Life of William Shakespeare

This is an accepted version of this page William Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, poet, and theatre entrepreneur in London during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.

[12][13][14][15][16] The King's New School at Stratford was on Church Street, less than a quarter of a mile from Shakespeare's home and within a few yards from where his father sat on the town council.

[44] Subject matter for Shakespeare's composition exercises in both prose and verse would have been drawn from authors of history, of whom Sallust and Caesar were nearly always required.

[53] The familiarity with the animals and plants of the English countryside exhibited in his poems and plays, especially the early ones, suggests that he lived the childhood of a typical country boy, with easy access to rural nature and a propensity for outdoor sports, especially hunting.

The licence, issued by the consistory court of the diocese of Worcester, 21 miles (34 km) west of Stratford, allowed the two to marry with only one proclamation of the marriage banns in church instead of the customary three successive Sundays.

[58] Since he was under age and could not stand as surety, and since Hathaway's father had died, two of Hathaway's neighbours – Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson – posted a bond of £40 the next day to ensure: that no legal impediments existed to the union; that the bride had the consent of her "friends" (persons acting in lieu of parents or guardians if she was under age); and to indemnify the bishop issuing the licence from any possible liability for the wife and any children should any impediment nullify the marriage.

While this lack of records bars any certainty about his activity during those years, it is certain that by the time of Greene's attack on the 28-year-old, Shakespeare had acquired a reputation as an actor and burgeoning playwright.

It is also reported, according to a note added by Samuel Johnson to the 1765 edition of Rowe's Life, that Shakespeare minded the horses for theatre patrons in London.

[62] In a 1973 book, W. Nicholas Knight presented a theory that Shakespeare pursued a legal career, finding evidence of such training in his written works.

"[64] In 1985 E. A. J. Honigmann proposed that Shakespeare acted as a schoolmaster in Lancashire,[65] on the evidence found in the 1581 will of a member of the Houghton family, referring to plays and play-clothes and asking his kinsman Thomas Hesketh to take care of "William Shakeshaft, now dwelling with me".

Another idea is that Shakespeare may have joined Queen Elizabeth's Men in 1587, after the sudden death of actor William Knell in a fight while on a tour which later took in Stratford.

The profession was unregulated by a guild that could have established restrictions on new entrants to the profession—actors were literally "masterless men"—and several avenues existed to break into the field in the Elizabethan era.

[70][71] By 1592 Shakespeare was a player/playwright in London, and he had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him in the posthumous Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

William's father John, a bailiff of Stratford with a wife of good birth, was eligible for a coat of arms and applied to the College of Heralds, but evidently his worsening financial status prevented him from obtaining it.

The theme of social status and restoration runs deep through the plots of many of his plays, and at times Shakespeare seems to mock his own longing.

[74] By 1596, Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and by 1598 he appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every Man in His Humour written by Ben Jonson.

Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker (a maker of ornamental headdresses) in the northwest of London in 1604.

The Stratford chamberlain's accounts in 1598 record a sale of stone to the council from "Mr Shaxpere", which may have been related to remodelling work on the newly purchased house.

[78] Boehrer comments that, Shakespeare had established himself in Stratford as the keeper of a great house, the owner of large gardens and granaries, a man with generous stores of barley which one could purchase, at need, for a price.

In short, he had become an entrepreneur specialising in real estate and agricultural products, an aspect of his identity further enhanced by his investments in local farmland and farm produce.

He bought a share in the lease on tithes for £440 in 1605, giving him income from grain and hay, as well as from wool, lamb and other items in Stratford town.

The purchase was probably an investment, as Shakespeare was living mainly in Stratford by this time, and the apartment was rented out to one John Robinson.

In June 1613 Shakespeare's daughter Susanna was slandered by John Lane, a local man who claimed she had caught gonorrhea from a lover.

[90] In the last few weeks of Shakespeare's life, the man who was to marry his younger daughter Judith — a tavern-keeper named Thomas Quiney — was charged in the local church court with "fornication".

Of the tributes that started to come from fellow authors, one — by James Mabbe printed in the First Folio — refers to his relatively early death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room.

There are no direct descendants of the poet and playwright alive today, but the diarist John Aubrey recalls in his Brief Lives that William Davenant, his godson, was "contented" to be believed Shakespeare's actual son.

Davenant's mother was the wife of a vintner at the Crown Tavern in Oxford, on the road between London and Stratford, where Shakespeare would stay when travelling between his home and the capital.

He was granted the honour of burial in the chancel not because of his fame as a playwright but because he had purchased a share of the tithe in the church for £440 (a considerable sum of money at the time).

A monument on the wall nearest his grave, probably placed by his family,[95] features a bust showing Shakespeare posed in the act of writing.

[96] 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.