William Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

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  William Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on the 25th of March 1616, describing himself in it as being in "perfect health." Within a month he was dead, on the 23rd of April 1616, at the age of 52. No contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, the vicar of Stratford, John Ward, wrote in his notebook that Shakespeare, the poet Michael Drayton, and the playwright Ben Jonson "had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." This is the man widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, yet few records of his private life survive. How does a glove-maker's son from a Warwickshire market town become England's national poet, the figure called the "Bard of Avon"? Who attacked him in print before anyone praised him? What happened during the years scholars cannot account for? And why, four centuries later, are his plays still performed more often than those of any other playwright? The answers begin in Stratford-upon-Avon and run through a London theatre that burned to the ground.

• 2. A Stratford Beginning

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  John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, was the father of the man who would become the Bard. His mother, Mary Arden, came from an affluent landowning family influential in the Recusant Catholic community. Their son was baptised on the 26th of April 1564. His actual date of birth is unknown, but tradition fixes it on the 23rd of April, Saint George's Day, a date traceable to William Oldys and George Steevens that appealed to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same day in 1616. He was the third of eight children and the eldest surviving son. Most biographers believe Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553 and located about a quarter-mile from his home in the town's guildhall. The basic Latin text used there was standardised by royal decree, giving him an intensive grounding in grammar drawn from Latin classical authors. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued the marriage licence on the 27th of November 1582, and the next day two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing no lawful claims impeded the match. The arrangement may have been hasty, since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times. A daughter, Susanna, was baptised on the 26th of May 1583, six months after the wedding. Twins followed, a son Hamnet and daughter Judith, baptised on the 2nd of February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried on the 11th of August 1596.

• 3. The Lost Years

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  After the twins were baptised in 1585, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he surfaces in the London theatre scene in 1592. Scholars call this gap his "lost years." The one exception is his name appearing in the "complaints bill" of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster, dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and the 9th of October 1589. Into this silence biographers have poured apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that he fled the town to escape prosecution for deer poaching on the estate of a local squire, Thomas Lucy, and supposedly took revenge by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. Another eighteenth-century tale has him beginning his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London. John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some twentieth-century scholars suggested he was employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a "William Shakeshafte" in his will. Little evidence supports any of these accounts beyond hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area. The lost years end with a fellow writer's jealousy that proves Shakespeare was already making his mark on the stage.

• 4. An Upstart Crow

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  In 1592 the playwright Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in print in his pamphlet Groats-Worth of Wit, calling him "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers" who "supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you" and an "absolute Johannes factotum" who is "the only Shake-scene in a country." Scholars read this as Greene accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank to rival university-educated writers like Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Greene himself, the so-called "University Wits." The phrase parodied the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, and the pun "Shake-scene" pinned the target. Greene's jealous swipe is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's work in the theatre. After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed at The Theatre in Shoreditch by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players that included him and soon became the leading troupe in London. After Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, the new king James I awarded the company a royal patent, and it became the King's Men. Shakespeare's standing as part-owner made him wealthy. In 1597 he bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, and in 1605 he invested in a share of the parish tithes there.

• 5. Comedy, History, Tragedy

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  Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama, are among the first recorded works of Shakespeare. His histories drew heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, dramatising the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule. The early plays were influenced by Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca. By the mid-1590s Shakespeare turned to the romantic comedies for which he is most acclaimed. A Midsummer Night's Dream mixes romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes, while The Merchant of Venice portrays the vengeful moneylender Shylock. Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night complete the sequence. In the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, Part 1 and 2 and Henry V, the rogue Falstaff appears as wit and friend of Prince Hal. Julius Caesar, based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, introduced a new kind of drama. The scholar James Shapiro observed that in it "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other." Many critics believe the tragedies represent the peak of his art. Hamlet, with his soliloquy beginning "To be or not to be; that is the question," has been analysed more than any other Shakespearean character. In Othello, Iago stokes the hero's jealousy until he murders his innocent wife; in King Lear, the old king's error leads to the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of his daughter Cordelia. Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of the tragedies, adds a supernatural element. In his final period Shakespeare turned to romance with Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, plays that end in reconciliation and forgiveness.

• 6. The Globe And Its Players

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  In 1599, members of Shakespeare's company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, naming it the Globe. When the company fell into dispute with the landlord of The Theatre, they pulled it down and used its timbers to construct the Globe, the first playhouse built by actors for actors. It opened in autumn 1599 with Julius Caesar among the first plays staged, and most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for it, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. After 1608 the partnership also took over the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, performing there during the winter and at the Globe during the summer. The indoor setting allowed more elaborate stage devices; in Cymbeline, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle." The company's actors included Richard Burbage, who played the leading role in the first performances of Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The comic actor Will Kempe played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing before being replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who took roles like Touchstone in As You Like It. Shakespeare acted too. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him in the casts of Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus His Fall, and in 1610 John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. On the 29th of June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event that dates a Shakespeare play with rare precision.

• 7. Will And Second Best Bed

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  Shakespeare retired to Stratford around 1613, after which no plays are attributed to him; his last three were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as house playwright of the King's Men. He still visited London during the years 1611 to 1614. In 1612 he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a case concerning the marriage settlement of the daughter of Christopher Mountjoy, a French Huguenot wig-maker from whom he had rented rooms. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory. He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married the physician John Hall in 1607, and Judith had married the vintner Thomas Quiney two months before Shakespeare's death. The day after he signed his will, Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who died with her child in childbirth, bringing shame to the family. Shakespeare left the bulk of his estate to Susanna, stipulating she pass it intact to "the first son of her body." His will scarcely mentions Anne, leaving her "my second best bed," a bequest that has fuelled endless speculation. Some scholars read it as an insult; others note the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed. He was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church two days after his death, beneath an epitaph carved with a curse against moving his bones, carefully avoided during the church's restoration in 2008. Before 1623 a funerary monument with a half-effigy of him writing was erected on the north wall, its plaque comparing him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.

• 8. Not Of An Age

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  In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends, published the First Folio, a collected edition containing 36 of Shakespeare's plays, 18 of them printed for the first time. Its preface carries a poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival, who hailed Shakespeare as "not of an age, but for all time" and called him "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage," though elsewhere Jonson had remarked that "Shakespeare wanted art." Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime but received much praise. In 1598 the cleric Francis Meres singled him out as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy. After the Restoration of 1660, classical taste rated him below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, yet John Dryden said of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare." By 1800 he was enshrined as the national poet and the "Bard of Avon." His influence ran deep. Herman Melville's Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick was a tragic hero inspired by King Lear, and scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to his works, including Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and Giuseppe Verdi's operas Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff. Akira Kurosawa adapted Macbeth and King Lear as Throne of Blood and Ran. According to Guinness World Records, Shakespeare remains the world's best-selling playwright, with sales believed to exceed four billion copies in the nearly 400 years since his death, his plays translated into over 80 languages from German and Hindi to Esperanto and Klingon. Around 230 years after his death, doubts arose about whether he wrote the works attributed to him, with candidates including Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Nearly all scholars consider this a fringe theory. In 2012, the Globe to Globe Festival in London staged 37 plays in 37 different languages, from Hamlet in Lithuanian to The Merchant of Venice in Hebrew, performed by Israel's national theatre, Habima.