The Early Life Story
of William Shakespeare
Stratford, England, 1564-1569

(Page 1: Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?)

Both his parents were illiterate. His father, who rose to become Mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, all his life signed his name with a mark. His mother, like most women of her day, was never taught to read or write.

There are those who believe that their eldest son was himself unable to read or write, that the collected works of William Shakespeare could not have been written by the simple son of Warwickshire whose baptism was recorded in the parish register of Stratford's Holy Trinity Church on 26 April 1564. So miraculous is Shakespeare's achievement that a thriving industry has grown up around baffled, usually snobbish attempts to deny it — to suggest that it must have been the work of more than one man, that the 'rude groom' from Stratford could only have been plagiarising, stealing or rewriting the work of others, lending his name to plays and poems which really belonged to better-educated contemporaries, also better-born.

Least logical of all, in the face of the canon's sheer scale and diversity, its breadth of observation and experience, its unparalleled combination of eloquence, learning and wisdom, are those who ascribe it all to some other individual, usually aristocratic — and also, presumably, possessed of superhuman powers. Anti-Stratfordians, as these diverse opponents of Shakespeare's authorship are collectively known, must also assume that his friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson, who first called him 'Swan of Avon', was in on the plot — that Jonson was, not to mince words, lying when he wrote of Shakespeare: 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped...'

Was Jonson still lying in the title of his poem 'To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And what he hath left us', and in its sentiments on the title page of the posthumously published First Folio?

Soul of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise ! . . .
He was not of an age, but for all time!

Must the same go for the writer Robert Greene, who enviously attacked the young Shakespeare's work in 1592; for the printer Henry Chettle, who rapidly apologised amid a shower of personal compliments; for the Stratford mercer Richard Quiney, whose son married Shakespeare's daughter, and who in 1598 wrote a begging letter to 'my loving good friend and countryman'; for the anonymous author of the so-called Parnassus Plays, who saluted 'sweet' Master Shakespeare as the author of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra and the poem Venus and Adonis, a copy of which he wished to keep beneath his pillow; for the Elizabethan scholar, critic and lawyer Gabriel Harvey, who praised Shakespeare as the author of Hamlet, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; for the comic actor Will Kemp and his satirical reference to 'my notable Shakerags'; for his family friend Leonard Digges, who spoke of 'thy Stratford monument'; and for numerous other contemporaries up to and including the playwright's friends and fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who lovingly gathered his plays into the indispensable First Folio of 1623, seven years after his death, to 'keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow-worker alive as was our Shakespeare'?

Was King James I of England and VI of Scotland also conning posterity when he named William Shakespeare and eight others, plus 'the rest of their associates', as the King's Men in a royal charter granted under the Great Seal of England on 17 May 1603? Of course not. Only a talent so uniquely versatile could have inspired such a perverse combination of jealous rivalry, awe-struck eulogy and affectionate remembrance.

Jump to: 1 (Was Shakespeare Shakespeare?) | 2 (Shakespeare's Birthday) | 3 (Shakespeare's Grandfather) | 4 (Shakespeare's Uncle) | 5 (Shakespeare's Father) | 6 (Shakespeare's Mother) | 7 (The Plague) | 8 (His Family Prospered) | 9 (His Family Grew) | 10 (Shakespeare's Catholicism)

Shakespeare photos from the historic Frith collection