean, n.d.). The dramatic grew in literacy and academic study during the late of 16th century, when was also brought in into the instructive system. In this period, England was well organized and had an effective government, with a reputation of English Renaissance by eminent poets such as Shakespeare.

An important figure representing English language is a playwright named William Shakespeare. Growing up in Stratford-Upon-Avon, he began to learn reading and writing in the petty school since he was four (Haley, n.d.). At ten years old, he had learnt Latin language including grammar, texts, speech writing, and also Latin history. He left for London at some point for more theatrical world and started to become recognized by the early 1590s. His first log narrative poem, available in 1593 when he was a published poet, was Venus and Adonis (Werstinen, 2005). Following by Lucrece, the writings were in the time of plague, thus, the theaters were closed. Nevertheless, when the theaters were reopened, Shakespeare had written several comedies, English history plays, and tragedies, which were the three categories of his plays. Besides, ha was a main member of the King’s Men, a performing corporation that he was a prime actor, a shareholder, and a dramatist. Hence, his plays were frequently performed in the company’s theaters. The plays originally presented only male actors; the female roles were performed by boys, and most of his works usually include the weight of whereabouts he lived such as metropolitan London, where it was rapidly expanded, attracting thousands of new populace a year, and rural England: Stratford. All Shakespeare’s history works were written in the reign of Elizabeth, except Henry VIII; the last play written before he died in 1616 (Hattaway, 2002). Seven years after, in 1623, some of his social group published his collected 36 plays as the First Folio (Haley, n.d.). It is the very source containing eighteen of his plays, counting Macbeth, which could have been lost. The significance of William Shakespeare’s works on the modern life and culture is incredibly prominent. The words he invented and, especially, the well-known speeches in his writings still exist and are used nowadays, for instance, “To be, or not to be” from Hamlet (Werstinen, 2005). This is unsurprising because Shakespeare plays an essential role not only in people’ leisure, but also the academic curriculum as mentioned in the previous paragraph. Teachers nowadays seem to commit to the bard’s plays and assert the relevance to use these plays in the teaching program (Colarusso, 2010). From my own experience,