When Is Shakespeare’s Birthday?

When was William Shakespeare born? We don’t actually know; birth certificates didn’t exist in the sixteenth century. We celebrate his birthday on April 23, but whether scholars and biographers got the date right is a matter for debate.

26 Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspeare (William son of John Shakespeare)
Image credit: Flickr.com/usm photos

We know Shakespeare was born somewhere between the 21st and 25th of April, 1564. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. At the time, the English Prayer Book stipulated that baptism must occur no later than the Sunday or other holy day following birth. April 23rd in 1564 was a Sunday, and the 25th was the feast day of St. Mark the Evangelist. So to follow the prayer book, Shakespeare would need to be born on the 25th to be baptized on April 26th.

In Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, however, Samuel Schoenbaum writes that one explanation may be that superstition prevented the Shakespeares from baptizing their son on St. Mark’s Day, which was considered unlucky. It was called “Black Crosses” for the black cloth that was hung on crosses and church altars that day, and some reported that the specters of those would die in the coming year might be glimpsed that day haunting the churchyard.

Shakespeare’s bust.
Image credit: Flickr.com/Laurence Lew

One other clue is on Shakespeare’s monument, above his tomb in Holy Trinity Church. It states that when Shakespeare died, on April 23, 1616, he was 53. The only way for this to be true would be if Shakespeare was born on or before April 23, 1564 so that he would have just turned 53 before he died. Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare was actually born on the 22nd of April, arguing that his granddaughter chose to be married April 22, 1626 because it was the anniversary of her grandfather’s birthday.

The first to declare that April 23 was Shakespeare’s birthday was an eighteenth-century antiquary named William Oldys, who wrote in the margins of his copy of Gerard Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) that the 23rd was the poet’s birthday. His contemporary Joseph Greene, Curate of Stratford and master of the King Edward VI School, the grammar school which Shakespeare attended as a boy, also identified April 23 as Shakespeare’s birthday when he gave an extract from the parish register recording baptisms to George Steevens, the Shakespearian scholar. Steevens endorsed this date in his 1773 edition of Shakespeare, and it has been the generally accepted date ever since.

April 23 is certainly the most attractive date. Not only does it fit what evidence is provided by his baptism record and his monument in Holy Trinity Church, but it is both the date of his death in 1616 and the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England. The feast day of St. George has been celebrated as a national festival in Britain since 1222, and to many Shakespeare lovers it has seemed only too appropriate to celebrate the national poet of England and England’s patron saint on the same day.