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Shakespeare portrait with speech bubbles and famous writer's citations. Shakespeare ink drawn vector illustration with quotes from author's plays. Old English greeting Holla!

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Shakespeare portrait with speech bubbles and famous writer's citations. Shakespeare ink drawn vector illustration with quotes from author's plays. Old English greeting Holla! - buy this vector on Shutterstock & find other images.

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William Shakespeare - Playwright | Mini Bio | BIO

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Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England's national poet, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students memorize his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed. They also hunt for clues about the life of the man who inspires such "bardolatry" (as George Bernard Shaw derisively called it), much of which remains shrouded in mystery. Born into a family of modest means in Elizabethan England, the "Bard of Avon" wrote at least 37 plays and a collection of sonnets, established the legendary Globe theater and helped transform the English language.

Shakespeare's Childhood and Family Life

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town 100 miles northwest of London, and baptized there on April 26, 1564. His birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23, which was the date of his death in 1616 and is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. Shakespeare's father, John, dabbled in farming, wood trading, tanning, leatherwork, money lending and other occupations; he also held a series of municipal positions before falling into debt in the late 1580s. The ambitious son of a tenant farmer, John boosted his social status by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic landowner. Like John, she may have been a practicing Catholic at a time when those who rejected the newly established Church of England faced persecution.

Did you know? Sources from William Shakespeare's lifetime spell his last name in more than 80 different ways, ranging from "Shappere" to "Shaxberd." In the handful of signatures that have survived, he himself never spelled his name "William Shakespeare," using variations such as "Willm Shakspere" and "William Shakspeare" instead.

William was the third of eight Shakespeare children, of whom three died in childhood. Though no records of his education survive, it is likely that he attended the well-regarded local grammar school, where he would have studied Latin grammar and classics. It is unknown whether he completed his studies or abandoned them as an adolescent to apprentice with his father.

At 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (1556-1616), a woman eight years his senior, in a ceremony thought to have been hastily arranged due to her pregnancy. A daughter, Susanna, was born less than seven months later in May 1583. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Susanna and Judith would live to old age, while Hamnet, Shakespeare's only son, died at 11. As for William and Anne, it is believed that the couple lived apart for most of the year while the bard pursued his writing and theater career in London. It was not until the end of his life that Shakespeare moved back in with Anne in their Stratford home.

Shakespeare's Lost Years and Early Career

To the dismay of his biographers, Shakespeare disappears from the historical record between 1585, when his twins' baptism was recorded, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene denounced him in a pamphlet as an "upstart crow" (evidence that he had already made a name for himself on the London stage). What did the newly married father and future literary icon do during those seven "lost" years? Historians have speculated that he worked as a schoolteacher, studied law, traveled across continental Europe or joined an acting troupe that was passing through Stratford. According to one 17th-century account, he fled his hometown after poaching deer from a local politician's estate.

Whatever the answer, by 1592 Shakespeare had begun working as an actor, penned several plays and spent enough time in London to write about its geography, culture and diverse personalities with great authority. Even his earliest works evince knowledge of European affairs and foreign countries, familiarity with the royal court and general erudition that might seem unattainable to a young man raised in the provinces by parents who were probably illiterate. For this reason, some theorists have suggested that one or several authors wishing to conceal their true identity used the person of William Shakespeare as a front. (Most scholars and literary historians dismiss this hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights.)

Shakespeare's Plays and Poems

Shakespeare's first plays, believed to have been written before or around 1592, encompass all three of the main dramatic genres in the bard's oeuvre: tragedy ("Titus Andronicus"); comedy ("The Two Gentlemen of Verona," "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Taming of the Shrew"); and history (the "Henry VI" trilogy and "Richard III"). Shakespeare was likely affiliated with several different theater companies when these early works debuted on the London stage. In 1594 he began writing and acting for a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men (renamed the King's Men when James I appointed himself its patron), ultimately becoming its house playwright and partnering with other members to establish the legendary Globe theater in 1599.

Between the mid-1590s and his retirement around 1612, Shakespeare penned the most famous of his 37-plus plays, including "Romeo and Juliet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Macbeth" and "The Tempest." As a dramatist, he is known for his frequent use of iambic pentameter, meditative soliloquies (such as Hamlet's ubiquitous "To be, or not to be" speech) and ingenious wordplay. His works weave together and reinvent theatrical conventions dating back to ancient Greece, featuring assorted casts of characters with complex psyches and profoundly human interpersonal conflicts. Some of his plays-notably "All's Well That Ends Well," "Measure for Measure" and "Troilus and Cressida"-are characterized by moral ambiguity and jarring shifts in tone, defying, much like life itself, classification as purely tragic or comic.

Also remembered for his non-dramatic contributions, Shakespeare published his first narrative poem-the erotic "Venus and Adonis," intriguingly dedicated to his close friend Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton-while London theaters were closed due to a plague outbreak in 1593. The many reprints of this piece and a second poem, "The Rape of Lucrece," hint that during his lifetime the bard was chiefly renowned for his poetry. Shakespeare's famed collection of sonnets, which address themes ranging from love and sensuality to truth and beauty, was printed in 1609, possibly without its writer's consent. (It has been suggested that he intended them for his intimate circle only, not the general public.) Perhaps because of their explicit sexual references or dark emotional character, the sonnets did not enjoy the same success as Shakespeare's earlier lyrical works.

Shakespeare's Death and Legacy

Shakespeare died at age 52 of unknown causes on April 23, 1616, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. (Anne Hathaway, who outlived her husband by seven years, famously received his "second-best bed.") The slabstone over Shakespeare's tomb, located inside a Stratford church, bears an epitaph-written, some say, by the bard himself-warding off grave robbers with a curse: "Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones." His remains have yet to be disturbed, despite requests by archaeologists keen to reveal what killed him.

In 1623, two of Shakespeare's former colleagues published a collection of his plays, commonly known as the First Folio. In its preface, the dramatist Ben Jonson wrote of his late contemporary, "He was not of an age, but for all time." Indeed, Shakespeare's plays continue to grace stages and resonate with audiences around the world, and have yielded a vast array of film, television and theatrical adaptations. Furthermore, Shakespeare is believed to have influenced the English language more than any other writer in history, coining-or, at the very least, popularizing-terms and phrases that still regularly crop up in everyday conversation. Examples include the words "fashionable" ("Troilus and Cressida"), "sanctimonious" ("Measure for Measure"), "eyeball" ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") and "lackluster" ("As You Like It"); and the expressions "foregone conclusion" ("Othello"), "in a pickle" ("The Tempest"), "wild goose chase" ("Romeo and Juliet") and "one fell swoop" ("Macbeth").

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Considered the greatest English-speaking writer in history and known as England's national poet, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had more theatrical works performed than any other playwright. To this day, countless theater festivals around the world honor his work, students memorize his eloquent poems and scholars reinterpret the million words of text he composed.

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Shakespeare's comedies (or rather the plays of Shakespeare that are usually categorised as comedies), just as in the case with he tragedies, do not fit into any slot. They are generally identifiable as the comedies of Shakespeare in that they are full of fun, irony and dazzling wordplay.

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21 Words Created by Shakespeare (And 4 That Weren’t)

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The Bard gave us ‘bedazzled’ and so many other words—but there are a few cases where words we thought he created actually originated earlier.

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There have always been attempts to classify Shakespeare's play types, using labels to place them in categories that could restrict the ways in which we might think about them. Certainly, we can justify calling the Henry plays, the Richard plays and King John Shakespeare's 'history plays' although that would be the most superficial kind of description, given the variety of action, mood, feeling, tone and structure among them and within the texts individually.

The so-called Shakespeare tragedies and Shakespeare comedies have more similarities than differences and what they have in common is a recognizability that comes from their all being the work of the same writer whose genius makes him the best plot constructor, character-maker, story-teller and poet of his time. A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, with its forbidden love, threatens to fall into a dark chasm of unhappiness for the characters but survives that danger amidst hilarity and joy, while Romeo and Juliet with the same theme of forbidden love seems to be developing towards a joyful conclusion but suddenly and unexpectedly falls into the deepest darkness. Much Ado About Nothing teeters on the brink of darkness but then comes out of it and proceeds towards a felicitous climax.

A nineteenth century critic, F.S. Boas, desperate to classify everything, coined the term 'problem plays' for some of them because of the difficulty he had squeezing them into any of the conventional slots. The plays Shakespeare wrote between 1601 and 1603 - All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida - seemed confusing to him as they lurch back and forth between dark drama and a light comic tone. The Winter's Tale is usually put into the 'problem play' category as well.

When it comes to the two main divisions, 'comedy' and 'tragedy', there is a broad range of dramatic types in each and, whatever those two terms may mean, none of the plays fits comfortably into either of them. The Merchant of Venice, for example, traditionally a comedy, features Shylock, a tragic figure in every way, while the comic elements are only there to frame and heighten the tragic feeling. On the other hand, one of the 'great' tragic plays, Antony and Cleopatra, shows the ultimate genius of a mind that doesn't respect classification boxes in that it produces a real tragic feeling from a completely comic structure. That play alone confounds the efforts of all the scholars bent on classifying Shakespeare's dramas.

Here are the more or less standard classifications:

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There have always been attempts to classify Shakespeare's play types, using labels to place them in categories that could restrict the ways in which we might think about them.

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Since William Shakespeare lived more than 400 years ago, and many records from that time are lost or never existed in the first place, we don't know everything about his life. For example, we know that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, 100 miles northwest of London, on April 26, 1564. But we don't know his exact birthdate, which must have been a few days earlier.

We do know that Shakespeare's life revolved around two locations: Stratford and London. He grew up, had a family, and bought property in Stratford, but he worked in London, the center of English theater. As an actor, a playwright, and a partner in a leading acting company, he became both prosperous and well-known. Even without knowing everything about his life, fans of Shakespeare have imagined and reimagined him according to their own tastes, just as we see with the 19th-century family scene at the top of this page.

Primary sources: Shakespeare Documented
Visit Shakespeare Documented to see primary-source materials documenting Shakespeare's life. This online resource of items from the Folger and other institutions brings together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare and his works, as well as additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter.

On This Page: Birth and Childhood | Marriage and Children | London Theater | Final Years

William Shakespeare was probably born on about April 23, 1564, the date that is traditionally given for his birth. He was John and Mary Shakespeare's oldest surviving child; their first two children, both girls, did not live beyond infancy. Growing up as the big brother of the family, William had three younger brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and two younger sisters: Anne, who died at seven, and Joan.

Their father, John Shakespeare, was a leatherworker who specialized in the soft white leather used for gloves and similar items. A prosperous businessman, he married Mary Arden, of the prominent Arden family. John rose through local offices in Stratford, becoming an alderman and eventually, when William was five, the town bailiff-much like a mayor. Not long after that, however, John Shakespeare stepped back from public life; we don't know why.

Shakespeare, as the son of a leading Stratford citizen, almost certainly attended Stratford's grammar school. Like all such schools, its curriculum consisted of an intense emphasis on the Latin classics, including memorization, writing, and acting classic Latin plays. Shakespeare most likely attended until about age 15.
On Shakespeare Documented: Primary-source materials relating to Shakespeare's family

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An overview of Shakespeare's life from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including his birth and childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon, his marriage to Anne Hathaway and their children, his work in the London theaters, and his final years before his death in 1616.