and 23rd of April 1564 on Henley Street  in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in  

Warwickshire in the English West Midlands.

His father was John Shakespeare, son of Richard  Shakespeare and William's mother was Mary Arden,  

born in 1536. Richard Shakespeare was a humble  farmer, who had moved to Snitterfield near  

Stratford-upon-Avon in 1529. He had leased  land during his lifetime from Robert Arden,  

a powerful local landlord who had eight  children including Mary Arden. Several years  

before Richard's death in 1561, the ties between  the Shakespeares and the Ardens were cemented by  

the marriage of John, who had established  himself as a renowned glover and whittawer,  

a specialist in light-coloured leather, to Mary  Arden, Robert's daughter, at Aston Cantlow,  

a parish church at Wilmcote. This marriage took  place sometime before the birth of their first  

daughter Joan in September 1558. John's marriage  to Mary came with significant financial benefits,  

as upon the demise of Robert Arden, his daughter  inherited a large estate in Wilmcote called the  

Asbies, which enabled John to start buying up  properties around Stratford-upon-Avon such as  

the house and garden on Henley Street in 1556  where William was born eight years later. At  

the same time as expanding his property portfolio,  John was also forging a reputation as an important  

local dignitary in Stratford-upon-Avon, becoming  an alderman, the equivalent of a city councillor  

in modern times, in 1565, and then a bailiff of  the town in 1568 and finally in 1571, assuming the  

role of chief alderman and deputy bailiff. These  were offices of such high repute that in the same  

year he requested a coat of arms for his family  to signify his meteoric rise in civil society.

However, it was Mary Arden's father's status  as a significant landowner in Warwickshire,  

which allowed her husband John to advance within  the societal hierarchy of Stratford-upon-Avon and  

the surrounding region after they married in  the 1550s. She was named as an executor of her  

father's will in November 1556, which implied  that unlike her husband she was literate and  

well-educated by the standards of the sixteenth  century. As such, it has been speculated that  

Mary was a considerable influence on young  William's budding literary sense when he was  

growing up in the 1570s. William was far from  her and John's only child. Their first daughter  

was a girl called Joan who was born in 1558, but  she died in infancy, as did their second child,  

Margaret, when she was just five months old  in April 1563. Consequently William was the  

oldest surviving child of theirs. Five further  children followed, Gilbert in 1566, Joan in 1569,  

Anne in 1571, Richard in 1574 and Edmund in 1580.  With the exception of Anne, who passed away in  

the spring of 1579 before her eighth birthday,  all of William's younger siblings would live  

into adulthood. Very little is known about  Shakespeare's relationship with his brothers,  

apart from his possible attendance at their  funerals much later in his life, which he may  

have also paid for. There is also some indication  that he was fond of his sister Joan, who continued  

to live at the family home on Henley Street in  Stratford-upon-Avon, long after William inherited  

it as the eldest son of the family. She was also  mentioned as a beneficiary of his will in 1616.

In order to understand William Shakespeare's  work, one must take full account of the world  

he was living in. The Renaissance, through  which the texts of ancient Greece and Rome were  

rediscovered and used to reform European society  in all manner of ways, from the visual arts and  

architecture to the way governments functioned  and education curriculums were structured,  

had started in Italy in the fourteenth century,  finding its fullest expression in the city of  

Florence. From there it travelled north to  countries like France and England in the late  

fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, driven  by individuals like Thomas More who composed  

his famous political treatise Utopia in England  in the mid-1510s. The English Renaissance would  

peak during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth  I between 1558 and 1603. That period saw Edmund  

Spenser compose The Faerie Queen and Philip Sidney  his Arcadia, while the new studia humanitatis  

educational curriculum saw individuals across  England being taught Greek and Roman classical  

texts and how to write in the fine Italianate  script that had been developed in Florence and  

Rome two centuries earlier. In time the English  Renaissance would see its greatest achievements  

on the Elizabethan stage, as playwrights like  Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare  

himself composed the finest works of the day. Shakespeare's youth had as its backdrop, this  

changing cultural world along with the increased  opportunities for children of families of a modest  

background to acquire a good education. As a  young boy of five years old, Shakespeare was  

first enlisted into 'petty school' where he began  to learn to read and write. When he was seven,  

he was transferred to King's New School, the local  grammar school where as part of his education,  

he was first exposed to many Roman and Greek  authors such as the rhetorician and political  

commentator Cicero, the greatest poet of the Roman  Empire Virgil and Roman historians such as Livy.  

We might, however, speculate that the foremost  influence on him throughout his education were  

the great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles,  Aristophanes and Euripides and the Roman comic and  

tragic playwrights Plautus, Terence and Seneca.  Shakespeare's love for the stage was further  

enhanced by the many traveling theatre groups  of 'players', as they were termed, which visited  

Stratford in his youth, such as Leicester's  Men in 1572 and 1576, Warwick's Men in 1574,  

Worcester's Men in 1574 and 1581, Lord Strange's  Men in 1578, and Lord Berkeley's Men in 1580 and  

1582, all of whom usually performed in front of  local notables such as John Shakespeare, who may  

have brought William along with him to watch  their shows. William might have also attended  

the 1575 entertainments organized by the earl  of Leicester for the royal household at nearby  

Kenilworth, or the mystery plays and Hocktide  performances that were often put on in Coventry,  

as well as the numerous shows put together by  members of amateur dramatics groups in Stratford.

While William's love of the theatre was growing,  his family's fortunes were declining. In the  

1570s John Shakespeare's business fortunes  took a turn for the worse. In response he  

turned to smuggling wool, the most significant  commodity in the English economy at the time,  

while also engaging in usury, the practice  of lending money for high interest rates,  

which was illegal for Christians across Europe  in medieval and early modern times. He found  

himself in legal difficulty as a result of this  activity and by the end of the decade, John's  

finances were extremely precarious. In 1578 he was  forced to mortgage many of his wife's properties,  

losing nearly all of the estate they had in  1580, after failing to repay lenders. This  

would deprive William of much of his inheritance,  as John's stature in the community plummeted,  

beginning in 1576 when he stopped attending  council meetings and culminating in 1586  

when he was stripped of his aldermen title  entirely. By 1592, John Shakespeare was named  

as a frequent absentee of the local Protestant  parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon, and although  

some claim that this illustrated that John was a  secret follower of the Catholic faith in largely  

Protestant England, as they have also insisted  for his son William, it is also possible that  

the social stigma which surrounded him by then,  saw him avoiding public gatherings. As tumultuous  

as this period was for the Shakespeares, it might  have been the making of William. Had his father  

still possessed a large estate to pass on to his  eldest son in Warwickshire, William might have  

been satisfied to settle down as a comfortable  member of the gentry in Stratford-upon-Avon,  

but his family's declining fortunes forced  him to carve out his own place in the world.

At fifteen years of age in 1579 Shakespeare  left grammar school. The years that followed  

are shadowy ones when it comes to evaluating his  life, a common problem for the bard's life story.  

Despite his status as the greatest playwright of  all time and the foremost figure of the English  

Renaissance, there is a surprising dearth of  sources available for studying significant chunks  

of Shakespeare's life, in contrast to figures like  Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, the latter of  

whom was a member of a leading political family  from Kent and who moved in government circles,  

generating a lot of correspondence  and historical records concerning him,  

which have survived down to the present day. The  same cannot be said of Shakespeare and so the  

chronology of his life has to be stitched together  from fragmentary details. As we will see later,  

it is this lack of source material that has  led to speculation for the last four centuries,  

that Shakespeare did not write all of the  plays which are usually attributed to him.

Given the lack of information concerning his life,  a number of theories have emerged concerning his  

further education and movements in the 1580s. Some  have argued that he may have started performing in  

plays in the Midlands himself during these years,  with John Aubrey, a seventeenth-century writer  

stating of Shakespeare that: “when he killed a  calf, he would do it in a high style, & make a  

speech”, a reference to the common dramatic trope  in which the actor would pretend to butcher a calf  

onstage. Another line of thinking, places William  Shakespeare as a schoolteacher in his early adult  

years, an argument based on a conversation  that John Aubrey had with the son of one  

of Shakespeare's business associates, in which he  states that Shakespeare: “has been in his younger  

years a Schoolmaster in the Country.” This is a  possibility at a time when an individual who was  

well educated could have become a tutor or teacher  in a free-school for a time without specific  

qualifications for teaching. What is beyond  doubt, though, is that Shakespeare must have  

continued to improve his writing abilities and  read voraciously during these years, as so many of  

his works are based on his detailed understanding  of English history and medieval literature.

We do, however, stand on firmer ground when it  comes to Shakespeare's marriage. On the 27th of  

November 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, the  daughter of family friend, Richard Hathaway,  

who John Shakespeare had twice bailed out of debt  and acted as surety for. Anne was 26 at the time,  

while William was just 18. She had possibly been  working for John Shakespeare as a stitcher in  

his glove-making business. These facts, combined  with Anne already being several months pregnant  

when they married, have led scholars to argue that  this was a shotgun wedding, forced on the couple  

by their families to prevent the child being  born out of wedlock, something which carried  

a major social stigma in the sixteenth century.  While these details of their marriage are known,  

Anne is a curiously obscure figure for the most  part, one whom people are generally keen to know  

more about in the interests of determining whether  William's love plays like Romeo and Juliet or  

his sonnets, were influenced by his relationship  with her. She features in William's will of 1616,  

but little is known about her besides, other than  the details of their children together. Their  

daughter, with whom Anne was heavily pregnant on  the day of their marriage in the winter of 1582,  

was born the following year and was christened  Susanna. Twins followed two years later,  

a boy named Hamnet and a girl named Judith.  Tragically Hamnet died in 1596 at 11 years of age  

from an outbreak of the bubonic plague in England,  which even after the initial Black Death of the  

fourteenth century continued to ravage Europe  periodically down to the eighteenth century.

William and Anne's wedding ceremony was  somewhat unorthodox by the standards of  

Elizabethan England, a country which was gradually  moving towards becoming uniformly Protestant  

at that time, although there was still a large  minority of Roman Catholics across the country,  

particularly the further north one headed from  London. The wedding was overseen by John Frith,  

a priest who was characterized as being, quote,  “unsound in religion” in a 1586 assessment,  

and it was also unusually quick, the couple being  pronounced as husband and wife after only a single  

reading of their marriage banns instead of the  usual three. Despite the unusual circumstances,  

the marriage was confirmed the next day in a  legal document which outlined a £40 surety was  

to be paid by Fulke Sandells and John Richardson,  associates of the Hathaways, as Shakespeare was  

still technically a minor and needed the  permission of his elders to become Anne's  

husband. The peculiar circumstances surrounding  the marriage have led many to speculate that  

Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic, a supposition  which is supported by the fact that his mother's  

family, the Ardens, were committed Catholics,  leading to the supposition that, so too was  

John Shakespeare. However, the evidence remains  tenuous and all that can be said for certain  

is that William seems to have conformed to the  established Protestant church during his lifetime.

Hardly anything is known concerning Shakespeare's  life and movements between the mid-1580s and 1592,  

a period of time which has consequently  become known as his 'lost years'. There are  

a few references to him in documents outlining  his family's business dealings in Warwickshire  

at this time, but little else. As a result,  many writers have woven fanciful narratives  

concerning this period. This tendency was in  evidence as early as the first years of the  

eighteenth century when the English dramatist  and poet, Nicholas Rowe, writing in a preface  

to the 1709 folio edition of Shakespeare's plays,  conjectured that William became embroiled in legal  

trouble during this period, specifically after  being caught poaching deer on the Charlecote  

estate of Sir Thomas Lucy, a man whose coat of  arms he would subsequently mock in later years,  

in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor.  Accounts like this cannot be entirely dismissed,  

as while there is no documentary evidence  to support these versions of events today,  

it is possible that Rowe had seen records to  this effect which are now lost, or that this  

story had been passed down orally over the  hundred years since Shakespeare's own time.

Others claim that Shakespeare may have joined  the 'Queen's Men' in 1587 as a replacement  

for one of their stars, William Knell, who was  killed in an altercation in Thame, Oxfordshire,  

that summer. The Queen's Men had been formed in  1583 on the express command of Queen Elizabeth,  

a great lover of the theatre. They were a troupe  of actors or players who were amongst the finest  

in the country and who were the most famed troupe  of the 1580s, performing versions of Montemayor's  

pastoral romance, Diana, which later became the  basis for Shakespeare's play The Two Gentlemen  

of Verona. They also played King Leir, the tale  of an ancient King of Briton prior to the Roman  

invasion of the island, a work which was the  foundation for Shakespeare's own later play  

King Lear. The Queen's Men also performed various  productions concerning the reigns of King John,  

Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V,  English monarchs of the thirteenth,