William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare wrote about thirty-eight plays and 154 sonnets, and shaped English drama and the language itself more than any other writer. Baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, the son of a glover and alderman who later fell into debt, he attended the local grammar school, married Anne Hathaway in 1582 when he was eighteen and she was pregnant, and had three children including twins. Nothing reliable is known of him between 1585 and 1592, the so-called lost years. By 1592 he was in London and established enough to be attacked in print by Robert Greene as an upstart crow. He wrote narrative poems when plague closed the theatres in 1593-94, then became a founding shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 — an ownership stake, not a salary, which is what made him wealthy. The company built the Globe in 1599 from the timbers of an earlier theatre, and became the King's Men under James I in 1603. The work moves from the history cycles and early comedies through the great tragedies — Hamlet around 1600, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth in the following years — to the late romances. He wrote for a specific company, with particular actors in mind and a thrust stage with no scenery, which is why the verse carries the setting. He borrowed nearly all his plots, from Holinshed, Plutarch and existing plays, and the originality is in the language and the interiority. He retired to Stratford and died in 1616, leaving his wife the second-best bed. Half the plays existed only in manuscript until his colleagues Heminges and Condell collected them in the First Folio of 1623.

• Lived: 1564 CE – 1616 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: playwright, poet, actor