William Shakespeare - British History - HISTORY.com William Shakespeare A+E Networks Introduction 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. Google 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”). Tags Shakespeare's Children Shakespeare's Children William and Anne Shakespeare had three children. Their first child was Susanna, born a mere six months after the wedding of her parents. She was christened on May 26, 1583, and twins arrived in January, 1585. They were baptized on February 2 of that year and named Hamnet and Judith, after two very close friends of William: the Stratford baker, Hamnet Sadler and his wife, Judith. Tragically, Hamnet Shakespeare died of unknown causes in August 1596, at the age of eleven. The events of his short life are unrecorded.

The Life of Susanna Shakespeare (Hall) Witty beyond her sex, but that�s not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall. (Susanna Hall�s Epitaph) On June 5, 1607, Susanna married the famed and prosperous Stratford physician John Hall. Susanna's marriage to Dr. Hall must have pleased Shakespeare tremendously, for Shakespeare appointed John and Susanna executors of his will. Susanna moved into John's home (Hall's Croft) and on February 21, 1608 gave birth to a baby girl. Shakespeare's granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall, was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Shakespeare left the clever and business savvy Susanna most of his property upon his death in 1616, and she and John left Hall's Croft to live at Shakespeare�s home, known as New Place, where they oversaw the affairs of Susanna�s mother. With respect to her literacy, we know that Susanna could sign her own name and, if we also consider her reputation as a highly intelligent woman, it is plausible that she could have enjoyed the printed work of both her father and husband, the two most celebrated men in Stratford. Dr.

Hall left detailed records of his medical practice which reveal that, astonishingly, he had developed a treatment for scurvy made from local grasses and plants high in ascorbic acid, over one hundred years before James Lind�s discovery that the disease could be treated with citrus fruit. When Susanna herself contracted scurvy, John�s treatment was a complete success. 1 John Hall died suddenly in 1635 and was buried close to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church. Susanna died in 1649, at the good age of sixty-six, with comfort knowing that her only child was a remarkable success. Elizabeth Hall lived a noteworthy life indeed. John and Susanna made sure Elizabeth was well educated and we have evidence that �her handwriting was well formed and clear like that of her father� 2 . Her first husband was the wealthy barrister Thomas Nash, son of Shakespeare�s good friend, Anthony Nash. They were wed in 1626 and moved into New Place, where Nash died in 1645. Four years later Elizabeth married her second husband, John Barnard, who was knighted in 1661 by Charles II.

Sir and Lady Bernard took up primary residence at Abington Manor, John�s sprawling estate in Northamptonshire, with his eight children from a previous marriage. Elizabeth herself had no children and was Shakespeare's last descendant. She died in 1670, just days short of her sixty-second birthday. The Life of Judith Shakespeare (Quiney) Shakespeare�s daughter Judith appears to have had a gloomy and tragic life. Unlike her sister's marriage to the upstanding Dr. Hall, Judith's marriage to a vintner named Thomas Quiney in February 1616 caused Shakespeare no end of scandal. Quiney did not receive the license necessary for a wedding during Lent before his marriage, and thus the couple were excommunicated a month later. Moreover, Quiney was prosecuted for 'carnal copulation' with a local woman named Margaret Wheeler, who had died in March along with her baby by Quiney. He confessed, and was sentenced to perform public penance. His penalty, however, was commuted to a small fine and private penance.

"It has been speculated that this scandal may have hastened Shakespeare's death, for he died a few weeks later, after changing his will to protect Judith's inheritance from Quiney." 3 Thomas and Judith Quiney had three children named Shakespeare, Richard, and Thomas. Shakespeare Quiney died in infancy and was buried in 1617; Richard and Thomas died within weeks of each other (aged twenty-one and nineteen) and were buried in 1639. With the death of her husband sometime around 1652, Judith was alone. She lived to the amazing age of seventy-seven, and was buried on February 9, 1662. Sadly, there was no epitaph praising her wit and wisdom. _________ Notes 1. Mitchell, p. 76. Mitchell's book includes many detailed accounts of John Hall's remedies and excerpts from his personal case-book. 2. Mitchell, p. 49. Shakespeare Solved: Shakespeare & Shylock and Hamnet & Hamlet Shakespeare & Shylock and Hamnet & Hamlet On 11 August 1596, William Shakespeare buried his only son, Hamnet.

Would Hamnet have looked like his father William Shakespeare, as drawn here at the age of 12? from Harper's Young People, 1880 Hamnet was 11 years old when he died. The cause of his death is unknown, but it may have been the plague. When Hamnet died, Shakespeare was left with two daughters. While there is every reason to believe that Shakespeare loved his children equally, the death of a man's only son was especially painful. Without a son, there was no one to carry on the Shakespeare name. This, the matter of his legacy, was not a small matter to Shakespeare. From what we know of his life, he was very ambitious and he wanted to make a name for himself. Not long after Hamnet died, Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms at the College of Arms in London. They still have his handwritten application. The Latin motto that Shakespeare chose for his coat of arms was "Non Sanz Droit." It roughly translates as "not without right." For a man whose family was not considered noble and of the gentle class, and therefore whose rights were limited, it was an important message.

Shakespeare was declaring that he and his family, who now had the gentle status, had as much rights as anyone else in England. Shakespeare was declaring that he had arrived, and the Shakespeare name would live on. Coat of Arms Application The hand-drawn image for the coat of arms In a sense, perhaps more than anything else in his life, it was this ambition to become a gentleman, and elevate his family, that was the driving force for Shakespeare. It was his reason for being. His work in the theatre was just a means to make money and become wealthy enough to make sure that his family would live on forever. He considered himself to be from a very good family. His great-grandfather, on his father’s side of the family, had served King Henry VII and was rewarded with land to farm in Warwickshire. Shakespeare’s mother’s family, the Ardens, are one of only three families in England that can trace their lineage back to Anglo-Saxon times, and were one of the most prominent families in Warwickshire. One of her ancestors served in King Henry VII’s court. Shakespeare would have been raised on such stories of the past glory and importance of his family.

It makes sense then that he would want to restore his family’s name as much as possible during his life. When he had Hamnet, he chose his son’s name with great care. The name Hamnet was based on a story of Amleth, a boy who was a commoner, who married the daughter to the King of England, who takes revenge for his father on his uncle, and becomes a hero. Shakespeare obviously related to this story, and in naming his son Hamnet, he was passing on to his son his own ambitious plans for becoming a noble family once again. The name Hamnet is interchangeable with the name Hamlet. Why then did Shakespeare write a play called Hamlet, in which almost everyone dies, including Prince Hamlet himself? I explore this question in my version of Hamlet. But to give you an idea, I think Shakespeare wrote more than one version of the play. In the earlier versions, the play would have not been a tragedy, and Prince Hamlet may not have died. He may have survived, as in the heroic story of Amleth, which served as the basis for Shakespeare’s play. These early heroic versions of Shakespeare’s play would have been written before Hamnet died.

The later versions, written after Hamnet died, would have become more tragic, and would have included Prince Hamlet’s death. It is very sad then to imagine that Shakespeare, so full of hope and dreams for his future and the future of his family, just becoming the greatest playwright in London by 1596, would suddenly lose the future of his family and lose the reason for those hopes and dreams. When I wrote my version of The Merchant of Venice, I discovered that it would have been written right after Hamnet’s death. It may have been written because of his death. It has been written that Shylock may have been a representation of Shakespeare himself. In the play, Shylock’s only child, his daughter Jessica, has run away and left him. She has also taken all of the family’s wealth. Shylock’s desperation, and his anger, come from the fact that his daughter has left him. He cries out “My daughter! My ducats!” because everything that is valuable to him is gone.

English actor Charles Macklin as Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice at Covent Garden, London, 1767-68, by Johann Zoffany When Shakespeare lost Hamnet, it was arguably the most desperate and saddest time of his life. What was most valuable to him was gone. When we consider this, it is even more remarkable that Shakespeare not only survived this tragedy, but that he channeled it into his writing, and these plays have become some of the greatest works of art in human history. Cheers, William Shakespeare's will featuring his last signatures goes on show | Culture | The Guardian William Shakespeare's will featuring his last signatures goes on show Exhibition of playwright’s document on display in London to mark the 400th anniversary of his death The Bard’s updated will was signed ‘By me William Shakespeare’.

Photograph: Adrian Brooks/Imagewise Tuesday 2 February 2016 12.31 EST Last modified on Wednesday 3 February 2016 07.14 EST Close This article is 12 months old The handwriting and the spelling of the most famous name in literature are uncertain, but the autographs are priceless: four of only six known genuine signatures of William Shakespeare have gone on display in an exhibition hosted by King’s College London, marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. On the pages carrying his very last signatures, written when he updated his will a few weeks before his death in April 1616, the surname has vanished completely from the tattered edge of one of the three pages, the second page has a very wobbly version, and only the final page is unmistakably signed “By me William Shakespeare”.

By the 19th century, the will, leaving money for his actor friends to buy mourning rings to remember him by, and the notorious bequest to “my wief my second best bed with the furniture”, was so famous that tourists paid the hefty fee of a shilling to see it at Somerset House, then the home of the records of births, marriages and deaths. It has now returned, with other precious documents relating to Shakespeare’s life and work, from the present home of the National Archives at Kew . The earliest signature on display reads William Shak... and trails off into a scribble, as if Shakespeare himself hadn’t quite decided how to spell his own name. The confusion was general: the clerk who transcribed the will spelled his client Shackspeare. The will made careful provision for the grandsons he assumed would become his heirs, after the death of his only son, Hamnett, left his daughters Judith and Susanna to inherit. But the direct line proved as faltering as the signature – three grandsons were born after his death; one died as a baby and the others as childless young men. Pinterest William Shakespeare’s will is on display alongside other unique documents that witness his life.

Photograph: Adrian Brooks/Imagewise The most entertaining of the documents – chosen with difficulty, according to curator Katy Mair, from more than 100 relating to his life in the archives – is the bitter complaint in 1601 from their former landlord that the actor manager Richard Burbage, and members of his company believed to include Shakespeare, had stolen his theatre after a dispute about the lease. They are accused of dismantling the theatre, shipping it across the river and rebuilding it on their own site on the South Bank, “in very ryotous, outrageious and forcyble manner”, while armed “with divers and and manye unlawfull and offence weapons as ... swordes, daggers, billes, axes and such like”. The act of piracy meant that Burbage brought him in as a shareholder in the new theatre, Prof Gordon McMullan, coordinator of the Shakespeare 400 festival , said.

“It was a marvellous break for Shakespeare, setting him on the path to solid prosperity, instead of the hand-to-mouth existence of a jobbing playwright who might have ended in a debtor’s gaol.” He hopes the exhibition will show Shakespeare as a shrewd man of affairs, closely involved in the everyday life of his adopted city of London, rather than a solitary genius receiving divine inspiration in an attic. But the mystique of the man remains, he admitted. “You can argue all you like against the romantic concept – but you can’t get away from the fact that he wrote beautifully.” • By me William Shakespeare , at Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing, King’s College London, until May 29 2016, closed Mondays The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet | by Stephen Greenblatt | The New York Review of Books The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet October 21, 2004 Issue 1. Shakespeare was in the business, all of his life, of probing the passions of his characters and arousing the passions of his audiences.

His skill in doing so is almost universally acknowledged to have been unrivaled, but the inner sources of this skill remain largely unknown. Scholarship has tirelessly reconstructed at least something of his wide-ranging, eclectic reading, but his own passionate life—his access through personal experience and observation to the intense emotions he represents—is almost completely mysterious. None of his letters, working notes, diaries, or manuscripts (with the possible exception of “Hand D” in Sir Thomas More) survives. His sonnets have been ransacked for autobiographical evidence, but, though written in the first person, they are baffling, elusive, and probably deliberately opaque. Over centuries of feverish speculation, the most compelling reflections on the presence of Shakespeare’s emotional life in his plays—preeminently, James Joyce’s brilliant pages in Ulysses, but there are many others—have focused on Hamlet. This biographical attention to a work deriving from recycled materials and written for the public stage would seem inherently implausible, were it not for the overwhelming impression on readers and spectators alike that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials.

I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare must have received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. Whether in London or on tour with his company he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from his family in Stratford, but at some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time the father reached Stratford the boy—whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, 1596, Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.” Unlike Ben Jonson and others who wrote grief-stricken poems about the loss of beloved children, Shakespeare published no elegies and left no direct record of his paternal feelings.

It is sometimes said that parents in Shakespeare’s time could not afford to invest too much love and hope in any one child. One out of three children died by the age of ten, and overall mortality rates were by our standards exceedingly high. Death was a familiar spectacle; it took place at home, not out of sight. When Shakespeare was fourteen, his seven-year-old sister Anne died, and there must have been many other occasions for him to witness the death of children. In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It. This fact is, for some, decisive evidence that the father’s grief must at most have been brief. But the plays of these years were by no means uniformly cheerful, and at moments they seem to reflect an experience of deep personal loss. In King John, probably written in 1596 just after the boy was laid to rest, Shakespeare depicted a mother so frantic at the loss of her son that she is driven to thoughts of suicide.

Observing her, a clerical bystander remarks that she is mad, but she insists that she is perfectly sane: “I am not mad; I would to God I were!” Reason, she says, and not madness, has put the thoughts of suicide in her head, for it is her reason that tenaciously keeps hold of the image of her child. When she is accused of perversely insisting on her grief, she replies with an eloquent simplicity that breaks free from the tangled plot: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. (III.4.93–97) If there is no secure link between these lines and the death of Ham-net, there is, at the very least, no reason to think that Shakespeare simply buried his son and moved on unscathed. He might have brooded inwardly and obsessively, even as he was making audiences laugh at Falstaff in love or at the wit contests of Beatrice and Benedick.

1 Nor is it implausible that it took years for the trauma of his son’s death fully to erupt in Shakespeare’s work or that it was triggered by an accidental conjunction of names. For Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare evidently named his son after his recusant neighbor and friend Hamnet Sadler, who was still alive in March 1616 when Shakespeare drew up his will and left 26 shillings, 8 pence to “Hamlett Sadler…to buy him a ringe.” Writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea. At least one play, now lost, about the Danish prince who avenges his father’s murder had already been performed on the English stage, successfully enough to be casually alluded to by contemporary writers, as if everyone had seen it or at least knew about it. Someone in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with an eye on revenues, may simply have suggested to Shakespeare that the time might be ripe for a new, improved version of the Hamlet story.

For that matter, with his high stakes in the company’s profits, Shakespeare was sin- gularly alert to whatever attracted London crowds, and he had by now long experience of dusting off old plays and making them startlingly new. The likely author of the early play, Thomas Kyd, was no obstacle: he had died back in 1594, at the age of thirty-six, possibly broken by the torture inflicted upon him when he was interrogated about the charges of blasphemy and atheism brought against his roommate, Christopher Marlowe. In any case, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were squeamish about stealing from each other. Shakespeare had certainly seen the earlier Hamlet play, probably on multiple occasions. When he set to work on his new tragedy, he likely had it by heart—or as much of it as he chose to remember. It is impossible to determine, in this case, whether he sat down with books open before him—as he clearly did, for example, in writing Antony and Cleopatra—or relied on his memory, but he had also certainly read one and probably more than one version of the old Danish tale of murder and revenge.

At the very least, to judge from the play he wrote, he carefully read the story as narrated in French by François de Belleforest, whose collection of tragic tales was a publishing phenomenon in the late sixteenth century. Belleforest had taken the Hamlet story from a chronicle of Denmark compiled in Latin in the late twelfth century by a Dane known as Saxo the Grammarian. And Saxo in turn was recycling written and oral legends that reached back for centuries before him. Here then, as so often throughout his career, Shakespeare was working with known materials—a well-established story, a familiar cast of characters, a set of predictable excitements. If Shakespeare had died in 1600 it would have been difficult to think that anything was missing from his achievement and still more difficult to think that anything yet unrealized was brewing in his work. But Hamlet makes it clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill. This development may have been entirely deliberate, the consequence of a clear, ongoing professional design, or it may have been more haphazard and opportunistic.

The achievement was, in any case, gradual: not a sudden, once-and-for-all discovery or a grandiose invention, but the subtle refinement of a particular set of representational techniques. By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough. He had perfected the means to represent inwardness. The task of conveying an inner life is an immensely challenging one in drama, since what the audience sees and hears is always in some sense or other public utterance—the words that the characters say to one another or, in occasional asides and soliloquies, directly to the onlookers. Playwrights can pretend, of course, that the audience is overhearing a kind of internal monologue, but it is difficult to keep such monologues from sounding “stagey.” Richard III, written in 1591 or 1592, is hugely energetic and powerful, with a marvelous, unforgettable main character, but when that character, alone at night, reveals what is going on inside him, he sounds oddly wooden and artificial: It is now dead midnight. Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes. I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason. Why? Lest I revenge? Myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? O no, alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not. (V.5.134–145) Shakespeare is dramatizing his chronicle source, which states that Richard could not sleep on the eve of his death, because he felt unwonted pricks of conscience. But though it has a staccato vigor, the soliloquy, as a way of sketching inner conflict, is schematic and mechanical, as if within the character on stage there was simply another tiny stage on which puppets were performing a Punch-and-Judy show. In Richard II, written some three years later, there is a comparable moment that marks Shakespeare’s burgeoning skills.

Deposed and imprisoned by his cousin Bolingbroke, the ruined king, shortly before his murder, looks within himself: I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts. (V.5.1–7) Much of the difference between the two passages has to do with the very different characters: the one a murderous tyrant full of manic energy, the other a spoiled, narcissistic, self-destructive poet. But the turn from one character to the other is itself significant: it signals Shakespeare’s growing interest in the hidden processes of interiority.

Locked in a windowless room, Richard II watches himself think, struggling to forge a metaphoric link between his prison and the world, reaching a dead end, and then forcing his imagination to renew the effort: “Yet I’ll hammer it out.” The world, crowded with people, is not, as he himself recognizes, remotely comparable to the solitude of his prison cell, but Richard wills himself to generate—out of what he pictures as the intercourse of his brain and soul—an imaginary populace. What he hammers out is a kind of inner theater, akin to that already found in Richard III’s soliloquy, but with a vastly increased complexity, subtlety, and above all self-consciousness. Now the character himself is fully aware that he has constructed such a theater, and he teases out the bleak implications of the imaginary world he has struggled to create: Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented. Sometimes am I king; Then treason makes me wish myself a beggar, And so I am. Then crushing penury Persuades me I was better when a king, Then am I kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing.

But whate’er I be, Nor I, nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased With being nothing. (V.5.31–41) Richard II characteristically rehearses the drama of his fall from kingship as a fall into nothingness and then fashions his experience of lost identity—“whate’er I be”—into an intricate poem of despair. Written in 1595, Richard II marked a major advance in the playwright’s ability to represent inwardness, but Julius Caesar, written four years later, shows that, not content with what he has mastered, Shakespeare subtly experimented with new techniques. Alone, pacing in his orchard in the middle of night, Brutus begins to speak: It must be by his death. And for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crowned. How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him: that!

(II.1.10–15) This soliloquy is far less fluid, less an elegant and self-conscious poetic meditation, than the prison soliloquy of Richard II. But it has something startlingly new: the unmistakable marks of actual thinking. Richard speaks of hammering it out, but the words he utters are already highly polished. Brutus’s words by contrast seem to flow immediately from the still inchoate toing-and-froing of his wavering mind, as he grapples with a set of momentous questions: How should he respond to the crowd’s desire to crown the ambitious Caesar? How can he balance his own personal friendship with Caesar against what he construes to be the general good? How might Caesar, who has thus far served that general good, change his nature and turn dangerous if he is crowned? “It must be by his death”: without prelude, the audience is launched into the midst of Brutus’s obsessive brooding. It is impossible to know if he is weighing a proposition, trying out a decision, reiterating words that someone else has spoken.

He does not need to mention whose death he is contemplating, nor does he need to make clear—for it is already part of his thought—that it will be by assassination. Brutus is speaking to himself, and his words have the peculiar shorthand of the brain at work. “Crown him: that!”—the exclamation is barely comprehensible, except as a burst of passionate anger provoked by a phantasmatic image passing at that instant through the speaker’s mind. The spectators are pulled in eerily close, watching firsthand the forming of a fatal resolution—a determination to assassinate Caesar—that will change the world. A few moments later Brutus, intensely self-aware, describes for himself the molten state of consciousness in which he finds himself: Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in counsel, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

(II.1.63–69) Was it at this moment, in 1599, that Shakespeare first conceived of the possibility of writing about a character suspended, for virtually the whole length of a play, in this strange interim? Brutus himself is not such a character: by the middle of Julius Caesar, he has done the dreadful thing, the killing of his mentor and friend—possibly his own father—and the remainder of the play teases out the fatal consequences of his act. If Shakespeare did not grasp it at once, then certainly by the following year he understood perfectly that there was a character, already popular on the Elizabethan stage, whose life he could depict as one long phantasm or hideous dream. That character, the prince of the inward insurrection, was Hamlet. 2. Even in its earliest-known medieval telling, Hamlet’s saga was the story of the long interval between the first motion—the initial impulse or design—and the acting of the dreadful thing. In Saxo the Grammarian’s account, the murder of Amleth’s father Horwendil (the equivalent of Shakespeare’s old King Hamlet) by his envious brother Feng (the equivalent of Claudius) was not a secret.

Glossing over “fratricide with a show of righteousness,” the assassin claimed that Horwendil had been cruelly abusing his gentle wife Gerutha. In reality, the ruthless Feng had simply seized both his brother’s kingdom and his wife. No one was prepared to challenge the usurper. The only potential challenger was Horwen- dil’s young son Amleth, for by the time-honored code of this pre-Christian society a son was strictly obliged to avenge his father’s murder. Feng understood this code as well as anyone, so that it was reasonable to expect that he would quickly move to eliminate the future threat. If the boy did not instantly come up with a clever stratagem, his life would be exceedingly brief. In order to grow to adulthood—to survive long enough to be able to exact revenge—Amleth feigned madness, persuading his uncle that he could never pose a danger. Filthy and lethargic, he sat by the fire, aimlessly whittling away at small sticks and turning them into barbed hooks.

Though the wary Feng repeatedly used intermediaries (the precursors of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern) to try to discern some hidden sparks of intelligence behind his nephew’s apparent idiocy, Amleth cunningly avoided detection. He bided his time, slipped out of traps, and made secret plans. Mocked as a fool, treated with contempt and derision, he eventually succeeded in burning to death Feng’s entire retinue and in running his uncle through with a sword. He summoned an assembly of nobles, explained why he had done what he had done, and was enthusiastically acclaimed as the new king. “Many could have been seen marvelling how he had concealed so subtle a plan over so long a space of time.” Amleth thus spends years in the interim state that Brutus can barely endure for a few days. Shakespeare had developed the means to represent the psychological experience of such a condition—something that neither Saxo nor his followers even dreamed of being able to do. He saw that the Hamlet story, ripe for revision, would enable him to make a play about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfillment.

The problem, however, is that the theater is not particularly tolerant of long gestation periods: to represent the child Hamlet feigning idiocy for years in order to reach the age in which he could act would be exceedingly difficult to render dramatically exciting. The obvious solution, probably already reached in the lost play, is to start the action at the point in which Hamlet has come of age and is ready to undertake his act of revenge. In Saxo the Grammarian’s Hamlet, as in the popular tale by Belleforest, no ghost appeared. There was no need for a ghost, for the murder was public knowledge, as was the son’s obligation to take revenge. But when he set out to write his version of the Hamlet story, either following Kyd’s lead or on his own, Shakespeare made the murder a secret. Everyone in Denmark believes that old Hamlet was fatally stung by a serpent. The ghost appears in order to tell the terrible truth: “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (I.5.39–40). Shakespeare’s play begins just before the ghost reveals the murder to Hamlet and ends just after Hamlet exacts his revenge.

Hence the decisive changes in the plot—from a public killing known to everyone to a secret murder revealed to Hamlet alone by the ghost of the murdered man—enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his “first motion” and “the acting of a dreadful thing.” But something in the plot has to account for this suspension. After all, Hamlet is no longer, in this revised version, a child who needs to play for time, and the murderer has no reason to suspect that Hamlet has or can ever acquire any inkling of his crime. Far from keeping his distance from his nephew (or setting subtle tests for him), Claudius refuses to let Hamlet return to university, genially calls him “our chiefest courtier, cousin, and son,” and declares that he is next in succession to the throne. Once the ghost of his father has disclosed the actual cause of death—“Murder most foul, as in the best it is,/But this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—Hamlet, who has full access to the unguarded Claudius, is in the perfect position to act immediately.

And such instantaneous response is precisely what Hamlet himself anticipates: Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift As meditation or the thought of love May sweep to my revenge. (I.5.29–31) The play should be over then by the end of the first act. But Hamlet emphatically does not sweep to his revenge. As soon as the ghost vanishes, he tells the sentries and his friend Horatio that he intends “to put an antic disposition on”—that is, to pretend to be mad. The behavior made perfect sense in the old version of the story, where it was a ruse to deflect suspicion and to buy time. The emblem of that time, and the proof of the avenger’s brilliant, long-term planning, were the wooden hooks that the boy Amleth, apparently deranged, endlessly whittled away on with his little knife. These were the means that, at the tale’s climax, Amleth used to secure a net over the sleeping courtiers, before he set the hall on fire. What had looked like mindless distraction turned out to be brilliantly strategic. But in Shakespeare Hamlet’s feigned madness is no longer coherently tactical.

Shakespeare in effect wrecked the powerful and coherent plot that his sources conveniently provided him. And out of the wreckage he constructed what most modern audiences would regard as the best play that he had ever written. Far from offering a cover, the antic disposition leads the murderer to set close watch upon Hamlet, to turn to his counselor Polonius for advice, to discuss the problem with Gertrude, to observe Ophelia carefully, to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy upon their friend. Instead of leading the court to ignore him, Hamlet’s madness becomes the object of everyone’s endless speculation. And, strangely enough, the speculation sweeps Hamlet along with it: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth.” “But wherefore I know not”—Hamlet, entirely aware that he is speaking to court spies, does not breathe a word of his father’s ghost, but then it is not at all clear that the ghost is actually responsible for his profound depression.

Already in the first scene in which he appears, before he has encountered the ghost, he is voicing to himself, as the innermost secret of his heart, virtually the identical disillusionment he discloses to the oily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: O God, O God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (I.2.132–127) His father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, public events and not secret revelations, have driven him to thoughts of “self-slaughter.” By excising the strategic rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy.

The play’s key moment of psychological revelation—the moment that virtually everyone remembers—is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide: “To be or not to be; that is the question.” This suicidal urge has nothing to do with the ghost—indeed Hamlet has so far forgotten the apparition as to speak of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns”—but rather with a soul-sickness brought on by one of the “thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.” 3. Hamlet marks a sufficient break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause for his daring transformation both of his sources and of his whole way of writing. A simple index of this transformation is the astonishing rush of new words, words that he had never used before in some twenty-one plays and in two long poems.

There are, scholars have calculated, more than six hundred of these words, many of them not only new to Shakespeare but also—compulsive, fanged, besmirch, intruding, overgrowth, pander, outbreak, unfledged, unimproved, unnerved, unpolluted, unweeded, to name only a few—new to the written record of the English language. 2 Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion. As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy of Hamlet had come to Shakespeare from strictly commercial considerations, the coincidence of the names—the writing again and again of the name of his dead son as he composed the play—may have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed. But, of course, in Hamlet it is the death not of a son but of a father that provokes the hero’s spiritual crisis.

If the tragedy welled up from Shakespeare’s own life—if it can be traced back to the death of Hamnet and to the repeated writing of the name—something must have made the playwright link the loss of his child to the imagined loss of his father. I say “imagined” because Shakespeare’s father was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard on September 8, 1601: the handwriting may have been on the wall, but he was almost certainly still alive when the tragedy was written and may still have been alive when it was first performed. How might the father’s death have become bound up so closely in Shakespeare’s imagination with the son’s? Shakespeare undoubtedly returned to Stratford in 1596 for his son’s funeral. The minister, as the regulations required, would have met the corpse at the entry to the churchyard and accompanied it to the grave. Shakespeare must have stood there and listened to the words of the prescribed Protestant burial service.

While the earth was thrown onto the body—perhaps by the father himself, perhaps by friends—the minister intoned the words, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take upon himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.” Did Shakespeare find this simple, eloquent service adequate or was he tormented with a sense that something was missing? “What ceremony else?” cries Laertes, by the grave of his sis-ter Ophelia; “What ceremony else?” Ophelia’s funeral rites have been curtailed because she is suspected of the sin of suicide, and Laertes is both shallow and rash. But the question he repeatedly asks echoes throughout Hamlet, and it articulates a concern that extends beyond the boundaries of the play. Within living memory, the whole relationship between the living and the dead had been changed.

Perhaps in conservative Lancashire, where Shakespeare may have sojourned briefly as a young man, if not closer to home, he could have seen the remnants of the old Catholic practice: candles burning night and day, crosses everywhere, bells tolling constantly, close relatives wailing and crossing themselves, neighbors visiting the corpse and saying over it a Pater noster or a De profundis, alms and food distributed in memory of the dead, priests secretly paid to say Masses to ease the soul’s perilous passage through Purgatory. 3 All of this had come under attack for decades; everything had been scaled back, forced underground, or eliminated outright. Above all, it was now illegal to pray for the dead. Belief in Purgatory may well have been abused—plenty of pious Catholics thought it was—but it attempted to address fears and longings that did not simply vanish when people were told by the officials of the church and the state that the dead were beyond all earthly contact. Ceremony was not the only or even the principal issue: what mattered was whether the dead could continue to speak to the living, at least for a short time, whether the living could help the dead, whether a reciprocal bond remained.

When Shakespeare stood in the churchyard, watching the dirt fall on the body of his son, did he think that his relationship with Hamnet was gone without a trace? Perhaps. But it is also possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as a “thou,” its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate. 4 And if he could make his peace with the Protestant understanding of these things, others close to him assuredly could not. His wife, Anne, must have stood at Hamnet’s grave, and so too Shakespeare’s parents, John and Mary. Indeed the grandparents had spent far more time with the boy than the father had, for while Shakespeare was in London, they were all living together in Stratford in the same house with their daughter-in-law and the three grandchildren. They had helped to raise Hamnet, and they must have tended Hamnet through his last illness. And about his parents’ beliefs with regard to the afterlife—specifically, about his father’s beliefs—there is some evidence.

This evidence, which points to Catholic connections and half-concealed Catholic beliefs, suggests that John Shakespeare would have wanted something done for Hamnet’s soul, something that he perhaps appealed urgently to his son to do or that he undertook to do on his own. The arguments, or pleading, or tears that may have accompanied such appeals are irrevocably lost. But it is possible to surmise what Shakespeare’s father (and, presumably, his mother, linked by birth to a staunchly Cath-olic Warwickshire family) would have thought necessary, proper, charitable, loving, and, in a single word, Christian. Recusant Catholics, prevented from regular confession and communion, were often intensely fearful of a death that would prevent the ritual opportunity to settle the sinner’s accounts with God and to show appropriate, cleansing contrition. (This is precisely the death Hamlet’s father, murdered in his sleep, has suffered: “No reck’ning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head./O, horrible! O, horrible!

most horrible!”) Any stains that remained after death would have to be burned away in purgatorial agony, unless the living took steps to alleviate the suffering and reduce the afterlife prison term. In 1596, at the funeral of Hamnet, the issue would almost certainly have surfaced. The boy’s soul needed the help of those who loved and cared for him. John Shakespeare may well have urged his prosperous son William to pay for masses for the dead child, just as he no doubt wanted masses to be said for his own soul. For his father was getting old and would soon be in need of the “satisfactory works” that could shorten the duration of his agony in the afterlife. If this delicate subject was broached, did the playwright angrily shake his head no or instead quietly pay for clandestine masses for Hamnet’s soul? Did he tell his father that he could not give his son—or, looking ahead, that he would not give his father—what he craved? Did he say that he no longer believed in the whole story of the terrible prison house, poised between heaven and hell, where the sins done in life were burned and purged away?

Whatever he determined at the time, Shakespeare must have still been brooding in late 1600 and early 1601, when he sat down to write a tragedy whose doomed hero bore the name of his dead son. His thoughts may have been intensified by news that his elderly father was seriously ill back in Stratford, for the thought of his father’s death is deeply woven into the play. And the death of his son and the impending death of his father—a crisis of mourning and memory—could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet. All funerals invite those who stand by the grave to think about what, if anything, they believe in. But the funeral of one’s own child does more than this: it compels parents to ask questions of God and the universe. Shakespeare must have attended the regular services in his Protestant parish; otherwise his name would have turned up on lists of recusants. But did he believe what he heard and recited? His works suggest that he did have faith, of a sort, but it was not a faith securely bound either by the Catholic Church or by the Church of England.

By the late 1590s, insofar as his faith could be situated in any institution at all, that institution was the theater, and not only in the sense that his profoundest energies and expectations were all focused there. Shakespeare grasped that crucial death rituals in his culture had been gutted. He may have felt this with enormous pain at his son’s graveside. But he also believed that the theater—and his theatrical art in particular—could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings that, for him and for thousands of his contemporaries, no longer had a satisfactory outlet. The religious reformation was in effect offering him an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice—and he knew how to accept and use this gift. He was hardly indifferent to the success he could achieve, but it was not a matter of profit alone. Shakespeare drew upon the confusion, pity, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals—the world in which most of us continue to live—because he himself experienced those same emotions in 1596, at the funeral of his child, and later, in anticipation of his father’s death.

He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet. With Hamlet Shakespeare made a discovery by means of which he relaunched his entire career. The crucial breakthrough did not involve developing new themes or learning how to construct a shapelier plot; it had to do rather with an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. He had rethought how to put a tragedy together—specifically, he had rethought the amount of causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be strongly convincing. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays—that he could provoke in the audience and himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response—if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action to be unfolded. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.

Shakespeare’s work had long been wryly skeptical of official explanations and excuses—the accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why peo- ple behave the way they do. His plays had suggested that the choices people make in love are almost entirely inexplicable and irrational—that is the conviction that generates the comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. But at least love was the clearly identifiable motive. With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper. The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.

This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical—that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with the enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excision of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s deepest perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations. 1 In “Death in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 51 (2000), pp. 127–153, Richard P. Wheeler argues that the death of Hamnet left significant traces in the great comedies, particularly in Twelfth Night. ↩ 2 See G.R.

Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare: Hamlet (Oxford University Press, 1987). ↩ 3 For the claim that William Shakespeare was the “Shakeshafte” mentioned in the will of a wealthy Catholic magnate in Lancashire, see Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion, and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). For a sharply dissenting view, see Rob- ert Bearman, “‘Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?’ Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 53 (2002), pp. 83–94. Bearman’s arguments are in turn countered by E.A.J. Honigmann, “The Shakespeare/Shakeshafte Question, Continued,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 54 (2003), pp. 83–86. The argument is likely to continue. ↩ 4 In The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c.

1580 (Yale University Press, 1992), Eamon Duffy gives a rich and eloquent account of the consequences to the community and the individual of the Reformation assault on Catholic ritual practices. Duffy tends to assume that those practices were almost universally efficacious, an assumption one can certainly call into question. It is less easy to call into question the cumulative force of changes that a recent scholar has characterized as a cultural revolution: see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History: 1350– 1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩ 10 Things You Didn’t Know About William Shakespeare - History Lists History Lists July 16, 2013 By History.com Staff Share Take a look at the life of one of the most celebrated authors of all time, legendary wordsmith William Shakespeare, in this video. Share this: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About William Shakespeare Author 10 Things You Didn’t Know About William Shakespeare URL Google Did you know that some people think England’s beloved Bard never existed? According to one longstanding theory the literary masterpieces attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford.

Find out more about this hypothesis and explore other interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s life and legacy. Shakespeare’s father held a lot of different jobs, and at one point got paid to drink beer. The son of a tenant farmer, John Shakespeare was nothing if not upwardly mobile. He arrived in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1551 and began dabbling in various trades, selling leather goods, wool, malt and corn. In 1556 he was appointed the borough’s official “ale taster,” meaning he was responsible for inspecting bread and malt liquors. The next year he took another big step up the social ladder by marrying Mary Arden, the daughter of an aristocratic farmer who happened to be his father’s former boss. John later became a moneylender and held a series of municipal positions, serving for some time as the mayor of Stratford. In the 1570s he fell into debt and ran into legal problems for reasons that remain unclear. Shakespeare married an older woman who was three months pregnant at the time. In November 1582, 18-year-old William wed Anne Hathaway, a farmer’s daughter eight years his senior.

Instead of the customary three times, the couple’s intention to marry was only announced at church once—evidence that the union was hastily arranged because of Anne’s eyebrow-raising condition. Six months after the wedding, the Shakespeares welcomed a daughter, Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith followed in February 1585. Little is known about the relationship between William and Anne, besides that they often lived apart and he only bequeathed her his “second-best bed” in his will. Shakespeare’s parents were probably illiterate, and his children almost certainly were. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s quite likely that John and Mary Shakespeare never learned to read or write, as was often the case for people of their standing during the Elizabethan era. Some have argued that John’s civic duties would have required basic literacy, but in any event he always signed his name with a mark. William, on the other hand, attended Stratford’s local grammar school, where he mastered reading, writing and Latin. His wife and their two children who lived to adulthood, Susanna and Judith, are thought to have been illiterate, though Susanna could scrawl her signature.

Nobody knows what Shakespeare did between 1585 and 1592. 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.” The insult suggests he’d already made a name for himself on the London stage by then. 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. Shakespeare’s plays feature the first written instances of hundreds of familiar terms. William 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”). He is also credited with inventing the given names Olivia, Miranda, Jessica and Cordelia, which have become common over the years (as well as others, such as Nerissa and Titania, which have not). We probably don’t spell Shakespeare’s name correctly—but, then again, neither did he. 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, the Bard never spelled his own name “William Shakespeare,” using variations or abbreviations such as “Willm Shakp,” “Willm Shakspere” and “William Shakspeare” instead.

However it’s spelled, Shakespeare is thought to derive from the Old English words “schakken” (“to brandish”) and “speer” (“spear”), and probably referred to a confrontational or argumentative person. Shakespeare’s epitaph wards off would-be grave robbers with a curse. William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52—not bad for an era when the average life expectancy ranged between 30 and 40 years. We may never know what killed him, although an acquaintance wrote that the Bard fell ill after a night of heavy drinking with fellow playwright Ben Jonson. Despite his swift demise, Shakespeare supposedly had the wherewithal to pen the epitaph over his tomb, which is located inside a Stratford church. Intended to thwart the numerous grave robbers who plundered England’s cemeteries at the time, the verse reads: “Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare, / To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” It must have done the trick, since Shakespeare’s remains have yet to be disturbed.

Shakespeare wore a gold hoop earring—or so we think. Our notion of William Shakespeare’s appearance comes from several 17th-century portraits that may or may not have been painted while the Bard himself sat behind the canvas. In one of the most famous depictions, known as the Chandos portrait after its onetime owner, the subject has a full beard, a receding hairline, loosened shirt-ties and a shiny gold hoop dangling from his left ear. Even back in Shakespeare’s time, earrings on men were trendy hallmarks of a bohemian lifestyle, as evidenced by images of other Elizabethan artists. The fashion may have been inspired by sailors, who sported a single gold earring to cover funeral costs in case they died at sea. North America’s 200 million starlings have Shakespeare to thank for their existence. William Shakespeare’s works contain more than 600 references to various types of birds, from swans and doves to sparrows and turkeys.

The starling—a lustrous songbird with a gift for mimicry, native to Europe and western Asia—makes just one appearance, in “Henry IV, Part 1.” In 1890 an American “bardolator” named Eugene Schiffelin decided to import every kind of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s oeuvre but absent from the United States. As part of this project, he released two flocks of 60 starlings in New York’s Central Park. One hundred twenty years later, the highly adaptable species has taken over the skies, becoming invasive and driving some native birds to the brink of extinction. Some people think Shakespeare was a fraud. How did a provincial commoner who had never gone to college or ventured outside Stratford become one of the most prolific, worldly and eloquent writers in history? Even early in his career, Shakespeare was spinning tales that displayed in-depth knowledge of international affairs, European capitals and history, as well as familiarity with the royal court and high society. 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. Proposed candidates include Edward De Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Mary Sidney Herbert.

Most scholars and literary historians remain skeptical about this hypothesis, although many suspect Shakespeare sometimes collaborated with other playwrights. Tags

Question: What was the name of William Shakespeare's only son?
Answer: HAMNET