William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare's Backstory

Stratford

William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564; the date of his birth is not recorded.¹ His father, John, was a glove-maker who became an alderman and then the town’s bailiff, and his mother, Mary Arden, came from a prominent local family.¹ He probably attended Stratford’s grammar school, where the teaching centered on Latin classics, and likely left at about 15.¹ In late 1582, at 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26; their daughter Susanna was baptized in May 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith in February 1585.¹

The lost years and London

Nothing is known for certain of his life from about 1585 to 1592: how he earned a living, when he went to London or how he came into the theater.¹ By 1592 he was established there as an actor and playwright, mocked by a rival as an upstart “Shake-scene.”¹ His narrative poem Venus and Adonis was published in 1593, followed by The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, the year the first quarto editions of his plays appeared.¹⁶² He became a partner in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company renamed the King’s Men in 1603.¹

Family and fortune

His son, Hamnet, died at 11 and was buried on August 11, 1596; the cause is not known.¹ The same year a coat of arms was granted to his father, and in 1597 Shakespeare bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford.¹ In 1613 he bought the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London for £140, his only London property; he had rented it out by 1616, and whether he ever lived there is unclear.³

Death and the First Folio

Shakespeare signed his will on March 25, 1616, and died in Stratford on April 23, 1616; the cause is not known.¹ He is buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.⁸ At his death only about half of his plays had been printed, in small single-play editions.² In 1623 his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell compiled Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, now called the First Folio, with 36 plays, 18 of them printed for the first time.⁴⁶ The Two Noble Kinsmen was printed separately in 1634, with John Fletcher named on the title page as co-author.⁶

Authorship

Since at least the nineteenth century some people have argued that someone else wrote his works, among them Delia Bacon, who promoted Francis Bacon, and later supporters of the Earl of Oxford.⁷⁹ The academic consensus is that Shakespeare wrote them; the evidence includes his name in more than forty official documents and dozens of literary references from his lifetime, and Ben Jonson’s tribute in the First Folio.⁹

Hamlet

At a glance