The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (12 page)

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, shows that he was baptized there on April 26, 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. His father, John Shakespeare, was a burgess of the borough, who in 1565 was chosen an alderman and in 1568 bailiff (the position corresponding to mayor, before the grant of a further charter to Stratford in 1664). He was engaged in various kinds of trade and appears to have suffered some fluctuations in prosperity. His wife, Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, Warwickshire, came from an ancient family and was the heiress to some land. (Given the somewhat rigid social distinctions of the 16th century, this marriage must have been a step up the social scale for John Shakespeare.)

Stratford enjoyed a grammar school of good quality, and the education there was free, the schoolmaster's salary being paid by the borough. No lists of the pupils who were at the school in the 16th century have survived, but it would be absurd to suppose the bailiff of the town did not send his son there. The boy's education would consist mostly of Latin studies—learning to read, write, and speak the language fairly well and studying some of the Classical historians, moralists, and poets. Shakespeare did not go
on to the university, and indeed, it is unlikely that the scholarly round of logic, rhetoric, and other studies then followed there would have interested him.

Instead, at age 18, he married. Where and exactly when are not known, but the episcopal registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated Nov. 28, 1582, and executed by two yeomen of Stratford, named Sandells and Richardson, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a license for the marriage of William Shakespeare and “Anne Hathaway of Stratford,” upon the consent of her friends and upon once asking of the banns. (Anne died in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare. There is good evidence to associate her with a family of Hathaways who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, 2 miles [3.2 km] from Stratford.) The next date of interest is found in the records of the Stratford church, where a daughter, named Susanna, born to William Shakespeare, was baptized on May 26, 1583. On Feb. 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamnet and Judith. (Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died 11 years later.)

How Shakespeare spent the next eight years or so, until his name begins to appear in London theatre records, is not known. There are stories—given currency long after his death—of stealing deer and getting into trouble with a local magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford; of earning his living as a schoolmaster in the country; of going to London and gaining entry to the world of theatre by minding the horses of theatregoers. It has also been conjectured that Shakespeare spent some time as a member of a great household and that he was a soldier, perhaps in the Low Countries. In lieu of external evidence, such extrapolations about Shakespeare's life have often been made from the internal “evidence” of his writings. But this method is unsatisfactory. One cannot conclude, for example, from his allusions to the law that Shakespeare was a lawyer, for he was clearly a writer who without
difficulty could get whatever knowledge he needed for the composition of his plays.

The first reference to Shakespeare in the literary world of London comes in 1592, when a fellow dramatist, Robert Greene, declared in a pamphlet written on his deathbed:

There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tygers heart wrapt in a Players 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
.

What these words mean is difficult to determine, but clearly they are insulting, and clearly Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasms. When the book in which they appear (
Greenes, groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance
, 1592) was published after Greene's death, a mutual acquaintance wrote a preface offering an apology to Shakespeare and testifying to his worth. This preface also indicates that Shakespeare was by then making important friends. For, although the puritanical city of London was generally hostile to the theatre, many of the nobility were good patrons of the drama and friends of the actors. Shakespeare seems to have attracted the attention of the young Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd earl of Southampton, and to this nobleman were dedicated his first published poems,
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
.

One striking piece of evidence that Shakespeare began to prosper early and tried to retrieve the family's fortunes and establish its gentility is the fact that a coat of arms was granted to John Shakespeare in 1596. Rough drafts of this
grant have been preserved in the College of Arms, London, though the final document, which must have been handed to the Shakespeares, has not survived. Almost certainly William himself took the initiative and paid the fees. The coat of arms appears on Shakespeare's monument (constructed before 1623) in the Stratford church. Equally interesting as evidence of Shakespeare's worldly success was his purchase in 1597 of New Place, a large house in Stratford, which he as a boy must have passed every day in walking to school.

How his career in the theatre began is unclear, but from roughly 1594 onward he was an important member of the Lord Chamberlain's company of players (called the King's Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They had the best actor, Richard Burbage. They had the best theatre, the Globe (finished by the autumn of 1599). They had the best dramatist, Shakespeare. It is no wonder that the company prospered. Shakespeare became a full-time professional man of his own theatre, sharing in a cooperative enterprise and intimately concerned with the financial success of the plays he wrote.

Unfortunately, written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare's professional life molded his marvelous artistry. All that can be deduced is that for 20 years Shakespeare devoted himself assiduously to his art, writing more than a million words of poetic drama of the highest quality.

Shakespeare had little contact with officialdom, apart from walking—dressed in the royal livery as a member of the King's Men—at the coronation of King James I in 1604. He continued to look after his financial interests.
He bought properties in London and in Stratford. In 1605 he purchased a share (about one-fifth) of the Stratford tithes—a fact that explains why he was eventually buried in the chancel of its parish church. For some time he lodged with a French Huguenot family called Mountjoy, who lived near St. Olave's Church in Cripplegate, London. The records of a lawsuit in May 1612, resulting from a Mountjoy family quarrel, show Shakespeare as giving evidence in a genial way (though unable to remember certain important facts that would have decided the case) and as interesting himself generally in the family's affairs.

No letters written by Shakespeare have survived, but a private letter to him happened to get caught up with some official transactions of the town of Stratford and so has been preserved in the borough archives. It was written by one Richard Quiney and addressed by him from the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, London, whither he had gone from Stratford on business. On one side of the paper is inscribed: “To my loving good friend and countryman, Mr. Wm. Shakespeare, deliver these.” Apparently Quiney thought his fellow Stratfordian a person to whom he could apply for the loan of £30—a large sum in Elizabethan times. Nothing further is known about the transaction, but, because so few opportunities of seeing into Shakespeare's private life present themselves, this begging letter becomes a touching document. It is of some interest, moreover, that 18 years later Quiney's son Thomas became the husband of Judith, Shakespeare's second daughter.

Shakespeare's will (made on March 25, 1616) is a long and detailed document. It entailed his quite ample property on the male heirs of his elder daughter, Susanna. (Both his daughters were then married, one to the aforementioned Thomas Quiney and the other to John Hall, a respected physician of Stratford.) As an afterthought, he
bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife; no one can be certain what this notorious legacy means. The testator's signatures to the will are apparently in a shaky hand. Perhaps Shakespeare was already ill. He died on April 23, 1616. No name was inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon. Instead these lines, possibly his own, appeared:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear

To dig the dust enclosed here
.

Blest be the man that spares these stones
,

And curst be he that moves my bones
.

Other than
Titus Andronicus
(
c
. 1589–92), Shakespeare did not experiment with formal tragedy in his early years. The young playwright was drawn more quickly into comedy, and with more immediate success. These comedies—such as
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(
c
. 1590–94) and
The Taming of the Shrew
(
c
. 1590–94)—revel in stories of amorous courtship in which a plucky and admirable young woman (played by a boy actor) is paired off against her male wooer. His early history plays represent a genre with very few precedents; such plays as
Richard III
(
c
. 1592–94) were immediately successful.

In the second half of the 1590s, Shakespeare brought to perfection the genre of romantic comedy that he had helped to invent with such plays as
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(
c
. 1595–96),
Much Ado About Nothing
(
c
. 1598–99), and
As You Like It
(
c
. 1598–1600). More history plays completed his dramatization of 15th-century English history. The two genres are nicely complementary: the one deals with courtship and marriage, while the other examines
the career of a young man growing up to be a worthy king. The tragedy
Romeo and Juliet
(
c
. 1594–96) is unique among plays of this middle period: it combines elements of romantic comedy and tragedy, yet the tragic vision is not that of the great tragedies that were to follow.

About 1599–1600 Shakespeare turned with unsparing intensity to the exploration of darker issues such as revenge, sexual jealousy, aging, midlife crisis, and death. He began writing not only his great tragedies but a group of plays that are hard to classify in terms of genre:
All's Well That Ends Well
,
Measure for Measure
, and
Troilus and Cressida
, all of which date from 1599 to 1605. One remarkable aspect about Shakespeare's great tragedies is that they proceed through such a staggering range of human emotions, and especially the emotions that are appropriate to the mature years of the human cycle.
Hamlet
(
c
. 1599–1601) cycles through revenge, despondency, and world-weariness.
Othello
(
c
. 1603–04) centres on sexual jealousy in marriage.
King Lear
(
c
. 1605–06) is about aging, generational conflict, and feelings of ingratitude.
Macbeth
(
c
. 1606–07) explores ambition mad enough to kill a father figure who stands in the way.
Antony and Cleopatra
(
c
. 1606–07) studies the exhilarating but ultimately dismaying phenomenon of midlife crisis. Shakespeare then turned to comedies that are usually called romances or tragicomedies;
The Winter's Tale
(
c
. 1609–11) and
The Tempest
(
c
. 1611) are typical in telling stories of wandering and separation that lead eventually to tearful and joyous reunion.
The Tempest
seems to have been intended as Shakespeare's farewell to the theatre, although other plays, likely collaborations, followed.

Shakespeare's poetry dates from his early professional years, about 1592–94, during a pause in his theatrical career when the plague closed down much theatrical activity.
Venus and Adonis
(1593) and
The Rape of Lucrece
(1594) are the only works that Shakespeare seems to have shepherded through the printing process. Both owe a good deal to Ovid. His sonnets are more difficult to date, since they cannot have been written all at one time; most scholars set them within the period 1593–1600. As a narrative, the sonnet sequence tells of strong attachment, of jealousy, of grief at separation, of joy at being together and sharing beautiful experiences. But their order of composition is unknown, and Shakespeare did not oversee their publication; it is also unclear whether the sonnets reflect any circumstances in Shakespeare's personal life.