"So worthy a friend and fellow": The Life of William Shakespeare
Outside of the plays and poems, all that we know of the life of William Shakespeare is derived from a handful of official documents, including parish records and surviving contracts, contemporary anecdotes of uncertain trustworthiness, and later, often fanciful speculation. Amongst the most engaging of the anecdotes is that recorded by John Manningham in his diary in 1602, when Shakespeare was at the height of his powers as a dramatist--and perhaps also as a lover.  | | The British Library | | Title page of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, published posthumously in 1623. The famous engraved portrait is by Martin Droeshout. |
The actor Richard Burbage apparently made an assignation with a woman, agreeing that he would use "Richard the Third" as a password at her door. "Shakespeare," Manningham wrote, "overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."
Early years in Stratford
In a more sober vein, the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon records not only William Shakespeare's baptism (on 26 April 1564) but also that of seven younger brothers and sisters. At least three of these died in childhood, whilst the playwright's youngest brother Edmund is known to have become an actor in London, where he died in 1607 aged 27. Their father, John, was a local businessman, with a prosperous trade in gloves and wool, and a serious involvement in civic affairs, although he later fell on hard times. His wife, Mary, was the youngest daughter of a local landowner, Robert Arden.
Nicholas Rowe, the author of the first life of Shakespeare, published in 1709, asserts that William studied "for some time at a free school," which is held to be the well regarded King's New School in Stratford. Pupils here would probably have begun their education at the age of five, learning to read and write, and then from eight onwards would have been immersed in Latin grammar and the classics--Virgil, Ovid, Plautus and the rhetoric of Cicero. English and modern European literature and history, however, would not have been part of the curriculum. How long Shakespeare studied here is unknown, but Rowe records that John Shakespeare's circumstances forced him "to withdraw [William] from thence."
There is documentary evidence in November 1582 for authorisation of the marriage of "William Shagspere" to "Anne Hathwey of Stratford". She was twenty-six, whilst William was eighteen, and the marriage may be at least partially explained by the record six months later of the baptism on 26 May 1583 of Susanna, daughter to William. Just under three years later his twins, Hamnet and Judith, named after family friends, were also christened at Holy Trinity.
Life in the London theatre
The years between 1585 and 1592, when there is a first reference to Shakespeare in London, have been described as the "lost years." It is possible that the future dramatist was a schoolmaster in rural Lancashire, or he may have joined one of the touring companies of actors that came through Stratford in the 1580s. 1592 the dramatist Robert Greene issued a punning attack, including the dismissal as an "upstart crow", on a London actor and playwright clearly identifiable as Shakespeare.
Analysing Greene's attack, Ernst Honigmann suggests that it supports the view that Shakespeare was active in London's theatrical world from around 1586 or 1587. If correct, this "could mean that [Christopher] Marlowe (also born in 1564) was not Shakespeare's predecessor as a playwright, as stated in older textbooks, but his exact contemporary." (Ernst Honigmann, "Shakespeare's life" in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, ed., Cambridge, 2001, p. 5.)
Between the summer of 1592 and the spring of 1594 London was afflicted by the plague and all theatrical activity was halted. During this time Shakespeare wrote his long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which he dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. By this time he was apparently a member of the acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, along with the tragic actor Richard Burbage and the clown William Kempe.
Shakespeare was an actor on occasion, and according to Rowe, "the top of his performance was the ghost in his own Hamlet." He also took parts in plays by Ben Jonson, but he does not seem to have been regarded as a star. Instead, in addition to his responsibilities as a dramatist, he was one of the company's owners and business managers. He was also one of the leaseholders of the Globe Theatre, constructed in 1599, and from 1608, the Blackfriars Theatre. As a playwright, he contributed an average of two plays a year until 1602 or so, and then one each year afterwards.
Writing the plays
The order in which the plays were written has been reconstructed in outline, although the details continue to engage scholars, as does Shakespeare's role in the writing of a handful of collaboratively authored texts such as Sir Thomas More, The Reign of Edward III, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the late pageant Henry VIII. , however, that his early plays, written before about 1596, include the Tudor history tetralogy Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, and Richard III, as well as comedies including The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors and the revenge drama Titus Andronicus.
The second glorious quartet of history plays--Richard II, Henry IV, Parts I and II and Henry V--are dated to the later 1590s, as are further comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It) and the first tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is dated to c. 1599-1601, wheras the other great tragedies--Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra--almost certainly date from after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.
Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, all dating from the early years of James I's reign, have been grouped together as "problem plays" sharing, in Susan Snyder's words, "a grittiness not apparent in Shakespeare's earlier comedy, addressing deep-rooted perversions in both individuals and societies resistant to the magico-metamorphic strategies that heretofore had produced satisfying comic conclusions." (Susan Snyder, "The genres of Shakespeare's plays" in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, ed., Cambridge, 2001, p. 95) And in the final dramas, most notably The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, there is amongst an extraordinarily complex and ambiguous understanding of the world a strong sense of reconciliation and hope.
The return to Stratford
There is no evidence that Anne or his children lived at any point with Shakespeare in London, but he is said to have visited Stratford annually. In 1597 he bought the second largest house in the town, New Place, and there is a long-established tradition that he planted with his own hands a mulberry tree in the grounds. ![[image]](28701903_1monument.jpg) | | Shakespeare's monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, as illustrated in the 1899 edition of Sydney Lee's A Life of William Shakespeare. |
He nurtured business interests and made other significant investments in the area, and was known as a moneylender who drove a hard bargain. His final documented investment was the purchase in 1613 of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London, but even though this was a year in which he helped write two or three plays (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the lost Cardenio) he had already begun to withdraw from the capital and the theatre. Stratford once again became his home.
Shakespeare composed his will at the start of either 1615 or 1616, and he made some alterations to this on March 25 1616, by which date he was already ailing. He died just a month later, on April 23, and there is a famous anecdote recounted some fifty years later in his diary by the vicar of Holy Trinity, John Ward: "Shakespear, Drayton, and Ben Jhonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a fever there contracted." He was buried within the chancel of Holy Trinity on April 25, under a flagstone inscribed with these lines: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here!
Bless'd be the man that spares these stones,
And curs'd be he that moves my bones." Shakespeare's will has attracted extensive speculation, not least because of the notorious reference to Anne Hathaway: "Item, I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture." Various friends, including Burbage and others in the theatre, received bequests and gifts, and the bulk of the estate went to Susanna, by then married to a Stratford physician, John Hall. Of the twins, Hamnet had died at the age of 11 in 1596, and Judith married an untrustworthy vintner named Thomas Quiney. Anne Hathaway died in 1623, and tradition has it that although she wished to be buried in the same grave as her husband, the injunction on the tomb meant that she had to be interred alongside him.
In the same year as Anne's death appeared the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the great Folio of 1623, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, and with a prefatory verse by Ben Jonson. The volume, they said, was "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare."
This session draws extensively on "Shakespeare's life" by Ernst Honigmann, pp. 1-11 of "The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare", edited by Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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