William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, England

Billy Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright who spelled his own name at least eighteen different ways. He wrote comedy, drama, history, and romance, with moderate success in his own time. (Queen Elizabeth I liked him well enough, at least.) In the 19th century, his popularity totally skyrocketed. Boy howdy, everybody was readin' Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw called it "bardolatry". We don't have a lot of details about his personal life. His father made gloves for a living. When he was 18, he married an older woman named Anne Hathaway...in what was probably a shotgun wedding, since it was performed with unusual haste regarding protocol, and since she gave birth to a daughter six months later. (Scandalous!)

Today, he's considered to be the #1 writer in the English language, of all time, ever...Not bad for a guy that Robert Greene called "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." (This was a time of classy insults.)

Read his work here! My favorites are Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet.

(c) J. E. Seames 2008