William Shakespeare

Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. The parish register records his baptism on 26 April, but no record gives his exact birth date; 23 April is the traditional date associated with his birth. His parents were John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had three children: Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet. The documents that survive are mostly official records and references by contemporaries rather than personal papers. They place his life between Stratford and London, but leave important gaps, especially in the years before he became known in the London theatre.

A 1592 reference by fellow writer Robert Greene is the first definite evidence of Shakespeare as an established London actor and playwright. He worked in more than one capacity: writing plays, acting, and eventually sharing in the business of an acting company. From about 1594 he was associated with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, which became the King's Men when James I took the English throne in 1603. Shakespeare was also connected with the company's theatres, including the Globe and Blackfriars. The company system helps explain why his career involved performance and commercial partnership as well as writing.

Shakespeare wrote for the public stage during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. His dramatic works are commonly grouped as comedies, histories and tragedies; familiar examples include A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, Hamlet, Othello and The Tempest. His early printed works included the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and a sequence of 154 sonnets was published in 1609. In 1623, seven years after his death, fellow actors and company members John Heminges and Henry Condell helped publish the First Folio, the first collected edition of his plays. About half of the plays in the collection had not previously appeared in print, making the volume important to the survival and transmission of his dramatic work.

Shakespeare's plays have remained part of the repertory of theatres and are read, adapted and translated widely. Their range of dramatic forms, memorable language and sustained attention to political power, family, desire and conflict have made them influential in English-language literature and performance. His reputation rests on a substantial body of contemporary records and works, but not every detail of his life can be reconstructed: accounts of his early years are sparse, and later anecdotes are not all verifiable. Careful biographies therefore distinguish documentary evidence from tradition and conjecture.