WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Playwright and poet. Born in 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire,
England (historians believe Shakespeare was born on April
23, the same day he
died in 1616). The son of John Shakespeare, a glover,
and Mary Arden, of
farming stock. Much uncertainty surrounds Shakespeare's
early life. He was the
eldest of three sons, and there were four daughters.
He was educated at the
local grammar school, and married Anne Hathaway, from
a local farming family,
in 1582. She bore him a daughter, Susanna, in 1583,
and twins, Hamnet and
Judith, in 1585.
Shakespeare moved to London, possibly in 1591, and became
an actor. From
1592 to 1594, when the theatres were closed for the plague,
he wrote his poems
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
His sonnets, known by 1598,
though not published until 1609, fall into two groups:
1 to 126 are addressed to
a fair young man, and 127 to 154 to a dark lady who holds
both the young man and
the poet in thrall. Who these people are has provided
an exercise in detection for
numerous critics. The first evidence of his association
with the stage is in 1594,
when he was acting with the Lord Chamberlain's company
of players, later the
King's Men. When the company built the Globe Theatre
south of the Thames
in 1597, he became a partner, living modestly at a house
in Silver Street until
c.1606, then moving near the Globe. He returned to Stratford
c.1610, living as
a country gentleman at his house, New Place. His will
was made in March 1616,
a few months before he died, and he was buried at Stratford.
