William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glover and alderman. He was educated at the local grammar school, where he would have read Latin extensively and encountered the Roman authors — Ovid, Virgil, Plautus, Seneca — whose themes and structures he would spend his career absorbing and transforming. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway; by his mid-twenties he had left for London. The exact circumstances of his early years there remain uncertain, but by the early 1590s he was established as both a playwright and an actor with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that would become the King's Men after James I's accession in 1603.

He wrote approximately 37 plays over roughly two decades, a productivity that modern scholars attribute partly to the commercial pressures of the Elizabethan theater — plays were written fast, performed in repertory, and not usually published — and partly to a creative energy that left almost no form untouched. His output divides into histories (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Richard III), comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice), tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), and the late romances (The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline). The chronology of composition is disputed; the Folio of 1623, published seven years after his death, is the primary textual source for most plays.

The tragedies are the work that has most occupied later readers. Hamlet (c. 1600–01) is the longest play and in some ways the most modern: a prince who cannot act because he thinks too much, who watches himself thinking, whose interior life is too large for the revenge plot that frames it. King Lear (c. 1605–06) is about the destruction of authority, the failure of natural order, and the discovery that the universe does not organize itself around human deserving. Macbeth (c. 1606) is the shortest of the major tragedies and the most concentrated study of what ambition does to the person who pursues it. Othello (c. 1603) is about how easily earned trust can be destroyed by someone who has studied jealousy and knows where to apply it.

Shakespeare returned to Stratford around 1613 and died in April 1616, leaving his second-best bed to his wife — an inheritance that has generated more scholarly commentary than almost any other document from the period. He owned shares in the Globe Theatre and had considerable property; he had also written the body of work that would, for centuries after his death, be treated as the canonical example of what the English language could do.

The challenge Shakespeare presents is not the language but the medium. The plays were written to be performed, and certain things — the wit, the speed, the physical comedy — are easier to experience in a theater than on the page. The compensating advantage of reading is attention to structure: you can see how a scene works, how language creates character, how the same play holds comedy and death in the same moment. The advice for first-time readers: pick one of the accessible tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth) and read it twice, once for the story and once for the language.