William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glove-maker and local official, and was baptized there in April of that year. He married Anne Hathaway at eighteen, and the couple had three children before he established his career in London's theatre world.
By the 1590s Shakespeare was working in London as an actor and playwright, becoming a leading member and shareholder of the company known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later the King's Men, which performed at the Globe Theatre. Over roughly two decades he wrote some thirty-seven plays and a celebrated sequence of sonnets.
His works span comedy, history, and tragedy, and include masterpieces such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. His extraordinary command of language, his profound insight into human nature, and his enduring characters have made his plays the most performed and studied in the world, and have shaped the English language itself.
Shakespeare returned to Stratford in his later years and died there in 1616. His plays were collected by colleagues in the First Folio of 1623, preserving works that might otherwise have been lost. Four centuries later, his influence on literature, theatre, and culture remains unmatched.
