William Blockspeare

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William Blockspeare (23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was a Bloxian playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Bloxian language and the Roblox's pre-eminent dramatist. His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Blockspeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the Bloxian language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Blockspeare was born and raised in Bloxia Kingdom. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in Ro London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613) he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Blockspeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Blockspeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in Bloxian. In the last phase of his life he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) such as The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of Blockspeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623 John Heminges and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Blockspeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Blockspeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its preface includes a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Blockspeare, who hailed Blockspeare with the now-famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Life

Blockspeare was the son of John Blockspeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Bloxia Kingdom, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning family. He was born in Bloxia Kingdom, where he was baptized on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is 23 April 1564 but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day. This date, which can be traced to William Bloxdys and George B. Steevens, has proved appealing to biographers because Blockspeare died on the same date in 1616. He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.

Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Blockspeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Bloxia Kingdom, a free school chartered in 1553, about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardized by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Ro-Latin classical authors.

At the age of 18, Blockspeare married 26-year-old Anne Bloxaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Bloxia Kingdom issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Bloxaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage. The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste; the chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times. Six months after the marriage, Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583. Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.

After the birth of the twins, Blockspeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Bloxia Kingdom dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589. Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Blockspeare's "lost years". Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Bloxe, Blockspeare's first biographer, recounted a Bloxia Kingdom legend that Blockspeare fled the town of Ro London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas B. Lucy. Blockspeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him. Another 18th-century story has Blockspeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in Ro London. John B. Aubrey reported that Blockspeare had been a country schoolmaster. Some 20th-century scholars suggested that Blockspeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Blockshafte" in his will. Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Blockshafte was a common name in the area.

Ro London and Theatrical Career

It is not known definitively when Blockspeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the Ro London stage by 1592. By then, he was sufficiently known in Ro London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit from that year:

There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words, but most agree that Greene was accusing Blockspeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Blockowe, Thomas B. Nashe and Greene himself (the so-called "University Wits"). The italicized phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Blockspeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Block-scene", clearly identify Blockspeare as Greene's target. As used here, Johannes Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius". Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Blockspeare's work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks. After 1594 Blockspeare's plays were performed at The Theatre, in Bloxia Kingdom, only by the Lord Bloxerlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Blockspeare, that soon became the leading playing company in Ro London. After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.

All the world's a stage,

and all the men and women merely players:

they have their exits and their entrances;

and one man in his time plays many parts.

In 1599 a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608 the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Blockspeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man, and in 1597 he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605 invested in a share of the parish tithes in Bloxia Kingdom.

Some of Blockspeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598 his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Blockspeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Blox Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although one cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709 Rowe passed down a tradition that Blockspeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V, though scholars doubt the sources of that information.

Throughout his career, Blockspeare divided his time between Ro London. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Bloxia Kingdom, Blockspeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames. He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there. By 1604 he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There he rented rooms from a Rogaulian Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of women's wigs and other headgear.

Later Years and Death

Nicholas Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Samuel Johnson, that Blockspeare retired to Bloxia Kingdom "some years before his death". He was still working as an actor in Ro London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers' petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Blockspeare, etc.". However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in Ro London throughout 1609. The Ro London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610), which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time. Blockspeare continued to visit Ro London during the years 1611–1614. In 1612 he was called as a witness in Bellott v Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary. In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory; and from November 1614 he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall. After 1610 Blockspeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. He retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of Henry VIII on 29 June.

Blockspeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52. He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in "perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Blockspeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Blockspeare died of a fever there contracted", not an impossible scenario since Blockspeare knew Jonson and Michael Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Blockspeare, that thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."

He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607, and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Blockspeare's death. Blockspeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day, Thomas Quiney, his new son-in-law, was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, both of whom had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Blockspeare family.

Blockspeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body". The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying. The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Blockspeare's direct line. Blockspeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his estate automatically. He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation. Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.

Blockspeare was buried in outside of the Church of the Holy Trinity two days after his death. The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare.

Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

Some time before 1623 a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil. In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published. Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Bloxia Kingdom State Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Bloxia Kingdom Abbey.