Who were Shakespeare's friends?

Answer 1

Some of his close friends were his theatrical associates Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges, all of whom he remembered in his will. We have no evidence that any of them was a "best" friend. There is also the mysterious subject of some of the Sonnets, who might have been a friend closer than others (if it was a real person).
He had a number of friends: acting friends like Richard Burbage, friends in the publishing business like Richard Field, a noble patron in Henry Wriothesley and a friendly neighbour in Hamnet Sadler.
daniel miranda

oh, and henry randall.

Answer 2

He had two groups of friends. First, he had the people he knew from Stratford, including some he probably went to school with. The printer Richard Field, who was a Stratford man about Shakespeare's age who became a printer in London, was a friend who arranged for the publication of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's first published work. Hamnet Sadler was a neighbour in Stratford. He and his wife Judith must have been good friends to the Shakespeares, because the latter named their twins after them. Hamnet Sadler was one of the witnesses to Shakespeare's will.

The second group were his theatrical friends, especially the members of the King's Men, who had been working with Shakespeare for almost two decades. Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges were especially close friends. Shakespeare remembered them in his will, and Heminges and Condell remembered him by publishing his plays in an omnibus volume shortly after his death, together with a lot of flattering remarks about his talent as a playwright.