human life, its comic potential and its tragic difficulties. They show no sign of anti-
symbolic Reformation thinking.
He left school, probably at fifteen, and at eighteen married Anne Hathaway, eight
years his senior. At the time of the church wedding she was expecting a child, born
in 1583 and christened Susanna. In 1585 Anne had twins, Hamnet and Judith. When
next we hear of William, in 1592, he is in the London theatre, attacked in print by a
university writer who warns other graduates against a ‘puppet’ (an actor), an ‘upstart
crow’ who ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’.
This upstart is ‘in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’Shake-scene is
Shakespeare, whose name is found in various forms, some of them playful.
How had he lived between 1579 and 1592, the crucial ‘lost years’? Nothing is
known, but in 1681 an actor whose father had known Shakespeare told John Aubrey
that Shakespeare ‘had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’;
scenes in the plays would support this, and teaching would have improved his grasp
on what he knew. But his biography is mostly blanks. We know more about Chaucer
than we do about Shakespeare. We have the records of his birth, marriage and death
and a few routine legal transactions, and we have his writings. The writings should
be enough.
William kept up his links with Stratford, but his professional life was in London,
acting and writing, then writing and acting. He was a partner in the leading
company of actors, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, founded in 1594. Shakespeare
shared in the substantial profits of what in 1603 became the King’s Men. They played
at Court as well as at the Globe and, from 1608, at the indoor Blackfriars theatre,
especially in winter. In 1596 William’s son Hamnet died, aged 11. In 1597 William
bought the largest private house in Stratford, New Place. In 1601 his father died. In
1607 his daughter Susanna married;she bore a daughter in the following year. In110 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA
The title-page of the First Folio, with a portrait
engraved by Martin Droeshout. Not directly drawn
from life, but, according to Jonson, a good likeness.
The nearest thing we have to a reliable
representation of Shakespeare; the (restored)
monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, may
derive from it.