In November 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior.
Anne's age, combined with the fact that their first child was born
only six months after the wedding, has led some scholars to believe
that the marriage was one of necessity. That may not be the case,
however, because at that time it was socially acceptable for an
engaged couple to sleep together. William and Anne had two girls,
Susanna and Judith, and one son, Hamnet, who died young.
Nobody knows what work Shakespeare did while in Stratford. He may
have been a schoolteacher or a private tutor in a wealthy household.
Like Orlando in As You Like It, he had to leave his birthplace to
find his future. Unlike Orlando, who fled to the country, William
headed for the big city, London. (Legend has it that he had to leave
Stratford after being caught hunting illegally on a large estate,
but no records exist to verify that story.) In London he became
first an actor and later a playwright. Along with success, he found
envy. The first mention of Shakespeare in London is in a pamphlet by
a rival playwright, Robert Greene. In "A Groatsworth of Wit" (groat:
an old English coin worth four pennies), Greene warned fellow
university-educated playwrights of an upstart actor (Shakespeare)
who had the gall to write plays. Nevertheless, Shakespeare became
the most successful playwright of his day. He was an actor (of small
parts), a playwright, and a partner in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a
theater company favored by Queen Elizabeth. Her successor, James I,
elevated the company to the rank of King's Men in 1603.
Although plays were a popular form of entertainment, they weren't
highly regarded as literature. To secure his artistic reputation,
Shakespeare wrote poems. Between 1592 and 1601, he penned three long
narrative poems--Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and The
Phoenix and the Turtle--as well as a famous series of sonnets.
As You Like It premiered in 1599 or 1600, about the same time that
Shakespeare's company moved into the Globe Theatre, across the
Thames River from the city of London. Shakespeare's reputation had
been firmly established by nineteen previous plays. Among the
eighteen to follow would be his four great tragedies--Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. By 1612, Shakespeare had returned
to live in Stratford, where he owned a fine house called New Place.
He died there, presumably on his birthday, April 23, 1616.
As You Like It was rarely performed in the first century after
Shakespeare's death. In 1723 an enterprising London producer
combined the play with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and A
Midsummer Night's Dream to create a collage called Love in a Forest.
But by the nineteenth century, As You Like It had become one of
Shakespeare's most frequently performed works. The Romantic spirit
of that time probably helped the play to find new favor with
audiences. In addition, many leading ladies wanted to play the
