Shakespeare’s Baptism Shakespeare’s Baptism Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Baptism Childbirth Childhood Published file. Updated metadata proofed added two figures and updated biblio updated author respStmt. added new figure, updated citations. swapped the desc and figDescs to be correct. added image citation and figure. small edits, removed emph from headings, bibliography, removed the back tag, and moved the /body tag to the end. Corrected typos Created file. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Image of a group of people gathered around a font over which a baby is being baptised. There is a woman and three men, including the priest. The rest of the congregation can be seen in the background on the left. Image of a Baptism from A Booke of Christian Prayers (1578) by Richard Day. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library. Public Domain.
Facts

Shakespeare was the third child of eight born to John and Mary Shakespeare, but he was their first son and their first child to survive past infancy. In 1564, the year of his birth, plague struck Stratford, and by year’s end had killed 200 people, about 20% of the town’s population. The Shakespeare household was spared, but families just a few streets away lost children. The Parish Register for Stratford, housed in Holy Trinity Church, records William’s baptism on 26 April 1564. A digital image of this record is housed on the Shakespeare Documented site.

Image of a handwritten, slightly curved line of text, reading Guiliamus filius Johannes Shakspere, which is Latin for William son of John Shakspere Courtesy of Shakespeare Documented. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The entry is in Latin, the official language of the Church of England, and reads, Guiliamus filius Johannes Shakspere; that is, William son of John Shakspere.

Baptism Ceremony and Customs

John Shakespeare would have taken his newly born son to the parish church, Holy Trinity Church, accompanied by the child’s godparents, on the next Sunday or other holy day (such as a saint’s day) after the child’s birth. William’s mother Mary would not have attended, but rather remained secluded at home in a lying-in chamber, the warm, darkened bedroom where she gave birth. When the father and godparents arrived either before Matins (morning services) or after Evensong (evening prayers), they brought the babe to a special, raised basin filled with holy water called a baptismal font, located near the entrance to the sanctuary. The parish priest would meet them there and perform a prescribed ritual from The Book of Common Prayer. The central part of that ritual involved the priest making a short statement about how baptism is central to salvation for Christians because it washes them clean of the sin with which all humans are born. Next,the official prayer book instructs, Here shall the priest aske what shall be the name of the childe, and when the Godfathers and Godmothers have tolde the name, then shall he make a crosse upon the childes forehead and breste, saying. receyve the signe of the holy Crosse, both in thy forehead, and in thy breste, in token that thou shalt not be ashamed to confesse thy fayth in Christe crucifyed, and manfully to fyght under his banner against synne, the worlde, and the devill, and to continewe his faythfull soldiour and servaunt unto thy lyfes ende. Amen. And this he shalt doe and saye to as many children as bee presented to be Baptised, one after another.

Inferences About Shakespeare’s Bapstism

While the record from Holy Trinity Church indicates the date of Shakespeare’s baptism, the actual date of his birth is unknown, although it is traditionally celebrated on April 23. Because children were typically baptized two or three days after being born and on the Sunday or holy day closest to their birth, April 23 remains a likely date; however, it is also the day on which Shakespeare died in 1616, giving a pleasing, though possibly artificial, symmetry to his life. He is also buried in the same church in which he was baptized.

Legends About Shakespeare’s Baptism

April 23 is St. George’s Day, a day on which the nation of England celebrated its patron saint. St. George’s day and the red and white St. George cross flag gained increasing importance in England after the Reformation, which discouraged the use of saint’s images to disassociate its practices from those of the Church of Rome. The association of Shakespeare’s possible date of birth with the patron saint of England shakes the certainty of April 23 as Shakespeare’s actual birthdate and moves into legendary territory.

Key Print Sources Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death in Tudor and Stuart England: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford University Press, 1997. Cressy, David and Lori Ferrell. Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 2005.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Shakespeare’s Baptism. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/childhood/childhood.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2023. Day, Richard. A Booke of Christian Prayers. Folger Shakespeare Library, https://digitalcollections.folger.edu/bib169150-164322. Accessed 2 Mar. 2023. Greenwood, Robyn. The Birth and Burial Records of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 11 Apr. 2012, https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/birth-and-burial-records-william-shakespeare/. Bearman, Robert, and Folger Shakespeare Library Staff. Parish Register Entry Recording William Shakespeare’s Baptism. Shakespeare Documented, 2 May 2020, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/parish-register-entry-recording-william-shakespeares-baptism.
Image Source Day, Richard. Image of a Baptism from A Booke of Christian Prayers. 1578. MS. Folger Shakespeare Library. Parish Register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. 26 Apr. 1564. MS. Shakespeare Documented. https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/parish-register-entry-recording-william-shakespeares-baptism.