Shakespeare Bio

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

There are few recorded details about the life of William Shakespeare, and the information we do have -- the text of his last will and testament, for example -- sheds very little light on his work as a poet and playwright. Shakespeare is known to have been born in 1564 in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and historians assume (but have no evidence) that he attended school in his place of birth. At the age of 18, he married a local girl named Anne Hathaway who was eight years his senior. They had three children by 1585; their only son, Hamnet, died at the age of eleven. By the late 1580's, Shakespeare had begun his career as a playwright/actor and was producing plays for London's leading theater company, the Lord Chamberlain's Company (later renamed "The King's Men"). Shakespeare developed slowly as an artist; his early plays and poems (the poem Venus and Adonis and the Henry VI trilogy, for example) showed little promise of the great plays to come. His output, however, was steady -- an average of two plays per year for his company. Shakespeare's publishers, John Heminge and Henry Condell, later recalled that "[Shakespeare's] mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot on his papers." No copies of the plays printed during Shakespeare's life have survived; the earliest published versions appeared in the so-called "First Folio" edition of 1623. Shakespeare retired to his birthplace around 1610, where he died on April 23, 1616.

Selected Plays:

Richard III (1593)
Romeo and Juliet (1595)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
Richard II (1596)
The Merchant of Venice (1597)
Henry IV, Part I (1597)
Henry IV, Part II (1598)
Julius Caesar (1599)
Hamlet (1600-01)
Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1601-02)
Measure for Measure (1604)
Othello (1604)
King Lear (1605)
Macbeth (1605)
Antony and Cleopatra (1606)
Cymbeline (1609)
The Winter's Tale (1610)
The Tempest (1611)

Full-text versions of the plays are available online at: http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/