Shakespeare's Life

By today’s standards of biography, we really know very little about William Shakespeare. By Renaissance standards, however, we know a great deal, given that he was a commoner and a theater artist. And when compared to his fellow playwrights of the period, such as Christopher Marlowe or John Webster, the broad outlines of his life are, at least, discernible.

Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564 and his date of birth is conventionally given as three days earlier, on April 23, the same day he died fifty-two years later. He grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon in a family of eight children where his father was a glover and a tradesman and held local offices in town. Though it is not known if Shakespeare attended school, due to his father’s position in the town, it is probable that he attended the King’s New School in Stratford. There he would have been taught by an Oxford graduate and would have learned Latin and Greek.

When Shakespeare was eighteen years old, in 1582, he married Anne Hathaway who was eight years his senior. Six months later Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585. Although Shakespeare went to London sometime in the late 1580s, his family remained in Stratford throughout his career.

By the 1590s Shakespeare had established himself in London as a promising young playwright. We know little about the earliest years of his career, but we do know that by 1592 the plays 1, 2, 3 Henry VI, Richard III and Titus Andronicus had been performed. Plague closed the London theaters from the summer of 1592 through the spring of 1594 and during this time Shakespeare wrote two narrative poems and, most likely, began composing the Sonnets.

As a member and shareholder in the acting company called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare would have had many duties beyond writing plays for the company; for example, we know that he acted in two plays written by his contemporary, Ben Jonson. In 1598, the company tore down the playhouse where they performed, called The Theatre, and took the timbers to the south bank of the city where they built a new theater, the Globe.

Shakespeare was a financially successful and popular playwright in London, particularly after the theater-loving James I came to the throne in 1603 and took The Lord Chamberlain’s Men under royal patronage (after which they were known as The King’s Men). Shakespeare used his earnings to buy the “second best house” in Stratford for his family, in addition to adjoining properties. He retired there in 1613 and died in 1616. His wife, Anne, survived him by seven years, dying in 1623, the year Shakespeare’s plays were first published in a single volume. The range of his works is truly extraordinary, comprising not only his early history plays—a genre he seems to have invented—but his comedies (As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and his well-known later tragedies (King Lear, Othello and Macbeth) as well. His final work of sole authorship was The Tempest in 1611, after which he co-authored two plays with John Fletcher in 1613: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsman.

William and Anne Shakespeare are buried side by side in the Holy Trinity church in Stratford. His gravestone reads:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed hear.
Blessed be the man that spares
these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

However, a more fitting epitaph is the one that was given by his friend, competitor, and fellow playwright, Ben Jonson. Jonson wrote the following tribute in the introduction to the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays:

Thou are a monument, without at tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book
     doth live...
He was not of an age, but for all time.