Looking for clues
Shakespeare's biography has long been a source of controversy. He's one of the greatest writers in the world, yet what we know of the events of the first 28 years of his life could be written on the back of a postage stamp (he lived to be 52). What is particularly frustrating is that the crucial ten years of 1582-92 - between his marriage and his emergence as a playwright in London - have so far yielded only three authentic documents that name him.
'... the biographer can see the writer's early years only through the eyes of those around him.'
These are two baptismal records documenting the birth of his three children (a girl and twins - a boy and a girl), and a record of a court case of 1587, in which his family tried to recover property lost when his father's business collapsed. So the biographer can see the writer's early years only through the eyes of those around him.
This scarcity of real knowledge has led to theories that Shakespeare never actually existed, but was really the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the poet and politician Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford - and many of these ideas still have a wide popular currency. It is now mostly thought by serious historians, however, that these theories are baseless: the later years of Shakespeare's life are in fact relatively well documented, for someone of his social class and profession.
Despite this, his early biography has yet to be convincingly anchored in his turbulent times, so a fresh look at the limited range of historical documents relating to the period from his birth until 1592 - the time when a little more starts to be known about him - may offer some interesting clues to his life as a young man.
Published: 2003-06-01
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