Why is the life of William Shakespeare such a mystery?

Answer 1

Back around 1600, when Shakespeare lived, people didn't care about the lives of actors and writers. They would watch them act and read or listen to what they wrote, but they didn't want to know whether they had children or a hobby or anything else personal about them. What we know about Shakespeare and others who were actors and playwrights at the time was the information kept by the government--tax records, court records, heraldic records, land title records, birth, death, and marriage records and so on. With some of Shakespeare's contemporaries, there are not even these kind of humdrum records; with Shakespeare at least we have all of the above types of record. It doesn't really speak to the kind of man he was, and trying to deduce his character from them is certainly misleading. Some people get led down the wrong track in this way and say that Shakespeare was a man obsessed with money, but the fact is that it is the records about money which have survived, which gives them an unwarranted importance. We do not know things such as whether he liked mint-flavoured salads, and we never will. Nobody kept that kind of information.