William Shakespeare

From Stratford-upon-Avon to the crowded stages of London, William Shakespeare’s life sits at the heart of English literary history. Born in Warwickshire and baptised on 26 April 1564, he grew up as the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and successful glove-maker, and Mary Arden, from an affluent landowning family. His birth date is unknown, though it is traditionally observed on 23 April, the same date on which he died in 1616. He became known as England’s national poet, the “Bard of Avon,” and, more simply, “the Bard.”

Shakespeare was probably educated at the King’s New School in Stratford, where the curriculum would have centered on grammar and Latin classical authors. At 18, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26. Their daughter Susanna was baptised in 1583, followed almost two years later by twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died at age 11. After the twins’ birth, Shakespeare left few clear traces until records place him in the London theatre world by 1592. These missing years have invited stories and speculation, but little evidence supports them.

By the early 1590s, Shakespeare was known well enough in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene, who mocked him as an “upstart Crow.” The insult suggests something important about Shakespeare’s position: he was not one of the university-educated writers Greene grouped with figures such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Yet Shakespeare built a successful career as an actor, writer, and part-owner, or “sharer,” in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a playing company later known as the King’s Men after King James VI of Scotland came to the English throne.

Most of Shakespeare’s known work was produced between 1589 and 1613. His extant writings, including collaborations, include some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories. He then turned chiefly to tragedy until 1608, writing Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. In the last phase of his career, he wrote tragicomedies, also called romances, including The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in print during his lifetime in editions that varied in quality and accuracy. In 1623, two fellow actors and friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition that included 36 of his plays. Its preface contained Ben Jonson’s famous praise that Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time.” The phrase has proved fitting. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. His words still live because they are alert to love, trust, ambition, grief, wit, and human error, as in the plain counsel: “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”