William Shakespeare ’s accepted birth date, while not positively known, is April 23, 1564. The son of merchant John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, Shakespeare lived with his family in Stratford-upon-Avon and attended the local school, studying Latin, Greek, and classic literature. It is likely that Shakespeare left school in his mid-teenage years to work because of the financial difficulty his father experienced, and he quite possibly worked for his father. When he turned eighteen, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six. The couple had two daughters, Susanna and Judith, and one son, Hamnet, who was Judith’s twin and died at age eleven.

Shakespeare’s life between the twins’ birth in 1585 and the year 1592 is a collection of conjecture, but there seems to be little doubt that he began his acting and writing careers during those “lost” years. He probably focused primarily on playwriting, but when the… [His plays, which fit into four main categories of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance] … theatres closed because of the Black Plague, Shakespeare began writing sonnets as well as two longer poems, the widely acclaimed Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The new poet did not, however, wholly abandon his career as an actor; he joined the foremost acting troupe in England, Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1594. Five years later, Shakespeare and others from the company built and operated the world-famous Globe Theater in London.

Throughout Shakespeare’s extraordinarily prolific writing career, he produced over thirty dramatic works and an impressive collection of sonnets. His plays, which fit into four main categories of history, comedy, tragedy, and romance, drew such attention at the time of their original performance and continue to draw such unrequited attention in the present age that they are some of the most performed scripts in theatrical history. They include A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1596), Julius Caesar (1599), Hamlet (1600), and The Tempest (1611). Similarly, his poetry spawned the terminology “Shakespearean sonnet,” an expression used to describe the three quatrains-one couplet structure he created for his sonnets. His plays were not published formally until seven years after his death when, in 1623, fellow members of Lord Chamberlain’s company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published thirty-six of his plays in First Folio. In the same way, Shakespeare’s sonnets were unpublished until 1609, and even then he was not consulted in the printing.

After living in retirement in Stratford for several years, Shakespeare died on his fifty-second birthday, April 23, 1616, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, where he had been baptized.