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The man known to history as William Shakespeare was born between the 21st and 23rd of April 1564 on Henley Street in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in the English West Midlands. His father was John Shakespeare, son of Richard Shakespeare and William’s mother was Mary Arden, born in 1536. Richard Shakespeare was a humble farmer, who had moved to Snitterfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in 1529. He had leased land during his lifetime from Robert Arden,
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a powerful local landlord who had eight children including Mary Arden. Several years before Richard’s death in 1561, the ties between the Shakespeares and the Ardens were cemented by the marriage of John, who had established himself as a renowned glover and whittawer, a specialist in light-coloured leather, to Mary Arden, Robert’s daughter, at Aston Cantlow, a parish church at Wilmcote. This marriage took place sometime before the birth of their first
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daughter Joan in September 1558. John’s marriage to Mary came with significant financial benefits, as upon the demise of Robert Arden, his daughter inherited a large estate in Wilmcote called the Asbies, which enabled John to start buying up properties around Stratford-upon-Avon such as the house and garden on Henley Street in 1556 where William was born eight years later. At the same time as expanding his property portfolio, John was also forging a reputation as an important
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local dignitary in Stratford-upon-Avon, becoming an alderman, the equivalent of a city councillor in modern times, in 1565, and then a bailiff of the town in 1568 and finally in 1571, assuming the role of chief alderman and deputy bailiff. These were offices of such high repute that in the same year he requested a coat of arms for his family to signify his meteoric rise in civil society. However, it was Mary Arden’s father’s status as a significant landowner in Warwickshire,
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which allowed her husband John to advance within the societal hierarchy of Stratford-upon-Avon and the surrounding region after they married in the 1550s. She was named as an executor of her father’s will in November 1556, which implied that unlike her husband she was literate and well-educated by the standards of the sixteenth century. As such, it has been speculated that Mary was a considerable influence on young William’s budding literary sense when he was
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growing up in the 1570s. William was far from her and John’s only child. Their first daughter was a girl called Joan who was born in 1558, but she died in infancy, as did their second child, Margaret, when she was just five months old in April 1563. Consequently William was the oldest surviving child of theirs. Five further children followed, Gilbert in 1566, Joan in 1569, Anne in 1571, Richard in 1574 and Edmund in 1580. With the exception of Anne, who passed away in
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the spring of 1579 before her eighth birthday, all of William’s younger siblings would live into adulthood. Very little is known about Shakespeare’s relationship with his brothers, apart from his possible attendance at their funerals much later in his life, which he may have also paid for. There is also some indication that he was fond of his sister Joan, who continued to live at the family home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, long after William inherited
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it as the eldest son of the family. She was also mentioned as a beneficiary of his will in 1616. In order to understand William Shakespeare’s work, one must take full account of the world he was living in. The Renaissance, through which the texts of ancient Greece and Rome were rediscovered and used to reform European society in all manner of ways, from the visual arts and architecture to the way governments functioned and education curriculums were structured,
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had started in Italy in the fourteenth century, finding its fullest expression in the city of Florence. From there it travelled north to countries like France and England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, driven by individuals like Thomas More who composed his famous political treatise Utopia in England in the mid-1510s. The English Renaissance would peak during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I between 1558 and 1603. That period saw Edmund
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Spenser compose The Faerie Queen and Philip Sidney his Arcadia, while the new studia humanitatis educational curriculum saw individuals across England being taught Greek and Roman classical texts and how to write in the fine Italianate script that had been developed in Florence and Rome two centuries earlier. In time the English Renaissance would see its greatest achievements on the Elizabethan stage, as playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare
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himself composed the finest works of the day. Shakespeare’s youth had as its backdrop, this changing cultural world along with the increased opportunities for children of families of a modest background to acquire a good education. As a young boy of five years old, Shakespeare was first enlisted into ‘petty school’ where he began to learn to read and write. When he was seven, he was transferred to King’s New School, the local grammar school where as part of his education,
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he was first exposed to many Roman and Greek authors such as the rhetorician and political commentator Cicero, the greatest poet of the Roman Empire Virgil and Roman historians such as Livy. We might, however, speculate that the foremost influence on him throughout his education were the great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euripides and the Roman comic and tragic playwrights Plautus, Terence and Seneca. Shakespeare’s love for the stage was further
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enhanced by the many traveling theatre groups of ‘players’, as they were termed, which visited Stratford in his youth, such as Leicester’s Men in 1572 and 1576, Warwick’s Men in 1574, Worcester’s Men in 1574 and 1581, Lord Strange’s Men in 1578, and Lord Berkeley’s Men in 1580 and 1582, all of whom usually performed in front of local notables such as John Shakespeare, who may have brought William along with him to watch their shows. William might have also attended
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the 1575 entertainments organized by the earl of Leicester for the royal household at nearby Kenilworth, or the mystery plays and Hocktide performances that were often put on in Coventry, as well as the numerous shows put together by members of amateur dramatics groups in Stratford. While William’s love of the theatre was growing, his family’s fortunes were declining. In the 1570s John Shakespeare’s business fortunes took a turn for the worse. In response he
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turned to smuggling wool, the most significant commodity in the English economy at the time, while also engaging in usury, the practice of lending money for high interest rates, which was illegal for Christians across Europe in medieval and early modern times. He found himself in legal difficulty as a result of this activity and by the end of the decade, John’s finances were extremely precarious. In 1578 he was forced to mortgage many of his wife’s properties,
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losing nearly all of the estate they had in 1580, after failing to repay lenders. This would deprive William of much of his inheritance, as John’s stature in the community plummeted, beginning in 1576 when he stopped attending council meetings and culminating in 1586 when he was stripped of his aldermen title entirely. By 1592, John Shakespeare was named as a frequent absentee of the local Protestant parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon, and although
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some claim that this illustrated that John was a secret follower of the Catholic faith in largely Protestant England, as they have also insisted for his son William, it is also possible that the social stigma which surrounded him by then, saw him avoiding public gatherings. As tumultuous as this period was for the Shakespeares, it might have been the making of William. Had his father still possessed a large estate to pass on to his eldest son in Warwickshire, William might have
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been satisfied to settle down as a comfortable member of the gentry in Stratford-upon-Avon, but his family’s declining fortunes forced him to carve out his own place in the world. At fifteen years of age in 1579 Shakespeare left grammar school. The years that followed are shadowy ones when it comes to evaluating his life, a common problem for the bard’s life story. Despite his status as the greatest playwright of all time and the foremost figure of the English
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Renaissance, there is a surprising dearth of sources available for studying significant chunks of Shakespeare’s life, in contrast to figures like Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, the latter of whom was a member of a leading political family from Kent and who moved in government circles, generating a lot of correspondence and historical records concerning him, which have survived down to the present day. The same cannot be said of Shakespeare and so the
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chronology of his life has to be stitched together from fragmentary details. As we will see later, it is this lack of source material that has led to speculation for the last four centuries, that Shakespeare did not write all of the plays which are usually attributed to him. Given the lack of information concerning his life, a number of theories have emerged concerning his further education and movements in the 1580s. Some have argued that he may have started performing in
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plays in the Midlands himself during these years, with John Aubrey, a seventeenth-century writer stating of Shakespeare that: “when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style, & make a speech”, a reference to the common dramatic trope in which the actor would pretend to butcher a calf onstage. Another line of thinking, places William Shakespeare as a schoolteacher in his early adult years, an argument based on a conversation that John Aubrey had with the son of one
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of Shakespeare’s business associates, in which he states that Shakespeare: “has been in his younger years a Schoolmaster in the Country.” This is a possibility at a time when an individual who was well educated could have become a tutor or teacher in a free-school for a time without specific qualifications for teaching. What is beyond doubt, though, is that Shakespeare must have continued to improve his writing abilities and read voraciously during these years, as so many of
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his works are based on his detailed understanding of English history and medieval literature. We do, however, stand on firmer ground when it comes to Shakespeare’s marriage. On the 27th of November 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of family friend, Richard Hathaway, who John Shakespeare had twice bailed out of debt and acted as surety for. Anne was 26 at the time, while William was just 18. She had possibly been working for John Shakespeare as a stitcher in
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his glove-making business. These facts, combined with Anne already being several months pregnant when they married, have led scholars to argue that this was a shotgun wedding, forced on the couple by their families to prevent the child being born out of wedlock, something which carried a major social stigma in the sixteenth century. While these details of their marriage are known, Anne is a curiously obscure figure for the most part, one whom people are generally keen to know
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more about in the interests of determining whether William’s love plays like Romeo and Juliet or his sonnets, were influenced by his relationship with her. She features in William’s will of 1616, but little is known about her besides, other than the details of their children together. Their daughter, with whom Anne was heavily pregnant on the day of their marriage in the winter of 1582, was born the following year and was christened Susanna. Twins followed two years later,
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a boy named Hamnet and a girl named Judith. Tragically Hamnet died in 1596 at 11 years of age from an outbreak of the bubonic plague in England, which even after the initial Black Death of the fourteenth century continued to ravage Europe periodically down to the eighteenth century. William and Anne’s wedding ceremony was somewhat unorthodox by the standards of Elizabethan England, a country which was gradually moving towards becoming uniformly Protestant
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at that time, although there was still a large minority of Roman Catholics across the country, particularly the further north one headed from London. The wedding was overseen by John Frith, a priest who was characterized as being, quote, “unsound in religion” in a 1586 assessment, and it was also unusually quick, the couple being pronounced as husband and wife after only a single reading of their marriage banns instead of the usual three. Despite the unusual circumstances,
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the marriage was confirmed the next day in a legal document which outlined a £40 surety was to be paid by Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, associates of the Hathaways, as Shakespeare was still technically a minor and needed the permission of his elders to become Anne’s husband. The peculiar circumstances surrounding the marriage have led many to speculate that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, a supposition which is supported by the fact that his mother’s
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family, the Ardens, were committed Catholics, leading to the supposition that, so too was John Shakespeare. However, the evidence remains tenuous and all that can be said for certain is that William seems to have conformed to the established Protestant church during his lifetime. Hardly anything is known concerning Shakespeare’s life and movements between the mid-1580s and 1592, a period of time which has consequently become known as his ‘lost years’. There are
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a few references to him in documents outlining his family’s business dealings in Warwickshire at this time, but little else. As a result, many writers have woven fanciful narratives concerning this period. This tendency was in evidence as early as the first years of the eighteenth century when the English dramatist and poet, Nicholas Rowe, writing in a preface to the 1709 folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, conjectured that William became embroiled in legal
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trouble during this period, specifically after being caught poaching deer on the Charlecote estate of Sir Thomas Lucy, a man whose coat of arms he would subsequently mock in later years, in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. Accounts like this cannot be entirely dismissed, as while there is no documentary evidence to support these versions of events today, it is possible that Rowe had seen records to this effect which are now lost, or that this
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story had been passed down orally over the hundred years since Shakespeare’s own time. Others claim that Shakespeare may have joined the ‘Queen’s Men’ in 1587 as a replacement for one of their stars, William Knell, who was killed in an altercation in Thame, Oxfordshire, that summer. The Queen’s Men had been formed in 1583 on the express command of Queen Elizabeth, a great lover of the theatre. They were a troupe of actors or players who were amongst the finest
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in the country and who were the most famed troupe of the 1580s, performing versions of Montemayor’s pastoral romance, Diana, which later became the basis for Shakespeare’s play The Two Gentlemen of Verona. They also played King Leir, the tale of an ancient King of Briton prior to the Roman invasion of the island, a work which was the foundation for Shakespeare’s own later play King Lear. The Queen’s Men also performed various productions concerning the reigns of King John,
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Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V, English monarchs of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who were the subjects of much of Shakespeare’s output in the 1590s. Given the close parallels between the plays the Queen’s Men were performing in the late 1580s and early 1590s and the later content of Shakespeare’s own plays, there is a strong argument in favour of him being associated with the troupe during his ‘lost years’.
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That Shakespeare had committed to working as an actor, poet and playwright by the early 1590s is further suggested by a well-known literary attack against him from 1592. This came from the critic Robert Greene who, writing in a periodical entitled ‘Greenes Groats - Worth of Witte’ in 1592, which was published after his death in September of that year, lambasted Shakespeare as, quote, “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped
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in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” The reference to him being “wrapped in a Player’s hide” suggests he was known to be an actor, while also trying to break into writing his own work, a development which saw Greene refer to him as an upstart. It was an insult that Shakespeare would never forget, and one that he would later reference in Henry VI, Part 3 when he has the character of the Duke
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of York verbally assail Queen Margaret with the line: “O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” Shakespeare’s illustrious career as a playwright began in the early 1590s with his three part King Henry VI, a trilogy of plays concerning the ruler of England for several decades in the middle of the fifteenth century whose mental instability led to the Wars of the Roses. These plays were inspired by Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, the story of a fourteenth-century
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ruler of Central Asia, Timur the Lane, a production which became a massive hit after its first performance in 1587. It paved the way for historically-based dramas in England in the 1590s, a genre that Shakespeare would champion even in his closing years when they were less fashionable, with Henry VIII being one of his last masterpieces. Shakespeare might have collaborated with Marlowe and another playwright named Thomas Nashe in writing the first part of
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Henry VI. These early works also established a practice he would continue with for years to come of using popular histories of the period as source material. Thus, for Henry VI he consulted Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York published in 1548 and Raphael Holinshed’s The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the first edition of which appeared in 1577 and which had been so popular that a revised and
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updated second edition came out in 1586 shortly before Shakespeare began his writing career. He would draw on Holinshed’s writings for many of his works, while he also used classical texts as inspiration, notably the Lives of the second century AD Greco-Roman historical biographer, Plutarch, for source material on plays like Julius Caesar. Elsewhere in his work he displayed his knowledge of the classical texts which the Renaissance had brought back
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into wide circulation, such as Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Henry VI was an unqualified success and Shakespeare next attempted to broaden his repertoire, resulting in the drafting of his earliest comedies and tragedies, namely The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus. These were written in a remarkably prolific spate of creativity lasting from the autumn of 1592 through to June
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1594 in which all theatre performances were banned in London because of a deadly plague outbreak, though The Taming of the Shrew was most likely already drafted by the time the plague hit. It was during this period of isolation that Shakespeare also finished Richard III, one of his longest plays and a radical portrayal of madness with a comical touch. It includes the famous scene where Richard is forced to confront the ghosts of those he has
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killed the night before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, during which military clash he was killed and lost his throne to Henry Tudor. Shakespeare’s prestige was now in the ascendancy and he had proved himself extremely adept at writing scenes with multiple characters, especially in the sections of Henry VI, Part 2 addressing Jack Cade, the leader of a rebellion against the crown in 1450, which was first performed in 1594. As a result, he was asked
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to write the crowd scenes for Sir Thomas More sometime between 1593 and 1594, an unpublished play originally authored by Anthony Munday and co-written by other distinguished playwrights of the time including Henry Chettle. Shakespeare has been identified as ‘Hand D’ on a manuscript of Sir Thomas More, the only known piece of a script in his handwriting. His work on Sir Thomas More highlights the collaborative nature of play composition in the late Elizabethan period.
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The near two year period between 1592 and 1594 during which the London theatres were closed also saw Shakespeare compose his first examples of Ovidian narrative poetry, most significantly Venus and Adonis in 1593, a heady mixture of comedy and eroticism which remains his first ever printed work and among his most popular, being republished fifteen times by 1636. The Rape of Lucrece was released in 1594, a dark and brutal narrative poem of rape and death. With the
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passing of the plague in June 1594, Shakespeare started writing plays exclusively for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an elite collective of some of the most talented actors of the kingdom who would debut many of his definitive plays, and a company that Shakespeare would also become a stakeholder in from Christmas 1594, sharing ownership with their best actor Richard Burbage and the troupe’s fool, William Kemp, an astute business move that would guarantee
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Shakespeare a regular income. It was also an unusual move, as Shakespeare’s decision to stick loyally to just one theatre organization for many years was very unconventional for the time.
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The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s opening play would be The Comedy of Errors, a parody of Menaechmi, a play by the Roman playwright Plautus which Shakespeare probably read as a schoolboy. The play was staged in December 1594 at Gray’s Inn, one of the training colleges in London or inns of court for England’s lawyers, followed by a multitude of other works throughout the next year including Love’s Labour’s Lost, its lost sequel Love’s Labour’s Won, Romeo and Juliet,
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Richard II and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His inspiration for these was mixed. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, was largely based on a poem by Arthur Brooke entitled The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. Richard II, which addresses the king of England of the late fourteenth century, was the first in his sequence about the House of Lancaster and its tumultuous rule over England between the 1370s and the 1460s. This was a massively prolific period
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for Shakespeare and in 1595 and 1596 he also found time to write King John, a commentary on kingship that delved into tragi-comedy, while the text of some of his earliest plays such as Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew were also published at this time. Between 1596 and 1598 Shakespeare continued to develop his repertoire. It was during these years that The Merchant of Venice was first staged, the tale of a Jewish money-lender named Shylock in the
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city of Venice, this is one of Shakespeare’s most famous works which includes also his most famous characters, in a play which defies categorisation, blending elements of comedy, drama as well as tragedy. This was also the time that Much Ado About Nothing, an exposé on the social pressures of marriage, first appeared, as well as plays on the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, Kings of England in the early fifteenth century. The latter
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contains one of the most well-known scenes from Shakespeare’s entire repertoire in which King Henry V prior to the Battle of Agincourt against the French addresses his troops as, quote, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” before urging them to charge.
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Henry IV is notable for a character called Sir John Oldcastle, Henry IV’s drinking buddy, who incidentally shared a name with an ancestor of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, the king’s chamberlain who had served from 1596 until his death in 1597, also named Oldcastle and who was a famous Protestant martyr. The family of William Brooke were so furious that their descendant had been referenced in such a highly politically charged play that they
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forced Shakespeare to change his name to Sir John Falstaff after the first production runs of Henry IV, which also contained other problematic characters he was compelled to edit such as Russell, who was turned into Peto after a complaint from the earls of Bedford whose surname was Russell. Shakespeare however was not one to surrender easily to powerful authorities, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play written in 1596 or 1597, supposedly at the behest of
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Queen Elizabeth, he would again include a jibe against William Brooke when he named Master Ford’s alter-ego Brook. This was later changed to Broom after the first performances, the most notable of which occurred in May 1597 when Sir George Carey, the son of the founder of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and who had been given the honorific Lord Hunsdon, was initiated into the Order of the Garter to replace the recently deceased and ridiculed Lord Cobham.
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Shakespeare’s meteoric rise during these years was accompanied by personal grief, as his son and heir Hamnet died on the 11th of August 1596, a sorrow that some believe later seeped into his work, including the scene in Twelfth Night, written around 1601, when Viola bemoans the death of her twin brother. Yet the most obvious nod to his son’s passing was in the naming of his play about a Danish prince named Hamlet. Written around 1599 and 1600,
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it is Shakespeare’s longest play and arguably his finest, one in which the bard inverted the grief over his son’s death, by having Prince Hamlet grieve the death of his father. The late 1590s saw William begin petitioning for a grant of a coat of arms for the Shakespeare family, a process which John Shakespeare had started a quarter of a century earlier, but which had been aborted owing to his legal difficulties and social fall in the 1570s. This
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time around the claim was approved by the garter king-of-arms, Sir William Dethick, perhaps largely owing to William’s rise as one of London’s foremost playwrights by that time. The Shakespeares’ advancement to the lofty heights of high society was helped immensely by William’s rapid acquisition of wealth in the 1590s, which paid for an expensive family emblem bejewelled in gold and silver, emblazoned with a falcon holding a spear and adorned with the motto ‘Not
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Without Right’, a symbol of their transformation from commoners to a respected gentry family. Shakespeare’s promotion into the upper-classes however, did not go unnoticed in the theatrical circles of his time, with playwright Ben Jonson mockingly suggesting that Puntarvolo, a character from his work Every Man out of His Humour performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, change his family motto to ‘not without mustard’, in a reference to the
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words on Shakespeare’s family crest as well as its distinctive yellow colour. In fact, Shakespeare’s ascension was contested by many, including the York herald Ralph Brooke, who bitterly denounced Sir William Dethick for awarding the coat of arms not to John Shakespeare, as the garter king-of-arms had officially declared, but to ‘Shakespeare the Player’, going so far as to open up an inquest in which he identified 23 incorrectly awarded coats of arms.
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The criticism did not perturb John Shakespeare who in 1599, as an older man perhaps eager to speed up his family’s gentrification before he died, made another application requesting that a quarter of the coat-of-arms from the Ardens, a much more distinguished family than his own, be absorbed into the Shakespeare’s own crest, although this was probably never completed. Before that, however, William Shakespeare had
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sought other means to boost the status of his bloodline. In May 1597 he purchased New Place, the second biggest mansion in Stratford-upon-Avon, complete with five gables, ten fireplaces, two barns, two gardens, and two orchards for a fee of £120, a very considerable sum of money in the late sixteenth century. He redeveloped the house, selling masses of stone to the town council in 1598 in an indication he had undertaken expensive renovations at New Place,
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while in the following years he would further expand his property portfolio in his hometown, buying 107 acres of land in Old Town for the huge sum of £320 in May 1602, as well as obtaining a cottage on nearby Chapel Lane he would assimilate into New Place in September 1602. In 1605 he also invested £440 for a share of the local tithe, or church tax, which would guarantee him a £60 return every year, an investment which he ultimately barely profited from in his lifetime.
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By February 1598 Shakespeare was registered as living at Chapel Street where, in collaboration with his wealthy neighbours and in a sign that he was using his deep well of funds to protect the wellbeing of his own family during a particularly bad harvest season, it was noted that he had stockpiled 80 bushels of malt, but in addition to ensuring that his family were well looked after Shakespeare also helped his friends by
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lending them money. One benefactor was Richard Quiney, the father of his future son-in-law, addressing Shakespeare as his “Loving countryman” for his grant of £30 to pay off his debts. As much as Shakespeare enjoyed becoming one of the pre-eminent citizens of Stratford-upon-Avon, his work was in London and from about 1598 onwards he spent much of his time living here in the Clink parish of the city just a short stroll away from the
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Globe Theatre. This was newly built in the Southwark district of the city in 1599 close to the South Bank of the River Thames. The Globe was not the possession of a leading English magnate, or members of London’s increasingly wealthy mercantile classes, but instead was built by shareholders such as Shakespeare’s long-standing collaborator, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert. As such, the Globe was owned and ran by people who worked
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in staging plays and it gave those who performed there the creative freedom to carry out their work unhindered for the most part by political and economic considerations. Shakespeare’s troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, became the resident group of players and Shakespeare effectively the dramatist in residence at the Globe, a large theatre which could fit about 3,000 spectators. Shakespeare’s reputation had grown so exponentially by this point that
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he was even being mentioned in the plays of other dramatists, such as in the Parnassus, annually performed at Christmas between 1598 to 1601 at St John’s College in Cambridge, in which Gullio is represented as an avid fan speaking “nothing but pure Shakespeare” and is described as tucking his Venus and Adonis under his pillow before going to bed. Similarly, a pantheon of renowned poets including the likes of Richard Barnfield, John Marston, Robert Tofte,
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and John Weever frequently referred to Shakespeare in many of their works dating from between 1598 and 1599, with Francis Meres lauding Shakespeare as equal to Roman greats, rhapsodizing how: “As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.” In another marker of Shakespeare’s metamorphosis from unknown playwright to renowned English
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dramatist, over 200 extracts of his work, largely drawing from Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and Richard II, were selected for inclusion in a compilation of quotations called the Belvedere or The Garden of the Muses, published in London in 1600. With fame, however, came slander. For instance, a tale emerged in March 1602, told by John Manningham, a lawyer working for the Middle Temple Theatre where Twelfth Night
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had been performed a month before, in which he avowed that Shakespeare had bedded a woman who had wandered backstage after falling head over heels for Richard Burbage as Richard II. Such tales might suggest that Shakespeare was known for his infidelity, something which many scholars have proposed might account for the passionate nature of his sonnets and some of his plays like Romeo and Juliet, given the seemingly dispassionate nature of his relationship with his
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wife Anne. In another rumour it was claimed by Sir George Buck that Shakespeare had informed him that the anonymous author of George a Greene, a play performed in London in 1599, was in actual fact a leading political figure of the day who had written himself into the play. Another sign of Shakespeare’s distinction was the appearance of several bootleg versions of his own scripts, often erroneously written by admirers or by people looking to make a profit
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by producing pirate copies of his plays, which were frequently updated as “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended,” as was the case with an edition of Romeo and Juliet from 1599, one which attempted to iron out the previous inaccuracies of a 1597 folio. The very fact that Shakespeare was purposely named on the covers of many of his published manuscripts, such as the 1598 edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, and Richard III,
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was another indication of his soaring esteem, since playwrights were not usually given the honour of being referenced on their published works. Indeed, Shakespeare’s name carried such weight by this time that it was often employed as a useful advertising tool. Thus, we find a print version of a play called The London Prodigal being published in 1605, which sought to boost sales by falsely representing itself as a work of Shakespeare. Another example of this
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tendency comes from 1599, when a collection of poetry edited by William Jaggard also featured Shakespeare’s name. Shakespeare was irked by Jaggard, a man, quote, “altogether unknown to him…presumed to make so bold with his name.” This charlatan had also, without permission, included three excerpts from Love’s Labour’s Lost and two other Shakespearean tracts. Nevertheless, Shakespeare did not allow himself to become distracted by the trappings of fame,
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moving on to another era after the completion of his English history plays, this time the Roman period, penning his next work Julius Caesar, a tragedy crafted with the assistance of Plutarch’s historical overviews and possibly the first play performed at the Globe Theatre on the 21st of September 1599, before authoring the humorous As You Like It in 1600, based on a Thomas Lodge romance of 1590 called Rosalynde. This employed as one of its main locations the Forest of Arden,
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woodlands that occupy much of central England and from where William’s mother’s family had taken their surname. Finally, 1601 saw the first performance of Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays ever since. Both it and As You Like It utilized the singing abilities of the latest member to join the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Robert Armin, a multi-talented performer who was drafted in to replace Will Kemp, who left the company in 1599.
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It was around this time that Shakespeare also finalised Hamlet. Richard Burbage played the prince of Denmark when it was performed at the Globe. Hamlet is a tragedy that was a heavily modified version of another play with the same name, written by Thomas Kyd in 1589. It features one of Shakespeare’s most memorable female leads, Ophelia, whose death by drowning was a reference to a famous story that swept Stratford-upon-Avon in December 1579 in which a woman named Katherine
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Hamlet was found lying face down in a pool of water on the outskirts of the town. Right around the time he was finalising the play and it was being prepared for the stage, Shakespeare found himself in some political hot water. In February 1601, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, a powerful nobleman who had been Queen Elizabeth’s favourite and England’s war leader in a conflict with Spain throughout the 1590s, but who had fallen from power in 1599, personally requested
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a performance of Shakespeare’s play Richard II, a tale of treachery and usurpation in which King Richard himself is deposed. Just two days later Essex tried to overthrow the government. Many questioned the political messages of Shakespeare’s play as a result, so much so that in a later version in 1608 it was omitted entirely, yet luckily for Shakespeare this would be a mere blip, for he continued to have his plays performed at the royal court during the Christmas season for
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the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign and into that of her successor King James I from 1603 onwards. Into the 1600s Shakespeare continued to live in London for the most part to carry out his work, moving north of the River Thames again in 1604 to a more expensive house near St Paul’s Cathedral. But while he lived there for much of the year, his wife Anne and children nearly always resided in the north in Stratford-upon-Avon, with William returning to his home town for portions of the
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year when the Globe and the Lord Chamberlain’s men were in the quiet season. In Stratford he often had to attend to family and legal business. In September 1601, for instance, he had to manage his father’s funeral and the execution of his will. William inherited his father’s estates, including his childhood home on Henley Street, but William’s mother and his sister Joan, alongside her husband William Hart, a hat maker, continued to live there after William acquired
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it. Other records of his activity in Stratford are more mundane. In the spring of 1604 we find him selling malt to his neighbour Philip Rogers as well as requesting a 35 shilling 10 pence debt to be repaid back to him. Between August 1608 and June 1609 he prosecuted an individual called John Addenbrooke for damages amounting to 6 pounds and 24 shillings, demonstrating that on occasion Shakespeare zealously protected his hard-won earnings.
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We might ask at this juncture, who exactly was the individual who lived this dual life as one of the leading citizens of a small town in the West Midlands as well as one of the country’s most celebrated playwrights when in London? Shakespeare’s personality is shrouded in mystery. This is because none of his personal correspondence has survived. The millions of letters which have survived from countries like England which were composed in the sixteenth
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and early seventeenth centuries were nearly all written by monarchs, members of their governments and scions of noble families. They have survived down to the present day because these letters were deposited in state records’ offices or kept in family archives in the stately homes of earls and barons across England and other nations. By way of contrast, the correspondence of the gentry and common people of England in Shakespeare’s time were generally not preserved in this way.
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Occasionally we have letters which families kept as mementoes through the generations, but normally such letters were either thrown away or the paper used as fuel for fires by the recipients. Others were left in drawers and chests where the ravages of mould and decay took their toll over time or subsequent generations simply threw them away, not realising the knowledge that was being lost to future generations. Consequently, none of Shakespeare’s letters that he might have
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written during his lifetime have survived and we are left reliant on extracting impressions about who he actually was on a personal level from his plays, poems and other tangential sources. Only a handful of accounts directly commented on Shakespeare’s character. For instance, William Barksted, attested that he was a, quote, “so dear loved neighbor”, while another glimpse of Shakespeare’s likability comes from Augustine Phillips, a member of Shakespeare’s legendary
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theatre collective the King’s Men, who in 1604 declared in his will that for, quote, “My fellow William Shakespeare a Thirty shilling piece of gold.” Other flashes of Shakespeare’s persona can be found in the many surviving legal documents, which make up the majority of direct references to Shakespeare during his lifetime. These present an image of a man who guarded the wealth and properties he accrued as a result of his success as a playwright,
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but who could also be a loyal friend, as was the case in 1612 when he was called in as a witness to defend his friend Christopher Mountjoy. He was also a benevolent presence in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, such as in 1614 when he became part of a campaign to petition the Addled Parliament to repair the local roads. His will included bequests to the poor. We also have an idea of what he looked like from the Chandos Portrait hanging in the National
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Portrait Gallery, a work believed to depict Shakespeare during the 1600s painted by an unknown artist. Here, if it is indeed the playwright, we see a man in his late thirties or early forties, balding and sporting the moustache and beard which were fashionable in Elizabethan and early Stuart times. He is also wearing an earring, a not uncommon fashion for men at the time. But there is little else given away by the portrait or its provenance. With such a lack of contemporary
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testimonials, many scholars have turned to the numerous plays and poems of William Shakespeare to identify additional details about his life that may be hidden between the lines, most notably his sonnets which some have speculated, with their emphasis on the characters of a young man and a dark woman, show William struggling to remain a faithful husband to his wife Anne. With the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s genius was
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recognized by the new monarch, a fan of his work who changed the name of Shakespeare’s theatre troupe to the King’s Men after becoming its main patron. In the difficult period between 1603 and April 1604, which witnessed another outbreak of plague and again prevented Shakespeare’s plays from being performed, the king generously donated £30 to the troupe’s coffers to ensure their survival. Shakespeare would not have been in financial difficulty, but the lower ranking
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members of the group would have been, had it not been for the new king’s generosity. With the subsiding of the plague and the mourning rituals for Queen Elizabeth completed, in May 1604 the celebrated dramatist and many of his actors would accompany James as he made his first procession through London. Between then and the end of Shakespeare’s career they performed for James’ royal court no less than 107 times, with 11 of these productions occurring between November
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1604 and October 1605 alone. These included some of Shakespeare’s newer plays which he composed in the early-to-mid-1600s, such as Othello, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well. In 1605 and 1606 Shakespeare produced a flurry of his most successful tragedies, including Timon of Athens which he co-wrote with Thomas Middleton, a man who also wrote some of the witches’ scenes in Macbeth. The latter, often regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest play along with Hamlet,
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was first performed in 1606 and was crafted with James I in mind. Thus the character of Banquo, whose ghost appears to torment Macbeth in Act III, makes reference to the king’s claim of descent from the semi-mythical Scottish warlord of the same name. The introduction of witches into the play at the start also alludes to King James’ well-known fear of witchcraft, having written a treatise entitled Daemonologie on the subject in 1597 and hailing from Scotland where the witch
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craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was much more pronounced than in any other part of Europe other than Germany and Switzerland. Shakespeare was also brave enough to warn his benefactor about the dangers of a disunited realm in King Lear, which was first produced in 1606 as well. It was partly inspired by a famous news story in 1603 concerning a woman who was prevented from declaring her father Brian Annesley insane by her younger sister Cordell,
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who Shakespeare would transform into Cordelia. At this juncture, Shakespeare had become such a master storyteller that much of his output became very hard to pin down to a specific genre, for although Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and King Lear, the latter two of which relied heavily on Holinshed’s Chronicles, were viewed as tragedies, their lines and soliloquies were often spliced with many other styles, adding to the timeless nature of these particular works.
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While 1606 was a formidable year for Shakespeare from a professional point of view, on a personal level it was a difficult one. In May 1606 his daughter Susanna was added to a list of people who had failed to attend Protestant communion at Easter, or a recusant as those who refused to attend state-sanctioned religious services were termed. This was a particularly suspicious act in the wake of the failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and a
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band of Catholic renegades to blow up King James I during the opening of parliament in November 1605, the infamous Gunpowder Plot. Susanna, however, does not seem to have been a Catholic, marrying in June 1607 the doctor and ardent Protestant John Hall and receiving 105 acres of land as a wedding gift from her father. Shakespeare subsequently became a grandfather in February 1608 when Susanna gave birth to a girl named Elizabeth. His own mother did not live long enough to become a
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great-grandmother. She passed in September 1607 five months before Elizabeth’s birth. Shakespeare’s personal affairs at this time were happening against the backdrop of political unrest, as the Kingdom of England had experienced a series of violent revolts fomented by a poor harvest and high food prices between 1607 and 1608 in the Midlands where Stratford was situated, Shakespeare incorporated this outburst of anger into his next work Coriolanus,
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which was an exploration of the dynamics between citizen and ruler based on the writings of Plutarch. Released alongside this was Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play whose composition had a tangled history and the only play of his that would not appear in the first folio of 1623. By 1609 nearly half of his plays were available to the public in print. That same year his famous compendium entitled Shake-Speare’s Sonnets was also printed by George Eld,
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a release probably sanctioned by Shakespeare who, with theatres shut because of another plague epidemic between 1607 and 1609, was probably looking for another source of income to tide himself over and was also looking to reclaim ownership of his own name, which continued to be used by other publishers to promote their works. The compilation included 154 sonnets and a lengthier poem called ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, with many speculating that the characters,
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chiefly the dark lady, rival poet, and young man represented real people in Shakespeare’s own life. Some have identified the ‘young man’ of the sonnets as William Herbert, a lifelong patron of Shakespeare who authored the dedication of the first folio of his complete works in 1623, as there is reference in these to a young man who is implored to marry and have children, a clear parallel with Herbert, who is known to have repeatedly refused to
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marry. Others have interpreted the cryptic ‘Mr W.H’ to whom the collection of sonnets were dedicated in 1609 as an inversion of the initials of Henry Wriothesley, another important donor who funded Shakespeare at the start of his career in the early 1590s. The late 1600s and early 1610s saw Shakespeare continue to enjoy widespread success as he entered his third decade as one of London’s pre-eminent playwrights. Much of his work was
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now being performed at the Blackfriars Theatre, a lavish venue fitted with the most advanced stage equipment, which although having less audience capacity, had significantly higher ticket prices since it catered to a more elite clientele. It was here from 1608 that the King’s Men became resident artists after the Burbages acquired a controlling influence in the management of Blackfriars. Shakespeare debuted many of his later plays here, notably The Winter’s Tale,
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a tragi-comedy set both in the city and the countryside that borrowed heavily from the Greene’s 1588 Pandosto, also, Cymbeline, about a King of Britain in the period immediately prior to the Roman conquest, mirroring many of James I’s ambitions for his realm, The Tempest, a commentary on the colonization of America set on a fantastical island, Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s final history play including a dramatic depiction of the birth of Queen
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Elizabeth I, and finally, The Two Noble Kinsmen, a theatrical study of all-consuming lust in a chivalric setting derived from the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales. These were all produced between 1609 and 1611 in collaboration with the playwright John Fletcher. In 1612 Shakespeare became embroiled in a legal dispute. That year he graciously tried to help an old friend, Christopher Mountjoy, a wigmaker who Shakespeare had stayed with as a lodger in
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London between 1602 and 1604, who was being sued by Stephen Belott, Mountjoy’s former apprentice, for failing to provide him with an adequate dowry after he had married Mountjoy’s daughter. The match had been facilitated by Shakespeare himself, who was listed as being present at the ceremony known as a troth-plight, in which both parties promise to marry each other. The dowry was a standard feature of early modern weddings, whereby the father of the bride paid the groom a sum of
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money to help the couple financially in married life. With Mountjoy’s daughter passing away in October 1608, Belott maintained he was still owed £60 of the dowry, as well as £200 from her will, and so Shakespeare was called in to vouch for Mountjoy’s integrity in a deposition that remains the closest record of how the elusive playwright may have actually spoken. Acting as mediating witness, Shakespeare described Belott as: “A very good and industrious servant.” While
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noting how Mountjoy had treated his apprentice with: “a great good will and affection.” However, ultimately Shakespeare was not a particularly effective witness for either side, admitting that he had forgotten the amount of money pledged as the dowry in addition to professing ignorance about the details of the Mountjoy will. In the end Mountjoy exposed himself as a dishonest individual, refusing the instruction of a French ecclesiastical court by failing to
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hand over 20 nobles to the aggrieved Belott, a crime for which Mountjoy was excommunicated in a petty legal squabble reminiscent of one of Shakespeare’s own fictional storylines.
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Following on from the lawsuit, in 1613 Shakespeare continued to work. He was hired alongside Richard Burbage in March 1613 and paid 44 shillings to create an impresa, a motto that was emblazoned on a shield, on behalf of the Earl of Rutland to wield during the procession celebrating the anniversary of James I’s accession. By this time Shakespeare had started to invest in London property, with three other individuals, John Hemings of the King’s Men,
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William Johnson the landlord of the local Mermaid Tavern that Shakespeare frequented, and a man named John Jackson who may have been an associate of Shakespeare’s friend and brewer Elias James, the four men purchased the gatehouse of an abandoned Dominican monastery located close to the Blackfriars Theatre for £140, initially paying £80 and mortgaging the rest of the amount. The four subsequently rented the property out to John Robinson in 1616,
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although his acquisition was large enough that it was possible Shakespeare stayed in another part of the building and used it as a base for when he was in London. In his twilight years demand for Shakespeare’s plays only increased, with the King’s Men hired to perform 14 different productions in February 1613, four of which were of Shakespeare’s own creations, including Othello, for the wedding of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector of
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the Palatinate, a principality in the Rhineland in Germany. This was an auspicious celebration, though one that was overshadowed for William by the death of his brother Richard in the same month. This came exactly a year after the passing of William’s other sibling Gilbert, resulting in William and his sister Joan remaining the only surviving children of John and Mary Shakespeare. A tragedy of a different kind would strike only a few months later in June, when a cannon used for
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sound effects misfired and ignited the flammable thatched roof of the Globe Theatre, the stage where Shakespeare had made his name, causing over £1,400 worth of damage. The next month Shakespeare would doubtlessly have had to turn his attention to a legal case involving his daughter Susanna, who in July 1613 sued a man named John Lane for slanderously alleging that she had cheated on her husband with an individual called Rafe Smith and that she had also contracted gonorrhoea,
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an accusation that was, probably much to her father’s relief, judged to be false. Although records indicate that Shakespeare was in London in November 1614, he was still very much a leading luminary in Stratford, being one of 71 local notables who contributed their own money towards the promotion of a bill to the Addled Parliament that summer requesting that the local roads in the area be mended. All politics is local, even when it involves the great bard. Shakespeare was also
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enveloped in more legal disputes, vehemently opposing a move by William Combe and Arthur Mainwaring to transform a patch of public land in Welcombe into private property for the building of more houses after a fire in July 1613 made many homeless, since it would deprive Shakespeare of income he received from Church tithes, a privilege he had bought in 1605, and which he was able to maintain after Combe’s legal case fizzled out in an episode that illustrated Shakespeare was
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on occasion, more concerned about his own personal wealth than the wellbeing of local citizens. These legal disputes and local political affairs are indicative of his increased presence in Stratford and it has been regularly argued that Shakespeare was entering semi-retirement in the 1610s, spending more time in the Midlands than he did in the 1590s and 1600s. In January 1616 Shakespeare revised his will. There is no suggestion that he was
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ill or believed his death to be imminent, describing himself in the document itself as of ‘perfect health’. Rather this revision of his will was occasioned by the marriage of his youngest daughter Judith to Thomas Quiney, the son of Richard Quiney, a man who Shakespeare had lent money to in the past. Quiney, who was five years younger than his fiancé, was distrusted by Shakespeare and his dislike of him grew when Judith was excommunicated from the
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Church shortly after their wedding in the spring of 1616, owing to it having taken place in the middle of Lent and without a proper wedding license. Quiney disgraced himself ever further in March 1616 when he was charged and convicted with premarital fornication with another woman, Margaret Wheeler, who had died that month giving birth to his child. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shakespeare revised his will to cut Quiney out of it entirely and instead decreed that upon his
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death Judith was to immediately receive £100, with a further £150 three years later. If she died before any of those dates the money was to transfer to William’s granddaughter Elizabeth or his sister Joan. Other bequests which he arranged for at this time included a silver and gilt bowel to Judith, a sword to his friend Thomas Coombe, and money for the purchase of rings to his godson William Walker and his King’s Men companions Richard Burbage, John Heminges,
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and Henry Condell. £10, a not inconsiderable sum at the time, was left to the poor as charity. Surprisingly, the only mention of his wife Anne in the entire will is on the third page where she is referred to somewhat coldly only as his ‘wife’, starkly contrasting the terms of endearment used in the wills of his theatrical comrades Burbage and Condell, who both refer to their wives as ‘well-beloved’. In addition, Anne was given hardly anything, receiving what Shakespeare termed “my
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second best bed with the furniture”, whereas Burbage’s wife was named as executor of his will, while Henry Condell’s spouse acquired half of his property, a mysterious set of circumstances that either suggested the traditional one-third of her husband’s possessions she was within her legal rights to receive had been confirmed in another document, or that by 1616 Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife had broken down considerably. It is hard to know what to
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make of this. As ever with Shakespeare his relationship with Anne remains a mystery. Despite being of good health when he revised his will early in 1616, Shakespeare was dead within a few weeks. He took ill suddenly and died on the 23rd of April at just 52 years of age. The only details of his passing come from Stratford-upon-Avon-based churchman John Ward, who claimed in the 1660s that: “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting,
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and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.” Although the circumstances of Shakespeare’s death remain obscure, it is known for certain that he was laid to rest two days later at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, his grave located inside of the Church since the tithe tax shares he had bought up in 1605 meant that he was also recognized as an honorary lay rector. Shakespeare’s tomb is today marked by a stone
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etched with the words: “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.” Thought to have been written by Shakespeare himself, many have interpreted it as a curse to any would-be grave robbers that would dare disturb the sanctuary of England’s greatest playwright. The famed first folio of Shakespeare’s plays was published in 1623. Although 19 of his works had
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been published in various forms during his lifetime, this brought 36 plays attributed to Shakespeare into print in one volume. It is an absolutely vital text for establishing the Shakespearian canon, though only 750 or so copies were produced in the first run and editions of it in private circulation today can expect to fetch about two and half million dollars. Despite bringing together Shakespeare’s works, the authorship of many
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of his plays has been questioned repeatedly over the last 400 years with various theories emerging about other writers or nobles authoring some of his plays in part or in full. As we have seen, Shakespeare did have collaborators on a number of his works, particularly the earlier plays, but theories have been put forward over the years claiming that anyone from his fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe and the political theorist Sir Francis Bacon to Sir Walter Raleigh or well over
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a dozen different English nobles including the earls of Southampton and Derby could have been responsible for authoring some or nearly all of his plays. These theories contain a fair degree of class bias, many of them emerging in the nineteenth century when it was alleged that because there is no evidence of him attending the universities of Cambridge or Oxford, or hailing from an upper-class family, Shakespeare could not have written the learned and historically
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informed works that he did. But these remain simply theories, ones which have virtually no evidence to support them and which are broadly rejected today by most Shakespearian scholars. William Shakespeare is deemed to be the most significant figure of the English Renaissance and the greatest playwright to have ever lived, with National Shakespeare Day typically celebrated on the 23rd of April each year, which also happens to be St George’s Day. However,
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his esteemed position within Literary Society, is at stark odds with what we know about Shakespeare the man, which is very little. We have no letters penned by Shakespeare, no accounts of his life or character written by contemporaries, nor do we even have original copies of his plays as he wrote them. Instead we are left to cobble together the details of his life from his will, a smattering of
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administrative, financial and church records from London and Stratford-upon-Avon and our knowledge of the functioning of the Globe Theatre and the performances of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the King’s Men. Faced with such a dearth of source material, many people have understandably turned to Shakespeare’s plays and poems to try to understand who he was. But this has simply raised more questions than answers. How, one wonders, did the same man who wrote Hamlet and Macbeth,
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with all the psychological torment and malaise exhibited by the Danish prince and the usurper of the Scottish throne, turn his pen to writing light-hearted comedies like Measure for Measure and All’s Well that Ends Well in between? Moreover, why do the established details of Shakespeare’s life seem so mundane by contrast with the inner workings of his mind as displayed in his plays? Equally, his sonnets suggest an inner life or even a private life that
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was more colourful than the sources allow us to reconstruct. Given all of this, and also given the sheer volume of work that he managed to produce between 1592 and 1613, averaging a play every seven months for 22 years, it is understandable that some have called Shakespeare’s authorship into question. But the most obvious explanation is often the most likely, no matter how lacking in colour it might be. The likelihood is that William Shakespeare was simply a man from the English
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Midlands who went to London to indulge his passion for acting, started writing plays himself and over the space of twenty-plus years wrote some of the finest works of tragedy and comedy ever written. What do you think of William Shakespeare? Do you believe he is the greatest writer of the English language to have ever lived and what do you think was the true nature of his relationship with Anne Hathaway? Please let
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us know in the comment section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching.
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