A Portrait of the Bard as a Young Man

We know more about the life of William Shakespeare than a lot of people think, but less than we would like. There is ample documentation of his commercial career as the most popular London playwright of his era. It comes in the form of notices, commentaries, and of course the plays themselves, about half of which were published as standalone volumes for private reading during his lifetime. These last are especially potent testimony to his popularity; it was far less usual for his competitors to get this treatment, the turn-of-the-seventeenth-century equivalent of the novelizations that used to accompany blockbuster films. In addition to all of the public artifacts from the theatrical and publishing worlds, we have a fair number of more private documents involving Shakespeare: tax and financial statements, legal affidavits, Church records, and a last will and testament bearing his name, all of which tell of a self-made go-getter who came to London from his provincial hometown of…