William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the son of a glover and a farmer's daughter. He attended the local grammar school, married Anne Hathaway at eighteen, and had three children. By the early 1590s he had moved to London, where he began working as an actor and playwright, quickly drawing notice for history plays and comedies performed on the city's thriving stages.

Over roughly two decades he wrote some thirty-nine plays and 154 sonnets, moving with equal command through comedy, history, and tragedy. As a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, he helped build the Globe Theatre and wrote for its stage. Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, composed in an extraordinary tragic period, deepened the possibilities of drama and the English language itself.

Shakespeare retired to Stratford a prosperous man and died there in 1616, at fifty-two. Seven years later his colleagues gathered his plays into the First Folio, preserving works that might otherwise have been lost. His words entered everyday speech, his characters became mirrors for every generation, and his plays are still performed more often than those of any other dramatist. His legacy is the modern imagination itself.