directory
home contact

Shakespeare's Birth

The baptismal register of the Holy Trinity parish church, in Stratford, shows the following entry for April 26, 1564: Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakespeare. The actual date of Shakespeare's birth is not known, but, traditionally, April 23, St George's Day, has been Shakespeare's accepted birthday, and a house on Henley Street in Stratford, owned by William's father, John, is accepted as Shakespeare's birth place. However, the reality is that no one really knows when the great dramatist was born. According to The Book of Common Prayer, it was required that a child be baptized on the nearest Sunday or holy day following the birth, unless the parents had a legitimate excuse. As Dennis Kay proposes in his book Shakespeare:

If Shakespeare was indeed born on Sunday, April 23, the next feast day would have been St. Mark's Day on Tuesday the twenty-fifth. There might well have been some cause, both reasonable and great -- or perhaps, as has been suggested, St. Mark's Day was still held to be unlucky, as it had been before the Reformation, when altars and crucifixes used to be draped in black cloth, and when some claimed to see in the churchyard the spirits of those doomed to die in that year. . . .but that does not help to explain the christening on the twenty-sixth (54).
No doubt Shakespeare's true birthday will remain a mystery forever. But the assumption that the Bard was born on the same day of the month that he died lends an exciting esoteric highlight to the otherwise mundane details of Shakespeare's life.


How to cite this article:
Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare of Stratford: Shakespeare's Birth. Shakespeare Online. 12 Sept. 2000. < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/shakespearebirth.html >.

References
Brooke, Tucker. Shakespeare of Stratford. New Haven: Yale UP, 1926.
Kay, Dennis. Shakespeare. New York: Quill, 1992.




______________

More Resources

 Queen Elizabeth: Shakespeare's Patron
 King James I of England: Shakespeare's Patron
 The Earl of Southampton: Shakespeare's Patron
 Going to a Play in Elizabethan London

 The Shakespeare Sisterhood - A Gallery
 Worst Diseases in Shakespeare's London
 Preface to The First Folio

 Shakespeare's Pathos - General Introduction
 Shakespeare's Portrayal of Childhood
 Shakespeare's Portrayal of Old Age
 Shakespeare's Attention to Details
 Shakespeare's Portrayals of Sleep

 Publishing in Elizabethan England
 What did Shakespeare drink?
 Ben Jonson and the Decline of the Drama
 Publishing in Elizabethan England

 Alchemy and Astrology in Shakespeare's Day
 Entertainment in Elizabethan England
 London's First Public Playhouse
 Shakespeare Hits the Big Time


Shakespeare's Birth-Room. Where 'the greatest genius in all of literature first saw the light.' From The Shakespeare Country by John Leyland

More to Explore

 Shakespeare's Ancestry
 Shakespeare's Parents
 Shakespeare's Siblings
 Shakespeare's Education

 Shakespeare as Actor
 Shakespeare's Lost Years
 Shakespeare's Marriage

 Shakespeare's Children
 Shakespeare's Death
 Shakespeare's Burial

_____


Essential Resources ... Explore our exclusive spelled pronunciation guide to every character Shakespeare created, fantastic for actors and teachers. It includes an in-depth biography of many of Shakespeare's most popular and fascinating creations. Shakespeare's Characters A to Z ...

_____


 Was Shakespeare Italian?
 How Many Plays Did Shakespeare Write?
 What Did Shakespeare Look Like?

 Shakespeare's Religion
 Shakespeare's Contemporaries: Top Five Greatest
 Shakespeare's Audience: The Groundlings
 Four Periods of Shakespeare's Life

 Shakespeare's Language
 Words Shakespeare Invented
 Shakespeare's Reputation in Elizabethan England

 Shakespeare at the Globe
 Shakespeare's Impact on Other Writers
 Quotations About William Shakespeare
 Shakespeare's Boss: The Master of Revels

 Daily Life in Shakespeare's London
 Life in Stratford (structures and guilds)
 Life in Stratford (trades, laws, furniture, hygiene)
 Stratford School Days: What Did Shakespeare Read?

 Games in Shakespeare's England [A-L]
 Games in Shakespeare's England [M-Z]
 An Elizabethan Christmas
 Clothing in Elizabethan England