Questions to ask William Shakespeare

Who Shakespeare was, in the dates the documents give

William Shakespeare was baptised in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564 and died there on 23 April 1616, aged 52. His father John was a glover and town official; his mother Mary Arden came from a farming family. In between he became an actor, a playwright and a part-owner of the most successful acting company in London.

That table is most of what survives about his life in his own time: baptisms, a marriage licence, property deeds, tax records, lawsuits, the will. No diary survives and no letter written by him. Six signatures in his hand are known, all on legal documents.

How to use these questions without putting words in his mouth

The trap with Shakespeare is quoting his characters as if they were him. When Hamlet says the world is a prison, that is Hamlet. Scholars agree that almost nothing survives of his personal opinions outside the plays and poems (Samuel Schoenbaum makes the point throughout William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, 1975). So write questions that the documents and the works can answer, and in your interview let him talk about craft, business and family rather than give speeches about love or politics.

For a wax museum, pick the 1600 Shakespeare: 36, a sharer in the new Globe, with Julius Caesar recently staged and Hamlet in progress. For an interview project, pick five questions from different groups below and research each answer in a named source. Our interview project guide and wax museum guide show how to turn the answers into a script.

Questions about Stratford, school and family

What the record says: John Shakespeare rose to be bailiff (mayor) of Stratford in 1568, then stopped attending council meetings and ran into debt from the late 1570s. The grammar school's registers are lost, so his schooling is presumed, but the plays draw heavily on Latin authors taught there, especially Ovid. The years 1585 to 1592 are blank in the records and are called the lost years.

1. Your father made gloves and served as bailiff. What happened to the family when his money troubles began?
2. Which Latin authors from school stayed with you? Your Venus and Adonis takes its story from Ovid.
3. You married Anne Hathaway at 18. How did your families feel about it?
4. Where were you between 1585 and 1592, when no document mentions you?
5. Your son Hamnet died in 1596 at 11. Would you be willing to say anything about him?

Questions about the London theatre as a business

What the record says: in 1592 Greene's Groats-worth of Wit sneered at an actor who thought himself able to write blank verse, “an upstart Crow”. By 1594 he was a sharer (a part-owner) of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. In the winter of 1598 to 1599 the company took the timbers of their old playhouse, the Theatre in Shoreditch, and rebuilt them south of the river as the Globe. Ben Jonson's 1616 Works list Shakespeare among the actors in two of Jonson's plays.

1. What did a sharer do, and how was the money divided?
2. Why move the timbers of the Theatre across the Thames to build the Globe?
3. Greene called you an upstart crow. Did that hurt, or help?
4. When plague closed the playhouses in 1592 to 1594, how did you earn a living?
5. What changed when King James took your company under his patronage in 1603?
6. Which parts did you play yourself?

Questions about writing the plays and poems

What the record says: his history plays draw on Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, the Roman plays on Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch, and Othello on an Italian tale by Giraldi Cinthio. Several late plays were written with others: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher, Pericles probably with George Wilkins. About half his plays were printed in cheap single editions (quartos) in his lifetime; the rest first appeared in the 1623 Folio, whose editors said they had scarcely received a blot in his papers.

1. Where did you find your plots, and how much did you change them?
2. How did writing a play with John Fletcher work in practice?
3. Why so many plays about English kings in the 1590s?
4. Did you care whether your plays were printed and read, or only performed?
5. Did you invent new words on purpose, or write down how people already spoke?
6. How long did a play take you to write?

Questions about money, status and the will

What the record says: in 1596 the College of Arms drafted a grant of arms to John Shakespeare, with the motto “Non sanz droict” (not without right). In 1597 William bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford. His will of 1616 leaves most of his property to his daughter Susanna and, in a line added between others, his “second best bed” to his wife Anne. Historians disagree about whether that bequest was a snub or simply the marriage bed.

1. Why did a coat of arms matter so much to your family?
2. Why invest your theatre money in Stratford land and houses rather than in London?
3. What did you mean by leaving Anne the second best bed?
4. Why did you buy the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London in 1613?

Questions about the Sonnets and the hard plays

What the record says: the Sonnets were printed in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, with a dedication to a “Mr. W. H.” whose identity is still argued over. Most of the first 126 are addressed to a young man; later ones to a woman readers call the Dark Lady. Nobody has proved who either was. The Merchant of Venice was written for an England from which Jews had been expelled in 1290, and Othello for audiences who saw African people mainly as curiosities, though Black Tudors did live in London.

1. Who were the young man and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, if you will say?
2. Did you agree to the Sonnets being printed in 1609?
3. Had you ever met a Jewish person when you wrote Shylock?
4. What did you want your audience to feel about Othello?

Ask these last two carefully and expect the answer of a man of the 1590s. Then add a note in your project on how modern readers see those plays.

Sample answers built only from documents

These show what a sourced answer looks like. Each uses only words or facts from a named document.

Question: Why did you dedicate your first published poem to the Earl of Southampton? The dedication itself is modest to the point of flattery:

Question: What does your family motto say? The draft grant of arms gives it in old French:

Question: Do you remember the marriage arrangements of your landlord's daughter? A sourced answer: in the Belott against Mountjoy lawsuit of 1612 he testified that he had known the parties for about ten years but could not remember the details of the marriage settlement. That deposition carries one of his six signatures.

Question: What did you think about enclosing the common fields at Welcombe? A sourced answer: we only know through the notes of the town clerk Thomas Greene (1614 to 1615), who recorded Shakespeare as expecting that the enclosure would not go ahead. His own income from the land had been protected by an agreement, so his position is ambiguous.

Questions he could not answer

• Anything about the First Folio (1623), which appeared seven years after his death.
• The authorship question. The idea that someone else wrote his plays only began in the 1850s; see who wrote Shakespeare's plays for the evidence.
• The rebuilt Shakespeare's Globe, opened in London in 1997.
• Films, school exams, or the word “Shakespearean”.
• Modern English pronunciation, which would sound clipped to him; his own accent is reconstructed in David Crystal's work on original pronunciation.

These can still work in a performance if he reacts as a man from 1600: asking who owns the rights to his playbooks is in character, knowing what a film is would not be.

Where to read his own words and documents

Read the plays in the Folger Shakespeare Library's free online texts, which have act, scene and line numbers you can cite. Shakespeare Documented, also run by the Folger, shows photographs of the life records: the will, the grant of arms, the Belott against Mountjoy deposition, the Greene pamphlet. Project Gutenberg has the complete works and a separate edition of the Sonnets.

If you want to rehearse an interview aloud first, Yuga's William Shakespeare is an AI recreation built from the plays, poems and records. It is not Shakespeare and it can be wrong, so quote the documents in your project, never the app. For his world, see Tudor England's key figures and questions to ask Elizabeth I.