Week 2 – Shakespeare’s Life and Biography

Research Shakespeare’s life, ensuring you include information about his origins, family, relationships, the world he lived in and questions surrounding his work.

William Shakespeare and his Family

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor. He was regarded the greatest writer in the English Language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. It is believed that he was born on or near April 23^rd, 1564 as he was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26^th, 1564. It is believed that that was the date of his birth as this is the date in which scholars acknowledge it as William Shakespeare’s birthday. His actual birth was never recorded. Shakespeare, ironically, died on his birthday too on April 23^rd, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon. When Shakespeare was just a baby, the Plague had killed about 200 people in Stratford – 1 in 5 of the population, and he was lucky to survive. Shakespeare’s parents, John Shakespeare and Mary Shakespeare had eight children. Joan (1558-unkown, died in infancy), Margaret (1562-1563), William (1564-1616), Gilbert (1566-1612), Joan (1569-1646), Anne (1571-1579), Richard (1574-1613) and Edmund (1580-1607).

William Shakespeare

John Shakespeare was born in 1531, Stratford-upon-Avon, and died on September 7^th, 1601, Stratford-upon-Avon. He was a leatherworker who specialised in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar items. Being a prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden. John Shakespeare rose through offices in Stratford, became an alderman, and eventually when William Shakespeare was five, became the town bailiff. An alderman is a co-opted member of an English county or borough council and a bailiff is a sheriff’s officer who executes writs and processes and carries out distrains and arrests. He was much like a mayor. Mary Arden, later became Mary Shakespeare, was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, possibly around 1537, and died in September 1608, Stratford-upon-Avon. When her father, Robert Arden died in December 1556, she inherited her father’s farm, which is now called ‘Mary Arden’s House’ in Wilmcote, Warwickshire. Mary was from a family of status.

William Shakespeare, being the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost attended Stratford’s grammar school. Like most other schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on the Latin classics, including memorisation, writing, and acting classic Latin plays. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School, also known as King’s New School, in Stratford-upon-Avon from the age of 7 in 1571 and left school and formal education when he was fourteen or fifteen in 1578.

Marriage and Children

A few years after Shakespeare left school, in late 1582, he married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna. This was quite a common situation at the time. When they got married, Anne Hathaway was 26 and William was 18. Anne grew up just outside of Stratford in the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of her life in Stratford. Anne was born in 1556, Shottery and died in 1623, Stratford-upon-Avon. In early 1585, the couple had twins, Judith and Hamnet, completing the family. Shakespeare had three children. Susanna (1583-1649), Hamnet (1585-1596) and Judith (1585-1662). Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were named after William Shakespeare’s close friends, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. Whilst Shakespeare worked in London, Anne and the children stayed living in Stratford. Around 1590, that’s when William Shakespeare moved to London to do his first play ‘Henry VI, Part One’. Some later observers have suggested that the separation between William and Anne, and their relatively few children, were signs of a strained marriage. However, for William to pursue his ambition and theatre career, he had no choice but to work in London.

Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet died at the age of 11 and his eldest daughter, Susanna, later married a well-to-do Stratford doctor called John Hall. Susanna and John had a daughter called Elizabeth, in which meant that she was William’s first grandchild, born in 1608. Not long before William’s death in 1616, his daughter Judith, married a Stratford vintner, Thomas Quiney. A vintner was a wine merchant. This therefore meant that the family subsequently died out, leaving no direct descendants of William Shakespeare himself. Anne used had the profession of a homemaker and also outlived William by 7 years.

Shakespeare's Marriage and Children

London Theatre

Around 1590, Shakespeare moved to London to pursue his Theatre career. During this time, it was known that he was already in the middle of writing the Henry VI plays. In 1592, he became an established London actor and playwright, mocked by a contemporary as a “Shake-scene”. The next year, in 1593, Shakespeare published a long poem called Venus and Adonis. The first quarto editions of his early plays appeared in 1594. For more than two decades, Shakespeare had multiple roles in the London theatre as an actor, playwright, and, in time, a business partner in a major acting company called the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ (renamed the King’s Men in 1603). Over the years, he became steadily more famous in the London Theatre world; his name, which was not even listed on the first quarts of his plays, became a regular feature-clearly a selling point-on later title pages.

In 1592, a playwright called Robert Greene penned a scathing critique of Shakespeare, and called him an “upstart crow” who doesn’t belong with Greene’s university-educated dramatist crowd.’ Leading on from this diatribe, this highlights the fact that by this time, Shakespeare was successful enough as a playwright due to the fact that he was making his theatre peers jealous. In January 1593, the London theatres were closed due to the outbreak of the bubonic plague that eventually killed about five per cent of the city’s residents and citizens. Shakespeare thus used the outbreak of the plague to write poetry. That’s when ‘Venus and Adonis’ became published later in April that same year. 1694, the London theatres reopened to the public and over the next five years, Shakespeare’s troupe, the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, became one of the most popular acting groups and companies in London. They even accepted frequent invitations to perform in the royal court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Globe Theatre

In 1599, the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ built Shakespeare’s Globe. It is a wooden theatre in London and is where most of Shakespeare’s plays were performed for the very first time. The King’s Men began performing at Blackfriars theatre, an indoor theatre in London in 1608. Shakespeare’s Globe was built three times. On 29^th June 1613, the theatre burned down in about an hour. It was caused by gunpowder being held down by wadding, and a piece of the wadding caught fire when the canons were fired in the play Henry VIII. The company then built a second one, but this seemed to be a lot more extravagantly decorated than the first, using the same brick foundations of the first one. It also had a tiled roof, not a thatched one. The third Globe was built a street nearer to the river and was built to be just as accurate as the second one in every way, shape and form. They used the same tools, same techniques, same wood. The difference was that this Globe had more exits and fire doors were put in place in case of emergency. There had to be more stewards on duty to look after the audience members and the bench seating was numbered rather than the audience crowding together.

Shakespeare’s Criticism and Doubts Against Him

Anti-Stratfordians often portray the town as a cultural backwater lacking the environment necessary to nurture a genius, and depict Shakespeare as ignorant and illiterate. They also consider Shakespeare’s background incompatible with that attributable to the author of the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports; such as hunting, falconry, tennis, and lawn-bowling. Some of them found that the works showed little sympathy for the upwardly mobile types like John Shakespeare and William Shakespeare, and that the author portrays individual commoners comically, as objects or ridicule. Commoners in groups they believe were depicted typically as dangerous mobs.

No student registers of the period survived, so no documentation existed for the attendance of Shakespeare or any other pupil. This means that anyone who taught or attended the school never recorded that they were his teacher or classmate. This lack of documentation was taken by many Anti-Stratfordians as evidence that Shakespeare had little or no education. They also questioned how Shakespeare, with no record of the education and cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have acquired the extensive vocabulary found in the plays and poems. The author’s vocabulary is calculated to be between 17,500 and 29,000 words. No letters or signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare survived.  The appearance of Shakespeare’s six authenticated signatures, which they characterise as “an illiterate scrawl”, is interpreted as indicating that he was illiterate or barely literate.

Shakespeare’s Final Years

Financially, William Shakespeare prospered from his partnership in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men ~ King’s Men, as well as his writing and acting. He invested a lot of his wealth into real-estate purchases in Stratford and bought the second-largest house in the town, New Place, in 1597. One of the last plays in which William Shakespeare worked on, was The Two Noble Kinsmen. He wrote this with a frequent collaborator, John Fletcher around 1613. It is unknown what William Shakespeare died of, but an idea was that it may have been an infectious disease as his brother-in-law had died a week earlier; but his health may have had a longer decline as to why he survived longer than his brother-in-law.

Shakespeare's Bust

The memorial bust of William Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford was considered one of two authentic likenesses, because it was approved by people who knew him. The other such likeness is the engraving by Martin Droeshout in the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, produced seven years after his death by his friends and colleagues from the King’s Men.