Shakespeare's life

Most biographical information about William Shakespeare's life and death derives from public instead of private documents: vital records, real estate and tax records, lawsuits, records of payments, and references to Shakespeare and his works in printed and hand-written texts. The bare historical record documents that Shakespeare was baptised 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in the Holy Trinity Church, at age 18 married Anne Hathaway with whom he had three children, was an actor, playwright and theatre entrepreneur in London, owned property in both Stratford and London, and died 23 April 1616 at the age of 52.

Because of his social status as a commoner, the low esteem in which his profession was held and the general disinterest of the time in the biographies of writers, few personal biographical facts about Shakespeare survive. Nevertheless, literally thousands of biographies have been and continue to be written in the absence of any personal papers, based on the 70 or so hard facts recorded about Shakespeare the man, most of which embellish or interpret the facts.

Early life
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town of around 1,500 residents about 100 mi northwest of London. The town was a centre for the slaughter, marketing, and distribution of sheep, as well as for hide tanning and wool trading. The date of his birth is unknown, but his baptismal record was dated April 26, 1564. This is the first official record of Shakespeare, as birth certificates were not issued at the time of Queen Elizabeth. Because baptisms were normally performed within a few days of birth it is highly likely that Shakespeare was born in April 1564, although the long-standing tradition that he was born on April 23 has no historical basis (baptisms at this time were not invariably performed exactly three days after birth as is sometimes claimed). Nevertheless, this date provides a convenient symmetry because Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616. It is also the Feast Day of Saint George, the patron saint of England, which might seem appropriate for England's greatest playwright.

He was the son of John Shakespeare, a successful glover and alderman from Snitterfield, and of Mary Arden, a daughter of the gentry. They married around 1557 and lived on Henley Street when Shakespeare was born in a house now known as Shakespeare's Birthplace. They had eight children: Joan (baptised 15 September 1558, died in infancy), Margaret (bap. 2 December 1562 – buried 30 April 1563), William, Gilbert (bap. 13 October 1566 – bur. 2 February 1612), Joan (bap. 15 April 1569 – bur. 4 November 1646), Anne (bap. 28 September 1571 – bur. 4 April 1579), Richard (bap. 11 March 1574 – bur. 4 February 1613) and Edmund (bap. 3 May 1580 – bur. London, 31 December 1607).

Shakespeare's father, prosperous at the time of William's birth, was prosecuted for unlicensed dealing in wool and later lost his position as an alderman. Some evidence pointed to possible Roman Catholic sympathies on both sides of the family.

Education
Although no attendance records for the period survive, Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the grammar curriculum was standardised by royal decree throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and the classics. Edward VI, the king honoured in the school's name, had in the mid-16th century diverted money from the dissolution of the monasteries to endow a network of grammar schools to "propagate good literature... throughout the kingdom", but the school had originally been set up by the Guild of the Holy Cross, a church institution in the town, early in the 15th century. It was further endowed by a Catholic chaplain in 1482. It was free to male children in Stratford and it is presumed that the young Shakespeare attended, although this cannot be confirmed because the school's records have not survived. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the grammar curriculum was standardised by royal decree throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature—"as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries" As a part of this education, the students were exposed to Latin plays that students performed to better understand the language. One of Shakespeare's earliest plays, The Comedy of Errors, bears similarity to Plautus's Menaechmi, which could well have been performed at the school. There is no evidence that he received a university education.

During the period when Shakespeare was likely to have been continuously living in Stratford according to records, playing companies made at least 13 visits to the town, including on two occasions when the players performed in front of town officials including his father, who as bailiff was required to license playing companies before they could perform.

Marriage
On 28 November 1582 at Temple Grafton near Stratford, the 18-year-old Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was 26. Two neighbours of Hathaway, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson, posted bond ensuring that no legal impediments existed to the union. The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste; their first daughter, Susanna, was born on 26 May, 1583, six months later.

Twin children, a son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet died in 1596, Susanna in 1649 and Judith in 1662.

Lost years
After the birth of the twins, save for being party to a law suit to recover part of his mother's estate which had been mortgaged and lost by default, Shakespeare left no historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatrical scene. Indeed, the seven-year period between 1585 (when his twin children were born) and 1592 (when Robert Greene called him an "upstart crow") is known as Shakespeare's "lost years" because no evidence has survived to show exactly where he was or why he left Stratford for London. Several theories have been put forth to account for his life during this time, and a number of stories are given by his earliest biographers, including that Shakespeare fled Stratford after he got in trouble for poaching deer from local squire Thomas Lucy, or that he wrote a scurrilous ballad about him. Shakespeare's first biographer Nicholas Rowe recorded both these tales, stating that he wrote the ballad after being prosecuted for poaching by Lucy. John Aubrey says that he worked as a country school teacher, and Rowe that he minded the horses of theatre patrons in London. There is no documentary evidence to support any of these stories and they all were recorded only after Shakespeare's death.

Schoolmaster tradition
The tradition that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster was begun by John Aubrey, who reported it in his Brief Lives (1681) on the authority of William Beeston, son of Christopher Beeston, who had acted with Shakespeare in Every Man in His Humour (1598) as a fellow member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. In 1985 E. A. J. Honigmann proposed that Shakespeare acted as a schoolmaster in Lancashire, on the evidence found in the 1581 will of a member of the Hoghton family, referring to plays and play-clothes and asking his kinsman Thomas Hesketh to take care of "...William Shakeshaft, now dwelling with me...". The supposed link was John Cottam, Shakespeare's reputed last schoolmaster, who was purported to have recommended the young man. "Shakeshaft" was, however, a common name in Lancashire at the time. A better documented, but still far from conclusive, link was established some twenty years later in Shakespeare's life: in the will of London goldsmith Thomas Savage, Shakespeare's trustee at the Globe Theatre, one of the beneficiaries was Hesketh's widow. Scope for further speculation is offered by records showing that Lord Strange's Men, a company of players linked with Shakespeare's early career in London, regularly performed in the area and would be well known to the Hoghtons and the Heskeths. This would provide a neat explanation of Shakespeare's arrival on the London theatre scene when the troupe returned to the city, but no evidence to support this notion has been found.

London and theatrical career
Most scholars believe that by 1592 Shakespeare was a playwright in London, and that he had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." (The italicized line parodies the phrase, "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" which Shakespeare wrote in Henry VI, part 3.)



By late 1594, Shakespeare was part-owner of a playing company, known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men — like others of the period, the company took its name from its aristocratic sponsor, in this case the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the King's Men, after the death of their previous sponsor. The works are written within the frame of reference of the career actor, rather than a member of the learned professions or from scholarly book-learning. The Shakespeare family had long sought armorial bearings and the status of gentleman. William's father John, a bailiff of Stratford with a wife of good birth, was eligible for a coat of arms and applied to the College of Heralds, but evidently his worsening financial status prevented him from obtaining it. The application was successfully renewed in 1596, most probably at the instigation of William himself as he was the more prosperous at the time. The motto "Non sanz droict" ("Not without right") was attached to the application, but it was not used on any armorial displays that have survived. The theme of social status and restoration runs deep through the plots of many of his plays, and at times Shakespeare seems to mock his own longing.

By 1596, Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and by 1598 he appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour written by Ben Jonson. He is also listed among the actors in Jonson's Sejanus: His Fall. Also by 1598, his name began to appear on the title pages of his plays, presumably as a selling point.

There is a tradition that Shakespeare, in addition to writing many of the plays his company enacted and concerned with business and financial details as part-owner of the company, continued to act in various parts, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V.

He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599. In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker (a maker of ornamental headdresses) in the northwest of London in 1604. Mountjoy's apprentice Stephen Belott wanted to marry Mountjoy's daughter. Shakespeare was enlisted as a go-between, to help negotiate the details of the dowry. On Shakespeare's assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Belott sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry. Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the circumstances. On this case see article 'Bellott v. Mountjoy'.

Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place.

Later years and death


Rowe was the first biographer to pass down the tradition that Shakespeare retired to Stratford some years before his death; but retirement from all work was uncommon at that time, and Shakespeare continued to visit London. In 1612 he was called as a witness in a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.

In the last few weeks of Shakespeare's life, the man who was to marry his younger daughter Judith — a tavern-keeper named Thomas Quiney — was charged in the local church court with "fornication". A woman named Margaret Wheeler had given birth to a child and claimed it was Quiney's; she and the child both died soon after. Quiney was thereafter disgraced, and Shakespeare revised his will to ensure that Judith's interest in his estate was protected from possible malfeasance on Quiney's part.

He died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52. He was married to Anne Hathaway until his death and was survived by two daughters, Susanna and Judith. His son Hamnet had died in 1596. Susanna married Dr John Hall, and his last surviving descendant was their daughter Elizabeth Hall. There are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today, but the diarist John Aubrey recalls in his Brief Lives that William Davenant, his godson, was "contented" to be believed Shakespeare's actual son. Davenant's mother was the wife of a vintner at the Crown Tavern in Oxford, on the road between London and Stratford, where Shakespeare would stay when travelling between his home and the capital. Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel not on account of his fame as a playwright but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440 (a considerable sum of money at the time). A monument on the wall nearest his grave, probably placed by his family, features a bust showing Shakespeare posed in the act of writing. Each year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing hand of the bust. He is believed to have written the epitaph on his tombstone.

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
 * To dig the dust enclosed here.
 * Blest be the man that spares these stones,
 * And cursed be he that moves my bones.''