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William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564; his baptismal record is dated 26 April. His father, John Shakespeare, a glover and leather worker, rose through the town's government and in 1568 was elected bailiff, its highest office; his mother, Mary Arden, came from a landowning family. He is thought to have studied Latin and rhetoric and read Ovid and Virgil at the town's King's New School. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior; Susanna was born first, then the twins Hamnet and Judith.
No documents survive from the years between 1585 and 1592; by the end of that gap he was spoken of on the London stage as both actor and writer. In 1592 Robert Greene dismissed him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers” — a barb now taken as proof that his name already carried. In the years when plague closed the playhouses he published Venus and Adonis and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton.
In 1594 he became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men; in 1599 he was among the founders of the Globe, and in 1603, when James I came to the throne, the company took the name King's Men. Romeo and Juliet belongs to these years of ascent. In 1596 he lost his eleven-year-old son Hamnet; the following year he bought New Place, the largest house in Stratford.
He drew blank verse close to ordinary speech and let a king and a gravedigger speak on the same stage with equal weight. He loosened the borders of the inherited genres, folding comedy into tragedy. He died in Stratford in 1616, aged fifty-two, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church. Most of his plays reached us through the First Folio, compiled in 1623 by his fellow actors Heminges and Condell.
Shakespeare wrote in the last years of Elizabeth I and the first of James I. London's first commercial public playhouses had only just been built; Renaissance humanism had carried classical texts onto the stage, and the blank verse opened up by Marlowe had become the language of drama. Scripts passed under the censorship of the Master of the Revels, while Puritans accused the theatre of immorality and demanded its closure. Playwriting was not yet a respectable trade; plays were written between the taste of the court and that of the crowd. Waves of plague and anxiety over the succession set the mood of the age.
