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5. Features of biography and controversy about Shakespeare’s identity.

Bernard Shaw about Shakespeare: ‘...the man picked up some experience while working for his father, while the other poets and playwrights were wasting their lives at universities’.

Dates of life: 1564 – 1616. The elder son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Mary Arden, a gentleman’s daughter. 3 younger children, besides him: Gilbert, Joan and Ann. His father was an exceptionally capable man, full of initiative and ambition: in the 1570s he was made the major alderman and a judge.

William Sh. is supposed (by Nicolas Roe, his first biographer) to study in a local grammar school, where he got the beginnings of Ovid, Virgil and Horace. In 1582 (18-year-old) married Ann Hathaway, who was 8 years older than he was. By 1585 they had had 3 children – Susan, Hamnet and Judith.

In 1587 Shakespeare left Stratford for London (different accounts of this fact exist: because he poached deer in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy – dubious; he was bored; he was teacher in-between 1585 and 1587, or he travelled - to Italy or to the Netherlands).

From 1587 till 1611 he is believed to live “between” London and Stratford: this is the period of his activities as a playwright. 1593 – his first publication of Venus and Adonis, and 1613 – he wrote his last drama The Tempest and Henry VIII (a history).

Shakespeare’s heritage: he is said to be extremely negligent about having his plays published. Half of them were not published during his lifetime. It was only in 1623, 7 years after his death, that the first folio appeared thanks to his friends Heming and Candel. There were 37 plays published. All in all his heritage includes: 2 poems, Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Sonnets (154 in number – publ. In 1609, though written an the end of the 1590s – early 1600s), several poems, e.g. The Phoenix and the Turtle, and 37 plays.

Most scholars identify 3 periods in Shakespeare’s work. E.g., John Dowden describes the first period of 1584-1594 as the one when “the word was used as the decoration of thought”; the second period of 1595 – 1601 is the one when “the balance was found between thought and word”, giving the tragedy of Julius Caesar as the source; and the third period of 1601-1608 as the one when “ thought outweighed the word”, when “ words could hardly overtake the thought”.