Life of William Shakespeare Life of William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, poet, and theatre entrepreneur in London during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. He was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, in the Holy Trinity Church. At age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway with whom he had three children. He died in his home town of Stratford on 23 April 1616 at the age of 52. Though more is known about Shakespeare's life than those of most other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, few personal biographical facts survive, which is unsurprising in the light of
Shakespeare apocrypha from unsold copies of the 1612 edition. This poem was published as an appendix to Shakespeare's sonnets in 1609. Its authorship has been disputed by several scholars. In 2007 Brian Vickers, in his monograph, "Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint", and John Davies of Hereford", attributes the "Complaint" to John Davies. Other scholars continue to attribute it to Shakespeare. "To the Queen" is a short poem praising Queen Elizabeth, probably recited as an epilogue to a royal performance of a play. It was first attributed to Shakespeare by American scholars William Ringler and Steven May, who discovered the poem in 1972 in