Life & Times

It's a common complaint that we don't know much about Shakespeare's life. We don't even know for sure what he looked like.

True, we have plenty of contemporary documentation about Shakespeare and his work - records of births, marriages and deaths in his family; business and property transactions; his brushes with the legal system; the dates and places some of his plays were registered and performed. But we have no manuscripts of his plays indicating how they evolved and no diaries telling us of the minutiae of his personal life. In short, what we have is circumstantial - there's little to tell us what kind of man he really was. So most biographers are forced to build elaborate structures of supposition round what we do know. Or they just make it up.

But there's much more material than may at first be apparent. And you can find out more by clicking the appropriate links below. These are arranged chronologically, from Shakespeare's birth to his death.