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Show Happy Birthday Will William Shakespeare would have been 400 years old this April 23rd, a fact any schoolboy knows. But, did you know that Shakespeare originally became a playwright because he was considered just a "mediocre" actor? By the time he was 28, he had become England's leading dramatist, drama-tist, leaving us a legacy that includes "Romeo and Juliet" . . . "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" among the 152 sonnets and 45 plays he wrote. Today, four centuries later, scholars are still debating whether or not Shakespeare actually wrote those masterpieces. In celebration of the Bard's birthday, the April 24th issue of LIFE devotes a special section to Shakespeare. Featured are 10 pages of color paintings of the world of his time, plus an essay on "Hamlet" and what the play holds for modern man, and an absorbing roundup of the arguments argu-ments about who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. |
