William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, northwest of London, to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. William’s father made his living primarily as a tanner and a glover but also traded wool and grain from time to time. John Shakespeare also served in various offices, including high bailiff (like a mayor), the city’s highest public office. In the mid-1570s, John Shakespeare’s fortune began to decline mysteriously (some say it was because of his wife’s Catholicism, although that claim is unsubstantiated), and it was largely mortgages made on properties Mary brought to the marriage that helped to sustain the family.
Although there are no records to prove Shakespeare’s enrollment in school, critics accept it with considerable certainty. At school, Shakespeare would have studied reading and writing (in English as well as in Latin), and Greek and Roman writers including Horace, Aesop, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and Plautus. The extent to which he would have been familiar with the works of such ancient classics is unknown, but studying Shakespeare’s plays and long poems suggests he had at least a degree of knowledge about them in their original forms, not merely translations.
When William Shakespeare was 18, he married Anne Hathaway, 26. Their first child, Susanna, was born the following May; twins, Hamnet and Judith, followed in 1585. Little information is available regarding Shakespeare’s life from the time of the twins’ birth until 1592. All we know for sure is that by 1592, Shakespeare had arrived in London, leaving his family behind, and had begun what is perhaps the most successful literary career the world has ever known.
