Surprising Facts About Shakespeare

The documentary record of Shakespeare’s life is thinner than most people expect — and the gaps in it are as interesting as what survives.

He Disappears for Seven Years

Between 1585, when the baptism of his twins Hamnet and Judith was recorded in Stratford, and 1592, when the playwright Robert Greene attacked him in print as an “upstart crow” stealing work from university-educated writers, Shakespeare leaves no documentary trace whatsoever. These are sometimes called the “lost years,” and what he was doing during them — whether acting with a touring company, working as a schoolmaster, fleeing a poaching charge, or something else entirely — remains genuinely unknown. By the time he reappears, he is already established enough to provoke Greene’s jealousy. The transformation from the Stratford records to the London stage happened somewhere in that silence.

His Theatre Was Literally Stolen

The Globe was built from recycled materials — specifically, the timber of a previous playhouse called The Theatre, which Shakespeare’s company had leased and which the landowner refused to renew. In December 1598, the company’s chief carpenter Peter Street led a team that dismantled The Theatre beam by beam while the landowner was away and transported the timber across the Thames to Southwark, where it was reassembled into the Globe. The landowner sued. The company won. The Globe opened in 1599.

A Cannon Burned It Down

In June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a stage cannon misfired and ignited the Globe’s thatched roof. The entire theatre burned to the ground within two hours. According to one contemporary account, the only casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire and were extinguished with ale. The Globe was rebuilt, with a tiled roof this time, and reopened the following year.

Women Were Not Permitted on Stage

All female roles in Shakespeare’s plays — Juliet, Cleopatra, Ophelia, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth — were originally performed by boys or young men. This was standard theatrical practice in Elizabethan England and was not considered unusual. It adds an additional layer of complexity to plays that involve women disguising themselves as men: the boy actor playing Rosalind played a woman disguising herself as a boy, and then played that woman performing as herself for a man who could not see through her disguise.

He Shared His Birthday with His Death Day

The parish register records Shakespeare’s baptism on 26 April 1564. Tradition places his birth three days earlier, on 23 April — St George’s Day, the patron saint of England — though this is not confirmed by any document. What is confirmed is that he died on 23 April 1616. Whether the shared date is genuine coincidence or a later romanticisation is impossible to verify.

He Invented Hundreds of Words

Shakespeare wrote during a period of unusual linguistic flexibility, when English was expanding rapidly and writers felt free to coin new terms as needed. Many words that appear for the first time in his works — or gain their modern meanings through his use — are now entirely unremarkable parts of everyday English. “Bedroom,” “lonely,” “obscene,” “generous,” “swagger,” “bedroom,” “negotiate,” “addiction” — the list runs to several hundred, though scholars debate which coinages are genuinely his and which he found in sources that have since been lost. The full guide to words Shakespeare gave us covers the most significant examples.

He Was a Shareholder, Not Just a Writer

Shakespeare’s primary income came not from writing plays but from his shareholding in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men — later the King’s Men — and his part-ownership of the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. As a sharer, he received a portion of the company’s box office receipts. This was considerably more lucrative than any fee for writing, and it is how he accumulated the wealth that funded the purchase of New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, in 1597. He was a theatrical businessman who also happened to write the plays his company performed.

He Also Traded in Grain

Stratford records show that Shakespeare bought and hoarded malt and barley — commodities that could be resold at a profit, particularly during grain shortages. He was also recorded as a tax defaulter in London on at least two occasions, suggesting he was not especially diligent about his civic obligations. The documentary Shakespeare is a more recognisably ordinary person than the literary monument: litigious, financially careful, sometimes in arrears.

A Play of His Has Vanished Entirely

Francis Meres’s 1598 book Palladis Tamia mentioned a Shakespeare play called Love’s Labour’s Won alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting it was a companion piece or sequel. No copy has ever been found. Whether it was lost, destroyed, renamed and survives under a different title, or was simply never completed is unknown. It is the most significant gap in the canon — a whole play, mentioned by a contemporary, that has simply disappeared.

His Grave Has a Curse on It

The stone over Shakespeare’s grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, carries an inscription:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Grave-robbing and the reuse of burial plots were common enough in the period that the curse was probably practical rather than literary. Whether it was written by Shakespeare himself or by someone else is not known. Ground-penetrating radar surveys conducted in 2016 suggest the skull may be missing from the grave — possibly removed by relic-hunters sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

His Company Performed for Two Monarchs

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at Elizabeth I’s court on numerous occasions during the 1590s and early 1600s. After James I came to the throne in 1603, he took the company under direct royal patronage — they became the King’s Men — and they performed at court far more frequently than before. The change in patronage coincided with the period of the great tragedies, and James’s particular interests (witchcraft, kingship, dynastic anxiety) are visible in Macbeth, King Lear, and the late plays.

No Manuscripts in His Hand Survive

Not a single page of any play survives in Shakespeare’s handwriting. We have his signature — six examples, all slightly different from each other, on legal documents — and possibly a page or two of a collaborative play called Sir Thomas More, where the handwriting may be his. Everything else is reconstructed from printed texts of varying reliability. The absence of manuscripts is not unique to Shakespeare — very few Elizabethan play manuscripts of any kind have survived — but it means that every edition of Shakespeare is, at some level, an editorial act. The words we read are the products of a transmission process that Shakespeare himself never oversaw.

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