Although Shakespeare is most famous for his playwriting now, in Shakespeare’s time, poetry was much more well-regarded. Shakespeare wrote two long-form poems, and over ten years he wrote 154 sonnets. Sonnets are poems that have 14 lines, and a set rhyme structure.
No one is exactly sure how many plays Shakespeare wrote, but 37 have been decided by scholars as having been written, or co-written, by him.
Shakespeare’s plays can be divided into the following categories: tragedy (ends unhappily, nearly everyone dies); comedy (usually has a love-story and a happy ending); History (tells the story of real people).
Shakespeare used a huge vocabulary when he wrote, with over 25,000 different words in his poems and plays. 2000 of those words are recorded as being used by Shakespeare for the first time, so perhaps he made them up! A lot of those words are words which we still use today.
For more information about Shakespeare visit the library catalogue here. If you want to read something he wrote, or stories based on Shakespeare’s plays, then have a look at this list.
yeah shakespear rocks!