What would the English speaking world be without William Shakespeare? He was, indisputably, the greatest of all playwrights, and left us with terms, sayings, and quotes which have worked their way into everyday usage in the English language. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 to a father who was a wooldealer and a glover.  His early life and background are a bit of a mystery, but it is suspected that he must have spend a considerable amount of time around the theatre and perhaps was employed as a handyman as a young lad. One job might have been to watch the horse's of the theatre goes while they were watching the play.   It has remained an interesting point of debate as to who exactly  William Shakespeare was and did he write his own plays. Some believe that a better educated, aristocrat must have been the true author of the works and Francis Beacon's name is the one which is brought up most often. Others have suggested that Christopher Marlow or even Queen Elizabeth were the author of the plays. On the reverse side of this debate Shakespeare is sometimes credited with producing other works such as the King James version of the bible.  It seems fairly conclusive at this point that Shakespeare was the true writer of his own plays. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway in Stratford and had several children. His interest in the theatre drew him to the centre of that world, London.

It has also been suggested that he may have been forced to flee Stratford due to a problem with poaching. London of that age had prospered and grown under the reign of Elizabeth and theatre had become popular. Shakespeare probably started by working odd jobs around the playhouses and then picking up a few parts as an actor and maybe offering to help with script copying, re-writing or reversions. Whatever the exact path was to becoming a fully fledged playwright,  

he began to have an impact upon the world of theatre. By the early 1590's he had acquired a good reputation as a hard worker and a talented producer of plays. During this startup phase of his career he was pushed by other talented writers, such as Christopher Marlow who may have helped him flower into the greatest of all playwrights. Many biographers of Shakespeare divide his production into 4 periods, the first of which ends in 1593 and included plays such as 'Two Gentlemen of Verona' and 'A Comedy of Errors'. His second period which was from 1593 to about 1600 was the time that he established himself as one of the foremost powers in the world of theatre.

Some of the plays form this period include 'The Merchant of Venice' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' which may have been performed earlier but in a different version. He borrowed heavily from other stories, legends and works in developing his plays but the treatment with which he put together the words and thoughts was a singular stroke of artistic genius which may not have been equaled by any other writer at any other time. He used over 29,000 different words in his plays which is an enormous vocabulary compared to the average person today who uses about 2,000 words in their day to day life.

From 1600 to 1610 his plays took a definitively darker tone and some of his greatest tragedies such as 'King Lear', Hamlet, MacBeth, and Othello were produced. The last period was that of 1610 to his death when he enriched and developed his word relationships to an art form that was definitely on it's own level. In April of 1616 Shakespeare passed away from a fever which he had acquired during a party with fellow theatre participants.

His will was written by himself with his signature on each of the three pages it occupied. This document is extremely valuable due to the fact that none of his manuscripts have survived and only three other signatures are known to exist.