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These are the words of William Shakespeare's doomed King Lear, whose kingdom is divided,

and who, in the end, loses himself to madness and despair.

Since the illustrious career of The Bard, the greatest of English playwrights and poets,

and perhaps even the greatest in the world, there have been scholars of Shakespeare, who,

lacking much contemporary documentation of the man's life, turned to his works

for indications of who he was, imagining all his works to be autobiographical, and thus

interpreting his characters as versions of himself. According to this view, then, we might imagine the words of King Lear,

quote, who is it that can tell me who I am, end quote, in the mouth of William Shakespeare himself,

especially because his very identity would eventually come to be doubted. How could this be? In part, it's because of a dearth of

primary source records about his personal life. We do know that a man named William Shakespeare

was born into a farming family in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, his father a glove-maker and a city alderman. At 18 years old, he married

Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years his senior, who was already pregnant with their first child,

a daughter. Their firstborn would be followed by twins, one of whom, his only son, would

...