Shakespeare was for all time
William Shakespeare is the most famous English dramatist and poet. His contemporary and rival playwright Ben Jonson wrote about him thus: "He was not of an age, but for all time." Stephen Greenblatt, the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, writes, "Indeed, so absolute is Shakespeare's achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature: the common bond of humankind." Shakespeare's life is split into the regimes of two monarchs: Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth Tudor: 1533-1603; reign: 1558-1603) and King James I (James Charles Stuart: 1566-1625; reign: 1603-1625). James I (also James VI of Scotland) was the grandson on his mother's side of Elizabeth's father Henry VIII's sister Margaret. James's mother Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed by Elizabeth on the charge of sedition in 1587. During Elizabeth's reign England expanded its trade and commerce to the Americas and the Far East. John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt --- all these navigators-cum-adventurers were plundering at sea and were helping the English coffers to increase. It is now known that though the English parliament passed a law against plundering or piracy, Elizabeth herself invested money in the plundering voyages of John Hawkins. Elizabeth died unmarried, and her successor King James I was a thorough scholar. He once said that he spoke Latin before he learnt his native tongue Scottish. He wrote a 120-page book titled Basilicon Doron (1599) in which he explained his ideas about the ideal king. The book was a bestseller, though James' permanent contribution to the English civilization is his instrumentalizing the publication of an authorized English translation of the Bible in 1611. It is known as the King James Bible. In 1564, the year of Shakespeare's birth, the population of England was approximately 3.06 million, and by 1600 it had increased to 4.06 million, and by 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, to 4.51 million. In 1600, the population of the city of London was 200,000. Every year about 10,000 people migrated to London. Shakespeare's actual date of birth is conjectured to be 23 April 1564 on the basis of the record of his baptism which took place in the Holy Trinity Church of Stratford on 26 April. 1564 was a plague-ridden year, and in Stratford alone 254 people out of 800 died that year. Shakespeare's grandfather Richard Shakespeare was a farmer in a village called Snitterfield near Stratford-upon-Avon. He was a tenant of a rich man called Robert Arden, whose daughter Mary Arden would marry John Shakespeare, the father of the poet. Stratford was a scenic small town with open fields and rivers, which, in 1570, William Camden, a historian and Ben Jonson's teacher, called a "handsome small market town." In the year of Shakespeare's birth there were in Stratford 400 houses, all made of timber, and forty ash trees. John Shakespeare was a glover (one that makes and sells gloves), a whittawer (a curer and whitener of skins), a wool-dealer, a landowner and a moneylender, though usury was illegal in England at that time. He also involved himself in the affairs of the town and in 1568 was elected bailiff, the town's highest post. He also became an alderman, and in conformity with his status he wore a big ring on his thumb, which might have caught Shakespeare's fancy as a child. In Henry IV Part I, Shakespeare makes his famous comic character Falstaff jokingly say to the Prince (future Henry V) that he was so lean as a youth that he could easily sneak through an alderman's ring: "When I was about thy years, Hal, . . . I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring" (2.5.332-334). Because of his over speculative habit, John Shakespeare soon ran into debts and his fortunes declined. Shakespeare may have reflected upon his father's condition when he made Polonius in Hamlet utter this famous line to his son Laertes: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" (1.3.75). He lost his membership in the city council because of his frequent absences. It was given to believe that he had absented himself for fear of being arrested for unpaid loans, but another speculation is that John had feared the repercussions for retaining his Catholic faith. England had turned to the Protestant faith since the time of Henry VIII. But Elizabeth's elder sister Queen Mary (1553-1558) revived the Catholic faith during her reign. But Shakespeare was a Protestant. John Shakespeare lived at Heanley Street, in a house now known as The Birthplace. John and Mary had eight childrenfour daughters and four sonsof which William was the third child and eldest son. Though his brothers were hardier, none of them outlived Shakespeare. His youngest brother Edmund, born sixteen years after him, also took to the stage but died at the age of twenty-eight in 1607. Shakespeare by that time was a highly successful playwright in London and provided an expensive feast at his brother's funeral ceremony. Shakespeare may also have paid for realizing his father's dream to promote himself to the gentry. John Shakespeare finally got entitled to the coat of arms, which was a prestigious mark inscribed on a shield in 1596, five years before his death. Shakespeare married at eighteen, in November 1582, and his wife Anne Hathaway, who came from a nearby village called Shottery, was twenty-six years old at the time. The reason for this hasty marriage on Shakespeare's part could have been that Anne had become pregnant by him as their first daughter, Susanna, was baptized on 26 May 1583. Shakespeare then became the father of twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585. Hamnet, echoing Hamlet, the character he would create fifteen years later, died at the age of eleven. It might have worried Shakespeare that he, a considerably rich man of the time, should have died without a male heir. So in Macbeth, we find Macbeth urging Lady Macbeth to "bring forth man-children only." Shakespeare's father died in 1601 and his mother in 1608. Both parents had the opportunity to see their eldest son achieve name and fame. He bought them the second largest house in Stratford. The name of this new house was New Place. Shakespeare's wife, Anne died in 1623, the year Shakespeare's two friends from the theatre, Heminges and Condell, published the first folio edition of his plays, popularly known as F1623. Susanna, Shakespeare's favourite daughter, was married to a successful physician, John Hall, in 1607. Their daughter Elizabeth, the poet's first grandchild was first married to Thomas Nash, and then after his death, to John (later Sir John) Bernard, and she died childless. His younger daughter Judith was married to Thomas Quiney, a vintner, in February 1616. But six weeks after the marriage, in March, it was discovered that a woman by the name of Margaret Wheeler, who died at childbirth, had been impregnated by Quiney. It upset Shakespeare much, and he radically revised his will bequeathing most of his property, including the New Place, to Susanna. Susanna died in 1649, and Judith died fairly old, at the age of seventy-seven in 1662. Documents show that Shakespeare was very sharp and exacting in money matters. He was one of the shareholders of the Globe Playhouse, from which he earned a handsome profit annually. In Stratford, where he would finally return in 1613, after the Globe burnt down, he would invest money in real estate business, buying big houses and lands: "barns and garners never empty," as he writes in The Tempest. He also purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London in 1613 for 70 pounds. He gave that too to Susanna. There is a good conjecture that Shakespeare may have died of a fever contracted from overdrinking. Or the unsettling circumstances involving his younger daughter may have hastened his death. On 25 March 1616 he revised his will, and, to the historians' puzzlement even today, left "my second-best bed" as a bequest to his wife. Many biographers conjecture that Shakespeare may not have had a happy married life, because they had no more children after 1585, and Shakespeare wrote in his will, "to my wife," a curt, rather indifferent, expression compared to "to my loving wife," or "my well-beloved wife," which was more customary. Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. The epitaph, which he probably wrote for his own grave, reads: Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here:
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones. This cautionary epitaph is mainly intended at forbidding gravediggers not to remove his bones. That probability was there as was so perceptively shown by Shakespeare in the graveyard scene in Hamlet.
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