Shakespeare Facts: Things You Probably Didn't Know

His baptism record survives. His will survives. Six of his signatures survive. Yet enormous amounts of what gets repeated about William Shakespeare turns out to be vague, misattributed, or impossible to verify. Here are the facts that hold up.

1. He provided the first written evidence of more than 1,700 English words

Shakespeare's writings provide the first known written use of over 1,700 words still used today, including "bedroom," "critic," and "zany." The important distinction is that this means he was the first person to write them down, not necessarily that he invented them all from scratch. Many likely existed in spoken English before he committed them to the page.

2. He never prepared his plays for publication

Shakespeare did not oversee the publication of a collected edition of his work during his lifetime. The First Folio, which gathered 36 of his plays into one volume, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, by his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell.

3. Eighteen of his plays would have been lost without the First Folio

Of the 36 plays in the First Folio, 18 had never been printed in any form before 1623. These include Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It. Had Heminges and Condell not acted, roughly half of what we consider his major work would be gone.

4. At least one of his plays is lost, and another may be

Cardenio, a play attributed to Shakespeare and his collaborator John Fletcher, was performed by the King's Men around 1612–13 but no text survives. A second title, Love's Labour's Won, was listed by Francis Meres in 1598 and again in a bookseller's records in 1603, but scholars still debate whether it was a genuinely lost play or simply an alternative title for a comedy we already have, such as Much Ado About Nothing.

5. He only ever signed his name six times, and the spelling varies every time

Six surviving signatures exist on four legal documents, dating from 1612 to 1616. The six versions read: Willm Shakp, William Shaksper, Wm Shakspe, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere, and By me William Shakspeare. This reflects Elizabethan spelling conventions rather than any inconsistency on his part.

6. He left his wife the 'second-best bed'. What that meant is still debated.

Shakespeare's will, signed on 25 March 1616, gave Anne Hathaway "my second best bed with the furniture" (furniture meaning the hangings and bedding). Analysis by The National Archives and the British Library, using X-ray and infrared imaging, indicated the personal bequests, including the bed, were added in March 1616, about a month before he died. What the bequest meant is debated: some read it warmly, since the second-best bed may have been the marital bed (the best being kept for guests), while others, such as scholar Lena Cowen Orlin, argue that "best" and "second-best" were simply standard, neutral descriptors in wills of the period. The truth is not recoverable from the document alone.

7. His son Hamnet died aged eleven

Hamnet Shakespeare was baptised on 2 February 1585 and buried on 11 August 1596, aged eleven. He was one of twins with his sister Judith, both named after Shakespeare's friends Hamnet and Judith Sadler. No record survives of what caused his death.

8. He owned a share of the Globe Theatre

Shakespeare was one of the original sharers in the Globe, which opened in 1599 on the south bank of the Thames. The Burbage brothers held half; Shakespeare and four fellow actors took one tenth each. He was an active member of the same company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, that owned and ran the building.

9. He was also a professional actor

Shakespeare acted as well as wrote. He was a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the leading acting company of his era, which became the King's Men after James I granted them royal patronage in 1603. He appears on cast lists for at least two of Ben Jonson's plays.

10. He retired to Stratford around 1613

Shakespeare appears to have withdrawn from London theatrical life around 1613, returning to Stratford-upon-Avon where he had owned the large house New Place since 1597. Records show him in London in November 1614, so the withdrawal was gradual rather than sudden.

11. The Globe burned down during a performance. The only injury was cured with ale.

On 29 June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII (then also called All Is True), a theatrical cannon ignited the Globe's thatched roof, and the playhouse burned to the ground in under an hour. According to the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, writing in a letter dated 2 July 1613, no one was killed; the only casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire, which he put out with a bottle of ale. The Globe was rebuilt the following year.

12. Francis Meres praised him by name in 1598, citing twelve plays

Francis Meres published Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury in 1598, calling Shakespeare "the most excellent" English writer in both comedy and tragedy and naming twelve of his plays. This is one of the earliest documents linking the man from Stratford directly to specific works by name.

13. His father was once the senior elected official of Stratford

John Shakespeare was elected bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1568, when William was four years old. Bailiff was the highest civic office in the town. John signed official documents with a mark, suggesting he could not write, though records indicate he could read.

14. He earned a coat of arms, and a rival mocked it.

In 1596 Shakespeare's family was granted a coat of arms, with the motto "Non Sanz Droict" ("Not Without Right"), making him formally a gentleman. The playwright Ben Jonson is widely thought to have mocked it in his 1599 comedy Every Man Out of His Humour, where a social-climbing character is handed the absurd motto "Not Without Mustard." A likely dig at the gold colouring of Shakespeare's new arms.

15. Susanna, his eldest child, was born six months after his marriage

William and Anne married in November 1582. Their daughter Susanna was baptised on 26 May 1583. Premarital pregnancy was not uncommon in Elizabethan England, but the timing has been noted by every biographer as likely explaining the speed of the marriage.

16. Romeo and Juliet is among his most-filmed plays

Romeo and Juliet is among the most frequently filmed of all Shakespeare's plays, adapted for the screen many times over, both as direct adaptations using his text and as looser reworkings that borrow the plot, such as West Side Story.

17. He bought a London property just three years before he died

In March 1613, Shakespeare bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars Priory in London for £140, paying £80 up front and mortgaging the rest. It was his only known London property purchase. He bought it at roughly the point when he was stepping back from the stage, which has made the purpose of the purchase a subject of debate among biographers. He continued to live at New Place in Stratford, not in London.

18. Around half of his plays appeared in print during his lifetime in unauthorised editions

By the time Shakespeare died in 1616, eighteen of his plays had been printed in quarto form, most without his authorisation or involvement. Heminges and Condell described these in the First Folio preface as "stol'n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths."

19. His gravestone carries a curse

Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, beneath a stone bearing no name, only a verse warning against disturbing his remains: "Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones." It is widely believed Shakespeare wrote it himself, though this cannot be confirmed. Grave-robbing and the reuse of burial space were real concerns in his day.

Sources

• Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on language
• Folger Shakespeare Library on the First Folio
• Britannica on the First Folio
• Folger Shakespeare Library on the Globe
• Britannica on Anne Hathaway
• Wikipedia on Shakespeare's signatures
• Shakespeare Documented (Folger) — primary source documents
• Shakespeare Birthplace Trust — Shakespedia
• Britannica — William Shakespeare

More on Shakespeare's life: Who Was William Shakespeare? A Complete Life and Biography