William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England to Mary Arden and John Shakespeare. He was the third of eight children. He went to a local grammar school, where his studies included Latin and Greek (Debnam).

At the age of eighteen he married Anne Hathaway who was eight years older than he. Their marriage was hurried because Anne was already pregnant (The Tragedies, 16). Shakespeare was the father of three children, two daughters and one son, Hamnet. At this time, Shakespeare was twenty-one, and the way he supported his family is unknown. In August of 1596, Hamnet died at the age of eleven (Shakespeare's History).

Stories say that Shakespeare began his career by holding horses outside the theaters. More reliable information indicates that he acted in plays, many of his own. From acting Shakespeare progressed to writing plays both for the theater and for court performances (The Tragedies, 17).

Shakespeare didn't attend college, so in order to broaden his education, he studied the ways of a gentleman and read widely. He looked to Cambridge

-educated playwright Christopher Marlowe, as a mentor. Marlowe was the same age as Shakespeare, but who preceded him in skillfully combining drama with poetry. In many plays throughout his career, Shakespeare paid tribute to Marlowe, though ultimately he eclipsed Marlowe as a dramatist (The Tragedies, 17).

Charles Haines praises Romeo and Juliet in his book Immortals of Literature, William Shakespeare and His Plays. He reminds us of the fact that Shakespeare was a poet, and that he had a poet's knowledge of words and a playwright's understanding of what the audience wants and combined this gave him a sort of sixth sense of combining poetry with drama. Haines declares:

Romeo and Juliet, which was Shakespeare's first tragedy, was first printed in 1597. Upon this first printing it is described as 'An excellent conceited tragedy' that had 'been often (with great applause) played publicly'. At this time the play was already well known, in Italian, French, and English. Shakespeare owes most to Arthur Brooke's long poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1592) (The Complete Works, 335). He also may have looked and studied other versions of the play before writing his own version of Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare is the greatest playwright the world has ever known. The thirty-seven plays he wrote more than 400 years ago are the most popular on Earth. They are performed more often than those of any other playwright. He also wrote sonnets, a kind of poem. Writing sonnets was thought to be much more important than writing plays in Shakespeare's day (Debnam).

It is obviously true that the plot depends on seemingly random occurrences. For example: in Act 1, Capulet entrusts the party invitations to a messenger who is unable to read; the messenger therefore consults a passer-by, who just happens to be Romeo; Romeo thus learns of the festivities, and decides to attend them in order to see Rosaline; and thus he chances to encounter Juliet. In Act 3, Romeo seeks to part the combatants in the street-fight, and the unintended result is that Mercutio, impeded by Romeo's arm, is mortally stabbed by Tybalt. Above all, there is the absurd delay of Friar Laurence's letter to Romeo: 'absurd' not only because the somewhat farcical obtrudes itself at a crucial point but also because the playwright's arrangement of events here seems uncharacteristically maladroit. Laurence entrusts his letter to Friar John ( a new character introduced inelegantly late in the play), and hapless John is trapped for a while in a house at Padua because there has been an outbreak of plague - an outbreak of which there has been no mention previously. The chance event seems rather clumsily contrived. Again, if Friar Laurence had arrived only a few minutes later, and if Juliet had awakened only a minute sooner, the disaster might have been averted. Hence the painful quality of the plotting in Act 5: we think, 'If only, if only...So near and yet so far' (40).

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