The Description and Analysis of the Main Characters in the Traged "King Lear" by W.Shakespeare

What we know – really know, as opposed to what we conjecture or what we hope – about Shakespeare is almost nothing. Even the birthday, 23 April 1564, is a guess complicated by patriotism, for that day is also St Georges’s Day. His father was a glover, a man of some substance in the midlands town of Stratford–on–Avon, though his fortunes seem to have waxed and waned – being decidedly precarious during the period of Shakespeare’s adolescence. He almost certainly attended the Stratford Grammar School, and when only eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, several years his senior, and already pregnant. By her he had a daughter, and a twin boy and girl, of whom the boy died at the age of eleven. Then we lose sight of Shakespeare for some years, but he reappears in London in 1592, arousing the jealousy of Robert Greene (‘he… is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’) and, apparently, the admiration of the printer and literary hack Henry Chettle (‘divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing… and his facetious grace in writing’). He both acted (small parts) and wrote for the Lord Chamberlain’s company, later known as the King’s Men, and by 1598 he was hailed by Francis Meres as ‘the most excellent in both kinds (comedy and tragedy) for the stage,’ as well as the author of ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends.’
Around 1611 he seems to have gone into semiretirement at Stratford, returning to his wife and family. He died on his supposed birthday in 1616, in his will he left his wife ‘my second-best bed,’ a fact which has afforded more scope for fun (and conjecture) than all the rest of his shadowy life.’[1; 22] …