William Shakespeare: life and background

Abstract

We know comparatively little about the life and career of Shakespeare and what we do know has to be pieced together from fragments of evidence. He spent much of his life involved in the theatre which (though not for the same reason) was probably as precarious an existence in Elizabethan times as it is today, and actors enjoyed little social standing and left few records. Playwrights and actors were too preoccupied with rehearsing, performing and preparing scripts for the next show to be over-conerned with the interest of posterity but such evidence as we have suggests that William Shakespeare was an unusually shrewd businessman and a very popular dramatist in his own lifetime.