William Shakespeare Born: The Bard's Legacy Begins

William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. His exact birth date is unknown, but tradition assigns it to April 23, three days before the baptism, partly because it makes a tidy match with the date of his death fifty-two years later. His father John was a glove maker and wool dealer who served as an alderman and bailiff of Stratford; his mother Mary was from a family of minor gentry. Shakespeare attended the King's New School in Stratford, where he would have received a rigorous education in Latin grammar and rhetoric, but he left school around fourteen and never attended university. He married Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-six and already pregnant with their first daughter, Susanna. Twins Hamnet and Judith followed in 1585. Then Shakespeare vanished from the historical record for seven years, a gap scholars have filled with theories ranging from schoolteaching to deer poaching to military service. He reappeared in London in the early 1590s as an actor and playwright associated with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company that became the King's Men under James I. Over roughly twenty years, he wrote thirty-seven plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. He retired to Stratford around 1613 and died on or around April 23, 1616. His will distributed his estate carefully: the bulk went to his daughter Susanna, some cash and silver went to his daughter Judith, and his wife Anne received the "second-best bed," a bequest that scholars have spent four centuries arguing about.