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William Shakespeare
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SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
FAMOUS PERSONALITIES OF THE WORLD
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare, the greatest and most famous of English writers, and probably the greatest playwright who has ever lived, was bom on the 23d of April, 1564, in Stratford-on-Avon.
In spite of his fame we know very little about his life. At the age of six he was sent to school, but had to leave it at the age of 13. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker, and when he fell into debt, William had to help him in the trade.
Just what William did between his fourteenth and eighteenth year isn't known. At the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. Ann was eight years older than her husband and the marriage wasn't a happy one.
When Shakespeare was twenty-one, he went to London. We don't know why he left Stratford-on-Avon.
There is a story that Shakespeare's first job in London was holding rich men's horses at the theatre door. But nobody can be sure that this story is true.
Later, Shakespeare became an actor and a member of a very successful acting company. It's highly probable that The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet and some other plays by Shakespeare were performed for the first time on this stage.
Very soon, however, the actors were told that they could no longer use the land that their theatre was built on and the company had nowhere else to perform. There is a story that in the dead of night the whole acting troop took down their theatre, timber by timber, brick by brick. They carried it across the river and rebuilt it. The new theatre was called the Globe.
Shakespeare's Globe was rather different from modern theatres. The plays were performed in the open air and the audience got wet if it rained. There was no scenery, very few props, and the only lighting was the daylight that came from the open roof above. Women in those days weren't allowed to act in public and all the parts (even Juliet!) were played by men. Much of the audience stood to watch the performance and moved around, talking with each other and throwing fruit at the stage if they didn't like something.
Shakespeare wrote 37 plays: 10 tragedies (such as Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth), 17 comedies (such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing), 10 historical plays (such as Henry IV, Richard III.). He also left 7 books of poems.
Most of Shakespeare's plays were not published in his lifetime. So some of them may have been lost in the fire when the Globe burnt down in 1613.
Shakespeare spent the last years of his life at Stratford, where he died, ironically, on the same date as his birthday, the 23d of April, 1616. He was buried in the church of Stratford. A monument was erected to the memory of the great playwright in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. In 1997, Shakespeare's Globe was restored.
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Agatha Christie is known all over the world as the Queen of Crime. She wrote 78 crime novels, 19 plays and 6 romantic novels under the name of Mary Westmacott. Her books have been translated into 103 foreign languages.
She is the third best-selling author in the world (after Shakespeare and the Bible). Many of her novels and short stories have been filmed. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, is now the longest-running play in history.
Agatha Christie was born at Torquay, Devonshire. She was educated at home and took singing lessons in Paris. She began writing at the end of the First World War. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. That was the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, who became one of the most popular private detectives since Sherlock Holmes. This little Belgian with the egg-shaped head and the passion for order amazes everyone by his powerful intellect and his brilliant solutions to the most complicated crimes.
Agatha Christie became generally recognised in 1926, after the publishing of her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's still considered her masterpiece.
When Agatha Cristie got tired of Hercule Poirot she invented Miss Marple, a deceptively mild old lady with her own method of investigation.
Her last Poirot book, Curtain, appeared shortly before her death, and her last Miss Marple story, Sleeping Murder, and her autobiography were published after her death.
Agatha Christie's success with millions of readers lies in her ability to combine clever plots with excellent character drawing, and a keen sense of humour with great powers of observation. Her plots always mislead the reader and keep him in suspense. He cannot guess who the criminal is. Fortunately, evil is always conquered in her novels.
Agatha Christie's language is simple and good and it's pleasant to read her books in the original.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ernest Hemingway is one of the great 20th century American writers. His incredible career, and the legend which developed around his impressive personality, was that of a man of action, a devil-may-care adventurer, a brave war correspondent, an amateur boxer, a big-game hunter and deep-sea fisherman, the victim of three car accidents and two plane crashes, a man of four wives and many loves, but above all a brilliant writer of stories and novels.
Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a doctor who initiated the boy into the outdoor life of hunting, camping and fishing. In high school Hemingway played football and wrote for the school newspaper.
In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, Hemingway left home and schooling to become a young reporter for the Kansas City Star. He wanted to enlist for the war but was rejected because of an eye injury from football. Finally he managed to go to Europe as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He joined the Italian army and was seriously wounded.
His war experience and adventurous life provided the background for his many short stories and novels. He achieved success with A Farewell to Arms, the story of a love affair between an American lieutenant and an English nurse during the First World War.
Hemingway actively supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and wrote another successful novel of war, love and death. It was For Whom the Bell Tolls.
During the Second World War Hemingway was a war correspondent first in China and then in Europe. He fought in France, and helped to liberate Paris.
In his later years Hemingway lived mostly in Cuba where his passion for deep-sea fishing provided the background for The Old Man and the Sea. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Hemingway is famous for his lean style, which has been widely imitated but never matched. His heroes show courage in the face of danger, a characteristic which Hemingway admired greatly and which he prided himself on possessing.
Unwilling to live with the inevitable physical aging, Hemingway committed suicide, as his father had done before him under similar circumstances.
ROBERT BURNS
Robert Burns was born in 1759 and was the eldest of 7 children, growing up in a life of poverty and hard farm work. His father made sure that his sons were well educated and employed a private tutor to teach them English, French, Latin, and even Philosophy. It was the kind of education that rich children of the day might have had, certainly not the son of a poor farmer.
When Robert wasn't having lessons he would help his father on the farm. In his spare time he started to write poetry. In 1784 Robert's father died leaving Robert with his mother, and the rest of the family, to support. The farm was a failure, the crops wouldn't grow and to make matters worse, Robert had fallen in love with Jean Anna.
They wanted to marry but Jean's father disapproved. Burns was a poor farmer with little money and not good enough for his daughter.
Burns was fed up and planned to emigrate from Scotland to Jamaica and in order to make some money for the voyage he decided to print some of his poems. When Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published, Burns became famous overnight and editions appeared all over the world.
Burns didn't just write poems, he was Scotland's first collector of folk songs. In 1787 he set off on a journey around Scotland, jotting down fragments of old songs like Auld Lang Syne, often rewriting them into the versions we know today.
In 1788 Burns and Jean Arma married and went to live at Ellisland Farm. There he wrote his famous Тат О 'Shanter — a tale of a farmer who, after a night of drinking, stumbles across some dancing witches on his way home.
Burns and his family left Ellisland and moved to Dumfreys in 1793. My love is Like a Red Red Rose was written soon after.
By 1796 Bums had become dangerously ill and on the 21st of July he died, aged just 37 years old. Scotland had lost one of its best loved poets and a national hero.
Bums dreamt of immortality and wanted to be the poet of Scotland. His dream came true and today his work is loved by millions all over the world.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain is one of America's most famous authors. He wrote many books, IV'I including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain's own life was interesting enough to be a book.
Twain was bom in 1835 in the state of Missouri, near the Mississippi River. He came from a poor family. His father died when he was twelve, so he had to leave school. While he was still a boy, he worked as a riverboat pilot. He steered boats up and down the long Mississippi River.
The Civil War, which started in 1861, made travelling on the Mississippi impossible.
Twain then went west to Nevada. There he worked on a newspaper. In 1864 he went to California to find gold. Twain did not have much luck as a gold miner. He left California to travel in Europe. Twain wrote a book about his trips around Europe.
But the most important influence on Twain and his books was the Mississippi River. When Twain finally settled down, he lived in a house with a porch that looked like the deck of a riverboat. Huckleberry Finn, Twain's greatest book, is about the adventures of a boy on the Mississippi River. Another of Twain's books is called Life on the Mississippi.
In fact, even the name Mark Twain comes from the Mississippi. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhome Clemens. On the river Samuel Clemens often heard the boatmen shout " Mark twain! " This meant the water was twelve feet deep. When Samuel Clemens began to write he chose for himself the name Mark Twain.