Shakespeare Baptized: The Bard's Life Begins in Stratford

The parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon records the baptism of "Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere" on April 26, 1564, three days after the presumed date of William Shakespeare's birth. Elizabethan custom called for baptism within days of birth, and April 23, St. George's Day, has been accepted as the traditional birthday, though no birth record exists. His father, John Shakespeare, was a prosperous glove maker and civic official; his mother, Mary Arden, came from a family of minor gentry. The child baptized that spring Wednesday would become the most performed, most translated, and most studied writer in the history of the English language. Stratford in 1564 was a market town of roughly 1,500 people in Warwickshire, connected to London by road but culturally provincial. The year of Shakespeare's birth was also a plague year. An outbreak of bubonic plague struck Stratford in July 1564, killing more than 200 residents, approximately one in seven. The Shakespeare family survived, though their neighbors the Greenes, who lived on the same street, lost four children. The proximity of death to birth was unremarkable in Elizabethan England, where infant mortality ran above 30 percent and plague was an episodic fact of life. John Shakespeare's position as alderman ensured his son's education at the King's New School, a grammar school that provided rigorous training in Latin language and literature. The curriculum centered on Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca, authors whose influence saturates Shakespeare's later work. Ben Jonson's famous remark that Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek" was relative to Jonson's own formidable classical learning; by any normal standard, Shakespeare's education was thorough. The so-called "lost years" between his departure from Stratford and his appearance in London's theatrical world around 1592 remain a biographical blank that scholars have filled with speculation ranging from schoolteaching to deer poaching to secret Catholicism. What makes the baptismal record extraordinary is the chasm between its ordinariness and its subject's subsequent impact. No writer in any language has generated more critical commentary, more theatrical productions, more adaptations, more scholarly careers, or more passionate argument about attribution, biography, and meaning. The entry in the Stratford parish register is a single line of Latin in a ledger filled with the births, marriages, and deaths of people history forgot entirely. One line was different.