William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. Working in London's commercial theatre under Elizabeth I and James I, he wrote or co-wrote about 39 plays, 154 sonnets and several longer poems. His tragedies, comedies and histories have been performed, translated and adapted more than those of any other dramatist, and his language has shaped English itself.

Shakespeare was baptised in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564; his birthday is traditionally kept on 23 April, though the exact date is unknown. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and wool dealer who rose to become bailiff, the town's mayor, before falling into debt in the late 1570s. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a farming family of some standing. William almost certainly attended the town's grammar school, where boys learned Latin grammar and read authors such as Ovid, whose stories he later used again and again, but he did not go to university.

In November 1582, at eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, who was 26 and already pregnant. Their daughter Susanna was born in 1583, followed in 1585 by twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died in 1596, aged eleven. Almost nothing is recorded of Shakespeare between 1585 and 1592, the so-called lost years, and stories that he was a schoolmaster or fled Stratford after poaching deer are later legends.

By 1592 he was established in London, then a fast-growing city of perhaps 200,000 people with a new and lively trade in public playhouses. That year the dramatist Robert Greene sneered at an "upstart crow" who thought himself the only "Shake-scene" in the country, the first reference to him as a writer. When plague closed the theatres in 1592 and 1593, he published two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton; they were the most commercially successful of his works in his lifetime.

In 1594 he became a founding member and shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the acting company for which he wrote for the rest of his career. In 1599 the company built the Globe on the south bank of the Thames, and after the accession of James I in 1603 it became the King's Men, under royal patronage. From 1608 it also played at the indoor Blackfriars theatre, lit by candles, which suited more intimate effects. Shakespeare acted as well as wrote, and his share in the company made him prosperous. In 1596 his father was granted a coat of arms, and in 1597 William bought New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford.

Shakespeare's early plays include the histories of Henry VI and Richard III, comedies such as The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and the bloody revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus. In the 1590s he wrote a series of English history plays, from Richard II through the two parts of Henry IV to Henry V, which dramatised the dynastic struggles of the Kingdom of England in the fifteenth century and gave the country much of its popular sense of its own past. In the same decade came Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and the mature comedies Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Around 1600 to 1608 he wrote the tragedies on which much of his fame rests: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, the last drawing, like Julius Caesar, on Thomas North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives. His final plays, often called romances, including The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, mix tragedy with reconciliation and magic. In The Tempest one speech on an ideal commonwealth draws closely on John Florio's translation of an essay by Michel de Montaigne. In his last years he collaborated with John Fletcher on Henry VIII, about the reign of Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and a lost play, Cardenio, apparently based on an episode in Don Quixote by his exact contemporary Miguel de Cervantes. During a performance of Henry VIII in 1613, a stage cannon set fire to the Globe's thatched roof and the theatre burned down; it was rebuilt the following year.

What sets the plays apart is their combination of popular entertainment and depth: clowns and kings share the stage, plots borrowed from chronicles and Italian stories are transformed, and characters such as Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff and Rosalind seem to think and change before the audience. His flexible blank verse, which grew looser and more like speech over his career, carried a vocabulary of extraordinary range.

Besides the narrative poems, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, published in 1609, possibly without his permission. Most are addressed to a young man, urged at first to marry and preserve his beauty in children, and a smaller group to a "dark lady" with whom the speaker has a troubled affair, while a rival poet appears in others. Who, if anyone, these figures were has never been settled. The sonnets explore time, love, desire and the power of poetry to outlast death, and they rank among the finest love poems in English.

Shakespeare seems to have spent more time in Stratford from about 1613. He made his will in early 1616, famously leaving his wife his "second best bed", and died on 23 April 1616, aged 52, of unknown causes. He was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, under a stone warning against moving his bones.

About half his plays had appeared in cheap single editions, called quartos, during his life, some of them unreliable. In 1623 two of his fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published 36 plays in a large collected volume, now called the First Folio. Eighteen of them, including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, had never been printed before and might otherwise have been lost. In a prefatory poem, the playwright Ben Jonson declared that he was "not of an age, but for all time".

Shakespeare's reputation grew steadily. In the eighteenth century he was raised to the status of England's national poet, and German writers of the Romantic era, among them Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, took him as a model of untamed genius against French classical rules. His plays have been translated into every major language and adapted into opera, ballet and film, and they are central to school teaching across the English-speaking world and beyond. Hundreds of words and phrases are first recorded in his works, though many were probably in use before he wrote them down. Since the nineteenth century some have argued that someone else, such as the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon, wrote the works, but scholars overwhelmingly reject these theories: the documentary evidence for the man from Stratford as author is as good as for any writer of his time. He is one of the defining figures of the late Renaissance and of the cultural history of the United Kingdom.