William Shakespeare, his life outside the dramas
The early years
Shakespeare was a fantastic writer and is still one of the most famous.
The overage person around sixteen years old knows, more or less, about 1000 words. A student from Oxford or Cambridge knows about 3000 words. Shakespeare knew about 20000. How come he knew all of those? Of course, because he knew a lot of them and when he thought there was a word missing, he built another. But Shakespeare wasn't just a very good writer - he was more than that...
William Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare moved from Snitterfield, where John's father was a well-known farmer, to Stratford-upon-Avon, a beautiful village lying in a woody valley. There, John became a glove maker and made some money from different businesses. He met Mary Arden, who was from the local county Warwickshire, in Stratford and they got married.
Stratford was then a market town and located to the west of Wales and to the south of London, not far from Oxford.
Things went well for John Shakespeare, he became richer and got one of the finest jobs in the city.
But in 1577 his carrier was over and he had many depts.
In April 1564, the first son, William Shakespeare, was born in the small house on Henry Street.
He was the third child of eight and was christened in the Holy Trinity Church of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on April 26, 1564. Since the normal age when a child was christened in 15th century age was around three days, one can assume William Shakespeare's birthday was April 23.
There isn't much noted about Shakespeare's childhood.
When William Shakespeare was around four or five years old he went to Latin school in Stratford - that school was free for the bourgeoisies' sons and the days in school took a lot of time. Shakespeare would have gone six days a week every week of the year, except on holidays. The school ran from six in the morning to six in the evening.
In school, the pupils read normal schoolbooks and the one book they would have to know inside out was the bible.
William Shakespeare also studied Latin - later on, he wrote about his teacher in Latin.
When he was eleven years old he started at grammar school but after that, there was no more school for him. So he didn't get any university education, which the most of the dramatizers of that time got.
The Missing Years
No one really knows why Shakespeare left school.
Some theories say that the father couldn't pay the school fee for him but facts say that John Shakespeare was a wealthy man during this time.
Some think that he became a butcher's boy. This is because he seems to know much about the trade of butchering meat in his plays. Other thinks that he started training for or did time as a lawyer, a doctor, a sailor, a falconer, a soldier or a gardener, because the plays seem to show much knowledge about these professions too. He may have worked in his fathers business, making and selling leather goods.
We don't know much about Shakespeare in his childhood or his teenage years, neither do we know what he was working with or if he wrote anything until 1592.
But we know what he might have though about growing up, though, from the words of a shepherd on one of his plays:
"I would were no age between ten and
three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest;
for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches
with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting..."
Shepherd, the Winter's Tale
One might wonder if this is a good description of him when he was young - stealing and fighting?
On November 27, 1582 when Shakespeare was eighteen years old, he got married to the eight year older Anna Hathaway who was a woman from a farmyard outside of Stratford.
They got married very fast after they met, only after one "banns" when you usually needed three. They had their first child seven months after the marriage, a girl named Susanna. There are some that speculate that they got married so fast because they found out that Anna was pregnant. At this time in England it was big shame if a child was born outside the marriage. This may be why they got married after just one "banns".
Two years after Susanna was born, in 1585, the twins were born, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet became only eleven years old and died in 1596.
The Later Years
In 1592, a writer named Robert Greene insulted Shakespeare. Greene's popularity had sunk and he was probably afraid of the much younger and new star, Shakespeare.This insult confirms that Shakespeare moved to London a year or so before 1592.
During this time he had started to write plays, which were being put on in London. When he was between the age of twenty-eight and thirty-two, we know that Shakespeare was writing poetry and plays. He wrote his most famous plays in London and owned quite a lot of money, which he invested in houses in Stratford. In 1597 he had earned enough money to buy one of the biggest houses in Statford.
The year after he got into some trouble with society after some business that wasn't entirely legal. He never broke the contact with Statford.
In 1607, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna got married to the doctor John Hall. Just before 1610, Shakespeare moved back to Stratford.
In the last years of his life, Shakespeare's brother died and he became the only male Shakespeare alive in his family. The year before he died, he became involved in more legal problems and an enemy to some of the people in Stratford.
His own family was still alive when he died on his birthday; 52 years old, and just before he died he rewrote his will. The will has amused a lot of people and especially the phrase when he announces that he will leave his "second best bed" to his wife.
Why didn't he leave his best bed to her? No body knows why, one can only speculate if he was unfaithful and didn't love her. We don't know if the marriage was happy or if he was being ironic when he wrote this.
Some say that his wife would have gotten one third of all his houses and land in Stratford but historians say that in that part of the country England, widows didn't have this right. So maybe she didn't get anything of the inheritance.
One thing that is true about the will is that Shakespeare left more of what he owned to Susanna than to his other daughter, Judith. Susanna could read and was married to a doctor. Judith couldn't read and was married to someone who was known to be unfaithful.
Maybe he liked Susanna more than Judith? When he rewrote his will he wanted to make sure that his property would pass by Susanna's children and the fact is that he wanted to build up a wealthy family.
Maybe some times in his life he was worrying about whom he should leave his money to because he rewrote his will in the last three months of his life.
Anna Shakespeare died in 1623, Susanne in 1649 and Judith in 1662.
We don't know much about Shakespeare's life, for example if he was a happy or a sad and angry man. But we do know through the documents, which have survived, that he started as the son of a glove maker and ended up as a wealthy landowner. He was also the most famous writer of his time.
You should take the details of his life with a pinch of salt, because you have to remember that he lived about 500 years ago.
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