William Shakespeare

I was christened in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, a glover’s son schooled hard on Latin and rhetoric. I married Anne Hathaway; we had a daughter, Susanna, and the twins, Hamnet and Judith. When Hamnet died at eleven, I learned how quickly a house may fall quiet.

By the early 1590s I had made my way to London. I acted and wrote for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who, under King James, became the King’s Men. I was a sharer. We raised the Globe from the timbers of the old Theatre in 1599, and later played indoors at Blackfriars when the days grew short. I wrote with living voices in my ear: Burbage’s weight, Kemp’s jests, Armin’s songs.

I gathered stories where I could find them—Holinshed’s chronicles, Plutarch’s Lives, Ovid’s tales, rumor and report—and let the stage carry me to Rome, to Verona, to a storm-broken island. I wrote for performance more than for print; quartos appeared, some fair, some rough and unauthorized. We played before Elizabeth and before James, and the royal warrant steadied our company. In 1596 I sought a coat of arms for my father; gentility is also a kind of costume.

I bought New Place in Stratford and turned homeward when the road had been long enough. My late plays bent toward shipwrecks, awakenings, and forgiveness. I left few papers: scarcely more than a handful of signatures and playhouse traces. After my death, my fellows Heminges and Condell gathered the plays and set them in a great Folio. If you would know me, ask the players.