Reading and vocabulary
1 Work in pairs.Read the passage and decide what William Shakespeare wrote.
plays poems stories
plays; poems
The life of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a famous English writer of plays and poems.He wrote about thirty-eight plays, 154 short poems and a few long poems in his life.Two of his famous plays are Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford, England. Like many people 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s parents didn’t learn to read or write.At school he liked plays, so he decided to be an actor when he finished school at fourteen.He married in 1582 and had three children.
Shakespeare went to London and joined a theatre company in about 1592.He became a successful actor and began to write plays.Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed his works very much.
In 1599 the company built the Globe Theatre on the River Thames in London.You can visit the theatre today, but it isn’t the same building.There was a fire in the old theatre.They built it again in 1614 and in the 1990s.
William Shakespeare died at the age of fiftytwo.He was rich and successful.You can still see his plays in English and in many other languages.He’s famous around the world.