William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was the English playwright and poet who, working in London between roughly 1590 and 1613, produced thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets that constitute the most influential body of writing in the English language and possibly in any language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, he was the son of a glovemaker, attended the local grammar school, married at eighteen, and arrived in London sometime in his mid-twenties to join the theatrical world. His plays — the tragedies, the comedies, the histories — have never left the stage in four centuries, and his language has shaped the idioms of English so thoroughly that speakers of the language quote him constantly without knowing it. Give every man thy ear but few thy voice; all the world is a stage; to be or not to be — the plays think through every human condition with an inexhaustibility that has produced more commentary than any text except religious scripture.

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