Shakespeare Road

If Chaucer is regarded as the Father of English literature there can be little doubt that William Shakespeare is its most famous son.

It is therefore appropriate that the two longest roads in the post-war Honicknowle estate which contains so many streets with literary references are named after the two most significant figures in English literature. William Shakespeare was born over two hundred years after Chaucer and is accredited with having produced the finest plays and richest poetry and dramatic prose known to our language - certainly he is the most widely quoted individual writer in the world.

A successful and popular actor and dramatist in his own lifetime he is thought to have gone to London at the age of twenty six, in 1590. That same year he is said to have written his first plays - the three parts of Henry VI. Nine years and eighteen plays later he became a partner in the Globe Theatre and nine years after that, a partner in the Blackfriars theatre. In 1613 he retired to his native Stratford-on-Avon where he died three years later at the age of fifty-two.