William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564 to John Shakespeare, a glove-maker, commodities trader, alderman, and bailiff, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a prosperous landowner. Little is known of his upbringing, but he was locally schooled, likely at the King Edward VI School in Stratford, learned some Latin and Greek, and read Roman dramatists. In 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, and they had Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet, though Hamnet died in boyhood. Shakespeare first appeared in an account of professional accomplishment in 1592, when Robert Greene referred to him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers….” In 1594, he became a charter member of the Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, who performed mainly at the Globe Theater in London, where he held a one-tenth interest and where many of his plays were staged before the theater burned in 1613 during a production of his Henry VI; he retired to Stratford around that time. In a relatively short career, he wrote 13 comedies, 13 historical dramas, 6 tragedies, 4 tragic comedies, and 154 sonnets, leaving an indelible mark on the English language and Western culture. A full-standing portrait sculpture of Shakespeare by John Quincy Adams Ward was authorized in 1864, after delays advanced by a competition in 1866, cast in Philadelphia in 1870, and unveiled at the southern end of the Mall on May 23, 1872, on a temporary base because of delays in procuring and cutting the granite pedestal in Scotland. Jacob Wrey Mould designed the pedestal, Ward drew on numerous images of Shakespeare, especially a bust in Stratford, and opinion on the work was divided. In 1986, a replica was cast for the Carolyn Blount Theater in Montgomery, Alabama, and a maintenance endowment established there helped support restoration of the original in 1995. Central Park also developed other Shakespearean associations: in 1890 Eugene Schieffelin released 80 starlings there because Shakespeare mentioned them; in 1915 the Shakespeare Society assumed maintenance of a rock garden built in 1912; in 1934 the Shakespeare Garden was relocated, with a new landscape design implemented in 1989; and Joseph Papp's Shakespeare Festival moved to Central Park in 1958, with the Delacorte Theater becoming its permanent home in 1962.

New York, New York · United States