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BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE           William Shakespeare (1564-1616). English poet and playwright –  Shakespeare is widely considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 38 plays and 154 sonnets.           William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on 23rd April 1564.           His father William was a successful local businessman, and his mother Mary was the daughter of a landowner. Relatively prosperous, it is likely the family paid for Williams education, although there is no evidence he attended university.           In 1582 William, aged only 18, married an older woman named Anne Hathaway. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet and Juliet. Their only son Hamnet died aged just 11.           It seemed Shakespeare didn’t mind being absent from his family – he only returned home during Lent when all the theatres were closed. It is thought that during the 1590s he wrote the majority of his sonnets.           William Shakespea

A  ballad  is a type of poem that is sometimes set to music. Ballads have a long history and are found in many cultures. The ballad actually began as a folk song and continues today in popular music. Many love songs today can be considered ballads. A typical ballad consists of stanzas that contain a  quatrain , or four poetic lines. The  meter  or rhythm of each line is usually  iambic , which means it has one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. In ballads, there are usually eight or six syllables in a line. Like any poem, some ballads follow this form and some don't, but almost all ballads are  narrative , which means they tell a story. Because the ballad was originally set to music, some ballads have a  refrain , or a repeated chorus, just like a song does. Similarly, the rhyme scheme is often ABAB because of the musical quality of this rhyme pattern. While ballads have always been popular, it was during the  Romantic movement  of poetry in the l

IDIOMS Idioms are a type of figurative language, which means they are not always meant to be taken literally. Idioms express a particular sentiment, but they do not literally mean what the individual words themselves mean. EXAMPLE OF IDIOM  IN A SENTENCE:  The grass is always greener on the other side. This idiom does not literally mean that the “other side” will always have greener grass. There may not even be a literal “other side” to the subject at hand—or grass for that matter. EXAMPLES OF IDIOMS:  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Origin: The saying has existed for centuries in various forms; main creditor: Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, 1878 Meaning: What looks beautiful to one person may not look beautiful to another. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Origin: Samuel Butler poem, 1663 Meaning: Do not count on something before it has come to be. No crying over spilt milk. Origin: unknown Meaning: Do not be upset about something th