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William Shakespeare
(1564–1616)
 William
Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the
leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but
later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous
years his father was also involved in municipal affairs,
holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s.
While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably
attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have
been educated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and
literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous
comment that Shakespeare had “small Latine, and less Greeke,”
much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman
comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology.
In 1582
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and
pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children:
Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in
1585. Nothing is known of the period between the birth of the
twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London
(c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made
regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to
avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of
traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher.
The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic
style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for
example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus.
In 1594
Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord
Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's
Men under James I. Until the end of his London career
Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as
an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet
and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a
coat of arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New
Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement
years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the
Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the
Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to
Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living
throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never
a wealthy man.
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