William Shakespeare
"To be or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"
(Hamlet III)
Biography
William Shakespeare, a British poet and playwright, is often considered the greatest writer in
world literature.
William Shakespeare was baptized April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. He
received at most a grammar-school education, and at age 18 he married a local woman, Anne
Hathaway. By 1594 he was apparently a rising playwright in London and an actor in a leading
theatre company, the "Lord Chamberlain's Men" (later "King's Men"); the company performed at
the Globe Theatre from 1599. Shakespeare retired to Stratford before 1610 and lived as a country
gentleman until his death.
His earliest plays seem to date from the late 1580s to the mid-1590s and include history plays
based on the lives of the English kings, comedies, and the tragedy Romeo and Juliet. The plays
apparently written between 1596 and 1600 are mostly comedies. Approximately between 1600
and 1607 he wrote the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, which mark the
summit of his art. Among his later works are the fantastical romances The Winter's Tale and The
Tempest.
Shakespeare's plays, all of them written largely in iambic pentameter verse, are marked by
extraordinary poetry; vivid, subtle, and complex characterizations; and a highly inventive use of
English. His 154 sonnets, apparently written mostly in the 1590s, often express strong feeling
within an exquisitely controlled form. As with most writers of the time, little is known about his
life and work, and other writers, particularly the 17th earl of Oxford, have frequently been
proposed as the actual authors of his plays and poems. The first collected edition of his plays, or
"First Folio", was published in 1623.