England's greatest poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, was born the 23rd April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, the third child and eldest son (of eight) of John and Mary Shakespeare.

John was a glove-maker and Alderman of the community. You may still walk around the house in Henley Street where Will was born and brought up. William was baptised on 26th April 1564 and probably educated at Stratford Grammar School, but little is known of his life up to his eighteenth year.

He did not go to University and his younger contemporary and fellow-dramatist, Ben Johnson, would later speak disparagingly of his "small Latin, and less Greek" in the eulogy prefaced to the Firs Folio. However the Grammar School curriculum would have provided a formidable linguistic, and to some extent literary, education.

Although, in 1575 when he was eleven, there was a great plague in the country and Queen Elizabeth journeyed out of London to avoid its consequences and stayed for several days at Kenilworth Castle near Stratford enjoying "festivities" arranged by her host Lord Leicester. It is probable these events may have made a strong impact on the mind of young William.

At the age of eighteen, in 1582, he married twenty-six year-old Anne Hathaway and around six months later their first child Susannah was born. Twins, the boy Hamnet and the girl Judith followed less than two years later. As far as we know he and his growing family lived with his parents and his brothers and sisters.

There is no direct evidence of the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway although most historians accept that an entry in the Bishop's Register at Worcester in November 1582 regarding the issue of a marriage licence to William Shaxpere and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton does not refer to the famous bard. However the following day a guarantee of £40 was undertaken in Stratford by two yeomen of the town against the prevention of the legal marriage of William Shagspere and Anne Hathway on only one reading of the banns.

In 1582 , £40 was a considerable sum of money and one cannot believe that the simple fact of Anne's being three months pregnant would warrant it. No marriage of an Anne Whatelely has ever been traced, neither has the marriage of Anne Hathway, but lack of record does not mean that it did not happen.

Five years later, in 1587, William left left his family in Stratford and moved to London where he became an actor. He worked at the Globe Theatre and appeared in many small parts.

The first unmistakable reference to him in London is in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit of 1592. Greene was a playwright dying in poverty and bitterness when he wrote this pamphlet which was published after his death. In it he refers to

"An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."

In 1593 the theatres in London were all closed by the authorities because of the plague, and Will made a name for himself publishing the narrative poem "Venus and Adonis". This became very popular, and was reprinted many times. The following year he published the poem "The Rape of Lucrece".

The records show that in 1594, when plague had abated, Shakespeare was one of the players paid for giving two performances for Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich.

The play writing commenced in 1595 and of the 38 plays that comprise the Shakespeare Cannon, 36 were published in the 1st Folio of 1623, of which 18 had been published in his lifetime in what are termed the Quarto publications.

When The Globe playhouse was built in 1599, Will was one of the five sharers who put up money for its building, and shared in its profits. He also had an interest in the Blackfriars Theatre.

Love's Labour's Lost and The Comedy of Errors appear to be among the earliest, being followed by The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. Then followed Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, All's Well that Ends Well, Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, Much Ado about Nothing, As you like it, Twelth Night, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Will surely returned to his family at intervals, because in 1597, he bought a fine house called New Place in the heart of Stratford. New Place was the second biggest house in Stratford. He was still a great success in London, but investing for his retirement.

According to a drawing made in 1737 it was a three storey building with five gables, stretching sixty feet along Chapel Street. Contemporary records show that it had ten fireplaces, and it can be guessed, even more rooms.

Sadly New Place was knocked down in 1759 by its then owner, a vicar called Francis Gastrell. Earlier he had cut down the mulberry tree said to have been planted by Shakespeare. He was sick of all the tourists who pestered him to see the famous tree! The Reverend Gastrell was hounded from Stratford by the outraged citizens. Only the well and a few foundations remain, and another tree grown from a scion of the one reputedly planted by Shakespeare.

When he retired from writing in 1611, he returned to Stratford to live in a house which he had built for his family. His only son, Hamnet died when still a child. He also lost a daughter Judith (twin to Hamnet), but his third child Susanna married a Stratford Doctor, John Hall and their home "Hall's Croft" is today preserved as one of the Shakespeare Properties and administered by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

He died in Stratford at the age of 52 on 23rd April 1616. Tradition has it that he died after an evening's drinking and carousing with the playwright Ben Jonson and the poet Michael Drayton who had come to Stratford to visit him. He is buried in the parish church, Holy Trinity the same Church where he was baptised in 1564.

His gravestone bears the words:

Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,
to digg the dust encloased heare,
Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

In his will Shakespeare left his wife, the former Anne Hathaway, his second best bed. We cannot be sure of the reason for this. It may have been the marital bed, the best bed being reserved for guests. It may suggest that they had a not altogether happy marriage which nevertheless produced three children, Susanna, born on May 26th 1583 and twins , Hamnet and Judith, born on February 2nd 1585. These entries appear in the Holy Trinity Register.

Was Shakespeare GAY?

This question has come up many times over the years. Many people look at Shakespeare and they say to themselves "is he gay?" his tights and strange look in his eyes makes it seem that he must be of the gay orientation. His plays are also full of all kinds of gay stuff. Like many times in the plays of Shakespeare, one man will act very gay with another man. This is considered normal, but only to someone who is gay... like Shakespeare.

But whas Shakespeare really Gay? Sure he dressed in a very flamboyant, gay way, with poofy underpants and tights. And sure there are many gay things atributed to his plays. But does that make a man gay? Will we ever know?

The Shakespeare sonnet Number 116, begins, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds." Shakespeare wrote it to a man.

As the first 126 sonnets were written to a man, the response to them shows how people have struggled with the idea of same-sex love through the centuries. One of the great cover-ups was a 1640 edition in which a certain John Benson changed all the "he" pronouns to read "she" in the first 126 sonnets. He did leave the last 25 sonnets alone, since they were written to a woman, the so-called "dark lady." Moreover, when the scholar George Stevens read an unedited version of the sonnets in 1780, he admitted reading them "with an equal mixture of disgust and indignation."

Many suggestions have been offered to identify the mysterious "W.H." to whom all the sonnets were dedicated. An essay written by Oscar Wilde concludes that the best case is for William Hughes. Willie Hughes was a young actor who played women's roles in early Shakespeare plays, including Romeo and Juliet. So, it may have been Willie Hughes who was Shakespeare's muse.

One thing that most scholars agree upon is that Sonnet Number 18, that begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate..." was written for a fair-haired man. Greenblatt says, "the screenwriters simply moved 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day' from its sequence and redirected it to a recipient whom modern film audiences, or at least the studios that try to reach these audiences, deem acceptable." He questioned whether Hollywood underestimates how much the American public loves talent; "even if the film had depicted Shakespeare writing his sonnet to a fair young man, audiences may have delighted in his overwhelming success."

Oscar Wilde, (1854-1900) The Portrait of W. H. in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 885.

This narrative essay demonstrates that Shakespeare addressed his sonnets to a boy-actor in his company, Will Hughes. Unfolding in a manner worthy of Holmes and Watson, the essay proceeds as a dialogue between two friends, one of whom becomes increasingly drawn into proving the theory, conveyed by the internal evidence of the sonnets themselves. The narrator/reader thereby illustrates a Wildean reading of Shakespeare, and gives us a primer as to how to read both what is there on the page-and not--at the same time. The figure of Willie Hughes here operates very much like a green carnation the men might wear in their lapel, belief in him akin to membership in a society of men who can read Shakespeare in the Wildean way.

Was William Shakespeare gay? Here is a question that invariably surfaces about Shakespeare. I have three possible answers for it, none of which I mean flippantly, but all of which I think are worth careful consideration. Answer One: Why do you care? Answer Two: That depends on whether you think someone can be gay in a culture that defines human sexuality in strikingly different ways than our own does. Answer Three: Read Sonnet Twenty.

Answer One: Why do you care? You may have some very good reasons for caring, but perhaps now is a good time to ponder why you are asking this question. How will any answer flavor your reading of Shakespeare's works? Will any answer flavor your reading of Shakespeare's works? Do you really need to know this about authors in order to enjoy their works? If you are gay, perhaps you ask this question to create some sense of solidarity with your literary past in a culture that currently is blatantly homophobic. If you are straight, perhaps you ask it to create some sense of solidarity with a group you feel you do not understand or would like to understand better. Or perhaps you ask it in order to support your own anxieties about homosexuality or to excuse, in some form, your own fears that you will not be able to understand or to deal with Shakespeare's works. Please relax. In my experience, almost everybody handles Shakespeare well at some level; indeed, I would argue, that's exactly why his works have survived for four centuries.

Answer Two: Can someone be gay in a culture that defines human sexuality in strikingly different ways than our own does? Recent scholarship suggests that in Shakespeare's age, male homosexuality was not seen as a continuous state of being, but rather as an occasional action. In other words, if a man committed an act of sodomy with another man or a boy, the action was called "buggering," and neither participant was considered as anything other than someone who had committed buggery at that particular time. Buggery does not seem to have been a crime unless someone complained as a victim (i.e. male-to-male rape), and there seem to have been very, very few cases of this. Neither individual involved, however, was considered to be permanently homosexual, nor was anyone else considered permanently heterosexual in a continuing state. Quite simply, the idea of labeling an individual as existing continuously in one state or the other did not seem to have occurred to the people of the time.

One possible explanation for this could be that this was a highly patriarchal culture, in that family name and economic wealth were passed down through the male line. Any man with anything worth inheriting was expected to breed with a woman and produce male heirs, while women owned a disproportionately small amount of the wealth in comparison to the percentage of the population which they constituted. Laws restricted their inheritance of major wealth, and laws also heavily favored the inheritance of disputed wealth by the male descendants or family members of a deceased male.

So no matter who you preferred, if you were a man with something to give away, you made babies with a woman. Remember that we are considering here a culture with vastly different ingrained expectations compared to our own of how wealth and prestige were to be transmitted. That these expectations would flavor their way of considering human sexuality is not especially surprising. Certainly our own cultural expectations concerning the distribution of wealth have flavored our ideas of sexuality, if you think about it. But the bigger question then looms: Can Shakespeare be called homosexual if his culture had no sense of him (or any other man) as being in a continuous state of homosexuality? For that matter, can anyone in that culture be labeled as heterosexual for the same reasons?

Answer Three: Have you read Shakespeare's "Sonnet Twenty" yet? Well, you really should. Read it carefully. Please remember that "prick" means exactly the same things to Shakespeare, as far as we can tell, as it does to us. I mean both the polite meanings and the more scatological meanings. Please also remember that in his early years, Shakespeare got a woman slightly older than himself pregnant out of wedlock. He then married her and left her behind in Stratford while he went up to London to work. He also seems to have gone home on the occasional weekend or whatever (we get this from his godson Will D'Avenant) and sired more children with her (we get this from the church records in Stratford). In my book, this makes him bisexual, not exclusively homosexual, (if one feels able to ascribe any continuing state of sexuality to anyone in this age - see above) although many arguments can doubtlessly be raised about the pressures of cultural expectations on Will, etc.

A recently authenticated elegy was written for the funeral of a young Oxford student named William Peter, who was murdered during an afternoon of drinking and revelry. An excerpt:

For when the world lies wintered in the storms
Of fearful consummation, and lays down
Th' unsteady change of his fantastic forms,
Expecting ever to be overthrown;
When the proud height of much affected sin
Shall ripen to a head, and in that pride
End in the miseries it did begin
And fall amidst the glory of his tide;
Then in a book where every work is writ
Shall this man's actions be revealed, to show
The gainful fruit of well-employed wit,
Which paid to heaven the debt that it did owe.
Here shall be reckoned up the constant faith,
Never untrue, where once he love professed;
Which is a miracle in men, one saith,
Long sought though rarely found, and he is best
Who can make friendship, in those times of change,
Admired more for being firm than strange.

Professor Lars Engle of the University of California at Berkeley, a renowed Shakespearean scholar, said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times, "Shakespeare had what we would now think of as a homosexual attachment to the youth."

See also our book with Shakespeare Sonnets!