Stratford to Southwark
The documented life is a lattice of records with famous holes. A glover’s son baptised at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564; a grammar-school education (Latin, rhetoric — the syllabus is known, his attendance assumed); marriage at eighteen to Anne Hathaway, eight years older and pregnant; three children — then the “lost years”, c. 1585-92, of which nothing is known and everything has been conjectured (poaching legends, schoolmastering, soldiering), until a rival playwright’s 1592 sneer at an “upstart crow” places him in London theatre, already annoying.
From there the rise is corporate as much as poetic: Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the King’s Men from 1603) and in their theatre, the Globe (1599) — the business stake, not the scripts, made him prosperous enough to buy Stratford’s second-grandest house. The plays came at roughly two a year across two decades — the histories and comedies of the 1590s; the tragedies of the plague-shadowed 1600s (Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth — the theatres closing repeatedly around them for epidemics); the late romances — written for his company’s specific actors, revised in performance, and treated as trade stock rather than literature: no play survives in his manuscript, and eighteen plays would have vanished entirely had two fellow actors not compiled the First Folio in 1623, seven years after his death, with its engraved portrait and Ben Jonson’s verdict: “not of an age, but for all time.”
The language
English keeps his fingerprints at the level of vocabulary: hundreds of words and phrases have their first recorded use in his texts — assassination, lonely, swagger, “wild-goose chase,” “the be-all and the end-all” — a statistic partly an artefact of his being the best-indexed writer alive, and still staggering. The 154 sonnets (1609), with their unidentified Fair Youth and Dark Lady, run the biography-hunters’ industry to this day.
The bed, and the doubters
He died in Stratford on 23 April 1616 — tradition, unverifiable and tidy, makes it his birthday — leaving a businessman’s will whose single immortal line bequeaths his wife “my second-best bed”: read variously as a snub or (since the best bed was for guests and the second-best the marital one) a tenderness, it is the marriage’s only surviving sentence. His grave in Holy Trinity curses movers of his bones, which have accordingly never been moved. The authorship “question” — Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe — is a 19th-century invention resting on snobbery about the grammar-school glover’s son; the documentary record tying the Stratford man to the plays is, by early-modern standards, unusually good, and specialists treat the matter as settled. The plays, meanwhile, have been performed somewhere on Earth, without interruption, for four centuries.