William Shakespeare shows in 1599

Answer 1

We cannot be absolutely sure of when Shakespeare wrote any of his plays, because he did not keep a diary. If he had done so, we could say, "In his diary for June 30, 1594, he wrote that he had finished Romeo and Juliet and was starting on a new play called The Taming of the Shrew." Unfortunately we only have some record of when the plays were first performed or published, and so we know that the plays were written before then. Also, in 1598 Francis Meres made a list of Shakespeare's plays. If a play is not on that list, it was written (or actually performed) afterward. The rest of the dating game is about guessing whether current events are being alluded to, or whether the style is more like the things Shakespeare was writing in 1596 or those in 1604. It's all pretty much guesswork.

Here are some of the plays Shakespeare might have written in 1594: Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, King John, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Obviously he didn't write one-fifth of his lifetime production of plays in just one year, so a bunch of those plays weren't written in 1594. We just don't know which ones.

Answer 2

Between 1594 when the Lord Chamberlain's Men formed and 1599 when the company moved into the Globe Playhouse, the company played in Burbage's Theater and, possibly, also in the Curtain and the Swan. He wrote his history plays during this period, and Romeo and Juliet, probably also Midsummer Night's Dream.

Answer 3

Shakespeare wrote all of his history plays except Henry VIII in the 1590s. He also wrote the tragedies Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado about Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor. As well his two long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were written in the early 1590s and we assume he started writing sonnets then.

Because we are not sure about the dating of certain plays, there are a number which were possibly written sometime between 1599 and 1601, say. These might also have been written in the sixteenth century.

Answer 4

Some very cool stuff. He was able (possibly with money he had earned from his poem Venus and Adonis the year before) to buy his way into a partnership in a newly-formed theatre company, The Lord Chamberlain's Men. He published the sequel to Venus, The Rape of Lucrece. He saw the first publications of his plays, although they didn't have his name on the title-page. He wrote some new plays, but we cannot be sure which ones. Because plague was still a problem in London, the newly-formed company joined with the Admiral's men performing probably at the Newington Butts theatre which was out of the plague zone. Henslowe's diary says between June '94 and May '95 they performed 36 plays including Titus Andronicus and possibly Taming of the Shrew (which in that case would have been one of the newly-written plays).

Answer 5

You mean, what Shakespeare plays were written in 1599? Well, we cannot be absolutely sure, but Julius Caesar and Henry V are good possibilities. Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night were also written at about that time. Of course he could not have written all five plays in the same year, but he probably wrote two or three of them.

Answer 6

In 1594, Shakespeare joined the acting group Lord Chamberlain's Men. It lead actor was Richard Burbage, who later had the Blackfriars Theater built.

Answer 7

By that time, he was definitely part of the theatre community in London, both as an actor and as a playwright.

Answer 8

he was a teacher on P.E.