William Shakespeare's reputation is based primarily on his plays. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early nineteenth century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet Shakespeare first achieved celebrity as a writer through his narrative poems, and the study of his nondramatic poetry generally can illuminate Shakespeare's activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Shakespeare's exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564. He was his mother's third child, but the first to survive infancy. Of five further siblings, only one, his sister Joan, outlived him. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a farming family in Wilmcote that...