Some
famous taurus personalities born under the sign of the Taurus...
William Shakespeare
The English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare,
a famous taurus personality, was the author of the most widely
admired and influential body of literature by any individual
in the history of Western civilization. His work comprises
36 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 narrative poems. Knowledge of
Shakespeare is derived from two sources: his works and those
remains of legal and church records and contemporary allusions
through which scholars can trace the external facts of his
life. Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire, on April 26, 1564. He is buried in the same
church, where a memorial records his death on April 23, 1616.
In 1623 his colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell created
another memorial by publishing Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies,
Histories, and Tragedies, the collection of his plays now
known as the First Folio.
Robert Browning
Ranks with Tennyson, and a famous taurus personality, as one
of the greatest Victorian poets. Yet his optimistic sentiments
and innovative style provoked mixed reactions among 19th-century
readers and remain controversial even today. Born in London
on May 7, 1812, Browning derived from his parents a deep,
if unconventional, religious sense and a love of books, music,
and painting. His first published poem, Pauline (1833), which
was influenced by Shelley, was mainly a series of musings
on poetic sensibility. The volume attracted little notice,
but it did lead John Stuart Mill to censure Browning's self-absorption,
an attack that may have prompted Browning's turn toward the
dramatic monologue. Popular success long eluded him. Paracelsus
(1835) was largely ignored; Strafford, a play, had a brief
run at Covent Garden in 1837; Sordello (1840), a verse tale
of medieval Italy, quickly became a byword for willful obscurity
among the small circle of critics who read it. Yet Browning
was steadily improving his art, and a series of eight pamphlets,
known collectively as Bells and Pomegranates (1841-46), included
several of the poems on which his later reputation was to
rest, including "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy
of the Spanish Cloister," and "The Bishop Orders
His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church."
Karl Marx
Born on May 5, 1818, died March 14, 1883, he was a German
economist, philosopher, and revolutionist whose writings form
the basis of the body of ideas known as Marxism. With the
aid of Friedrich Engels he produced much of the theory of
modern Socialism and Communism. Marx's father, Heinrich, was
a Jewish lawyer who had converted his family to Christianity
partly in order to preserve his job in the Prussian state.
Karl himself was baptized in the Evangelical church. As a
student at the University of Berlin, young Marx was strongly
influenced by the philosophy of GWF Hegel and by a radical
group called Young Hegelians, who attempted to apply Hegelian
ideas to the movement against organized religion and the Prussian
autocracy. In 1841, Marx received a doctorate in philosophy.
Sigmund Freud
Born on May 6, 1856, a famous taurus personality, died September
23, 1939, Sigmund Freud is the creator of Pschoanalysis, was
the first person to scientifically explore the human unconscious
mind; his ideas profoundly influenced the shape of modern
culture by altering man's view of himself. Freud was born
in Freiberg, Moravia (now Pribor, in the Czech Republic),
the oldest child of his father's second wife. Before Freud
was 4 years of age, the family moved first to Leipzig, Germany,
and then to Vienna, where Freud remained for most of his life.
Freud's father, Jakob, a struggling Jewish merchant, encouraged
his intellectually precocious son and passed on to him a tradition
of skeptical and independent thinking. Jakob's passive acceptance
of anti-Semitic insults, however, troubled the young Freud:
his feelings toward his father were ambivalent. Freud shared
his mother's attention with seven younger brothers and sisters,
but he nevertheless maintained a close attachment to her.
Amalie Freud had high hopes for her oldest son--and they were
eventually realized.
Elizabeth II
Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories and Head of
the Commonwealth, as her proper title puts it, celebrated
the 40th anniversary of her accession in 1992. Her ancestry
dates back to William I, the Norman who seized the throne
of England in 1066. Born on April 21, a famous taurus personality,
1926, Elizabeth became heir to the throne when her father
became king as George VI upon the abdication of his brother
Edward VIII in December 1936. On November 20, 1947, she married
Philip Mountbatten, duke of Edinburgh, a distant cousin whose
mother was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. When George
died on February 6, 1952, Elizabeth came to the throne at
the age of 25.
|
