1564-1616. English dramatist and poet.
Established in London by 1589 as an actor and
a playwright, he was England's unrivalled
dramatist until his death, and is considered
the greatest English playwright. His plays,
written in blank verse, can be broadly
divided into lyric plays, including Romeo and
Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream;
comedies, including The Comedy of Errors, As
You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and
Measure For Measure; historical plays, such
as Henry VI (in three parts), Richard III,
and Henry IV (in two parts), which often
showed cynical political wisdom; and
tragedies, such as Hamlet, *Macbeth, and King
Lear. He also wrote numerous sonnets. Born in
Stratford-on-Avon, the son of a wool dealer,
he was educated at the grammar school, and in
1582 married Anne Hathaway. They had a
daughter, Susanna, in 1583, and twins Hamnet
(died 1596) and Judith in 1595. Early plays,
written around 1589-93, were the tragedy
Titus Andronicus; the comedies The Comedy of
Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two
Gentlemen of Verona; the three parts of Henry
VI ; and Richard III. About 1593 he came
under the patronage of the Earl of
Southampton, to whom he dedicated his long
poems Venus and Adonis 1593 and The Rape of
Lucrece 1594; he also wrote for him the
comedy Love's Labour's Lost, satirizing
Raleigh's circle, and seems to have dedicated
to him his sonnets written around 1593-96, in
which the mysterious `Dark Lady' appears.
From 1594 Shakespeare was a member of the
Chamberlain's (later the King's) company of
players, and had no rival as a dramatist,
writing, for example, the lyric plays Romeo
and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and
Richard II 1594-95, followed by King John and
The Merchant of Venice in 1596. The Falstaff
plays of 1597-99 - Henry IV (parts I and II),
Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor (said
to have been written at the request of
Elizabeth I) - brought his fame to its
height. He wrote Julius Caesar 1599. The
period ended with the lyrically witty Much
Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and
Twelfth Night about 1598-1601. With Hamlet
begins the period of the great tragedies,
1601-08: Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Timon
of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Coriolanus. This `darker' period is also
reflected in the comedies Troilus and
Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and
Measure for Measure around 1601-04. It is
thought that Shakespeare was only part author
of Pericles, which is grouped with the other
plays of around 1608-11 - - Cymbeline , The
Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - as the
mature romance or `reconciliation' plays of
the end of his career. During 1613 it is
thought that Shakespeare collaborated with
John Fletcher on Henry VIII and Two Noble
Kinsmen. He had already retired to Stratford
in about 1610, where he died on 23 Apr 1616.
For the first 200 years after his death,
Shakespeare's plays were frequently performed
in cut or revised form (Nahum Tate's King
Lear was given a happy ending), and it was
not until the 19th century, with the critical
assessment of Samuel Coleridge and William
Hazlitt, that the original texts were
restored.