Edmund Shakespeare

Edmund Shakespeare (1580, Stratford-upon-Avon – buried 31 December 1607, London) was a 16th- and 17th-century English actor.

Life

He was the youngest child of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden and the brother of the playwright William Shakespeare. He followed William to London to become an actor. While an actor, he had an affair with an unknown woman, probably around 1600 although there is no actual evidence. He fathered a son, Edward Shakespeare, in one record noted wrongly as Edmund Sharksbye. He died in 1607, at the age of 27, four months after that baby boy, and in the same year William's daughter, Susanna, was married. Twenty shillings was paid for his burial (possibly by William) at St Saviour's in Southwark "with a forenoone knell of the great bell".

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