3. Shakespeare's Life:
Shakespeare was born in 1564 at Stratford-upon-Avon. He was the eldest son and the third of eight children of John Shakespeare, a glover, and Mary Arden, a landowner’s daughter. He enjoyed an education at Stratford school that was based on Latin grammar, rhetoric and composition. He left school at the age of fifteen, and married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, when he was eighteen. At the time of the church wedding she was expecting a child, born in 1583 and christened Susanna. Two years later Anne bore twins, Hamnet and Judith.
William kept up his links with Stratford, but his professional life was in London, writing and acting. He was also a partner in the leading company of actors ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, founded in 1594. It played at Court and in the theatre, the Curtain, and in its own Globe theatre, built in 1599. Shakespeare shared in the substantial profits of what in 1603 became ‘The King’s Men’. They played at Court as well as at the Globe and, from 1608, at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, especially in the winter.
In 1596 William’s son Hamnet died, aged eleven. And a few years later, in 1601, his father died. After the death of his mother in 1609, William Shakespeare spent more time in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare himself died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity in his hometown.
At his death in 1616, half of Shakespeare’s plays had not been printed, but seven years later two of his fellow-actors brought out a collected edition: thirty-six plays in a book of nearly nine hundred double-column pages in a large Folio, entitled ‘Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies’.
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