THE LIFE b4h21hr
Although the amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly
large for one of his station in life, many find it a little disappointing, for
it is mostly gleaned from documents of an official character. Dates of baptisms,
marriages, deaths, and burials; wills, conveyances, legal processes, and payments
by the court--these are the dusty details. There is, however, a fair number
of contemporary allusions to him as a writer, and these add a reasonable amount
of flesh and blood to the biographical skeleton.
Early life in Stratford.
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church, 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.
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 tedious round of logic, rhetoric, and other studies
then followed there would have interested him.
Instead, at the age of 18 he married. Where and exactly when are not known,
but the bishop registry at Worcester preserves a bond dated November 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
Hathaway who inhabited a beautiful farmhouse, now much visited, two miles 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 February 2, 1585, twins were baptized, Hamlet and Judith.
(The boy Hamlet, 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 theatre goers; 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.
Career in the theatre.
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 Tiger’s
heart wrapped in a Player’s 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.
It is difficult to be certain what these words mean; but it is clear that they
are insulting and that Shakespeare is the object of the sarcasm. When the book
in which they appear (Greene’s goats-worth of wit, 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 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 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 Shakespeare’s, has not survived. It
can scarcely be doubted that it was William who 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 as a boy he must have passed every day in walking to school.
It is not clear how his career in the theatre began; but from about 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; 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.
Private life.
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, Cripplegate, London.
The records of a lawsuit in May 1612, due to 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 upon 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 <Picture: Apound sterlingS>30--a large
sum in Elizabethan money. 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; but
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 cursed be he that moves my bones.