Why didn’t Shakespeare go to university?
Shakespeare went to a very good school: Stratford Grammar taught a limited curriculum but it’s hard to believe it didn’t suit his talents well – rhetoric, languages, Classical Literature. He was later demeaned for having “little Latin and less Greek” but he seems to have had enough to find out what he wanted before writing extensively about the Classical world: “Julius Caesar”, “Antony and Cleopatra”.
Later in life, it seems some of his fellow playwrights looked down on him. Jealousy and snobbery, no doubt, but also the lack of a university education. Why didn’t he progress to Oxford (which was nearby) or Cambridge (where a Stratford Grammar master had been a student)? Maybe there was a financial problem after his father, a glove-maker, fell on hard times. Their loss.
Why did he marry Anne Hathaway?
Nothing wrong with a man of 18 marrying a woman of 26, though it’s quite an age gap. At 18, you’re still a boy. At 26, you’re emphatically an adult. One reason Will married Anne is that she was pregnant (they married in November, Susanna was baptised in May). Various details (to do with the banns) suggest it may have been a rushed job. So perhaps he didn’t have many options.
Shakespeare’s married life was an odd affair. By the time he was thirty he was living in London, but though he was pretty rich pretty soon, he didn’t buy a London property until 1613. Till then it was (as far as we know) a rented room, hardly space for wife or children. True, he would head for Stratford in the summer, where he kept his family in increasingly well-heeled conditions. But he didn’t live full-time with Anne till he was nearly fifty, and he didn’t buy a house in London till he was living in Stratford.
The average marital age for a woman in Elizabethan England was 28, incidentally.
Where did he spend the lost years?
Between his marriage to Anne in 1582 and his emergence as a best-selling poet in 1593, we know very little for certain about Shakespeare’s life. True, he fathered twins (Hamnet and Judith) in 1585, and he was probably writing plays for his theatre troupe by 1590, but these years are called “lost” for a reason.
There are several theories. One is that he was caught poaching on a local landowner’s estate and had to keep a low profile since the punishment for this kind of offence was potentially draconian. A second theory is that he was a closet Roman Catholic and spent time in the north-west of England, out of harm’s way. Once again, the penal system would have taken an unsympathetic view. Maybe most likely is that he was simply making his way in the theatre, the lowest rungs first, seeking a niche. But failing some unforeseen discovery, it’s just speculation.
What was he writing? Where did he learn to write?
When Shakespeare publishes “Venus and Adonis” in 1593 – an effortlessly fluent and witty narrative poem about love and death – he suddenly emerges as the most popular poet in England and the most widely-read. His poem is revered among the students at the universities he didn’t go to, and his success is sufficient to attract the jealousy and criticism of his fellow authors.
We cannot say this poem came from nowhere, but it is an extraordinary achievement. Up to now, Shakespeare has been, it seems, an apprentice playwright, with “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and “The Taming of the Shrew” to his name: respectable but not in the same league. Where did he learn to write like the poet of “Venus and Adonis”? Another mystery.
Where are his juvenilia?
Every major writer has juvenilia. These are the poems (or plays or novels) you wrote when you were in your teens, and were still finding out what you want to write about and how you want to do it. For many prominent writers, these documents are embarrassing and better left undiscovered. For critics, by contrast, they’re gold dust.
So where did Shakespeare cut his teeth? There was no permanent theatre in Stratford, so there was nowhere for him to find out what he couldn’t do, or what he could. And how did he suddenly deliver a manuscript like “Venus and Adonis” to the publishers without first writing something rather less precocious? We don’t know, and it’s likely we never will.
When did he first fall in love with the theatre?
Then as now, theatre was concentrated in centres of population, and Stratford wasn’t one of those. So visiting theatre companies performing plays with a strongly religious or at least moral dimension would have provided Shakespeare with his first metaphorical whiff of grease-paint: the so-called Miracle plays, which were in the process of being banned when Shakespeare was growing up.
It must have crossed his mind to set up a theatre in Stratford but these are the lost years, and we have no idea where he was or what he was doing, still less what he was thinking. So speculation on that is unlikely to be profitable. Off, like Dick Whittington, to London.
Who was Henry Wriothesley?
Shakespeare’s first two poems (“Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”) are published in the plague years 1593 and 1594 when the theatres are shut. They’re dedicated to one Henry Wriothesley (pronounced Rizley) in language dripping with devotion if not sycophancy. So who was Henry, and what do the dedications imply?
He was Earl of Southampton, and very wealthy. He was prominent at court, where his mother was part of the Queen’s coterie. And he was a valued if somewhat unsuccessful soldier, with a distinctly Elizabethan eye for an adventure. He was also bi-sexual (as far as can be established), which may perhaps raise further questions.
In the end, Henry settled down to a sensible middle age but his younger days lacked nothing in excitement. When the Earl of Essex launched a coup attempt in 1601, Henry was part of the plot. Essex was beheaded in the Tower of London. Henry just about escaped – his mother’s influence, it seems – but the plot as a whole very nearly dragged Shakespeare down with it. See “Richard II”.
Was Shakespeare bisexual, or gay?
Certainly he seems to have known what it meant to love another man – perhaps even physically, sexually. Critics will point out that we can no more analyse a writer by looking at his poems than we can analyse a carpenter from looking at his chairs. But is it really that simple?
Sexual relations between men were outlawed in Tudor and Jacobean times. But men still fell in love with other men, and went to bed with them. Wriothesley was quite possibly bi-sexual; so was King James – described by one distinguished historian as being impotent with women but “virile” with men.
Perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter – Shakespeare lived to a large extent in his head. But never to have felt what many of his female characters felt? Juliet, Portia, Desdemona? That seems unlikely. And then there are the sonnets ….
