Who was William Shakespeare? His life, plays and legacy

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor, baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, who wrote for the London stage from about 1590 to 1613 and died in 1616. He left about 39 plays, 154 sonnets and several long poems, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, and he is widely held to be the greatest writer in the English language. Who was William Shakespeare as a person is harder to say: the records show a working life, not an inner one.

In short

• Documents prove the outline of his life: born in Stratford, married at 18, a shareholder in London's leading acting company, and buried in Stratford in 1616.
• Two fellow actors collected 36 of his plays in the First Folio of 1623, and without it about half of them would be lost.
• He is the first recorded user of about 1,600 words, but he probably invented far fewer, and the doubt that someone else wrote his plays has almost no support among scholars.

What do the records actually show?

More than people think, but little of it is personal. The Folger Shakespeare Library notes that he was baptized on 26 April 1564; his birth is traditionally put on 23 April, but no record of it survives. His father, John, was a glover and later a town official; his mother, Mary Arden, came from a landowning family. He probably went to Stratford's grammar school, which taught Latin, rhetoric and classical authors like Ovid, though no list of its pupils from those years survives.

Year	What the documents show
1564	Baptized at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, 26 April
1582	A license is issued for his marriage to Anne Hathaway, eight years older, in November
1583–1585	Daughter Susanna, then twins Hamnet and Judith, are baptized
1585–1592	Almost nothing: the "lost years"
1592	The playwright Robert Greene mocks an "upstart Crow" who thinks himself "the only Shake-scene in a country"
1594	He is a sharer in a new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men
1596	Hamnet is buried, aged 11
1597	Buys New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford
1599	His company builds the Globe theater on the south bank of the Thames
1603	King James I takes the company under his patronage: they become the King's Men
1613	The Globe burns down during a performance of Henry VIII
1616	Dies on 23 April, aged 52; buried in Holy Trinity Church
1623	The First Folio is published

The legends fill the gaps. That he fled Stratford after poaching deer, that he held horses outside theaters, that he died after a heavy night drinking with Ben Jonson: each first appears decades after his death, and none can be checked. What the documents describe is less a lonely genius than a successful theater businessman who also wrote: he acted, owned a share of the company and its playhouses, invested in property, and left most of his estate to his daughter Susanna, and to his wife, famously, his "second-best bed".

What did he write?

About 39 plays, depending on how collaborations are counted, plus the Sonnets, published in 1609, and the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, written in 1593 and 1594 when plague closed the theaters. The First Folio sorted the plays into comedies, histories and tragedies. Critics in the 19th century added a fourth group, the romances, for the strange late plays that mix loss and reunion.

Kind	Examples	One famous line
Comedies	A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It	"The course of true love never did run smooth." (Dream)
Histories	Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V	"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more." (Henry V)
Tragedies	Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth	"To be, or not to be: that is the question." (Hamlet)
Romances	The Winter's Tale, The Tempest	"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on." (The Tempest)

Most of his plays are in blank verse, unrhymed lines of ten syllables with five stresses, mixed with prose for comic or low characters, and he grew freer with it over time. He borrowed nearly all his plots from histories, older plays and Italian stories. What he added was character: people who change their minds, talk themselves into things and surprise themselves, which is why critics still argue about Hamlet's motives. He also wrote in an age that prized rhetoric, and his characters argue, persuade and deceive with its full toolkit. Many of his plays turn on love, usually love that goes wrong.

Why does the First Folio matter so much?

Without it, about half his plays would probably be lost. In 1623, seven years after his death, two actors from his company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, with 36 plays. Eighteen of them, including Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar, had never been printed. The book also gives one of only two likenesses with a strong claim to show him, an engraving by Martin Droeshout (the other is his monument in Stratford), and Ben Jonson's tribute calling him the "Sweet Swan of Avon" and "not of an age, but for all time". About 750 copies are thought to have been printed; roughly 235 survive.

Did Shakespeare really invent thousands of words?

No, though he is the first known writer to use many. The claim goes back to the Oxford English Dictionary, which once credited him with the first use of about 3,200 words. As older texts have been digitized and searched, many of those have turned up earlier. By 2016, the OUP blog reported about 1,600 words for which his works still gave the OED's first citation; the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust gives "over 1,700". Strict counts of words he very probably coined himself run to a few hundred.

The reason is simple. For a long time Shakespeare was the most thoroughly read early modern writer, so his uses were the ones lexicographers found first. As the Oxford scholar Charlotte Brewer points out in a 2012 study, a word printed first in Shakespeare may have been spoken for years before. What is not in doubt is his habit of bending words: turning nouns into verbs, adding prefixes like "un-", and making compounds. Phrases he certainly made famous, like "wild-goose chase", "the be-all and the end-all" and "foregone conclusion", are part of how a language grows.

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

Yes, by the evidence. Doubts were first raised in the mid-19th century, about 230 years after his death, by writers who found it hard to believe a glover's son without a university degree could have written the plays. Their candidates have included the philosopher Francis Bacon, the playwright Christopher Marlowe and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, the most popular since a 1920 book proposed him.

Still argued

The authorship question is argued in public, not among most specialists. Its supporters point to the gaps in the records, the plays' knowledge of courts, law and Italy, and the absence of books or manuscripts in his will. Nearly all historians and literary scholars reply with the evidence: his name on title pages from 1598, Greene's attack in 1592, the testimony of fellow actors and Ben Jonson, who knew him, in the First Folio, and the Stratford monument that names him a writer. The Earl of Oxford died in 1604, before plays such as The Tempest were written. What scholarship does accept is collaboration: The Two Noble Kinsmen was written with John Fletcher, and the New Oxford Shakespeare of 2016 credited Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays.

Why is he still read?

Partly through history: English spread with an empire, and Shakespeare became a fixture of schools around the world. But the plays also keep working on stage. They leave a lot open, few stage directions, ambiguous motives, so each age stages them its own way, from Japanese films like Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood to musicals like West Side Story. And they put into memorable words feelings that most people have and can't phrase: jealousy, grief, ambition, doubt.

He wrote at the height of the English Renaissance, when the public playhouse was a new and popular business. Like Mozart nearly two centuries later, he worked fast, for patrons and paying audiences, which is a reminder that great art can be made on deadline, for money, for a crowd.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: which parts of Shakespeare's life are documented, and which are later stories?
• Why would Macbeth and The Tempest probably be lost without Heminges and Condell?
• Why is "Shakespeare invented 1,700 words" misleading, and what would be a more accurate sentence?

Sources

• Shakespeare's life — Folger Shakespeare Library
• William Shakespeare — Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
• Shakespeare's words — Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
• Shakespeare's linguistic legacy — OUPblog, Oxford University Press, 2016
• Shakespeare, word-coining and the OED — Charlotte Brewer, Shakespeare Survey, 2012
• William Shakespeare — Wikipedia