William Shakespeare(1564–1616)

William Shakespeare was baptised at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on the twenty-sixth of April 1564, the eldest surviving son of John Shakespeare, a Stratford glover, wool dealer and one-time alderman, and Mary Arden of the Wilmcote Ardens. The birthday is conventionally given as the twenty-third of April, the feast of St George, three days before the baptism. He was schooled at the King's New School (the Stratford grammar) on the standard Tudor humanist syllabus of Latin grammar, Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, Terence and Cicero in the original, the curriculum on which his entire later body of classical reference rests. He was married on the twenty-seventh of November 1582 in his eighteenth year to Anne Hathaway of Shottery; their daughter Susanna was baptised in May 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith in February 1585.

He arrived in the London theatre world by 1592, when Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit attacked him as the only Shake-scene in a country, the earliest unambiguous reference to him as a working dramatist. By 1594 he was a founding shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that became the King's Men under James the First in 1603 and the leading theatre company of the English stage for the rest of his lifetime. He was both the principal house dramatist and a sharer in the company's gate receipts and its buildings: the Globe on the Bankside (built in 1599 by the Burbages from the timbers of the old Theatre at Shoreditch), and from 1608 the indoor Blackfriars Theatre. The shareholder structure was unique to the company and made Shakespeare a man of substantial property by his early forties: he bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, in 1597, and added the lease of the Stratford tithes and a substantial Warwickshire freehold through the 1600s.

He wrote across the working twenty years of his London career roughly thirty-nine plays, a hundred and fifty-four sonnets and two long narrative poems. The plays sit conventionally in four manners: the early histories and comedies of the 1590s (the Henry VI trilogy, Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V), the great middle comedies and the four great tragedies (Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra), the dark comedies and the Roman plays of the early 1600s, and the late romances (The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles). Hamlet (composed around 1600) and King Lear (composed around 1605) are on every modern list of the central works of world literature; Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day) and Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds) are the two most-anthologised individual poems in the English language.

He retired to Stratford by 1613, having delivered the late romances and contributed to the final Henry the Eighth (the performance of which, on the twenty-ninth of June 1613, burnt the Globe to the ground when a stage cannon set the thatch alight). He drafted his will in March 1616, died at New Place on the twenty-third of April 1616 in his fifty-third year, and was buried under the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, the parish where he had been baptised fifty-two years before. The grave-slab carries the rhyming-curse epitaph he composed himself: Good frend for Iesus sake forbeare, to digg the dust encloased heare; Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, and curst be he yt moves my bones. The slab has not been moved in four centuries.

Seven years after his death his fellow King's Men sharers John Heminges and Henry Condell collected thirty-six of his plays into the great folio volume Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the First Folio of 1623, published at Edward Blount and the Jaggards' shop in Aldersgate Street. Without the First Folio eighteen of the plays (including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale) would have been entirely lost. Two hundred and thirty-five copies of the original 1623 First Folio survive worldwide; a copy sold at Christie's in October 2020 for nearly ten million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a book of literature. The Royal Shakespeare Company, founded at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1879, has performed his plays continuously since; the modern reconstructed Globe Theatre on the Bankside in London (1997) stands within two hundred yards of the original site. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Shakespeare more than any other single author for the first attested use of words in the English language. The Shakespeare name in modern world culture is the central single literary inheritance of the English language.