Shakespeare’s Plays
1564 O.S. – Dec 1623 O.S.79 items
early moderntheatreFrom Stratford to the First Folio
Around 1590 a glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon began writing plays for the London stage. Over the next two dozen years he wrote or shared in about forty plays, most of them for one company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who became the King’s Men, and for their playhouses: the Theatre in Shoreditch, the Globe on Bankside and the indoor Blackfriars. Seven years after his death two of his fellow actors gathered 36 of them into the First Folio. Eighteen of them had never been printed and might otherwise be lost.
The timeline runs from his baptism in 1564 to the Folio in 1623. Each play sits where the Oxford chronology of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor dates it, as a year or a range of years, because few of them can be dated more closely. Only what a document dates gets a day: a performance in Philip Henslowe’s accounts, a law student’s diary, a royal patent, a letter about a fire.
Julian dates, as the English wrote them
England kept the Julian calendar (Old Style) until 1752, ten days behind Catholic Europe, and every date here is entered in it. English records also began the year on Lady Day, 25 March, so the Middle Temple’s Twelfth Night of “2 February 1601” is 2 February 1602 on the timeline, and Queen Elizabeth died on the last day of 1602 by English reckoning, 24 March 1603 by ours.
It also untangles a famous coincidence. Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 in the Julian calendar; Miguel de Cervantes’s date, 23 April 1616, is Gregorian, and is really the day he was buried in Madrid. They are not the same day: Shakespeare’s 23 April was 3 May in Spain, some ten days after Cervantes.
How it is laid out
Periods: the two companies, the playhouses they played in, and the plague years that shut those playhouses for months at a time.
Threads to filter by:
comedies,historiesandtragedies(the First Folio’s own three shelves),theatre,court,plague,booksandfamily.
He was not of an age, but for all time! — Ben Jonson, in the First Folio, 1623
Items
Baptism at Holy Trinity, Stratford
- ≈ 18 years, 7 months
Marriage bond for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Henry VI, Part 2
Henry VI, Part 3
“harey the vj” at the Rose
Henry VI, Part 1
Titus Andronicus
Greene’s “upstart Crow”
Richard III
Venus and Adonis
“titus & ondronicus” at the Rose
The Comedy of Errors
The Night of Errors at Gray’s Inn
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Paid for two plays at court
Richard II
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
King John
Hamnet Shakespeare buried
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry IV, Part 2
Much Ado About Nothing
Francis Meres lists twelve plays
Pulling down the Theatre
Henry V
Julius Caesar
Thomas Platter sees Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Richard II for the Essex rebels
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple
Troilus and Cressida
Queen Elizabeth dies
Letters patent for the King’s Men
Measure for Measure
Othello
Sir Thomas More: the pages in “Hand D”
Red cloth for the coronation procession
“The Moor of Venis” at Whitehall
All’s Well That Ends Well
Timon of Athens
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
King Lear before the king at Whitehall
Pericles
Coriolanus
Shakespeare’s Sonnets published
The Winter’s Tale
Cymbeline
The Tempest
Simon Forman’s “Book of Plays”
The Tempest at Whitehall
Cardenio
Shakespeare buys the Blackfriars Gatehouse
The Globe burns down
Henry VIII (All Is True)
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The second Globe opens
Shakespeare signs his will
Death of Shakespeare
The Pavier quartos
The First Folio entered at Stationers’ Hall