44 Fascinating Things You Probably Don’t Know About Shakespeare - January 4th, 2008
I recently finished Peter Ackroyd’s 592-page biography of William Shakespeare. I won’t lie to you–it was a bit of a slog. Ackroyd doesn’t leave anything out. Plus there’s plenty of speculation, because the world doesn’t have 592 pages worth of facts about ol’ Bill. Plus, all the quotations from the plays are in the original Early Modern English, which makes reading them a little trickier.
That said, I enjoyed the biographer for the complete portrait it drew of our greatest English-language writer. As an exercise in, uh, active-reading, I made a list of interesting facts about The Bard, most of which I didn’t know.
Here they are for your perusal. My favourites are #2, #11 and #26.
Early Life
- One of the schools which Shakespeare attended is still in operation.
- At the age of 18, Shakespeare may have worked in the office of Henry Rogers, the town clerk of Stratford. While working there, he would have become familiar with the case of a young woman who drowned in the Avon river, in a stretch known for its overhanging willow trees and coronet weeds. The case revolved around whether the woman had fallen into the river accidentally, or had committed suicide. Rogers completed an inquest, and found the former to be true. The young woman, named Katherine Hamlett, could therefore have a Christian burial.
- Shakespeare’s father was a glove maker, a land speculator (with mixed results) and probably a secret Catholic.
- Shakespeare was only 18 when he got married. His new wife was 26. All of the manipulative older women in his plays don’t reflect very well on Anne.
- Anne was four months pregnant when the couple got married. In truth, this wasn’t particularly unusual. Cohabitation was common before marriage in Elizabethan England, and 20 to 30% of babies were born within the first eight months of wedlock.