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Shakespeare: Stratford Town
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Although the exact date of Shakespeare’s birth is unknown, his baptism on April 26, 1564, was recorded in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, a prosperous town in the English Midlands. Based on this record and on the fact that children in Shakespeare’s time were usually baptized two or three days after birth, April 23 has traditionally been accepted as his date of birth.
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Six years after his arrival in London, Shakespeare had won his way to the foremost rank of literary men. Riches were flowing into his hands. The young Earl of Southampton is said to have expressed admiration for his worth and genius by making him the princely gift of a thousand pounds. Through succeeding years his prosperity continued. In 1597, at the age of thirty three, he purchased "New Place," the finest house in Stratford, making it a home for his family, and a refuge for his parents. At about this time, he solicited a coat of arms for his father.
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There is no evidence that Shakespeare attended a university, although this was not unusual among Renaissance dramatists. Traditionally, scholars assume that Shakespeare was partly self-educated.[21] A commonly cited parallel is his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, a man whose origins were humbler than Shakespeare's, and who rose to become court poet. Like Shakespeare, Jonson never completed and perhaps never attended university, and yet he became a man of great learning (later being granted an honorary degree from both Oxford and Cambridge). However, there is clearer evidence for Jonson's self-education than for Shakespeare's. Several hundred books owned by Ben Jonson have been found signed and annotated by him[22] but no book has ever been proved to have been owned or borrowed by Shakespeare. In addition, Jonson had access to a substantial library with which to supplement his education.[23] One possible source for Shakespeare's self-education has been suggested: A. L. Rowse has pointed out that some of the sources for his plays were sold at the shop of the printer Richard Field, a fellow Stratfordian of Shakespeare's age.[24]
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Sometime after the birth of the twins, Shakespeare apparently left Stratford, but no records have turned up to reveal his activity between their birth and his presence in London in 1592, when he was already at work in the theater. For this reason Shakespeare’s biographers sometimes refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as “the lost years.” Speculations about this period abound. An unsubstantiated report claims Shakespeare left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Another theory has him leaving for London with a theater troupe that had performed in Stratford in 1587.
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The Royal Shakespeare Company is to scale down operations at the Barbican and mount productions in a wider range of theatres as part of a major overhaul. Under the plans, the company will become much more flexible, but it could mean job losses in both London and Stratford-upon-Avon.
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There was no standardised spelling in Elizabethan England, and throughout his lifetime Shakespeare of Stratford's name was spelled in many different ways, including "Shakespeare". Anti-Stratfordians conventionally refer to the man from Stratford as "Shakspere" (the name recorded at his baptism) or "Shaksper" to distinguish him from the author "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare" (the spellings that appear on the publications), who they claim has a different identity. They point out that most references to the man from Stratford in legal documents usually spell the first syllable of his name with only four letters, "Shak-" or sometimes "Shag-" or "Shax-", whereas the dramatist's name is consistently rendered with a long "a" as in "Shake".[15] Stratfordians reject this convention, believing it implies that the Stratford man spelled his name differently from the name appearing on the publications.[16] Because the "Shakspere" convention is controversial, this article uses the name "Shakespeare" throughout.
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