



This scarcity of real knowledge has led to theories that Shakespeare never actually existed, but was really the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the poet and politician Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford - and many of these ideas still have a wide popular currency. So the biographer can see the writer's early years only through the eyes of those around him. These are two baptismal records documenting the birth of his three children (a girl and twins - a boy and a girl), and a record of a court case of 1587, in which his family tried to recover property lost when his father's business collapsed.
