In his 52 years oflife, William Shakespeare transformed himself from the son of a small-town glovemaker to a favourite playwright of Queen Elizabeth and King James. Today he is celebrated as the most popular writer in the English language. Read on to explore our comprehensive guide to Shakespeare's world, including his earlylife, marriage, social context and best-known quotes.
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Early life
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in the middle of the English countryside. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and public servant with social ambitions, as suggested by his marriage to Mary Arden, the daughter of a well-to-do farmer. Though born to parents of good social standing, Shakespeare entered the world at a troubled time. In 1564 England was in the midst of an outbreak of plague. Owing to the Spanish interruption of the cloth market as well as an ongoing conflict between Protestants and Catholics, England also suffered economic hardship and religious upheaval. Despite these ongoing problems, John Shakespeare likely enrolled his son in the King’s New School in Stratford at the age of 7. In grammar school, Shakespeare would have been subjected to intensive training in Latin that lasted all day, six days a week. Grammar schools in Shakespeare’s time had an exclusive emphasis on drills, memorization, and imitation. Though the experience likely wasn’t a creative one, Shakespeare’s studies, and particularly his study of the Latin poet Ovid, influenced him deeply. Shakespeare’s schooling likely ended around age 15, when his father found himself in financial straits and required his eldest son’s help in the family glove-making business.
Marriage đź‘«
On 1 December 1582, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend who lived in the nearby village of Shottery. At the time of their marriage, Shakespeare was only 18 years old, whereas Anne was 26. Little is known about their courtship, though some scholars have drawn links between Shakespeare’s biography and his first published poem, Venus and Adonis, which features an experienced woman seducing a man. Shakespeare may have initially viewed the marriage as advantageous. Anne, who had been orphaned in her mid-twenties and was bequeathed significant resources in her father’s will, was “wholly at her government,” which means that she had complete autonomy over her affairs as well control over family property. Despite the lack of concrete evidence regarding their courtship, however, the conditions leading to their wedding seem much clearer. The couple was probably rushed into marriage because Anne was pregnant. This speculation appears to be confirmed by a baptismal record for their first child, Susanna, who was born just six months after their wedding. Three years later Anne gave birth to the twins Hamnet and Judith. After that, the Shakespeares would not have any more children.
Social context
Elizabethan England was a fiercely patriarchal society with laws that heavily restricted what women could and could not do. Women were not allowed to attend school or university, which meant they couldn’t work in professions like law or medicine. Most of the guilds, which trained skilled workers like goldsmiths and carpenters, did not officially admit women. Even the disreputable profession of acting was off-limits to women. The only trades legally available to women were those that could be mastered and practised in the home, such as hat-making and brewing. Women were also barred from voting, and though they could inherit property from their father or their husband, they could not themselves purchase the property. In addition to these legal restrictions, women were also bound by strict social expectations that did not apply equally to men. Sermons and books written during the Elizabethan era encouraged women to be silent and obedient to male authority, whether that of their father or their husband.
Early work
Following Shakespeare’s lost years, the first record of his life appears in 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene published a sarcastic remark about a “Shake-scene” that erupted within the theatre community, centred on an upstart poet who wrote for the theatre but didn’t possess a formal university education like the so-called “university wits” who dominated the business at the time. By the time Shakespeare had arrived in London, most likely in the late 1580s, the production of plays in theatres built solely for that purpose had only recently taken off in London. In fact, around the time of his arrival, the demand for theatre was on the rise, and performances drew crowds of the working class and the privileged alike. Along with the growing popularity of the theatre came greater competition, and indeed the theatre world into which Shakespeare entered was increasingly unpredictable, cutthroat, and precarious. To keep people coming, companies needed to perform a constantly rotating repertoire of up to six different plays each week. Not only did this place extraordinary demands on actors, but it also required playwrights to write quickly and prolifically, often in collaboration with actors and with each other.
Critical reputation
Shakespeare garnered a significant critical reputation among his peers that would long outlast the man himself. To this day, the name Shakespeare is widely recognized as not only the most famous but also the greatest writer the English language has ever known. As early as 1598 the intellectual and church rector Francis Meres declared Shakespeare to be the nation’s greatest poet, and another writer, John Weever, celebrated “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” Perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary rival was fellow dramatist and literary critic Ben Jonson. Jonson acknowledged that no one could equal Shakespeare’s comedies, but he took issue with several aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedies. His chief complaint related to Shakespeare’s failure to observe the three unities of Classical drama—that is, the unities of time, place, and action. In particular, Jonson felt that Shakespeare’s epic histories, which spanned long time periods and various geographies, compromised the tragic effect. Jonson also felt that Shakespeare’s characteristic mixture of the highbrow and the low, the courtly and the vulgar, marred his writing. Even so, Jonson clearly respected Shakespeare, as evidenced by an admiring elegy he wrote titled “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare,” which appeared in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
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