Why do we know so little about shakespeare's life?

Well, he lived in the Elizabethan era, and at that point in time not even record-keeping for people along the lines of "commoners" was precise enough to correctly record everything. Shakespeare's own name was spelt at least three different ways. And since it was so long ago, the records that DID exist are more likely to have been lost or misplaced, or something such as that. Besides all of that, he was mostly just another playwright in his day. If you think you know so little about Shakespeare...imagine how much LESS you know about all the OTHER writers that existed around the same time period, whose names have faded into obscurity due to bad/lost records combined with a mediocre output of work.  more