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I. The Shakespeare coat of arms, from a draft dated 20 October 1596, prepared by Sir William Dethick, Garter King-of-Arms
One of the unfounded myths about Shakespeare is that all we know about his life could be written on the back of a postage stamp. In fact we know a lot about some of the less exciting aspects of his life, such as his business dealings and his tax debts (as may be seen from the list of Contemporary Allusions, pp. lxv-lxviii). Though we ca
In October 1598 Richard Quiney, whose son was to marry Shakespeare’s daughter Judith, travelled to London to plead with the Privy Council on behalf of Stratford Corporation, which was in financial trouble because of fires and bad weather. He wrote the only surviving letter addressed to Shakespeare; as it was found among Quiney’s papers, it was presumably never delivered. It requested a loan, possibly on behalf of the town, of £30—a large sum, suggesting confidence in his friend’s prosperity. In 1601 Shakespeare’s father died, and was buried in Stratford. In May of the following year Shakespeare was able to invest £320 in 107 acres of arable land in Old Stratford. In the same year John Ma
Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
In 1604 Shakespeare was lodging in north London with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy; in 1612 he was to testify in a court case relating to a marriage settlement on the daughter of the house. The records of the case provide our only transcript of words actually spoken by Shakespeare; they are not characterful. In 1605 Shakespeare invested £440 in the Stratford tithes, which brought him in £60 a year; in June 1607 his elder daughter, Susa
As this selective survey of the historical records shows, Shakespeare’s life is at least as well documented as those of most of his contemporaries who did not belong to great families; we know more about him than about any other dramatist of his time except Ben Jonson. The inscription on the Stratford landowner’s memorial links him with Socrates and Virgil; and in the far greater memorial of 1623, the First Folio edition of his plays, Jonson links this ‘Star of poets’ with his home town as the ‘Sweet swan of Avon’. The Folio includes the second reliable likeness of Shakespeare, an engraving by Martin Droeshout which, we must assume, had been commissioned and approved by his friends and colleagues who put the volume together. In the Folio it faces the lines signed ‘B.1.’ (Ben Jonson) which we print beneath it. Shakespeare’s widow died in 1623, and his last surviving descendant, Elizabeth Hall (who inherited New Place and married first a neighbour, Thomas Nash, and secondly John Bernard, knighted in 1661), in 1670.
2. Shakespeare’s monument, designed by Gheerart Janssen, in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare’s Professional Career
We do not know when Shakespeare joined the theatre after his marriage, or how he was employed in the mean time. In 1587 an actor of the Queen’s Men—the most successful company of the 1580s—died as a result of manslaughter shortly before the company visited Stratford. That Shakespeare may have taken his place is an intriguing speculation. Nor do we know when he began to write. It seems likely (though not certain) that he became an actor before starting to write plays; at any rate, none of his extant writings certainly dates from his youth or early manhood. One of his less impressive so
The first printed allusion to Shakespeare dates from 1592, in the pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, published as the work of Robert Greene, writer of plays and prose romances, shortly after he died. Mention of an ‘upstart crow’ who ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’ and who ‘is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’ suggests rivalry; though parody of a line from Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) shows that Shakespeare was already known on the London literary scene, the word ‘upstart’ does not suggest a long-established author.