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 personal life but the richness of his works, his deep understanding of human emotions and conflicts, his exquisite imagery and skill with words have all contributed to him being ,as the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson once said of him, ” not of an age , but for all times”.