How would knowing Shakespeare's (or any author's) biography help understand his (their) work better?



Portrait of William Shakespeare. Image from Wikipedia.


 Knowing a fair amount about Shakespeare’s life would help in understanding his plays better, and could even give you an entirely different perspective to them. In addition to that, you might even learn about the culture and the ways of society at that time.

Happenings in Shakespeare’s life might have caused him to put them in his stories. Shakespeare bringing back people from the dead could mean that he had lost someone that he cared for (possibly his son, Hamnet) that he wanted to bring back, and since he couldn't, he let his imagination run free, and make the impossible only seemingly impossible in his world. So, Shakespeare bringing back someone from the dead in his plays could signify an important turning point in the storyline.


Shakespeare might have been intrigued or amused by the Roman story, Menaechmi, which could have led him to write a very similar story that he called The Comedy of Errors. The two stories are so similar to each other that if stories were so similar today, the work might even be branded as plagiarism. However, if Shakespeare were writing The Comedy of Errors as fan-fiction and the play came into the hands of the public unintentionally, it would change our perspectives on the work. We may never know the reason for him writing a story to similar to Menaechmi, as what we know about his personal life is quite limited.


A person’s upbringing and experiences impact their thoughts and views on life around them. So knowing a person’s biography could help us understand whether the views expressed are biased or real accounts of events or even people. (For example, an aristocrat living during the time of the French Revolution might have a pretty biased account of the uprisings.)

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