Because he’s such a significant historical figure and lived in a time when there are fewer reliable historical records about individuals, compared to other periods, there have been a number of theories advanced about Shakespeare over the years. In the eighteenth century especially, various people suggested that the actor William Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him, and that those works were actually written by the Earl of Oxford, King James, Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe. None of these views are currently accepted by a significant portion of historians or Shakespearean scholars, and Simply Charly makes the assumption that the conventional view of history is correct. Interested readers can find a wide variety of books on the subject; for a starter, John Michell’s 1999 book Who Wrote Shakespeare? provides an overview of the theories without taking a side.
William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564 - April 23, 1616) was born and raised in Stratford-on-Avon, England, and seems to have spent most of his life there and in London. He married Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and they had three children, Susanna (with whom Anne was pregnant at the wedding), Judith, and Hamnet. His actual date of birth is unknown -- churches kept records of baptisms more frequently than births, and he was baptized on April 26. April 23 is traditionally celebrated as his birthday both because it coincides with the date of his death and because that day is the feast day of Saint George, the patron saint of England. If it’s wrong, it’s only off by a few days -- English baptisms were nearly always performed within a week of a child’s birth.
Beyond his birth, marriage, and death, most of the details of Shakespeare’s non-professional life are a matter of speculation. His parents were John and Mary, either or both of who may have come from Catholic families (England was at this time Protestant by law, following the creation of the Church of England), and he was the third of eight children. Though not prosperous, his family didn’t struggle: his mother came from an upper-class family and his father served as an alderman in Avon for a time. William almost certainly attended grammar school (the local school was open for free to all boys), where he would have received instruction in Latin and literature, accounting for the knowledge of the classics and of Romance language, which he displays in his work.
From 1585 to 1592, no record of Shakespeare survives. Though this fact fascinates some readers and historians, it’s about what you’d expect for most residents of England at the time -- even when records were kept, many of them wouldn’t have survived to the present day, being vulnerable to fire, water damage, and simple neglect. Though well-known, Shakespeare was never as famous in his lifetime as he has become, and even if he were, history as an academic field just wasn’t pursued in the same way at the time -- preserving records of commoners for posterity would have been a strange notion, especially during a cold winter when papers could have been burned for fuel.
Various traditions have developed around Shakespeare’s life -- he is supposed to have worked as a teacher, to have done odd jobs related to the London theater, and to have been arrested for poaching deer (just as Robin Hood was) -- but there is no mention of any of these things until long after his death, and are probably the equivalent of George Washington and the cherry tree. We know that by 1592, he was a playwright -- because well-known writer Robert Greene dismissed him as "an upstart crow," deriding his play Henry VI. Interestingly -- given Shakespeare’s lack of serious education -- what Greene seems most upset by is the Bard’s attempt to rise above his station by writing serious work, rather than just entertainments for the masses.
Throughout the 1590s and the first decade of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare worked as a playwright and actor on the London stage. He was part owner of Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors later known as the King’s Men when King James I took over Chamberlain’s sponsorship. He acted both in his own plays and in those of others, and retired in 1613, returning to Avon, where he died three years later of food poisoning.
We know a good deal more about his plays and poetry than his personal life -- though even then, there are plays we are not sure Shakespeare wrote, and plays he wrote which have not survived to the present day.
Perhaps the most prominent aspect of Shakespeare’s work is one that has been emulated by many writers to follow him (notably Mark Twain, who supported the "Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare" theories): he wrote for the educated man and the "masses" simultaneously. His plays are full of sexual allusions, puns and dirty jokes, violence, revenge, ghosts and witches, romance, betrayal, slapstick, magic, and just plain goofiness -- but they also draw on history, on previous plays, and on Greek and Roman legendry. Those puns may provide an easy laugh, but they’re also part of a larger approach to language, a deep understanding of it. Shakespeare committed to print thousands of words, which had never been seen before -- more than all other writers of his generation combined.
Now, "committed to print" needs some explanation, and demonstrates what makes Shakespeare so interesting. Some of these words were probably in use at the time -- in speech. A writer with an excellent ear for dialogue, Shakespeare wrote down a good many words and phrases which were used in informal conversation but had never been used in print before. But on top of that, he also invented a great many words -- not out of whole cloth, but by deriving adjectives from nouns, verbs from adjectives, combining parts of words in ways that simply made sense to him. This was a fluid time in the history of the English language -- Shakespeare didn’t even spell his own name the same all the time, nor did anyone else -- and people were very receptive to these neologisms, just as new words and slang are introduced every week in the present day, thanks to television, music, and text messaging.
In addition to being the first to coin, record, or popularize such words, many of the phrases he used have caught on and become a common feature of English even among people who’ve never read his plays. "A foregone conclusion" is one such phrase. To vanish into "thin air" is another, as well as "mum’s the word," "in a pickle," and "love is blind."
