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Today's Featured Biography
William Shakespeare
 In a small glazed cabinet near the north door of Holy Trinity Church in the Warwickshire village of Stratford-upon-Avon, the long narrow volume of the parish register lies open at the page on which is inscribed in clear, clerkly hand the record of the christening of William Shakespeare, April 26, 1564. Tradition, which delights in coincidences, has selected as his birthday the anniversary of his death, which occurred April 23, 1616, but the date is unknown. His lineage was humble and his origin obscure, his ancestors having been tenant farmers and small tradesmen in the same locality, without wealth, education, estate, or public station. No other of the name has reached special distinction before or since. His grandfather, Richard, was a yeoman at the neighboring hamlet of Snitterfield. His father, John, who appears, from the vague glimpses of his history discernible, to have been of an ardent, careless, and improvident nature, removed in early life from the farm at Snitterfield to Stratford, where he kept a country store. He prospered in business for a while and was active in local politics, rising through the successive gradations of leet juror, constable, and alderman to high bailiff in 1568, although unable to write his own name. He married, in 1557, Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's landlord, who brought him as dower about sixty acres of land and the equivalent of $200 in money. His pride was apparently inflamed by political success, and he applied to the Herald's...
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