William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet, born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616. He lived in the age of Elizabeth I and James I, and spent much of his working life in London, where he wrote for the stage and acted in a leading theatre company. His surviving work includes some three dozen plays, among them tragedies, comedies and history plays, along with a famous sequence of sonnets and a few longer poems. Many details of his private life are poorly documented, and scholars still debate the exact dating of several plays. Shakespeare matters because of the range of his characters, the force and invention of his language, and his understanding of love, ambition, jealousy and grief. His plays have been performed and translated around the world for four centuries, and many phrases from them are still part of everyday English.