William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born Stratford-upon-Avon in England. He married Anne Hathaway when he was 18 years old. Soon after that he moved on to London.

He became an actor and began to write plays. He set up an acting company called the King’s Men. Together the actors set up the Globe Theatre.

Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight (38) plays altogether. They included comedies such as The Merchant of Venice and As You Like It, and tragedies such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.

Like many Renaissance writers, he based some of his plots on stories from Ancient Greece or Rome. Some of his characters were also based on Roman people such as Emperor Julius Caesar.

His plays are still popular today because he wrote about human problems such as love and jealousy.

He also wrote over 150 sonnets (a poem of fourteen lines). They were mostly about love. Some were to a mysterious ‘dark lady’. No one is sure who she was.

Shakespeare made a lot of money out of his plays and bought a big estate. He never published his work, but a few years after his death other people gathered his work and put them into books.