William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at Stratford-upon-Avon in the English Midlands, the son of a glover who was also a town official. He was educated at the town grammar school and at eighteen married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, with whom he had three children. In his twenties he came to London, began as an actor and became the most successful playwright of his day and a shareholder in the Globe Theatre. He wrote some thirty-seven plays, a hundred and fifty-four sonnets and several long poems, and in later life returned to his home town, where he died in 1616. His contemporary Ben Jonson said of him: 'He was not of an age, but for all time.'