William Shakespeare

Who Was William Shakespeare?

William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language and, with Homer and Dante, one of the three or four writers whose work has most shaped the literary imagination of the world. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a glover, educated at the local grammar school, he came to London in the late 1580s and became an actor, playwright, and part-owner of the Globe Theatre, producing in the following two decades a body of work — thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets — that has never been equaled in range, depth, or influence.

The plays move from the early comedies and histories through the great tragedies — Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth — to the late romances — The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest — with a range of human understanding that has led every subsequent generation to find its own concerns reflected in them. His religious beliefs are a matter of scholarly debate; his family had Catholic sympathies; his plays show a deep familiarity with Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer; his late romances are organized around patterns of sin, suffering, repentance, and grace that are unmistakably Christian in structure even if they are not explicitly theological in content.

Shakespeare is significant for TLA because his work is the most comprehensive literary engagement with the questions that TLA tracks — with sin and redemption, with the nature of power and justice, with the relationship between the visible and the invisible, with what it means to be human — that any single writer has produced.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Hamlet — c. 1600–1601
• King Lear — c. 1605–1606
• Macbeth — c. 1606
• The Tempest — c. 1610–1611
• The Winter's Tale — c. 1609–1611
• The Sonnets — 1609