THE LIFE OF SHAKESHPEARE

THe results of the almost ferocious industry spent upon unearthing and analysing every date and detail of Shakespeare's life are on whole very merge, and for literary purposes almost entirely unimportant, while with guesswork we have nothing to do. The certainties may be summarised very briefly, William Shakespeare was traditionally born on 23rd of April, and certainly baptised on the 26th of April 1564, at Stafford-on-Avon . His grandfather's name was Richard, that of his father, a dealer in hides, gloves, corn, wood, etc., and the poet's mother was Mary Arden. He had two sisters and three brothers. The family, which through Mary Arden had some small landed property, was at one time prosperous, at others not.

Shakespeare himself married early; the date of the actual ceremony is not known, but bond of marriage passed between him and his wife, Anne Hathaway on November 1582, when he was little more than eighteen, and his wife,  a yeoman's daughter, eight years older. They had three children , Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. 

Tradition there is- through of no great age, and of exceedingly slight authority- as to his leaving Stafford for London, perhaps in 1585, 1586, or 1587, and perhaps in consequence of deer stealing prank in the neighbouring park of sir Thomas Lucy of Charlotte. He perhaps began his connection with the theatre as a horse-holder; and was pretty certainly as an actor before long.

In 1593 appeared his first work, the remarkable Venus and Adonis, and next year the rather less remarkable Lucrece. He was connected soon after the middle of the last decade of the century with divers theatres, become a shareholder in them and by 1597 could buy a good house, New place, at Stratford, where he afterwards enlarged his property. It is to be noted that his constant residence at London during ten years, his wife desertion of his wife, etc., are all matters of guesswork founded on barely negative evidence. London was his headquarters during this decade from 1586 to 1596, and occasionally visited  by him during third- at close of which, in 1616 on 23rd April, he died. His reputation, through it has steadily grown, has always been great;  there has never from the day of his death to this day been wanting testimony to his position from the greatest living names of the time in English Literature.