Life of William Shakespeare
was an actor, playwright, poet, and theatre entrepreneur in London during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. He was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in the Holy Trinity Church. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children. He died in his home town of Stratford on 23 April 1616, aged 52.
Though more is known about Shakespeare's life than those of most other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, few personal biographical facts survive, which is unsurprising in the light of his social status as a commoner, the low esteem in which his profession was held, and the general lack of interest of the time in the personal lives of writers. Information about his life derives from public rather than private documents: vital records, real estate and tax records, lawsuits, records of payments, and references to Shakespeare and his works in printed and hand-written texts. Nevertheless, hundreds of biographies have been written and more continue to be, most of which rely on inferences and the historical context of the 70 or so hard facts recorded about Shakespeare the man, a technique that sometimes leads to embellishment or unwarranted interpretation of the documented record.
Early life
Family origins
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. His exact date of birth is not knownthe baptismal record was dated 26 April 1564but has been traditionally taken to be 23 April 1564, which is also the Feast Day of Saint George, the patron saint of England. He was the first son and the first surviving child in the family; two earlier children, Joan and Margaret, had died early.File:William Shakespeares birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon 26l2007.jpg|thumb|left|John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, now belonging to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
His parents were John Shakespeare, a successful glover originally from Snitterfield in Warwickshire, and Mary Arden, the youngest daughter of John's father's landlord, a member of the local gentry. The couple married around 1557 and lived on Henley Street when Shakespeare was born, purportedly in a house now known as Shakespeare's Birthplace. They had eight children: Joan, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Joan, Anne, Richard and Edmund.
Shakespeare's family was above average materially during his childhood. His father's business was thriving at the time of William's birth. John Shakespeare owned several properties in Stratford and had a profitablethough illegalsideline of dealing in wool. He was appointed to several municipal offices and served as an alderman in 1565, culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, in 1568. For reasons unclear to history he fell upon hard times, beginning in 1576, when William was 12.
Boyhood and education
A close analysis of Shakespeare's works compared with the standard curriculum of the time confirms that Shakespeare had received a grammar school education. 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. It was free to all male children, and though there is no direct evidence of which grammar school Shakespeare attended, there is hardly a possibility that it was any other than the school in Stratford. Shakespeare would have been enrolled when he was 7, in 1571, having already learned to read English in a separate "petty school." The grammar school was a single-room schoolhouse under one "master," assisted by an "usher" who taught the rudiments of Latin grammar to the younger students. Classes were held every day except on Sundays, with a half-day off on Thursdays, year-round. The school day typically ran from 6a.m. to 5p.m. with a two-hour break for lunch. Most of the day was spent in the study of Latin literature, much of which was to be committed to memory.Direct evidence of the curriculum at Shakespeare's particular school or the paedagogical methods of his schoolteachers is lacking, but William Lily's Latin grammar was required to be used throughout England by royal decree, and the curriculum was essentially uniform with slight variations. For his first three or four years, Shakespeare would have been under the tutelage of the usher. He would have studied Lily's grammar in English, and then in Latin, exercising the rules of Latin syntax by translation into Latin of sentences dictated by the usher, drawn from the Distichs of Cato or other collections of Latin aphorisms, followed by memorisation of the approved Latin and English forms of the sentence. Aesop's Fables were almost universally studied in the second or third form as the next subject for construction after Cato.
After Aesop, Shakespeare would have had his first introduction to dramatic structure by studying the comedies of Terence, and perhaps some of Plautus as well. It is possible that Shakespeare was also called upon to act in these plays, either by reciting sections of them in class or by taking part in a full performance of one or more of them, but there is nothing to suggest that plays were performed at Shakespeare's school. Shakespeare would also have been set to parse and construe at least parts of the eclogues of Mantuan in the lower grammar school, and may have been given his first lessons in prosody on that work. Shakespeare probably also acquired much of his knowledge of the Old Testament in the lower grammar school through being assigned biblical texts to translate into Latin. While Shakespeare was learning to read and compose Latin, he would also have been taught to speak it in conversation, with dialogues such as those composed by Corderius, Juan Luis Vives, Erasmus, and Sebastian Castellio studied as models.
At about the age of 10, Shakespeare progressed to the upper grammar school taught by the master. 15 was considered the normal age to complete grammar school and matriculate in university if one were to continue one's education, but it is possible Shakespeare remained a student at the grammar school until he was as old as 18. In the upper grammar school, Shakespeare studied rhetoric, with the Rhetorica ad Herennium as his basic textbook, supplemented by Cicero's Topica, before continuing his study of rhetoric with Quintilian. Shakespeare's instruction in extended Latin composition would have begun with the writing of epistles, and at about the same time, he studied the themes of Aphthonius. Finally, Shakespeare learned to write disputative orations or declamations.
It was also in the upper grammar school that Shakespeare began his study of classical Latin verse. Shakespeare evidently acquired some knowledge in school of the Heroides, Metamorphoses, Tristia, and Fasti of Ovid, and probably the Amores as well. From Virgil, he read at least portions of the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. Shakespeare also appears to have studied the Odes of Horace, Juvenal, and probably Persius. Beginning in the fourth form, Shakespeare would also have been assigned to imitate these authors in Latin verse composition; there is no evidence of the teaching of English verse in grammar schools of the 1570s.
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. It is fairly certain that Shakespeare also read some of Livy in school, as he later based his poem The Rape of Lucrece on Ovid's Fasti and the work of Livy, neither of which had been translated into English at the time. Shakespeare also appears to have read Cicero's Tusculan Disputations in school as part of his education in moral philosophy, which would heavily imply he had also read the De Officiis, De Amicitia, and De Senectute.
Ben Jonson's statement that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and lesse Greeke" is the strongest evidence that Shakespeare knew any Greek whatsoever. It is highly probable that Shakespeare was taught in school to read the New Testament in Greek, which was conventionally the first reading text used for that language, but there is very little that might indicate that Shakespeare went on to study classical Greek authors such as Homer or Isocrates.
By the end of their studies, grammar school pupils were quite familiar with the great Latin authors, and with Latin drama and rhetoric. However, all of the classical authors whose direct influence is clearly evident in Shakespeare are standard grammar school authors of the time; there is no sign that he was forced to master minor figures, or took great pains to pursue further classical learning outside of school.
Shakespeare is unique among his contemporaries in the extent of figurative language derived from country life and nature. 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.
Marriage
On 27 November 1582, Shakespeare was issued a special licence to marry Anne Hathaway, the daughter of the late Richard Hathaway, a yeoman farmer of Shottery, about a mile west of Stratford. He was 18 and she was 26. The licence, issued by the consistory court of the diocese of Worcester, 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.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" ; and to indemnify the bishop issuing the licence from any possible liability for the wife and any children should any impediment nullify the marriage. Neither the exact day, nor place, of their marriage is now known.
The reason for the special licence became apparent six months later with the baptism of their first daughter, Susanna, on 26 May 1583. Their twin children – a son Hamnet and a daughter Judith – were baptised on 2 February 1585, before Shakespeare was 21 years of age.