John Keats waWilliam Shakespeare, often called England's national

poet, is considered the greatest dramatist of all time. His works are
loved throughout the world, but Shakespeare's personal life is
shrouded in mystery.
Who Was William Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright and actor of the Renaissance era. He was
an important member of the King’s Men company of theatrical players from roughly 1594
onward.

Known throughout the world, Shakespeare's writings capture the range of human emotion and
conflict and have been celebrated for more than 400 years. And yet, the personal life of William
Shakespeare is somewhat a mystery.

There are two primary sources that provide historians with an outline of his life. One is his work
— the plays, poems and sonnets — and the other is official documentation such as church and
court records. However, these provide only brief sketches of specific events in his life and yield
little insight into the man himself.

When Was Shakespeare Born?

No birth records exist, but an old church record indicates that a William Shakespeare was
baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. From this, it is
believed he was born on or near April 23, 1564, and this is the date scholars acknowledge as
William Shakespeare's birthday.

Located about 100 miles northwest of London, during Shakespeare's time Stratford-upon-Avon
was a bustling market town bisected with a country road and the River Avon.

Family

William was the third child of John Shakespeare, a leather merchant, and Mary Arden, a local
landed heiress. William had two older sisters, Joan and Judith, and three younger brothers,
Gilbert, Richard and Edmund.

Before William's birth, his father became a successful merchant and held official positions as
alderman and bailiff, an office resembling a mayor. However, records indicate John's fortunes
declined sometime in the late 1570s.
Childhood and Education

Scant records exist of William's childhood and virtually none regarding his education. Scholars
have surmised that he most likely attended the King's New School, in Stratford, which taught
reading, writing and the classics.

Being a public official's child, William would have undoubtedly qualified for free tuition. But
this uncertainty regarding his education has led some to raise questions about the authorship of
his work (and even about whether or not William Shakespeare really existed).

Wife and Children

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway on November 28, 1582, in Worcester, in

Canterbury Province. Hathaway was from Shottery, a small village a mile west of Stratford.
William was 18 and Anne was 26, and, as it turns out, pregnant.

Their first child, a daughter they named Susanna, was born on May 26, 1583. Two years later, on
February 2, 1585, twins Hamnet and Judith were born. Hamnet later died of unknown causes at
age 11.

Shakespeare’s Lost Years

There are seven years of William Shakespeare's life where no records exist after the birth of his
twins in 1585. Scholars call this period the "lost years," and there is wide speculation on what he
was doing during this period.

One theory is that he might have gone into hiding for poaching game from the local landlord, Sir
Thomas Lucy. Another possibility is that he might have been working as an assistant
schoolmaster in Lancashire.

It's generally believed he arrived in London in the mid- to late 1580s and may have found work
as a horse attendant at some of London's finer theaters, a scenario updated centuries later by the
countless aspiring actors and playwrights in Hollywood and Broadway.

The King's Men

By the early 1590s, documents show William Shakespeare was a managing partner in the Lord
Chamberlain's Men, an acting company in London with which he was connected for most of his
career.
Considered the most important troupe of its time, the company changed its name to the King's
Men following the crowning of King James I in 1603. From all accounts, the King's Men
company was very popular. Records show that Shakespeare had works published and sold as
popular literature.

Although the theater culture in 16th century England was not highly admired by people of high
rank, some of the nobility were good patrons of the performing arts and friends of the actors.

Actor and Playwright

By 1592, there is evidence William Shakespeare earned a living as an actor and a playwright in
London and possibly had several plays produced.

The September 20, 1592 edition of the Stationers' Register (a guild publication) includes an
article by London playwright Robert Greene that takes a few jabs at William Shakespeare:
"...There is 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,"
Greene wrote of Shakespeare.

s born in London on 31 October 1795, the eldest of Thomas and

Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age
of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of
any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems, in three slim
volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development he
took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms from the
sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Miltonic epic, defining
anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest
energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-
consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Although he is now seen as part of the British Romantic literary

tradition, in his own lifetime Keats would not have been
associated with other major Romantic poets, and he himself was
often uneasy among them. Outside his friend Leigh Hunt‘s circle of
liberal intellectuals, the generally conservative reviewers of the
day attacked his work as mawkish and bad-mannered, as the work
of an upstart “vulgar Cockney poetaster” (John Gibson Lockhart),
and as consisting of “the most incongruous ideas in the most
uncouth language” (John Wilson Croker). Although Keats had a
liberal education in the boy’s academy at Enfield and trained at
Guy’s Hospital to become a surgeon, he had no formal literary
education. Yet Keats today is seen as one of the canniest readers,
interpreters, questioners, of the “modern” poetic project-which he
saw as beginning with William Wordsworth—to create poetry in a
world devoid of mythic grandeur, poetry that sought its wonder in
the desires and sufferings of the human heart. Beyond his precise
sense of the difficulties presented him in his own literary-
historical moment, he developed with unparalleled rapidity, in a
relative handful of extraordinary poems, a rich, powerful, and
exactly controlled poetic style that ranks Keats, with the William
Shakespeare of the sonnets, as one of the greatest lyric poets in
English.
Keats was said to have been born in his maternal grandfather’s
stable, the Swan and Hoop, near what is now Finsbury Circus, but
there is no real evidence for this birthplace, or for the belief that
his family was particularly poor. Thomas Keats managed the
stable for his father-in-law and later owned it, providing the
family an income comfortable enough for them to buy a home and
send the older children, John and George (1797-1841), to the
small village academy of Enfield, run by the liberal and gifted
teacher John Clarke. Young Tom Keats (1799-1818) soon followed
them. Although little is known of Keats’s early home life, it
appears to have been happy, the family close-knit, the
environment full of the exuberance and clamor of a big-city stable
and inn yard. Frances Keats was devoted to her children,
particularly her favorite, John, who returned that devotion
intensely. Under Keats’s father the family business prospered, so
that he hoped to send his son, John, to Harrow.
At the age of eight Keats entered Enfield Academy and became
friends with young Charles Cowden Clarke, the fifteen-year-old
son of the headmaster. He was not a shy, bookish child; Clarke
remembered an outgoing youth, who made friends easily and
fought passionately in their defense: “He was not merely the
‘favorite of all,’ like a pet prize-fighter, for his terrier courage; but
his high-mindedness, his utter unconsciousness of a mean motive,
his placability, his generosity, wrought so general a feeling in his
behalf, that I never heard a word of disapproval from any one,
superior or equal, who had known him.” On the night of 15 April
1804, when Keats had been in school less than a year, an accident
occurred that would alter his life and proved to be the first in a
series of losses and dislocations that would pursue him
throughout his brief life. His father was seriously injured when his
horse stumbled as he rode home, and he died the next day. The
shock to the family was great, emotionally and financially. Within
two months of her husband’s death, Frances Keats had moved the
children to her mother’s home and remarried; but the marriage
soon proved disastrous, and it appears that, after losing the
stables and some of her inheritance to her estranged husband,
William Rawlings, the poet’s mother left the family, perhaps to live
with another man. She had returned by 1808, however, broken
and ill; she died of tuberculosis (as had her brother just a few
months before) in March 1809. John became the oldest male in his
family, and, to the end of his life, felt a fiercely protective loyalty to
his brothers and sister, Fanny Keats. His most thoughtful and
moving letters on poetry’s relation to individual experience, to
human suffering and spiritual development, were written to his
brothers.

At school, Keats drew closer to the headmaster, John Clarke, and

his son, Cowden. He became, in fact, one of Clarke’s favorite pupils,
reading voraciously and taking first prizes in essay contests his
last two or three terms. In some part this new academic interest
was a response to his loneliness after his mother’s death. But he
had by then already won an essay contest and begun translating
Latin and French. Keats’s love for literature, and his association of
the life of imagination with the politics of a liberal intelligentsia,
really began in Clarke’s school. It was modeled on the Dissenting
academies that encouraged a broad range of reading in classical
and modern languages, as well as history and modern science;
discipline was light, and students were encouraged to pursue their
own interests by a system of rewards and prizes. Clarke himself
was a friend of the radical reformers John Cartwright and Joseph
Priestley and subscribed to Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, which Cowden
Clarke said, “no doubt laid the foundation of [Keats’s] love of civil
and religious liberty.”

Keats’s sense of the power and romance of literature began as the

Clarkes encouraged him to turn his energy and curiosity to their
library. Cowden Clarke recalled his reading histories, novels,
travel stories; but the books “that were his constantly recurrent
sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lamprière’s
‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s
‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy
with the Greek mythology.” On his own, Keats translated most of
the Aeneid and continued learning French. Literature for him was
more than a dreamy refuge for a lonely orphan: it was a domain
for energetic exploration, “realms of gold,” as he later wrote,
tempting not only as a realm of idealistic romance but also of a
beauty that enlarges our imaginative sympathies. All through his
life his friends remarked on his industry and his generosity:
literature for Keats was a career to be struggled with, fought for,
and earned, for the sake of what the poet’s struggle could offer
humankind in insight and beauty. This impression recurs often in
accounts of Keats, this pugnacity of one who fought his way into
literary circles, and this compassion for others that justifies the
literary career.