Today was St Georges day, the national day of England. It was also supposedly the birthday and deathday of William Shakespeare.
I must admit, I am sceptical of this idea. It just sounds too neat. Englands national poet born and died on its national day. As with much of Shakespeares life, there is sufficient uncertainty as to allow speculation. Whilst we know when he died, when he was born is uncertain. All we know for definite is that he was baptized on April 26th, which his local church documented. At the time, convention dictated that a child was baptized on the first Sunday or holy day following birth as it was believed that if not and if the infant died then they were going straight to hell. So, the error bars for his birth-date could be as high as a week before. If he had been born April 23rd 1564, a Sunday, then this presents a problem. St Marks day was April 25th. However, some people thought this to be unlucky, so maybe they delayed until April 26th.
Believe it or not, to have this amount of data is quite lucky. Stratford had only started to keep records from 1558, even though they had been ordered to in 1538 (it was viewed with suspicion as a way to increase tax collection). Unfortunately, this wasn't in time for Anne Hathaway, who was older by eight years, so no record of her birth exists.
Shakespeares life is 5% fact and 95% speculation, and surprisingly many speculative ideas have been worked into the publics knowledge of the man. I am going to write a series of articles about this and about Elizabethan England, because it's quite instructive on the limits of how much we can know history.
