William Shakespeare (c.

23[a] April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[b] was an English

playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the
English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[3][4][5] He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant
works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three 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.[6] Shakespeare remains arguably the most
influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied
and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised 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 ("sharer") of a playing company called
the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of
King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he
appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records
of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation
about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs
and even certain fringe theories[7] as to whether the works attributed to him were
written by others.[8][9][10]

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.[11][12] His
early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the
best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608,
among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the
finest works in English.[3][4][5] In the last phase of his life, he wrote
tragicomedies (also known as romances) such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest,
and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and

accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell,
two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text
known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic
works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben
Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous
epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".[13]

Life
Main article: Life of William Shakespeare
Early life

John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-

upon-Avon
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover
(glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the
daughter of an affluent landowning family.[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon,
where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown but is
traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.[1] This date, which can be
traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers
because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.[15][16] He was the third of
eight children, and the eldest surviving son.[17]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that
Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[18][19]
[20] a free school chartered in 1553,[21] 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,[22][23] and the school would have provided an intensive education in
grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[24]

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.[25] 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,[26][27] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth
to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[28] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter
Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[29]
Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[30]

Shakespeare's coat of arms, from the 1602 book The book of coates and creasts.
Promptuarium armorum. It features spears as a pun on the family name.[c]
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.[31]
Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
[32] 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.[33][34] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical
career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[35] John Aubrey reported
that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[36] Some 20th-century scholars
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.[37][38] Little evidence substantiates such stories other
than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the
Lancashire area.[39][40]

London and theatrical career

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.[41] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be
attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit from
that year:

... 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.[42]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,[42][43] 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").[44] 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".[42][45]

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.[46][47][48] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays
were performed at The Theatre, in Shoreditch, 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.[49] 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.[50]

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, 139–142[51]

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,[52] 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.[53]

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.[54][55][56] 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).[57]
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.[46] 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 one cannot
know for certain which roles he played.[58] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote
that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.[59] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition
that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.[60] Later traditions maintain
that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[61][62]
though scholars doubt the sources of that information.[63]

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.[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his
company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[64][66] 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 women's wigs and other headgear.[67][68]

Later years and death

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel
Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death".[69]
[70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the
sharers' petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease
of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men
players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.".[71] However, it
is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.[72]
[73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks
of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February
1610),[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was
uncommon at that time.[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years
1611–1614.[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court
case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[76][77] In
March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;[78] and from
November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him
after 1613.[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John
Fletcher,[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. He
retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of
Henry VIII on 29 June.[80]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.[d] He died within a month of
signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in
"perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a
century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook:
"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too
hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",[83][84] not an impossible
scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow
authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that
thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."[85][e]

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and is

buried
He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician,
John Hall, in 1607,[86] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months
before Shakespeare's death.[87] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on
25 March 1616; the following day, Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found
guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, both of whom had died
during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance,
which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.
[87]

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter
Susanna[88] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of
her body".[89] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.
[90][91] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without
children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.[92][93] Shakespeare's will
scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his
estate automatically.[f] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second
best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[95][96][97] Some scholars
see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best
bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[98]

Shakespeare's grave, next to those of Anne Shakespeare, his wife, and Thomas Nash,
the husband of his granddaughter
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his
death.[99][100] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes
a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of
the church in 2008:[101]

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[102][g]

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north
wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to
Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[103] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of
the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[104] Shakespeare has been
commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral
monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.[105][106]

Plays
Main articles: Shakespeare's plays, William Shakespeare's collaborations, and
Shakespeare bibliography

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as
critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.[107]

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of
Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama.
Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however,[108][109] and studies
of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest
period.[110][108] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[111] dramatise
the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a
justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[112] The early plays were
influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and
Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of
Seneca.[113][114][115] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but
no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it has an identical
plot but different wording as another play with a similar name.[116][117] Like The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[118][119]
[120] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man
sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.[121]

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double
plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic
atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.[122] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a
witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.[123] Shakespeare's
next comedy, the equally romantic The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of
the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views
but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.[124][125] The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,[126] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the
lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great
comedies.[127] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse,
Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV,
Part 1 and 2, and Henry V. Henry IV features Falstaff, rogue, wit and friend of
Prince Hal. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly
between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative
variety of his mature work.[128][129][130] This period begins and ends with two
tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged
adolescence, love, and death;[131][132] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind
of drama.[133][134] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius
Caesar, "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary
events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse
each other".[135]
Textual sources

Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin
Droeshout.
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the
King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays.
It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.[182] The others had
already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded
twice to make four leaves.[183] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved
these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious
copies".[184]

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as "bad quartos" because of
their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been
reconstructed from memory.[183][184][185] Where several versions of a play survive,
each differs from the others. The differences may stem from copying or printing
errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.
[186][187] In some cases, for example, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello,
Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In
the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the
1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare
prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.[188]
William Shakespeare (c. 23[a] April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[b] was an English
playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the
English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.[3][4][5] He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant
works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three 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.[6] Shakespeare remains arguably the most
influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied
and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised 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 ("sharer") of a playing company called
the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of
King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he
appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records
of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation
about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs
and even certain fringe theories[7] as to whether the works attributed to him were
written by others.[8][9][10]

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.[11][12] His
early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the
best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608,
among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the
finest works in English.[3][4][5] In the last phase of his life, he wrote
tragicomedies (also known as romances) such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest,
and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and

accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell,
two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text
known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic
works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben
Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous
epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".[13]

Life
Main article: Life of William Shakespeare
Early life

John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-

upon-Avon
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover
(glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the
daughter of an affluent landowning family.[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon,
where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown but is
traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.[1] This date, which can be
traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers
because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.[15][16] He was the third of
eight children, and the eldest surviving son.[17]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that
Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[18][19]
[20] a free school chartered in 1553,[21] 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,[22][23] and the school would have provided an intensive education in
grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[24]

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.[25] 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,[26][27] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth
to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[28] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter
Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[29]
Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[30]

Shakespeare's coat of arms, from the 1602 book The book of coates and creasts.
Promptuarium armorum. It features spears as a pun on the family name.[c]
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.[31]
Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
[32] 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.[33][34] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical
career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[35] John Aubrey reported
that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[36] Some 20th-century scholars
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.[37][38] Little evidence substantiates such stories other
than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the
Lancashire area.[39][40]

London and theatrical career

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.[41] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be
attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit from
that year:

... 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.[42]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,[42][43] 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").[44] 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".[42][45]

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.[46][47][48] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays
were performed at The Theatre, in Shoreditch, 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.[49] 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.[50]

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, 139–142[51]

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,[52] 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.[53]

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.[54][55][56] 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).[57]
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.[46] 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 one cannot
know for certain which roles he played.[58] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote
that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.[59] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition
that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.[60] Later traditions maintain
that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[61][62]
though scholars doubt the sources of that information.[63]

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.[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his
company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[64][66] 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 women's wigs and other headgear.[67][68]

Later years and death

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel
Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death".[69]
[70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the
sharers' petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease
of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men
players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.".[71] However, it
is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.[72]
[73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks
of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February
1610),[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was
uncommon at that time.[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years
1611–1614.[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court
case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[76][77] In
March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;[78] and from
November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him
after 1613.[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John
Fletcher,[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. He
retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of
Henry VIII on 29 June.[80]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.[d] He died within a month of
signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in
"perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a
century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook:
"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too
hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",[83][84] not an impossible
scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow
authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that
thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."[85][e]

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and is

buried
He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician,
John Hall, in 1607,[86] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months
before Shakespeare's death.[87] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on
25 March 1616; the following day, Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found
guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, both of whom had died
during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance,
which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.
[87]

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter
Susanna[88] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of
her body".[89] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.
[90][91] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without
children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.[92][93] Shakespeare's will
scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his
estate automatically.[f] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second
best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[95][96][97] Some scholars
see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best
bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[98]

Shakespeare's grave, next to those of Anne Shakespeare, his wife, and Thomas Nash,
the husband of his granddaughter
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his
death.[99][100] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes
a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of
the church in 2008:[101]

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[102][g]

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north
wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to
Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[103] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of
the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[104] Shakespeare has been
commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral
monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.[105][106]

Plays
Main articles: Shakespeare's plays, William Shakespeare's collaborations, and
Shakespeare bibliography

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as
critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.[107]

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of
Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama.
Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however,[108][109] and studies
of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest
period.[110][108] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[111] dramatise
the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a
justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[112] The early plays were
influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and
Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of
Seneca.[113][114][115] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but
no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it has an identical
plot but different wording as another play with a similar name.[116][117] Like The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[118][119]
[120] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man
sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.[121]

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double
plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic
atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.[122] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a
witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.[123] Shakespeare's
next comedy, the equally romantic The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of
the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views
but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.[124][125] The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,[126] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the
lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great
comedies.[127] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse,
Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV,
Part 1 and 2, and Henry V. Henry IV features Falstaff, rogue, wit and friend of
Prince Hal. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly
between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative
variety of his mature work.[128][129][130] This period begins and ends with two
tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged
adolescence, love, and death;[131][132] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind
of drama.[133][134] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius
Caesar, "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary
events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse
each other".[135]

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–
1785.
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure
for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of
his best known tragedies.[136][137] Many critics believe that Shakespeare's
tragedies represent the peak of his art. Hamlet has probably been analysed more
than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which
begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".[138] Unlike the introverted
Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, Othello and Lear are undone by hasty errors
of judgement.[139] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal
errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.[140]
In Othello, Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the
innocent wife who loves him.[141][142] In King Lear, the old king commits the
tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the
torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest
daughter, Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play...offers
neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".[143]
[144][145] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,
[146] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder
the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn.
[147] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic
structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain
some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful
tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.[148][149][150] Eliot wrote,
"Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from
the whole British Museum."[151]

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed

three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, as well as
the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these
four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with
reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.[152] Some
commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of
life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the
day.[153][154][155] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry
VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[156]

Classification
Further information: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays

The Plays of William Shakespeare, a painting containing scenes and characters from
several plays of Shakespeare; by Sir John Gilbert, c. 1849
Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed
according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies.[157]
Two plays not included in the First Folio,[13] The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles,
Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars
agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both.[158]
[159] No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as
romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term
is often used.[160][161] In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays"
to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and
Cressida, and Hamlet.[162] "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be
strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may, therefore, borrow a
convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as
Shakespeare's problem plays."[163] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to
other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.
[164][165][166]

Performances
Main article: Shakespeare in performance
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title
page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted
by three different troupes.[167] After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare's plays
were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch,
north of the Thames.[168] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry
IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest ... and
you scarce shall have a room".[169] When the company found themselves in dispute
with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct
the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south
bank of the Thames at Southwark.[170][171] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with
Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-
1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.
[170][172][173]

The reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames in London
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered
a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records
are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between
1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of
Venice.[62] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the
winter and the Globe during the summer.[174] The indoor setting, combined with the
Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more
elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder
and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on
their knees."[175][176]

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William
Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the
first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet,
Othello, and King Lear.[177] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant
Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other
characters.[178][179] He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles
such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.[180] In 1613, Sir
Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary
between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while
most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from
the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they
cannot be conflated without confusion.[188]William Shakespeare (c. 23[a] April 1564
– 23 April 1616)[b] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely
regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent
dramatist.[3][4][5] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of
Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist
of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three 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.[6]
Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language,
and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Shakespeare was born and raised 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 ("sharer") of a playing company called
the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of
King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he
appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records
of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation
about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs
and even certain fringe theories[7] as to whether the works attributed to him were
written by others.[8][9][10]

Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.[11][12] His
early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the
best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608,
among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the
finest works in English.[3][4][5] In the last phase of his life, he wrote
tragicomedies (also known as romances) such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest,
and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and

accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell,
two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text
known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic
works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben
Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, who hailed Shakespeare with the now famous
epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".[13]

Life
Main article: Life of William Shakespeare
Early life

John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-

upon-Avon
Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover
(glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the
daughter of an affluent landowning family.[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon,
where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown but is
traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.[1] This date, which can be
traced to William Oldys and George Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers
because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.[15][16] He was the third of
eight children, and the eldest surviving son.[17]

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that
Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[18][19]
[20] a free school chartered in 1553,[21] 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,[22][23] and the school would have provided an intensive education in
grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[24]

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.[25] 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,[26][27] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth
to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[28] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter
Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[29]
Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[30]

Shakespeare's coat of arms, from the 1602 book The book of coates and creasts.
Promptuarium armorum. It features spears as a pun on the family name.[c]
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.[31]
Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".
[32] 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.[33][34] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical
career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[35] John Aubrey reported
that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[36] Some 20th-century scholars
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.[37][38] Little evidence substantiates such stories other
than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the
Lancashire area.[39][40]

London and theatrical career

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.[41] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be
attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit from
that year:

... 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.[42]

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,[42][43] 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").[44] 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".[42][45]

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.[46][47][48] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays
were performed at The Theatre, in Shoreditch, 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.[49] 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.[50]

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, 139–142[51]

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,[52] 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.[53]

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.[54][55][56] 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).[57]
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.[46] 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 one cannot
know for certain which roles he played.[58] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote
that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.[59] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition
that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.[60] Later traditions maintain
that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[61][62]
though scholars doubt the sources of that information.[63]

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.[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his
company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[64][66] 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 women's wigs and other headgear.[67][68]

Later years and death

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel
Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death".[69]
[70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the
sharers' petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease
of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men
players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.".[71] However, it
is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.[72]
[73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks
of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February
1610),[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was
uncommon at that time.[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years
1611–1614.[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court
case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[76][77] In
March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;[78] and from
November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.
[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him
after 1613.[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John
Fletcher,[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. He
retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of
Henry VIII on 29 June.[80]

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.[d] He died within a month of
signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in
"perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a
century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook:
"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too
hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",[83][84] not an impossible
scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow
authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that
thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."[85][e]

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and is

buried
He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician,
John Hall, in 1607,[86] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months
before Shakespeare's death.[87] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on
25 March 1616; the following day, Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found
guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, both of whom had died
during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance,
which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.
[87]

Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter
Susanna[88] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of
her body".[89] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.
[90][91] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without
children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.[92][93] Shakespeare's will
scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his
estate automatically.[f] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second
best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[95][96][97] Some scholars
see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best
bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[98]

Shakespeare's grave, next to those of Anne Shakespeare, his wife, and Thomas Nash,
the husband of his granddaughter
Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his
death.[99][100] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes
a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of
the church in 2008:[101]

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.
Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[102][g]

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north
wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to
Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[103] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of
the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[104] Shakespeare has been
commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral
monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.[105][106]

Plays
Main articles: Shakespeare's plays, William Shakespeare's collaborations, and
Shakespeare bibliography

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist

Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, as
critics agree Shakespeare did, mostly early and late in his career.[107]

The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of
Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama.
Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however,[108][109] and studies
of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest
period.[110][108] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[111] dramatise
the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a
justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[112] The early plays were
influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and
Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of
Seneca.[113][114][115] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but
no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it has an identical
plot but different wording as another play with a similar name.[116][117] Like The
Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[118][119]
[120] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man
sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.[121]

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786.
Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double
plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic
atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.[122] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a
witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.[123] Shakespeare's
next comedy, the equally romantic The Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of
the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects dominant Elizabethan views
but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.[124][125] The wit and wordplay of
Much Ado About Nothing,[126] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the
lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great
comedies.[127] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse,
Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV,
Part 1 and 2, and Henry V. Henry IV features Falstaff, rogue, wit and friend of
Prince Hal. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly
between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative
variety of his mature work.[128][129][130] This period begins and ends with two
tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged
adolescence, love, and death;[131][132] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas
North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind
of drama.[133][134] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius
Caesar, "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary
events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse
each other".[135]

Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–
1785.
In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure
for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of
his best known tragedies.[136][137] Many critics believe that Shakespeare's
tragedies represent the peak of his art. Hamlet has probably been analysed more
than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which
begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".[138] Unlike the introverted
Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, Othello and Lear are undone by hasty errors
of judgement.[139] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal
errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.[140]
In Othello, Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the
innocent wife who loves him.[141][142] In King Lear, the old king commits the
tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the
torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest
daughter, Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play...offers
neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".[143]
[144][145] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,
[146] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder
the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn.
[147] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic
structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain
some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful
tragedies by the poet and critic T. S. Eliot.[148][149][150] Eliot wrote,
"Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from
the whole British Museum."[151]

In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed

three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, as well as
the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these
four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with
reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.[152] Some
commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of
life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the
day.[153][154][155] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry
VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[156]

Classification
Further information: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays

The Plays of William Shakespeare, a painting containing scenes and characters from
several plays of Shakespeare; by Sir John Gilbert, c. 1849
Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed
according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies.[157]
Two plays not included in the First Folio,[13] The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles,
Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars
agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both.[158]
[159] No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio.

In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as
romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term
is often used.[160][161] In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays"
to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and
Cressida, and Hamlet.[162] "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be
strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may, therefore, borrow a
convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as
Shakespeare's problem plays."[163] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to
other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.
[164][165][166]

Performances
Main article: Shakespeare in performance
It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title
page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted
by three different troupes.[167] After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare's plays
were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch,
north of the Thames.[168] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry
IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest ... and
you scarce shall have a room".[169] When the company found themselves in dispute
with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct
the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south
bank of the Thames at Southwark.[170][171] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with
Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-
1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.
[170][172][173]

The reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames in London
After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered
a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records
are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between
1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of
Venice.[62] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the
winter and the Globe during the summer.[174] The indoor setting, combined with the
Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more
elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder
and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on
their knees."[175][176]

The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William
Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the
first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet,
Othello, and King Lear.[177] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant
Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other
characters.[178][179] He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles
such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.[180] In 1613, Sir
Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary
circumstances of pomp and ceremony".[181] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to
the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which
pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.[181]

Textual sources

Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin
Droeshout.
In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the
King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays.
It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.[182] The others had
already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded
twice to make four leaves.[183] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved
these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious
copies".[184]

Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as "bad quartos" because of
their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been
reconstructed from memory.[183][184][185] Where several versions of a play survive,
each differs from the others. The differences may stem from copying or printing
errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.
[186][187] In some cases, for example, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello,
Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In
the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the
1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare
prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.[188]