Me Being Serious

The Phenomenal Life & Times Of William Shakespeare - Life Behind The Curtains?

WHAT OF HIS LIFE BEHIND THE CURTAINS?

The name of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets and the man’s name himself had travelled across the earth. There’s not a single person with the least bit of education that does not know of the renowned playwright and poet. Occasionally, once his name is mentioned in a conversation, there’s usually always a person who would exclaim, “Oh! Is it the man who wrote Romeo & Juliet, and Hamlet, and all the other plays? Oh yes, I know him alright!” But in truth, do we actually know him, the man whom everyone calls William Shakespeare? What of his life behind the floral lines of poetry and the red curtains of the stage? Do we honestly know anything about him at all? Now that I have hopefully caught your interest, let us proceed on solving this mystery of this man of renowned, one matter at a time.

Was Shakespeare really Shakespeare?

For hundreds of years people were perfectly content to embrace the simple logic that William Shakespeare, respected actor, poet and dramatist, was, in fact, William Shakespeare.It had not occurred to anyone that this man, so well-known to his contemporaries, might be part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth that another penned his works. The authorship craze seems to have started in 1857, when American writer Delia Salter Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, in which she argued that Lord Francis Bacon, among others, wrote Shakespeare's plays (and young William was a waiter at their club meetings!).

In his book Shakespeare era italiano in 2002, Martino Iuvara claims that Shakespeare was, in fact, not English at all, but Italian. Iuvara posits that Shakespeare was born not in Stratford in April 1564, as is commonly believed, but actually was born in Messina as Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza. His parents were not John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, but were Giovanni Florio, a doctor, and Guglielma Crollalanza, a Sicilian noblewoman. The family supposedly fled Italy during the Holy Inquisition and moved to London. It was in London that Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza decided to change his name to its English equivalent. Crollalanza apparently translates literally as 'Shakespeare.'

However, there is a solid body of evidence to show that a real person named William Shakespeare wrote the poems and plays attributed to him and that this very Shakespeare became an actor in the company that produced the plays. No Elizabethan documents support the claim that Shakespeare's plays and poems were written by someone else, or that the actor Shakespeare was not the author Shakespeare. There is also no evidence to suggest that the name used by this man who crafted the plays, sonnets, and poems was a pseudonym.

Shakespeare’s sexuality

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, apparently not intended for publication. The majority of these sonnets address the poet's love for a young man. There is no historical evidence to indicate Shakespeare was bisexual or homosexual; he was a married man with three children. However, the poet's intense romantic feelings for the young man in the sonnets have led some to believe Shakespeare was having a homosexual affair.

The sexuality of William Shakespeare has been the subject of recurring debate. It is known from public records that he married Anne Hathaway and they had three children. There has been speculation that he had affairs with other women, based on contemporary writings of others anecdotally recounting such affairs and possibly on the "Dark Lady" figure in his sonnets. Scholars have also speculated that he was bisexual, based on an analysis of the sonnets, many of which are love poems addressed to a man, the "Fair Lord", and which contain plays on words relating to sexual desire between men.

It is often assumed that this “Fair Lord” or “Fair Youth” the same person as the 'Mr W.H.' to whom the sonnets are dedicated. The identity of this figure (if he is indeed based on a real person) is unclear; the most popular candidates are Shakespeare's patrons, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke.

However, others have countered that these passages could be referring to intense platonic friendship, rather than sexual love.

What of Anne Hathaway and the Shakespeare children?

It has often been inferred that Shakespeare came to dislike his wife, but there is no existing documentation or correspondence to support this supposition. For most of their married life, he lived in London, writing and performing his plays, while she remained in Stratford. However, according to John Aubrey, he returned to Stratford for a period every year. When he retired from the theatre in 1613, he chose to live in Stratford with his wife, rather than London.

Much has been read into the bequest that Shakespeare famously made in his will, leaving Anne only the "second-best bed". A few explanations have been offered: first, it has been claimed that, according to law, Hathaway was entitled to receive one third of her husband's estate, regardless of his will

Here are indications supporting that Hathaway may have been financially secure in her own right. The National Archives states that "beds and other pieces of household furniture were often the sole bequest to a wife" and that, customarily, the children would receive the best items and the widow the second-best. In Shakespeare's time, the beds of prosperous citizens were expensive affairs, sometimes equivalent in value to a small house. The bequest was thus not as minor as it might seem by modern standards. In Elizabethan custom the best bed in the house was reserved for guests. If true, then the bed that Shakespeare bequeathed to Anne could have been their marital bed, and thus not intended to insult her.

Susanna Shakespeare married John Hall, the most successful doctor in town. She would have had to settle down because Hall was a solid, no-nonsense Puritan.

This makes the events of 1613 all the more strange.

There was a local ne’er-do-well in town, one John Lane, who had been in all kinds of trouble: he had been sued for riot and drunkenness and for having libelled various aldermen. You couldn’t go around libelling aldermen.

He went claiming that Susanna had been “naught” with a local hatter, Ralph Smith. “Naught,” in that time and in that context didn’t mean “nothing.” It meant “had screwed around with.”

Lively Susanna fought back. She sued Lane for slander.

In some ways, Stratford was a small town. Rumours of a scandalous nature were quick to circulate; it was important to quash them immediately. Susanna quashed effectively. John Lane didn’t show up at the trial and as a result he was excommunicated.

That may not seem like much to us, but in that society it was solid punishment. At any rate, Susanna had her reputation restored.

The other Shakespeare children, as we may recall, were the twins, Judith and Hamnet.

Judith had the misfortune to marry a man much like John Lane: Thomas Quiney. Shakespeare didn’t like this son-in-law at all.

In the last few weeks of Shakespeare's life, Quiney was charged in the local church court with "fornication". A woman named Margaret Wheeler had given birth to a child and claimed it was Quiney's; she and the child both died soon after. Quiney was thereafter disgraced, and Shakespeare revised his will to ensure that Judith's interest in his estate was protected from possible malfeasance on Quiney's part.

William’s only son was named Hamnet. The natural conclusion would be that this name had something to do with the play “Hamlet,” but it seems that it didn’t. The boy and his twin sister, as mentioned, were named after Will’s close, life-long friends, Hamnet and Judith Sadler.

It’s a sad fact that the playwright’s only son died at the age of eleven. How did William react to his son’s death? He may have expressed his feelings when he wrote these powerful lines.

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts.”