A garden of poems（The First Period）

    shakespeare, more perhaps than any other writer, made full use of the great resources of the english language. most of us use about five thousand words in our normal employment of english; shakespeare in his works used about twenty-five thousand! there is probably no better way for a foreigner (or an englishman) to appreciate the richness and variety of the english language than by studying the various ways in which shakespeare used it. such a study is well worth the effort (it is not, of course, recommended to beginners), even though some aspects of english usage, and the meaning of many words, have changed since shakespeare's day.
      it is paradoxical that we should know comparatively little about the life of the greatest english author. we know that shakespeare was born in 1564 in stratford-on-avon and he died there in 1616. he almost certainly attended the grammar school in the town, but of this we cannot be sure. we know he was married there in 1582 to anne hathaway and that he had three children, a boy and two girls. we know that he spent much of his life in london writing his masterpieces. but this is almost all that we do know.
      however, what is important about shakespeare's life is not its incidental details but his products, the plays and the poems. for many years scholars have been trying to add a few facts about shakespeare's life to the small number we already possess and for an equally long time critics have been theorising about the plays. sometimes, indeed, it seems that the poetry of shakespeare will disappear beneath the great mass of comment that has been written upon it.
      fortunately this is not likely to happen. shakespeare's poetry and shakespeare's people ( macbeth, othello, hamlet, falstaff and the others) have long delighted not just the english but lovers of literature everywhere, and will continue to do so after the scholars and commentators and all their works have been forgotten.
2. about shakespeare's plays
     william shakespeare ( 1564 ～ 1616), english dramatist and poet, is regarded by many people as the greatest english writer of all time. he wrote his first play when he was twenty-six years old. within about twenty- two years of this writing career, he gave to the world nearly forty plays, including comedies, histories and tragedies. of all his plays,“hamlet” is perhaps the best known. his plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small theatre, are today per- formed more often and in more countries than ever before. many of the words first used by him, and many of his expressions have become everyday usage in english speech and writing.