William Shakespeare

Their life

The glover's son from Stratford who wrote thirty-seven plays containing, somehow, everyone: kings and fools, lovers and murderers, doubt itself soliloquizing. Four centuries on, we still speak in his coinages.

Known for

• Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello
• the Globe Theatre
• 154 sonnets
• inventing hundreds of English words and phrases
• the First Folio (1623)
• history plays on English kingship

The road they walked

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a glove-maker and leather merchant who once served as town bailiff before falling on hard financial times. The parish records show his baptism in April; his birthdate is traditionally kept as April 23. He attended, most likely, the local grammar school, where boys drilled in Latin rhetoric and classical authors — an education that left its fingerprints on everything he later wrote, though no university ever claimed him. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and already pregnant; they had three children, including twins, before he vanishes from the historical record for the better part of a decade, a gap scholars call the 'lost years.'

He resurfaces in London around 1592, already enough of a threat to established playwrights that a rival, Robert Greene, sneered at this 'upstart crow' in print — inadvertently providing the first solid evidence of Shakespeare's presence in the theater world. He joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men under James I), the acting company that would perform nearly all his plays and make him a shareholder, not just a hired pen. This was Elizabethan and Jacobean London: plague closures shutting theaters for months at a stretch, religious tension simmering under a Protestant settlement, a public hungry for spectacle in an age without novels or film. The Globe Theatre, built in 1599 on the south bank of the Thames, became his company's home and, in effect, his laboratory.

Over roughly two decades he produced comedies, histories, and tragedies at a pace that still startles — 'Hamlet,' 'Othello,' 'King Lear,' 'Macbeth,' the great romances at the end. He wrote for money and for a live, unruly crowd, not for posterity, which makes the durability of the work stranger still. He retired to Stratford a wealthy man around 1613, having bought the second-largest house in town. Colleagues assembled his plays into the First Folio in 1623, seven years after his death, without which roughly half of them — including 'Macbeth' and 'The Tempest' — might not survive at all.

How their story ended

Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1616, at fifty-two, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church beneath an epitaph warning against moving his bones. The cause of death was never recorded and remains unknown; a later local tradition claiming he fell ill after a night of drinking with fellow writers is unverifiable gossip, not history. He left behind his wife, two surviving daughters, and a will best remembered for bequeathing Anne his 'second-best bed' — a line that has launched centuries of speculation but no settled answer. His literary afterlife began in earnest with the 1623 First Folio, the collection that secured his reputation for good.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

Tables where William sits

The Renaissance Studio

For making work that outlives you.

The Writers’ Room

For the craft of words and the courage to tell the truth with them.

From the Journal