Shakespeare, William 1564-1616
English playwright, poet and actor, the greatest English dramatist

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glover and wool dealer, and Mary Arden. The traditional date of his birth is 23 April, which is probably influenced by its coincidence with St George's Day and by the fact that Shakespeare is known to have died on that day. He lived for 52 years, partly in Stratford and partly in London. He was most likely educated at Stratford Grammar School; the numerous classical allusions in his plays and poems show a knowledge of the Latin and Greek poets and writers who were studied there, and John Shakespeare's civic status entitled him to have his son educated free of charge.

Shakespeare's life can be divided into three periods. The first was spent wholly in Stratford, and included boyhood and education, early marriage and the birth of his three children. The second period lasted for 25 years from the time when he left Stratford, still a young man, to work in London as an actor and playwright; he divided his time in these years between Stratford and London and continued to own property and take an interest in Stratford. Finally, when he was in his late forties and with ample means, he left London to live entirely in Stratford, where he spent the rest of his life.

During the winter of 1582-83, at the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, a farmer's daughter who lived in Shottery, near Stratford. She was 26, and pregnant by him. Less than six months after their wedding, their first child, Susanna, was baptized in Stratford church. Early in 1585, Anne gave birth to twins: Hamnet, their only son (who died young), and Judith, their second daughter. With a wife and three children to maintain, and still dependent on his father, Shakespeare joined one of the London acting companies that had been touring in Stratford; three troupes were playing there from 1583 to 1588.

By 1595 he had written several successful plays in all the forms of drama then popular, although the chronology and order of the early works is still disputed. They include histories, comedies, and the revenge-tragedy Titus Andronicus. Between 1592 and 1594, when the theatres were closed by an outbreak of plague, Shakespeare turned to poetry, writing sonnets and two long narrative poems: Venus and Adonis (published 18 April 1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (published 9 May 1594). Both were dedicated to the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was a patron of the arts, although nothing is known of the nature of Shakespeare's connection with him. In the literary and courtly circles in which they were read, the poems were highly praised for their eloquent treatment of classical subjects.

The 154 extant sonnets were probably written between 1592 and 1598, although they were not published until 1609, and the order in which he wrote them is not known. The poems of the first group are addressed to a young man, and of the second group to the 'Dark lady'; despite many attempts nobody has succeeded in identifying real people in these allusions, and it is doubtful that there is any real autobiographical basis for them. The language in which they treat recurrent themes, love's ecstasy and despair, implacable time, lust and its shames, separation, betrayal, fame and death, echoes that of the plays.

When the theatres reopened in 1594, Shakespeare joined the newly-formed Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was entitled to a share of the profits. The company already had some of the best actors, including Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, and Will Kempe, and performed regularly at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, notably during the Christmas festivities of 1594-95. Shakespeare's considerable output of six comedies, five histories and one tragedy (Romeo and Juliet) between 1594 and 1598 took the London theatre world by storm, and the language and the characters of the plays captured people's imagination and entered their daily conversation.

The income received from these successes enabled Shakespeare to meet the heavy expenses incurred when his father was awarded a grant of arms in October 1596. Henceforth, John Shakespeare was entitled to the style of 'Gentleman', an honour that would descend in due course to his eldest son although, two months earlier, Shakespeare's only son Hamnet had died at the age of 11. In 1597 Shakespeare bought and renovated New Place, a large and imposing mansion in Stratford, close by the Guild Chapel and the grammar school and a few minutes' walk from his parents' house. Two years later, the Chamberlain's Men dismantled the Theatre and used much of its material to build a new playhouse, called the Globe, on Bankside, south of the Thames. It was a bold and successful venture. Situated in the heart of London's pleasure-land of gaming-houses, bear-gardens, brothels and theatres, the Globe was both bigger and better equipped than any of its rivals. Its huge stage permitted the rapidity and continuity of action which the dramas of the day demanded and which Shakespeare was able to exploit in the plays he wrote for performance there. The Globe opened with Henry V, and its success was followed by Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Hamlet and Othello.

When James I (James VII and I) succeeded to the English throne in 1603, he immediately conferred his own royal patronage on Shakespeare and his fellow sharers. They became the King's Men ('His Majesty's Servants') and were granted a patent. The number of court performances was greatly increased, and the King's Men received twice the pay they had received from Elizabeth. The darker tone of the plays that Shakespeare wrote in the early years of James's reign has led to speculation that it reflected some kind of personal and spiritual crisis. But nothing that is known about him amounts to a feasible explanation of why he wrote a succession of so-called problem plays (or 'dark comedies') and tragedies between 1602 and 1609: All's Well, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida.

These plays were great popular successes at the Globe, and were also received with acclaim at court and when performed for wealthy and socially exclusive audiences in private halls and in the lawyers' Inns of Court. In 1608 the King's Men took over Blackfriars Theatre, one of the more comfortable and better equipped 'private' theatres that were enclosed with a roof; they used it for the winter seasons and the Globe in the summer. Shakespeare had bought a share in the Blackfriars Theatre, and began to write plays that could be performed with equal success on two very different stages. He solved the technical problems with increasing sureness in the so-called 'Last Plays': Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, which were the results of his characteristic urge to experiment with and make a distinctive contribution to developments in the art and craft of drama.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare was preparing to return to Stratford, where there was much to demand his attention. His parents were now dead and he took his position as head of the family seriously. In 1607, Susanna had married a respected physician, Dr John Hall, and a daughter, Elizabeth, Shakespeare's first grandchild, was born in 1608. Soon after writing The Tempest, he freed himself of his major commitment to the company by bringing forward John Fletcher to take over as the King's Men's chief dramatist. The company could stage any of his existing plays whenever the wished, and he was therefore able to spend more time in Stratford. By 1612 he had completed his withdrawal, although he collaborated with Fletcher in at least two plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Shakespeare died at his home in Stratford on 23 April 1616. Two days later, he was buried in the church in which he had been christened. The nature of his illness is not known, but the male Shakespeares of his generation were not long-lived. He had made provision in his will to keep the bulk of his estate intact, entailed for the benefit of his descendants; but his direct line of descent ended when his granddaughter died childless in 1670. In 1623 a monument to him was erected in Holy Trinity Church. A few months later, the first collection of his plays, known as the First Folio, was published (see below).

Bibliography: The Chronology of Shakespeare's Works

None of the original manuscripts of the plays, either autographs or copies, have survived. Nineteen plays were printed in Quarto editions, although the extent of Shakespeare's own involvement in their publication is not clear. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two of his former fellow-actors in the King's company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, collected 36 plays in the so-called First Folio, which forms the basis of the accepted canon. (Later editions were published in 1632, 1664 and 1685.) The First Folio omitted Pericles, although this had been published in a Quarto edition in 1609, and other texts differ substantially from the Quarto versions; some of the differences may be due to changes arising from experience in performance. Some Quartos (eg of Henry V) are known to be corrupt, often representing unauthorized versions concocted from actors' memories. Of other plays attributed to Shakespeare in later years, Edward III is thought not to be by him but to have included a contribution from him. At the end of his life he collaborated with John Fletcher in Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in a Quarto edition in 1634 with both names on the title-page. A manuscript in the British Museum preserves 147 lines of his contribution to a play called Sir Thomas More.

Dates given below are approximate dates of performance; Q precedes a date for a Quarto publication.

Early Plays:

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590-91)

Henry VI, Part I (1592)

Henry VI, Part II (1592)

Henry VI, Part III (1592)

Titus Andronicus (1592; Q1594)

The Taming of the Shrew (1593; Q1594)

The Comedy of Errors (1594)

Love's Labour's Lost (1594-95; Q1598)

Romeo and Juliet (1595; Q1597, 1599)

Histories:

Richard III (1592-3; Q1597)

Richard II (1595; Q1597)

King John (1595-96)

Henry IV, Part I (1596-97; Q1598)

Henry IV, Part II (1596-97; Q1600)

Henry V (1598-99; Q1600)

Later comedies:

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-96; Q1600)

The Merchant of Venice (1596-97; Q1600)

The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-98; Q1602)

Much Ado About Nothing (1598; Q1600)

As You Like It (1599-1600)

Twelfth Night (1601)

Troilus and Cressida (1602; Q1609)

Measure for Measure (1603)

All's Well That Ends Well (1604-05)

Roman plays:

Julius Caesar (1599)

Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

Coriolanus (1608)

Later tragedies:

Hamlet (1600-01; Q1603, 1604)

Othello (1603-04; Q1622)

Timon of Athens (1605)

King Lear (1605-06; Q1608)

Macbeth (1606)

Late Plays:

Pericles (1607; Q1609)

The Winter's Tale (1609)

Cymbeline (1610)

The Tempest (1611)

Henry VIII (1613)

Non-dramatic works:

Venus and Adonis (1593)

The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

'The Phoenix and the Turtle' (1601, in a collection by Robert Chester)

Sonnets (1609)

'A Lover's Complaint' (1609, with the sonnets)

Bibliography: The literature on Shakespeare is vast, and the works cited here are intended as general introductions in which more detailed bibliographical information will be found: S Wells, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1986); S Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives (1970), William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (rev edn, 1977); O J Campbell and E G Quinn (eds), A Shakespeare Encyclopaedia (1966); A L Rowse, Shakespeare: A Biography (1963). See also the introductory material to The Oxford Shakespeare (1988). Special periodicals include Shakespeare Quarterly (from 1950) and Shakespeare Studies (annually from 1965).