"I think it is nobody all over the word who has never heard about the English drama. Because the names like William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or J. B. Shaw are so famous and they are important for our life too because they had sometime the same problems we have. And you read the books and you say: yes! He is right! This is a beauty of the English drama. It is timeless.
The biggest name of the English drama is William Shakespeare. Somebody says he was nothing in his time because there were better writers like Christopher Marlow who lived in the same time and was murdered. Some of the Shakespeare´s play could be his. But this is only a theory and the history doesn´t know words like maybe.
We can sort Shakespeare´s work in three parts. His earlier plays include histories, comedies and tragedies. For example, Richard III, Comedy of Errors or Romeo and Juliet are the most famous.
His climax works are mainly “problems plays” and the great tragedies. Everybody knows Hamlet, which is an artistic expression of the crisis of humanism and Renaissance optimism. Humanism and Renaissance thinking, that had offered so much hope, was facing failure and defeat. The ideals of human dignity and equality did not materialise – society was still corrupt and people were still evil. Well-know part is: To be, or not to be: that is the question. I think this sentence is important to understanding the age when Shakespeare lived.
Shakespeare´s later works consist of romances and “reconciliation” plays based on utopian visions, fairy-tale fantasy, and miraculous solutions of conflicts, for example The Winter´s Tale. There is literary beauty in these works which had crystallized from the chaos and conflict of the times.
But in fact Shakespeare is a mystery for us. Because he didn´t graduated the grammar school and then he wrote about stories form antiquity. How could he know it? Was he so brilliant? Many people say it is not possible that some pure man without education could do it. And so are many theories about Shakespeare. Who was he? Was it one man or a group of poets? And one really wild theory says that all plays and sonnets wrote the Queen Elisabeth I. Because she loved theatres and culture and poems in her era was called Elisabeth´s drama. There were specials round theatres with balconies and the actors were played in the middle.
At the beginning Shakespeare was pure. But he earned a lot and in the end he had his own theatre called Globe. It was situated near the river Thames and it all burned down on 29th June 1613. A second Globe Theatre was built more or less on the same place by June 1614. It stays to this day and there is still a group of actors which play only Shakespeare´s plays."

Gymnázium Sokolov, Sokolov