Death of William Shakespeare -- also April 23 marked as his Birthday

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Minnesota Public Radio, Garrison Keillor):

Today (April 23) we celebrate the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). We don't know his birthday for sure, but he was baptized on April 26th, and since infants were usually baptized about three days after their birth, his birthday is celebrated today.
We know almost nothing about Shakespeare's life. His father was a successful glover and farmer, and the family was comfortable. Shakespeare probably went to the local school, King's New School, where he would have studied Latin, classic literature, and history. The next record of Shakespeare finds him at the age of 18 applying for a marriage license with 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The records show that the marriage was rushed, and six months into it, Anne gave birth to a daughter named Susanna. Two years later, Anne had twins, Judith and Hamnet.
No one knows exactly when or why Shakespeare left Stratford for London. There are rumors that he was in trouble for poaching deer from the estate of a local squire, and escaped to London to avoid prosecution. Others think he ran away from an unhappy marriage -- when he died, he left Anne only his "second-best bed." Still others think he was simply an ambitious young man and that London was the center of theater. In any case, by 1592, a fellow playwright named Robert Greene published a book that described Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow, beautified by our feathers, that with his Tyger's hart wrapped in a Player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you."
Greene's warnings about Shakespeare didn't dampen his success. Two years later, Shakespeare was writing his plays exclusively for a theater troupe called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which was owned by a group of actors, including Shakespeare. The troupe performed most of his plays at the Globe Theatre, and he acted in many of them himself. We don't know what roles he played, although he is often said to have played the Ghost in Hamlet. But we do know that unlike some playwrights, Shakespeare remained an actor throughout his life.
The Globe Theatre was closed down in 1642 by the Puritans, and demolished two years later, so no one knows for sure what the Globe looked like. But through excavation, sketches, descriptions, and contracts, much of it has been pieced together. We know it had 20 sides and a diameter of 100 feet, and could seat about 3,000 people. The open section of the theater, in front of the stage, had no seats and no roof. For a cheap ticket, people could stand in this open section and watch the plays -- these people were called "groundlings." They were free to drink, eat, shout at the actors, and generally do whatever they wanted. Along the outside were three levels of roofed seating for patrons who could afford a chair.
In Shakespeare's time, plays were not published for readers. If they were written down in one place, it was usually as a "prompt-book," an official copy for actors. When plays were reproduced, it was often without the consent of the writer. Twenty-two of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, but they are very different than the versions that were published just after Shakespeare's death, with the support of his theater troupe -- those new versions became the standard texts. No one knows how much of any of these versions was reconstructed from stage notes or from the memories of people who had seen the play performed.
Shakespeare wrote poems, including his famous sonnets, and 38 plays. He died on this day in 1616 at the age of 52.