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—— ON THIS DAY ——
APRIL 23, 1564
Stratford-upon-Avon, England
461 years ago
The Chandos portrait, c. 1610 — the most famous likeness of William Shakespeare and the first portrait to enter the British National Portrait Gallery, though its authenticity has always been debated.
William Shakespeare is traditionally said to have been born on April 23, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. This date is not documented. The parish baptism register records his baptism on April 26, and scholars have inferred an April 23 birth date from the common practice of baptizing infants three days after birth. We know when he was baptized. We do not know with certainty when he was born.
He is also said to have died on April 23, 1616 — St. George's Day, the patron saint of England. This death date is also inferred rather than directly recorded. The symmetry between the birth and death dates is appealing enough to be suspect — but the balance of historical evidence does support April 23 for both. The facts of Shakespeare's biography are few and contested. His plays are everywhere.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Shakespeare's birthplace on Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon — the house where the son of a glove-maker who would become the greatest writer in the English language was probably born on or around April 23, 1564.
What we do know about Shakespeare's life is considerably less dramatic than the work would suggest. He was the son of a glove-maker and alderman. He attended the local grammar school, which gave him a solid classical education. He married Anne Hathaway at 18, who was 26 and pregnant. He had three children. He went to London sometime in the late 1580s, joined a playing company, began writing plays, and eventually became a shareholder in the Globe Theatre. He retired to Stratford around 1613 and died three years later. That is essentially the documented record.
The works themselves — 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and several longer poems — are a different kind of record entirely. Shakespeare contributed an estimated 1,700 words to the English language, including 'bedroom,' 'eyeball,' 'manager,' 'critic,' 'generous,' 'hint,' 'lonely,' and 'swagger.' He invented phrases that have passed so completely into ordinary usage that their origin has been forgotten: 'break the ice,' 'cold-blooded,' 'heart of gold,' 'foregone conclusion,' 'wild goose chase,' 'green-eyed monster.' The English language is saturated with Shakespeare.
The 'authorship controversy' — the claim that Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him — has been a persistent strand of popular culture for nearly two centuries. The candidates proposed have included Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford, and others. Academic consensus is that the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship is substantially stronger than the evidence for any alternative, and that the controversy persists partly because people find the idea of a glove-maker's son from a provincial market town producing the greatest body of dramatic writing in the English language somehow insufficient. The works themselves suggest otherwise.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Shakespeare's influence on English is without parallel in any language. No other writer has contributed as many words, phrases, and concepts to a single language. The English spoken today is structurally different from the English that existed before Shakespeare, partly because of what he put into it.
His work defined the psychological vocabulary of Western literature. The complexity of Hamlet, the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth, the love of Romeo and Juliet — these are not just characters; they are psychological categories that writers, psychologists, and ordinary people have been using to understand human experience for four centuries.
The uncertainty about his biography is a philosophical gift. We cannot reduce Shakespeare to his life story because we barely know his life story. What we have is the work. The work has to speak for itself. In doing so, it speaks more universally than the biography of almost any other writer would allow.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On April 23, 1564, a glove-maker's son was probably born in Stratford-upon-Avon. Fifty-two years later, probably on the same date, he died in the same town. In between, he invented 1,700 words, wrote 37 plays, and transformed what it was possible to do with the English language. We are still living inside the change he made.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
— William Shakespeare, 'As You Like It,' Act II Scene VII
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Shakespeare's life, his works, the language he invented, and the extraordinary four-century journey of his plays from the Globe Theatre to every stage and screen on Earth?
