Introduction

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's reconstructed Globe Theater

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet (1948)

It wasn't his training: Shakespeare left school at age 15, and his contemporary Ben Johnson said Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek.” It wasn't where he was born: Stratford is still a pretty small town even today. It wasn't a long career: Shakespeare wrote all of his great works in about a twenty-five-year span and died relatively young at 52. It wasn't even his story ideas: the Bard adapted almost all his plots from known sources. No, what's impressive about Shakespeare is that his genius seems to have come from nowhere except himself. He penned comedies, tragedies, and lyric poems; and his mastery of language, character psychology, and emotion combined to make him the greatest writer in English.

Essential Facts

1. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was 18. She was eight years older and gave birth six months after the wedding...suggesting they may have had to get married.
2. Shakespeare’s will leaves his “second best bed” to his wife. Who got the best bed—and why?
3. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin released eighty starlings into New York’s Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I. There are now hundreds of millions of starlings in America.
4. Actors try to avoid saying “Macbeth” in a theater. Tradition (superstition?) says that it brings bad luck, so actors call it the “Scottish play” instead.
5. Some say that Shakespeare didn’t write any of the works staged under his name. This theory became popular in the nineteenth century, and some say you can find clues to the real author (Francis Bacon?) all through the works...if you read closely enough.