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 English poet, dramatist, and actor; considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare was the most popular dramatist of his age.
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire. There is no record of his birth, but church records indicate that William Shakespeare was baptised on April 26, 1564, and April 23 is widely accepted as his date of birth. Little is known of Shakespeare's early life. He is assumed to have been educated at Stratford Grammar School, and he may have spent the years 1580-82 as a teacher for the Roman Catholic Houghton family in Lancashire. He did not go to University and his younger contemporary and fellow-dramatist, Ben Johnson, would later speak disparagingly of his "small Latin, and less Greek" in the eulogy prefaced to the First Folio. However the Grammar School curriculum would have provided a formidable linguistic, and to some extent literary, education.
He was the third child, and eldest son, of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. His mother was of gentle birth, the daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmcote. His father was a respected tradesman (a glover who was involved in a variety of commercial activities) who held several important municipal offices. His wool business failed in the 1570s, but the family's position was restored in the 1590s by the earnings of William Shakespeare.
In December 1582 he married Ann Hathaway, daughter of a farmer of Shottery, near Stratford. In May of 1583 she gave birth to their first daughter, Susanna. In 1585, twins, named Hamnet -his only son, that died when still a child- and Judith, were born. Shortly thereafter, Shakespeare left Stratford. It is speculated that he was fleeing prosecution for poaching deer on the property of a local nobleman. By 1584 he emerged as a rising playwright in London, and soon became a central figure in London's leading theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain's Company, renamed later as the King's Men.
In April 1593 Shakespeare published his poem Venus and Adonis, which was dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: it was a great and lasting success, and was reprinted nine times in the next few years. In 1594, Shakespeare joined The Chamberlain's Men, a theatrical company which enjoyed the patronage of the royal court and in May he published his second poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that was also dedicated to Southampton.
He had already written the three parts of Henry the Sixth, Richard the Third, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and Taming of the Shrew. Soon afterwards he wrote the first of his greater plays - Romeo and Juliet, based on the lives of real lovers who lived in Verona, Italy, that died for each other in the year 1303- and he followed this success in the next three years with A Midsummer Night's Dream, King Richard II, and The Merchant of Venice.
In 1596 he had bought New Place, a large house in the centre of Stratford, for £60, and through his father purchased a coat-of-arms from the Heralds, which was the official recognition that he and his family were gentlefolk.
By the summer of 1598 Shakespeare was recognized as the greatest of English dramatists. Booksellers were printing his more popular plays. The two parts of Henry the Sixth, introducing Falstaff, the most popular of all his comic characters, were written in 1597-98.
He was one of the proprietors of the Globe Theatre which was built in 1599 and also had an interest in the Blackfriars Theatre. Shortly before the Globe was opened, Shakespeare had completed the cycle of plays dealing with the whole story of the Wars of the Roses with The Life of Henry V. It was followed by As you like it, and Julius Caesar, the first of the maturer tragedies. In the next three years he wrote Troilus and Cressida, Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night and Hamlet.
Hamlet, first printed in 1603, is Shakespeare's largest drama, based on a lost play known as the Ur-Hamlet. Prince Hamlet, an enigmatic intellectual, mourns both his father's death and his mother's remarriage. His father's ghost appears to him and tells that Claudius, married to Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, poisoned him. Hamlet, fascinated by cruelly witty games, swears revenge.
Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage about 1607: his name does not occur in the various lists of players after this year. Although he continued to contribute to the theatre in London until 1614, Shakespeare moved back to Stratford in 1610.
He still wrote a few plays, and he tried his hand at the new form of tragi-comedy - a play with tragic incidents but a happy ending - which Beaumont and Fletcher had popularised. He wrote four of these - Pericles: Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, which was acted at Court in 1611.
He died on April 23, 1616 of a fever contracted after an evening of entertaining fellow writers, Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, in his home. He was buried in the chancel of the church, before the high altar.
When Shakespeare died 14 of his plays had been separately published in Quarto booklets. In 1623 his surviving fellow actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, with the co-operation of a number of printers, published a collected edition of 36 plays in one Folio volume (called First Folio).
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English Literature 
