Explore "William Shakespeare" by S.L. Bensusan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The poet is credited with the authorship of some thirty-seven plays, though modern criticism has endeavoured to show that he took but a small part in the making of a few of these, and of the whole thirty-seven little more than a dozen were published during his life. It is supposed that his first play was the comedy "Love's Labour's Lost," in which he would appear to have gone to his own brain for the plot. Here we find a certain broad outlook upon contemporary life, with many a passing reference to matters of topical interest, while vivid recollections of life in Warwickshire among slow-witted rustics account for some of the humorous episodes. Historians can trace many of the references in the play, which is supposed to have been written in 1591, five years after the author left Stratford, revised in 1597, and published a year later. Cuthbert Burbie, who, like Shakespeare's earliest London friend, Richard Field, was a member of the Stationers' Company, was the publisher, and the printer was one William White of "Cow Lane near Holborn Conduit."
"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" came next, adapted from a Spanish source, and not published until the author was dead.