I think you need to clarify if you mean having never done anything else, serially, or having never done anything else, concurrently. If the former, that’s a pretty high bar. Almost everyone had some schlock job they did as a youth that was unrelated to their eventual career.
The tradition holds that Shakespeare was not a very good actor, and his role in the company soon shifted to that of writer, with perhaps some occasional small parts. I believe there is a legend that he played the ghost in Hamlet. AFAIK that is the only part traditionally associated with him as actor. As for being a business man, well yes, but as you yourself noted, he was a business man making his money primarily by exploiting his own work. In some sense, every writer who makes money off their work is also a businessman.
I will say that it seems very likely that as well as being his company’s writer, Shakespeare probably filled much of the function of what we would now call the director of his plays. Whether that rules him out of the OP’s intended criteria, I cannot say.
From your link:
The OP may have left a good deal of room for interpretation, but one thing that was explicitly ruled out was making a living primarily from teaching.
“The tradition” doesn’t reflect the documentary evidence, then. You’re correct that we don’t know for sure which parts Shakespeare played (although we don’t know this for most actors of the period, apart from a few superstars like Burbage, whose eulogy mentions several characters that he played. Detailed cast lists only rarely appear in printed plays; everything else is guesswork.) However, Shakespeare is listed as one of the “principal tragedians” in the cast list for Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, and he’s at the head of the list of “principal comedians” printed with Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour. These plays were first performed in 1603 and 1598, respectively, well after Shakespeare was an established playwright. Sejanus is a particularly complicated and sprawling Roman history play with over thirty characters; Shakespeare is one of only eight actors who makes the cut as one of the leads. We’ve got references to him as an actor well into the first decade of the seventeenth century. He doesn’t seem to have given up the day job until quite late in his career – unlike, say, Jonson, who gave up acting as soon as he could support himself as a writer.
(BTW, this part is a total hijack, but apparently I just can’t stop myself being nerdy about Shakespeare.) There’s also a tradition that Shakespeare played Adam in As You Like It, but like the Hamlet’s Ghost rumor, it doesn’t surface until the eighteenth century. (The Adam story is supposed to have come down to us via one of Shakespeare’s Stratford relatives, possibly his nephew Thomas, who saw him perform as a child. This isn’t impossible, but we don’t have a reliable provenance for it either.) At any rate, I suspect both of these traditions have more to do with the sort of parts eighteenth-century fans wanted Shakespeare to have played – old men with unimpeachable virtue, plenty of gravitas, and very little stage time – than the ones he actually did play.
It would be pretty funny if Shakespeare actually preferred wildly undignified roles (Juliet’s Nurse? Sir Toby Belch? the bear?), but I doubt we’ll ever know.
I remember being taught in school that Edgar Allan Poe was a general loser at life. His college ambitions got him nowhere - he was expelled from West Point, then later decided to give college another chance - he got through one year at UVa until he got discouraged and quit, and spent most of his life abusing narcotics. In the end, he was found delirious (drunk? high?) on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, he was so far gone that doctors couldn’t save him. RIP.
He wasn’t just a poet, though, but was also keen on the short story - not only the horror/gothic stuff he is stereotypically associated with but also detective stories and SF, both of which were fairly new in his day.
And there have been a large number of writers who were also teachers of some sort - the intellectual development necessary to teach seems to be pretty similar to what produces great writers. Obvious examples I can come up with quickly : Lewis Carroll (math professor), J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.
T. S. Eliot, accoring to ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen in Catch 22.
(quote #2 on this page)
Robert W. Service did more than write poetry, but could easily have lived off the money he made from it.
FWIW in the case of all three of these men, they started out in academia and only produced the works for which they are generally famous as a sort of sideline or hobby. Also, all three did write poetry and perhaps aspired to being known as Poets; but Carroll’s and Tolkien’s best known poetry is widely read thanks to it being embedded in their popular prose works.
Charles Bukowski. Of course, he was also an author and painter. And he did live readings until he had enough money to stop doing them. I hope I’m not putting words into his mouth, but I think he considered himself a poet foremost. Well, I’m sure I’m not putting words in his mouth if I said he considered himself a drunk foremost. He lived off of his work later in life, and barely lived doing shit jobs earlier in life.
Buk on poetry: bukowski on poetry - YouTube
Clips from Bukowski readings Charles Bukowski - One Tough Mother Preview - YouTube
Doctor Seuss?
I think you’d have to disqualify him, as he was also an artist.
Thanks! That was cool. Off to Amazon to see if that DVD is available.
Probably the same income disparity as today’s superstars compared with has-beens, also-rans, and the talented-but-never-to-be-discovered guys out there.
I was gonna say Hank Chinaski but he wrote stories too.
“poets don’t drive cars” Bob Dylan.
and a screenplay
Oh, I don’t know. I have an intense dislike for the O Star part of Frostiana. Or at least the soprano parts…
Nothing against Frost, it is the composer I hate actually. That is a seriously annoying bit of music.