The Early Years of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's life is believed to have began on April 23rd 1564, and it is known as a fact that he was baptized into the church three days later on the 26th. Not much is known about Shakespeare's early childhood. In those days as soon as you were a teenager you were hurled into an adult life. Children were considered miniature adults and were therefore treated that way. There really was no distinct "teenage" group like there is in today's society. There was child and adult, no clear in between. Marriage was the next step in a young adults life and typically occurred as soon as you were no longer a child.
Shakespeare started at the King Edward V1 Grammar School when he was seven. Most boys of his status attended these types of grammar schools. The boys had a long and hard day starting around five in the morning and ending around five or six in the evening. They did not have physical education or even vacations. Church on Sunday was mandatory. Latin was at the heart of the curriculum and the method of learning was to memorise long passages of Latin prose and poetry. Latin was the international language of Europe and it was used in the law, the medical profession and Church. If you wanted to enter any sort of profession in that time you had to be fluent in Latin. Shakespeare would also have been drilled in grammar, logic, math, and astronomy. They were also taught music. There were intense tests every week and if you didn't pass you were given physical punishment.
When he was fourteen Shakespeare's father somehow became disliked and his sons had to leave grammar school. There is no real record of what happened to him at this point in his life. The next time we hear of him is when he is eighteen and marrying a twenty-six year old named Anne Hathaway. Anne just so happened to be three months pregnant on her wedding day. Back then it wasn't unusual to be pregnant on your wedding day. When a boy knocked a girl up he was bound to marry her or the child would be coined a "bastard", looked down on for the rest of its life and given no legal rights whatsoever.
So at this point Shakespeare is a penniless, teenage father, married to a women eight years his senior. It is unclear how he was supporting his little family but we know that he must have made money somehow. A few years later, after the birth of twins, another girl, and a boy, Shakespeare made his way to London where he began a career in theatre. He did really well in that and was able to send money to his family and visit them frequently. Eleven years after the birth of the twins he had become so rich that he bought a house for his family which was one of the biggest houses in their city. Amidst all this joy and wealth one of the twins, the boy named
Hamnet, died at the age of eleven.
A random side note about Shakespeare and his life at this time that I thought was disgusting; Since hygiene wasn't that big of a deal back then, Shakespeare only bathed once a year in the month of May. It was a huge ordeal. The water was fetched and boiled into the largest tub where he then bathed, followed by any other man in the household, then the women and the children. By the time the kids entered the tub it was thick with the dirt and nastiness of the other people. Eww.
So it seems that not much is really known about Shakespeare's earliest years, other than the major events in his life, we can really only infer what his life was like as a kid according to the lifestyles of the other people in that time period. No one really knows when he started to write poetry and plays, but it must have started sometime in his schooling years and manifested into something greater when he ventured into the world of theater. I guess you could say that the rest is history.


Resources:

Shakespeare's Early Childhood. No Sweat Shakespeare : Modern Shakespeare Resources & Translations. May 23rd, 2010. http: com="" resources="" htm="">http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-childhood.htm

Shakespeare Facts: Read Facts About Shakespeare. No Sweat Shakespeare : Modern Shakespeare Resources & Translations. May 23rd 2010. http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-facts.htm

Shakespeare's School Years & Teenage Years. No Sweat Shakespeare : Modern Shakespeare Resources & Translations. May 23rd, 2010. http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-teenage-school-years.htm