Five things we know | Shakespeare's Life

Happy birthday month to William Shakespeare! Shakespeare was probably born on April 23, 1564, but we don’t know for sure. The earliest reference to him appears in the parish register for Holy Trinity Church in an entry for his baptism on April 26, 1564. Tradition celebrates his birthday three days before his baptism. In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, here are five things we do know about his life.

1. Shakespeare’s youthful marriage was probably controversial, but not for the reason you’d think.

In late 1582, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly common situation at the time. The couple’s relative ages were unusual. William was 18, well below the average marrying age of 26 for a man during that period and too young to have completed an apprenticeship for a trade. Anne Hathaway was eight years older than Shakespeare and two years beyond the average age of women at their first marriage. These considerations do not rule out a marriage for love but have cast suspicion on whether the couple would have married if Anne had not been pregnant.

What was more likely to have been seen as unfortunate was that William, then only eighteen, did not have a home of his own to raise his family in, or an income to support them. The young family likely lived in his parents’ Henley Street home, at a time when his father was in financial difficulty.

2. Shakespeare’s career as a playwright was taking off by 1592, when he is referred to in print as an “upstart crow.”

Susanna Shakespeare, William and Anne’s first child, was born in 1583. The twins Judith and Hamnet, likely named for Shakespeare’s school friend Hamnet Sadler and his wife Judith, were born in 1585. But by 1592, Shakespeare had left Stratford for London and was making a name for himself as a poet and playwright. The earliest known allusion to him appears in the pamphlet Greenes, groats-worth of witte.

In the pamphlet the author warns three established playwrights to stay away from actors who also write for the stage (as Shakespeare, an actor in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, did):

“an up-start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.”

Shakespeare had likely written Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors by the early 1590s and “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,” is a reference to Henry VI Part 3, “O Tyger’s hart wrapt in a woman’s hide!” Shakespeare was well known enough by this time to have ruffled some competitive feathers!

3. Most of Shakespeare’s works were written over the course of just 20 years.

Shakespeare spent his life not only as a poet and playwright, but as an actor and a business partner in the acting company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (which became the King’s Men under the patronage of James I in 1603).  In the 1590s, he wrote his plays on English history, as well as several comedies and tragedies. In 1599, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men constructed the now legendary Globe Theatre and it is believed that his major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth) were written and performed while the company was resident at the Globe. Later plays include The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, written sometime between 1608 and 1612, and documented as having been performed at the Globe and elsewhere in 1611 and 1613.

Shakespeare seems to have written very little after 1612 and possibly returned home to Stratford-upon-Avon around this time. He had amassed a large home called New Place and considerable property in the area by the time of his death in 1616.

4. Shakespeare has no direct descendants.

Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. The cause of his death is unknown to us today. Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna married and had one daughter, Elizabeth, in 1608. She is the only grandchild Shakespeare would have known. Elizabeth had no children. Shakespeare’s other daughter Judith had three sons, but they did not survive to have children of their own.

Shakespeare’s sister Joan, however, married a man named William Hart in 1600 and there are descendants of this marriage alive today. While you could not be a many-times-great-grandchild of Shakespeare, you could be a many-times-great-niece or nephew!

5. Always theatrical, Shakespeare’s epitaph includes a curse!

Shakespeare is buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The memorial bust there is one of only two authentic likenesses of Shakespeare, as it was approved by people who knew him. (The other likeness is the engraving by Martin Droeshout that appears in the First Folio).

Shakespeare’s grave includes this epitaph:

GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES.

His wife Anne is also buried in Holy Trinity Church. Her epitaph includes a much sweeter Latin ode to her dedication as a mother, which may have been written by Susannah Shakespeare.

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Bonus fact! Though they were not nobility, the Shakespeares did have a family coat of arms.

William’s father, John Shakespeare, first applied for a family coat of arms around 1575. He was granted one in 1596, by which time his son would have been a wealthy and prominent man. The design combines the coat of arms of the more illustrious Arden family (William Shakespeare’s mother was Mary Arden) with a falcon holding—what else?—a spear. The coat of arms was disputed in 1602 by York Herald, Ralph Brooke, saying that the arms were too similar to existing coats of arms, and that the family was unworthy. However, the challenge was unsuccessful.