William Shakespeare (/ekspr/;[1] 26 April 1564 (baptised) 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an
English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the
world's pre-eminent dramatist.[2] He is often called England's national poet, and the "Bard of Avon". [3][nb
2]
His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays,[nb 3] 154 sonnets, two
long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been
translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other
playwright.[4]
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he
married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.
Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-
owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears
to have retired to Stratford around 1613, at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of
Shakespeare's private life survive, which has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters
as his physical appearance, sexuality, and religious beliefs and whether the works attributed to him
were written by others.[5]
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. [6][nb 4] His early plays were
primarily comedies and histories, and these are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these
genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,
and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. [2] In his last phase, he
wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623,
however, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published a
more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of his dramatic works that
included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. [7] It was prefaced with a poem by Ben
Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time". [7]
In the 20th and 21st centuries, his works have been repeatedly adapted and rediscovered by new
movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular, and are constantly studied,
performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally
from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.[8] He was born
in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains unknown, but
is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.[9] This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-
century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to biographers, because Shakespeare died on 23 April
1616.[10]He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son. [11]
Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was
probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[12] a free school chartered in 1553, [13] about a
quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but
grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,
[14]
and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon
Latin classical authors.[15]
John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon
At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of
Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway's neighbours
posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. [16] The ceremony may have been
arranged in some haste, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once
instead of the usual three times, [17] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a
daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[18] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two
years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. [19] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and
was buried 11 August 1596.[20]
After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the
London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a
law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October
1589.[21] Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years". [22] Biographers
attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe,
Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to
escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also
supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. [23] Another 18th-
century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in
London.[24]John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. [25] Some 20th-century
scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander
Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.
[26]
Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte
was a common name in the Lancashire area.[27]
London and theatrical career
"All the world's a stage,
and all the men and women merely players:
they have their exits and their entrances;
and one man in his time plays many parts ..."
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 13942[28]
It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of
performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592. [29] By then, he was
sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of
Wit:
... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's
hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an
absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. [30]
Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words, [31] but most agree that Greene was accusing
Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself (the so-called "university wits").[32] The italicised phrase
parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3,
along with the pun "Shake-scene", clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene's target. As used here, Johannes
Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the
more common "universal genius". Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's work
in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just
before Greene's remarks.[34] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord
Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the
leading playing company in London.[35] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was
awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.[36]
In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River
Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor
theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association
with the company made him a wealthy man, [37] and in 1597 he bought the second-largest house in
Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.[38]
Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name
had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.[39]Shakespeare continued to act in his
own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him
on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).[40] The absence of his
name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career
was nearing its end.[41] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in
all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which
roles he played.[42] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. [43] In 1709,
Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. [44] Later traditions
maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[45]though scholars doubt
the sources of that information.[46]
Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the year
before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St.
Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. [47][48] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599,
the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. [47][49] By 1604, he had moved north of the
river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a
French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear. [50]
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.]
Poems
In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative
poems on erotic themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances
of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.
[134]
Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,[135] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result
from uncontrolled lust.[136] Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A
third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive
suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare
wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects. [137]The
Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the
legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144
appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission. [138]
