The Stratford boy
The parish church of Stratford records William's baptism on 26 April 1564. Nicholas Rowe, the first to write his life (1709), tells the Stratford story, now generally accepted, that William's father sent him for a time to a free school, but poverty and the need for the boy's help at home forced him to take him out. Ben Jonson, in the poem prefixed to the first collected edition, tells his rival that he had small Latin and less Greek. Shakespeare seems not to have known the Greek dramatists, but he learned enough Latin to use Latin words now and then and to pun in both languages. Had he learned more, he might have become a learned, hardworking and obscure scholar. But London became his school.
Another story, reported by Richard Davies in 1681, says that William was always in trouble for poaching rabbits and deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy, who often had him whipped and sometimes jailed. (This is a legend and cannot be confirmed.) On 27 November 1582, when he was eighteen, a license was issued for his marriage to Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-five. In May 1583, about six months after the wedding, a daughter was born and named Susanna. Later Anne bore twins, christened Hamnet and Judith in February 1585. Perhaps late that year Shakespeare left his wife and children. For the years between 1585 and 1592 we have no news of him, but by 1592 he was working in London as an actor.
The making of a dramatist, 1592-1595
The first references to Shakespeare in print do not speak well of him. On 3 September 1592 Robert Greene, from his deathbed, warned his friends that an 'upstart crow, beautified with our feathers' had taken their place in the London theatre, a man with a 'tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide' (a line parodying Henry VI) who thinks he can bombast out blank verse like the best of them and, being a jack-of-all-trades, fancies himself the only stage-shaker in the country. Henry Chettle printed the passage as part of Greene's tract, then apologized in a letter to one of the two men attacked (probably Marlowe and Shakespeare): he did not know either, and if he never met one it would not matter; but he was sorry about the other, for he had seen that his manners were civil and his art excellent, and respectable gentlemen had reported his honest dealing and praised the grace of his writing, which testified to his craft.
There is no doubt that Greene's attack and Chettle's apology concern Shakespeare, so by 1592 the former Stratford lad had become an actor and playwright in the capital. Dowdall (1693) and Rowe (1709) report that he entered the theatre as a servant, in a lowly job, which is not surprising. But he was very ambitious. Soon he began playing small parts, and later took the roles of the kind old Adam in As You Like It and the Ghost in Hamlet. Perhaps he was given larger parts, since his name stands first among the actors in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598), and in Jonson's Sejanus he and Richard Burbage are named among the 'principal tragedians'. (The book dates Sejanus to 1614, but it was first staged in 1603.) In late 1594 Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's company. He prospered not as a dramatist but as an actor and part-owner of the company.
Yet from about 1591 he began to write. At first he apparently revised and mended plays for his company, and from there rose to be a collaborator; the three parts of Henry VI (1592) seem to be work done at this stage with others. From then on he wrote about two plays a year, thirty-eight in all. His first few, The Comedy of Errors (1592), The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's Lost (1594), are of little worth in style and full of tiresome jokes. It is notable that Shakespeare reached greatness through hard labor, but his progress was fast. Using Marlowe's Edward II, he learned to make plays from English history. Richard II, according to the book, was like his earlier play, but Richard III was better. He too made the mistake of trying to build a whole man from one trait, in this case fatal and treacherous ambition embodied in a hunchbacked king, but with his deeper analysis Shakespeare stirred feeling, and with his splendid phrases he outstripped Marlowe. Soon 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!' was on every tongue in London. In Titus Andronicus, however, his genius achieved little: imitation led him, and the play piles up violent horrors. Critics who revere Shakespeare have tried to blame some or all of it on his colleagues, on the false assumption that he could not write nonsense. But he wrote plenty of it.
The narrative poems
In this phase he also wrote his narrative poems and sonnets. Perhaps the plague that closed all London theatres from 1592 to 1594 gave him idle time without income, and he set about writing a poem to win a reward from a patron. In 1593 he dedicated Venus and Adonis to Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The tale comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses by way of Lodge. The earl was young and handsome, and Shakespeare perhaps shaped the poem to his taste. Much of it seems stale and insipid to older readers, but it has passages on sensual delight bolder than anything yet seen in English. Encouraged by praise and by the earl's reward, Shakespeare in 1594-1595 wrote The Rape of Lucrece, a tale of seduction and violation told briefly. It was the last of his optional works.
The Sonnets
Around 1593 Shakespeare began the sonnets that first showed his mastery over the poets of his day, but he declined to publish them. In them, the technically most perfect of his works, he draws heavily on the themes of Petrarch's sonnets: the fleeting beauty of the beloved, her or his doubts and cruel faithlessness, the tedious passing of days in idleness, the jealousy and fierce longing of the lover, and the poet's claim that the beloved's beauty and fame are made eternal by his verse. He borrowed even from the phrases and descriptions of Constable, Daniel, Watson and many other sonneteers, who themselves had 'pilfered' from others.
Nobody has managed to turn the sonnets into a narrative, for the poet wrote them casually, on different days. Their vague outline should not be taken too seriously. It speaks of the poet's love for a young man, his strong attraction to a dark-haired lady of the court, her unfaithfulness and her friendship with the poet's friend, the winning of that friend by another poet who was Shakespeare's rival, and, in a few places, the poet's despairing thoughts of death. Some have guessed that the lady was Mary Fitton, a maid of honor to the queen who became the mistress of the Earl of Pembroke (a guess, nothing more).
In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published the sonnets, apparently without Shakespeare's consent. Since the poet had dedicated them to no one, Thorpe did so, and puzzled readers for centuries. He wrote: 'To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W.H., all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet, wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T.T.' T.T. may be Thomas Thorpe, but who was W.H.? Perhaps William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the man to whom, together with his brother Philip, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays after his death was dedicated. When Shakespeare began the sonnets (1593) Herbert was only thirteen, but the writing went on until 1598, when Pembroke was ready to be a patron of poets.
The poet speaks warmly of his 'love' for the 'boy'. In that age the word 'love' was used for friendship; yet in Sonnet 20 he calls the young man the master-mistress of his passion, and in Sonnet 128 (apparently addressed to the 'lovely boy' of Sonnet 126) the language is of ardent delight. Some Elizabethan poets professed ardent love for young men and were ready to address passionate words to any wealthy man. The importance of these sonnets lies not in their story but in their beauty. Many of them (for example Nos. 29, 30, 43, 55, 64, 71, 97, 106 and 117) have a depth of meaning, warmth of feeling, power of imagination and beauty of phrase that have made them famous for centuries in the English-speaking world.